Screenplay: I am Switzerland…(with a French 75 chaser)

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

No.  Upon final rewrite, make that Lichtenstein, a  tiny cinematic metaphor freezing its alpine ass off smack in the middle of a much larger, tempestuous world money market.  I’ll declare the Swiss Franc my new currency—diminutive, but not to the point as to be completely overlooked at the box office; still along the lines of cinema verite mind you, but hedging toward a safer ‘middle’  ground.  For, to be artistically and financially agnostic, is to be, as Studs Terkel once put it, “merely a cowardly atheist.”  It’s like trying to sift layman sense from a Steely Dan  harangue sans the jazzy guitar rides….sober. ‘Careful what you carry…’

So I go to the movies to willingly suspend disbelief.

I walk past the marquee, daring only a brief, side-swiped glimpse at my own bankable image in the reflection. Until witnessing in person, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I never thought I could ever bear a resemblance to Brad Pitt.  But Voila!….there I was, up on the silver shroud, lurking (the first hour only, to be sure) like the penny pinching AARPer I’m becoming.  An old man on the surface, picking through the Big Board rubble for some common retirement ground, I search for my own safe spot  in Pharmaceuticals or Technologies.  But, alas,  feeling the  Fourth Quarter financial shiver in my brittle bones,  I panic like every other old man on my ward at 4PM Eastern Time on Fridays and sell.  Like the French, I retreat and quickly convert to cash.  Where do people in the South of France run to at the end of the trading week, I wonder?   If still around this summer, I’m taking the entire month of August off, I decide. If only I were bright and wealthy enough to meld into the European Intelligentsia (does it still exist?) for good, or romantic and brave enough to join the Foreign Legion for even a short stint.  If only….

I’d drink stiff coffee, talk shit all day long with the expatriates, and take cover only when truly necessary.  I’d jot caustic notes on the backs of napkins (and into my iPhone Word app).  I’d start smoking again—-drinking too, perhaps, if I could figure a way to keep out of  jail or divorce court.  Hell, I’d even pray in foxholes if need be. If only….I were growing younger by the year instead, like our man Button. I’d travel the world and report back to loved ones on post cards (and of course, Twitter).

But  according to my financial calculator, I’m screwed by the Rule of 72s.  There are not enough mathematical breathing years left  for my existing Charles Schwab portfolio to double that one last, vital  time.  I’m 10.8  years shy of undisputed prosperity. I’ve been short changed by an economic downturn and the Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado (those fiscal Mountain Time liberals). If I thought I was going to end up with this projected relative pittance  in the end, I wouldn’t have worked my ass off all these years slinging  insurance, real estate, and sundry other salable whorage.  I would have become the irreverent literary bum my inner-self has been begging me to evolve into since conception, or at least since the first time I saw Barfly.

“You’re lookin’ at a new man, my boy. I gotta full tank of fu-ell…”

In line at the Latino Quartino Cine, I watch a You Tube trailer from The Wrestler on my iPhone and yet another scary dialectic is posed as I stand there shivering—is Art  imitating  tragedy here or has Mickey Rourke too, left this planet forever? I can’t bear the thought or the sight. I navigate to Fandango and secure a  ticket to Marley and Me instead.  Even with his botched plastic surgeries, various arrests and failed marriages, false starts and gypsy sense of fashion, Mickey is still a lifetime and half ahead of me—according to the Atomic Clock and the Rule of 72s—if not just sad, simple destiny.

I take a deep breath and  inhale some sort of second hand smoke from the gang bangers standing behind me. They’ve come to see Gran Torino, I surmise from my own broken Spanglish.  I step into the lobby and find myself gravitating toward the middle line for a bucket of popcorn. I  consider the price for a Medium—$5.50.   That’s a buck fifty more than a share of General Motors.  And all at once,  I suspend disbelief and scurry into the puppy dog movie where it’s safe to cry in darkness at the end.