Avarice

Gordon Gekko brings us up to date on the last two decades of his life.

Hey there, sport -- my name is Gordon Gekko. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Yep, it’s been almost twenty years since the documentary of my life, Wall Street, hit movie theaters. You may be wondering what I’ve been doing for the past two decades. Well, sit down and sip your Frappuccino or mojito or whatever the hell it is people drink nowadays and let me fill you in, kid.

As you might have guessed from the movie, I did end up going to federal prison, no thanks to that ungrateful bastard Bud Fox, who snitched and got himself a reduced sentence. Last I heard about that guy, he converted to Islam in prison and then fought alongside the Taliban after he got out. As for me, I got sent to a Club Fed. All things considered, prison wasn’t that bad.

In the first few months of my five-year sentence, Michael Milken and I orchestrated a hostile takeover of Cell Block 4, which had nicer bunks. It was pretty easy since CB4 was populated by a bunch of Ivy League creampuffs. I liked to kid Milken, a holier-than-Mao Cal-Berkeley putz, “It’s all about bunks, kid; the rest is conversation.” Then he tried to stick me with a toothbrush shiv so he could get the bottom bunk. I’m not going to go into detail about what happened next, but let me just say that I never bothered to give that little prick a reach-around.

The feds seized a good chunk of my assets, but I was still a millionaire when I got out of the joint. Yeah, I still had enough liquid to piss on a few bushes. And, thank God, the whole Internet thing was just about to hit. So I moved to Silicon Valley, but that place is more boring than screwing my wife, so I relocated to Blackhawk. I live right down the way from Joe Morgan and some damn rapper named Easy-E40. Or something like that. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah -- the Internet. So while all the MBA meatheads are betting on dogs like Webvan and that damn company with the sock puppet, I pumped all my money into pussy. Internet porn made Gordon Gekko a billionaire again.

So ya see, buddy, the more things change, the more they stay the same, as they say. The ´80s had the corporate raiders, the junk-bond traders, the S&L bailout. The ´90s had the Internet gold rush. Now you gotta pay $8 for a domestic beer in a plastic cup at the Coliseum during an Oakland A’s game. You think 9/11 changed anything? Can you say Enron? Or Starbucks? No, buddy, nothing has changed. Greed is still good. -- Gordon Gekko