A Message for Louis

I don't know Louis's last name.

I hired him in Boston sometime in the 1990s. I was working for a company called Continental Trade, owned by a friend of mine from Purdue. I was in charge of basically everything except the sales force. Administration, shipping, inventory, the website, internal systems, whatever needed to be created or fixed. If it wasn't sales, it was probably mine.

Continental Trade is a whole collection of other stories. Years after I left, the FBI asked me to return to Boston and testify in front of a grand jury about my time there. That gives you the short version of how well everything turned out. This story isn't really about the company.

We needed someone to work as the assistant to our shipping manager. There was only about half a job there, but I wanted to make it a full-time position. My plan was to hire somebody for the shipping work and make up the other half by teaching them some of the things I was doing. Inventory management. Computer systems. Website work. Whatever else they seemed capable of taking on. It wasn't a college-grad job. There was no reason for a degree. I was looking for a motivated high school graduate who wanted to learn.

I don't remember any of the other applications. I remember Louis's.

He was absurdly overqualified. He had a business degree, strong grades, academic honors, and a long list of things he'd actually done while he was in college. Not the polished extracurricular bullshit people collect because they know it'll look impressive later. He'd worked, taken responsibility, joined things where somebody needed to show up and do something. He'd used college the way people are always claiming college is supposed to be used.

And he was applying to be the assistant to a shipping manager. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. Nobody with that résumé asks for a job designed for a motivated high school graduate. I went through the application again looking for the catch. The only thing that stood out was the school. He hadn't gone to Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern, or one of the other names that made people in Boston immediately decide you must be important. He'd gone to some local college nobody cared about. I wish I remembered which one. I don't. What I remember is thinking that this guy had done everything people tell young people to do, while plenty of people getting the good jobs had gone to the right school, spent four years doing far less than he had, and were being rewarded for the name at the top of the paper.

Then he walked in, and I clearly remember thinking, are you fucking kidding me? I knew instantly that everything on his résumé was true and why he was applying for an hourly job in a shipping room.

Boston in the 1990s wasn't subtle about race. I can't prove that every company passing over Louis did it because he was Black. I wasn't inside those rooms. I didn't hear what anybody said after he left. But come on.

The guy was spectacular. He was intelligent, prepared, serious, willing to work, and willing to begin far below the level he should have been entering at because he understood that he needed somebody to open the first door. He'd done everything right. He just hadn't gone to one of the schools that gave mediocre people the benefit of every doubt, and he was a Black man interviewing in a city where that mattered a lot more than people wanted to admit.

There was nothing wrong with Louis. People weren't giving him a chance.

I knew within seconds that I wanted to hire him. That almost never happened to me. Usually an interview is spent trying to figure out what somebody is exaggerating, what they're hiding, and whether the person sitting across from you is going to become a problem six weeks later. With Louis, I knew.

In the few months I knew him, he never gave me a reason to question that decision. He didn't bullshit, gossip, disappear when work showed up, or wait around pretending not to notice that something needed to be done. If he had extra time, he found something useful. If I showed him something new, he paid attention. If he saw a way to improve the inventory system, he brought me a suggestion. He became interested in the website and the computer work because they were more things he could learn. He wanted every opportunity I could give him, even when the opportunity was just learning something nobody else had bothered to teach him.

Louis wasn't the only person there I was teaching to do more than we'd hired them to do. As I showed people how the systems worked, I started noticing I was pretty good at it. I could usually tell where someone's understanding stopped and explain the same idea another way without making them feel stupid. That was around the time I started seriously thinking about becoming a teacher. I looked at Louis and some of the others, saw how eager they were to learn something that might move them forward, and apparently assumed teaching would provide me with a similar audience. I can't imagine ever being more wrong about a prediction.

Still, I wasn't wrong about the teaching part. I understood that you had to begin where the other person actually was, not where you thought they should be. I'm not sure I would've recognized that in myself as clearly without Louis sitting there ready to learn everything I could show him.

I was ahead of him in business experience. I knew more about the systems we were working with, and I'd been given access to rooms he hadn't been allowed into yet. As a person, he was so far ahead of me that I could see the distance almost immediately.

Not long after I hired him, Continental Trade started falling apart. Or, more accurately, I finally admitted that it had already fallen apart and we were standing inside the part that hadn't hit the ground yet. I found financial records that had been fudged, forged, invented, or whatever word best describes numbers created to make money that didn't exist look real. The company was being held together by loans stacked on loans, promises stacked on lies, merchandise nobody could pay for, and one more scheme meant to keep the previous scheme alive.

There wasn't a future for Louis there. There probably wasn't a future for any of us there, but I was already buried in it.

I told him what I could. I apologized for bringing him into something that collapsed almost as soon as he arrived. I wanted him to know that I hadn't hired him as part of some game or brought him in knowing the whole thing was a sham. I'd known something was wrong before I really knew it, but I hadn't understood how wrong. I wrote him the best reference letter I could. I never heard from anyone he gave it to, so I don't know whether he ever used it.

He decided to stay and help me anyway.

I'm pretty sure he wasn't getting paid by then. Maybe we found one last bit of money and gave him something. I can't make the memory cleaner than it is. But there was no reliable paycheck and no career opportunity left. Staying meant spending his time inside a disaster that had nothing more to offer him. He stayed because he believed I'd given him a chance, and he wanted to help me for as long as he could. Most people would never have done that.

Around then, I flew my friend Brent out to Boston. I had something like two million frequent-flyer miles at one point, which is another story. I used a lot of them to fly people to wherever I happened to be or to bring groups of people on trips with me. This time, I flew Brent out because what was happening at Continental Trade was monumental in the worst possible way. It was Fyre Festival-level shit before Fyre Festival existed. You don't often get to watch something collapse that completely from the inside. Even though my own financial world was disintegrating, Brent and I were also in full I can't believe we get to watch the world burn from these seats mode. That probably wasn't the healthiest response, but it was a response.

Louis wasn't part of that. We couldn't tell him most of what was happening, and I didn't want him close enough to learn it by accident. He was still mostly an employee, not the third member of some little disaster team. But he was an unusually interesting person, and Brent and I were drawn to him. I also appreciated that he was still there at all. So we took some time each day to talk with him about whatever we could talk about. Work when it was safe. Life when it wasn't. During one of those conversations, Louis told us a story.

He and his wife had recently finished school. They'd saved for a long time to rent a place together and make it nice. They were proud of it, not just because of the apartment itself, but because of what it represented. They were building a life. They'd worked for it, saved for it, and were finally getting started.

I never met his wife. Louis talked about her as if she were almost angelic. Not perfect in some shallow way. Good. Deeply, unusually good. I already saw him as one of the best people I'd ever met, so when someone that far ahead of me looked at another person with that kind of awe, I trusted his judgment. As far as I was concerned, she was probably close to heavenly.

An old roommate of Louis's came to visit. The guy was having a hard time. I don't remember what had happened to him, but Louis and his wife invited him to stay with them while he got himself together. A few days later, they came home from work and the place had been cleaned out.

The old roommate had taken everything he could sell. He'd taken the money they had saved to get themselves through those first months. He didn't just steal their possessions. He tore apart the thing they'd worked so hard to build, and he did it after they'd opened their home to help him.

Louis was crushed. His wife was crushed. They'd trusted this guy, and he'd rewarded them by taking almost everything they had. They did what people do when there's no other option. They kept going. They started saving again. Eventually, somehow, they rebuilt.

About a year later, Louis saw the old roommate across a street somewhere around Boston, and he took off running toward him.

Brent and I were listening to this story and thinking we knew exactly what was coming. This guy had robbed Louis and his wife, betrayed them, destroyed the beginning of their life together, and disappeared. Now Louis had finally found him.

The old roommate didn't notice him at first. Then he looked up, saw Louis running across the street, and froze.

He thought Louis was about to fucking kill him.

Louis reached him and wrapped him in a huge hug.

"Man, are you okay? We've been worried about you. I hope you're doing better. I hope everything's all right."

He hugged him again, told him to take care of himself, and walked away.

Brent and I couldn't believe it. We argued with him. We said, oh, man, no. What do you mean you hugged him? What about your money? What about your wife? What about everything he did to you?

Then one of us asked the obvious question. "So you invited him back?"

Louis looked at us like that would've been insane. No. Of course he hadn't invited him back. He'd learned the lesson. He would never put himself or his wife in that position again, and he would never give the guy another chance to do the same thing. That line was absolute. But he still loved him.

That made the contrast even worse. It would've been easier to understand if Louis had just been some patsy who forgave everybody and kept opening the door until there was nothing left to steal. Then we could've dismissed the whole thing as weakness. He was too nice. He needed to toughen up. He didn't understand how the world worked. But Louis understood exactly how the world worked. He knew what his friend had done and what it had cost him and his wife. He'd drawn a line that would never move. He just didn't need hatred to hold it there.

He wasn't confused about the betrayal, and he understood exactly why the man had frozen when he saw him coming. He was sincerely worried about his friend anyway. The guy had been someone he loved, something had gone terribly wrong in his life, and the hurt hadn't erased the love or his concern for the person underneath it.

We argued because we couldn't make it fit inside the way we understood people. At the same time, I knew. I knew I was standing in the presence of a better human being than myself. And if I had been stronger and more true, I might have started crying right there at the recognition of how far from good I was.

Louis wasn't claiming to be better than us, which somehow made it worse. He wasn't performing forgiveness or proving a point. He'd simply refused to turn his friend into someone he needed to hate.

I haven't had many friends I cared enough about to feel anything close to that. Brent was one of them. I could understand loving a friend and wanting to help one. I still couldn't make Louis's story reconcile. I didn't understand his relationship with his wife. I didn't understand his relationship with himself. I didn't understand his relationship with God, whatever it was. I think he knew that I didn't.

There are some people I've interacted with who I'm not entirely convinced were real. Louis is one of them.

I'm pretty sure the next day was his last day at Continental Trade. Maybe it was a day or two later. The situation had reached the point where he was going to begin seeing things he couldn't unsee. Whatever happened next, I didn't want him involved in it. He'd already helped me far more than he should have, probably without being paid, and I wanted him to leave while he could still honestly say he didn't know everything.

I told him he couldn't come back. Then I never heard from him again.

Maybe his life simply moved forward and I was one strange, short job he had no reason to keep thinking about. At the time, everything around me was so upside down that his disappearance didn't even seem particularly strange. Nothing seemed strange by itself anymore.

But I never forgot him. I never forgot the résumé that made no sense until he walked through the door. And I never forgot that he could draw a line nobody would ever cross again without needing hatred to keep it in place.

Thank you, Louis. I hope you and your wife are doing well. I'm still not there yet, but I know where I'm going.