What Falls Out the Bottom
The Rate of Exchange
My father worked in the space program. Walked away from it just as it hit its peak. Traded the Space Coast for the hills of western North Carolina — the cool air, the French Broad, the silence that a man can actually hear himself inside of. I was born in Melbourne, Florida, a direct consequence of his proximity to all that controlled fire and ambition. Then he made his exit, and we followed.
I thought about that arc for years without understanding it. I do now.
I spent a career in mortgage finance, primarily mortgage-backed securities, moving between boardrooms in Atlanta and Dallas and New Orleans and Ft Smith and Jacksonville. And New York and San Francisco and many points in between. They brought me in to handle the South specifically — which meant they recognized something I already knew: the slick approach collapses when it hits a man who built things with his hands and his instincts, who can smell the difference between the math and the story you’re trying to tell with the math.
The line that organized my understanding of all of this came from J.B. Fuqua. If you’re from Atlanta or Carolina, you know the name. If you’ve read A Man in Full, you know the type. I was a young analyst in his boardroom, my partner from up North sweating through a presentation about the Georgia Federal acquisition. Fuqua waited him out. Then he looked at him — not unkindly, just directly — and said:
All I want to know is, if I drop a dollar into the top of this sumbitch, what falls out the bottom?
My partner froze. I went Southern. I explained the numbers from the bottom up, in a language Fuqua could actually use. The presentation got back on track. Later, my boss said of me: he talks slow but thinks fast. I’ve been living on that observation for forty years.
The thing Fuqua was really asking wasn’t a finance question. It was an ontology question. He wanted to know what was actually true — not what the model suggested, not what the pitch deck implied, but what was real, what moved, what converted. He had built enough machines to know that the machine doesn’t care about your narrative. The dollar either falls out or it doesn’t. You either explain that with honesty or you don’t get another meeting.
I carried that model forward. Not always consciously. You absorb a thing like that and it starts running underneath everything else.
A few years later, I walked away from a board position after a merger, the same way my father walked away from the rockets. Not dramatically. Just on purpose. My interests were elsewhere.
Now I’m on another shore. Writing fiction. Listening to lemon trees in the dark. There’s a cat who understands the perimeter of the property better than any resident. I wrote a piece called Saudade — a man in Lisbon, mostly inside his own head — and then a sequel called Sarandë, because the story had somewhere else to go.
What’s the through-line? I’ve thought about it.
It’s the same question Fuqua asked. Everything I’ve built — the finance career, the exit, the fiction, the music, the move across an ocean — has been organized around trying to find what actually falls out the bottom. Not what the prospectus says. Not what the room expects to hear. What’s true, what moves, what converts.
My sons are in Charlotte, Atlanta, Richmond. They think I should land in Lagos, Portugal, probably so they’d have a place to stay. They’re not wrong that Lagos is extraordinary. The limestone cliffs. The light on the water. An unhurried town that doesn’t perform its own beauty.
But home is still in the Blue Ridge, where my father put us down. Where the honeysuckle rises in the first light and the ridges hold the morning fog until it decides to let it go.
I’ll know when the time is right. That’s not evasion. It’s the same discipline. You don’t force the dollar. You build the machine correctly and you wait.
Saudade is the coin of the realm, wherever we are. It’s not grief, exactly. It’s more like the awareness that the true thing is always just out of reach — or was real once and now exists only in its absence. That’s what makes the machine go.
And that’s what falls out the bottom.
I can't wait!