Outside Business Activities

TCSB owns NLPW and MCMF.

except TMFI owns TCSB.

except TMFI pays the employees.

NLPW is still the securities-facing DBA, except sometimes TMFI is the name in the room and apparently whether a name is in the room is a thing i now need to define with a straight face.

w-2 or dba.

dba or oba.

one oba or two.

client-facing or partner-facing. except the partners have clients and our wholesalers sit in meetings with those clients, so now please define facing.

one executive already has two.

that helps for about forty-five seconds.

someone says there was never supposed to be a TMFI business card. someone else has the mockup. it was never printed, which is not actually the same thing as never existing, and i am apparently in a profession where this distinction can eat part of my afternoon.

advertising is spot checked.

advertising is one hundred percent reviewed.

both of these sentences have been said to me.

fine.

move to insurance.

the BGA is in our home state. the partner agency is not. the client is somewhere else and the person who will actually sell the policy is licensed everywhere he needs to be.

great.

who gets paid.

wrong question.

who can get paid.

still not quite.

for what.

there we go.

a referral.

define referral.

a name and a phone number?

probably.

a name, a phone number, consent.

safer.

not needs analysis, not product discussion, no comparison or illustration or quote or recommendation or application or persuasion or anything else that starts to resemble selling the thing while you are trying to refer someone to the person who is allowed to sell the thing.

a clean handoff does not wash dirty hands.

fixed fee.

completed-business fee.

nominal fee.

twenty-five dollars in one state.

maybe ten in ours, subject to the minor detail of actually asking ours.

one northeastern state does not like product-based compensation. also does not like premium-based compensation.

that state, broadly speaking, would prefer nobody have any fun.

west coast: hold.

deep south: hold.

New England.

another southern state.

mountain west.

southwest.

Appalachia.

upper Midwest.

three more need another question.

twenty-six states appear broad enough, thirteen narrow enough, three need determinations, eight are standing in the doorway with their arms crossed and i have long since stopped pretending these numbers make the problem smaller.

because a permissive state does not override a restrictive state.

routing the money through the good state does not make the bad state stop existing.

the seller being licensed everywhere does not make the referrer licensed anywhere.

the partner being outside our home state may matter. the BGA being inside it may matter more.

a regulation with too many numbers in it.

does our home state care what its resident BGA pays for business that happened somewhere else.

does it care whether the agency getting paid has a license there.

does the client state care. the partner state. the carrier. the broker-dealer.

does the entity receiving the money exist in precisely the right legal shape.

appointments, anti-rebating, privacy, securities affiliation, compensation allocation. i keep opening doors to walk through and then falling into the trap doors waiting behind them.

somewhere inside all of this there is supposedly a procedure another human being will be expected to follow.

i stare at the screen until the words turn into furniture.

state. entity. agency. producer. referral. solicitation. compensation. resident. nonresident. business. doing business as.

none of it sounds like language anymore.

then the sessions end.

ii.

the hair comes down.

sleeves roll up, higher heels come out.

we hunt and play.

dinner is old friends and people i have known long enough to be professionally inappropriate with.

one of the advisors sits down and almost the first thing out of his mouth is that i should be a writer.

excuse me.

i tell him it is a hobby.

this is technically true and also about as much information as i am prepared to release. worlds are generally better off not colliding.

still, i hug the fuck out of him.

there are compliments and then there is accidentally finding the thing someone does alone in the dark and telling them they are good at it.

anyway.

i give the boss hell.

to be fair, that started at breakfast.

i see him and immediately ask where his better half is, meaning his closest “colleague,” because apparently i have learned absolutely nothing.

there are subjects a person should retire. this is almost certainly one of mine.

the last time i addressed the longstanding office mythology around those two with anything approaching sincerity, we were both drunk and i ended up in a verbal altercation with the man at the top of the organization that signs my paycheck.

he accused me of recording the conversation.

then suggested i might be trying to collect leverage.

this after about a decade of repeatedly proving my loyalty, which made it particularly rich coming from someone whose own relationship with the truth has, from time to time, been recreational.

the absolute fucking irony.

so naturally i poke it again over breakfast.

i like fire.

sometimes it burns things. sometimes it is just pretty.

tonight, mostly pretty.

dinner, a Halloween-themed light show, ice cream, then the bar.

this is where everybody loosens. ties and posture and judgment and whatever else has been held in all day.

alcohol moves freely through the room and the eyes change with it. they run the full length of me and then come back less subtly the next time, redder and glassier with every round.

i am drinking water.

this does not appear to hurt my evening.

the east-coast contingent has been butthurt all week because they got none of me at the last meeting. not even chat time. apparently this was an actual grievance and i have been hounded for days to promise that this time they will get their piece.

eventually we find a couch off to one side, secluded enough that nobody across the room can be permitted to steal even a glance of me for themselves.

before we even properly settle in, one of them clocks the Louboutins. immediately.

then the dress.

vintage Karl Lagerfeld, i tell him. the overshirt too.

that gets an actual reaction out of him. surprised, impressed. i enjoy this immensely.

we have only just sat down when the oldest member of my DTF fan club appears.

about a decade.

seriously. an entire fucking era of sexual tension.

“can i steal you for one minute?”

one of my couch companions looks genuinely wounded. after being especially insistent all week that he is getting his time with me tonight, he has, at this point, been in possession of that time for maybe thirty seconds.

one minute, the interloper promises.

fine.

he takes me over to meet his family. sister, brother-in-law, a young niece and nephew he makes introduce themselves to me properly. names. eye contact. handshake. and they are fucking adorable.

he tells them we have worked together forever.

they tell me i must have a lot of patience.

no, actually.

we have the same quirks. that is why we mesh better than almost anyone else. we are both so accustomed to people not quite understanding us that normally half the work of talking is explaining why we said the thing the way we said it in the first place. with each other, a lot of that part is just gone. we can start farther into the conversation.

“we have the exact same brain,” he says.

not exact, but i know what he means.

and true to his word i am only gone a few minutes. he gives me express permission to return to my impatient suitors, but first pulls me into one of those fierce hugs where you are not really being hugged so much as briefly crushed against another person.

“i love you,” he says into my ear.

and i know he means it.

not instead of wanting to fuck me.

not because he wants to fuck me.

just also.

then i go back to the couch.

custody restored.

eventually we are discussing sex addiction and depravity like old men discussing municipal bonds.

one of them is beating himself up over a girl from last night.

they drank. they texted. he walked her back to where she was staying, although according to him he stopped short of the door.

i give him a look.

he insists.

okay.

he thought he was over this.

baby, that is like saying you are over a gambling addiction and then spending three days in a casino, playing roulette, and getting angry with yourself because apparently the roulette wheel still works on you.

look around.

these environments are made for appetite.

i do not think getting better means carving every bad impulse out of yourself until you have nothing left that could misbehave. some things are just part of the inventory. you decide which ones get to drive.

i tell him it is okay that this is still in there.

unfortunately, one version of me would very much enjoy being the next bad decision he makes.

that part is still in the inventory too.

i keep it seated.

i like him.

what an inconvenience.

i do not especially want to be better. but i also do not want to make him feel worse.

his friend starts giving him shit for giving himself shit, which is funny because this man is the king of giving advice he cannot take. almost the only thing he cannot take, really. he is so fucking chill on the outside that you could miss the fact that underneath he is a ball of nerves who has somehow decided every responsibility in the immediate vicinity belongs on his shoulders.

he is the other one’s wingman, but also the one quietly making sure the wingman assignment does not end in catastrophe. lets him flirt, stops him from crossing the line, keeps track of everybody.

meanwhile he would also very much like his own shot at me.

and arguably he gets more action.

when we hug goodbye his hand lands on my ass and he says, delighted with himself,

“i knew you were wearing a thong. i knew i saw it.”

sir.

excellent supervisory controls.

i leave before midnight.

responsible.

i have declined every drink pushed at me, including the increasingly relentless coercion of a pent-up east-coaster who seems to be taking my sobriety personally.

after all, i have a five-k to run tomorrow.

i have been training hard for this, including continuing to train on a sprained ankle, so perhaps we should not inspect the word responsible too closely.

group meetup is 5:45.

hair back up.

heels back off.

somewhere between the bar and sunrise i have to become the person who runs.

5:45 comes quick.