MELVIN STERNE is the senior editor and publisher of Carve Magazine. He has published fiction, essays, and poetry in more than a dozen literary magazines.

                                                         the investment


My uncle Al made a mint in real estate in Chi-town, and made damn sure everybody knew it. Penthouse apartment on Lakeshore. His and her matching Corvettes for him and his wife, Darleen. Later on it was computers, then training videos for companies buying computers. We're talking early 80's here. He was riding the crest, curling his toes in the foam. Then he retired.

He had it all mapped out. He'd diversified his portfolio, called it hedging his bets. Stocks, bonds, securities, T-Bills, futures, investment properties. Some paid quarterly, some paid monthly, some just sat there bloating like road kill. If one was cold, another was sure to be sizzling.

Al moved to Florida, bought up a quarter-mile of prime beach outside of Destin. Country club, tennis club, yacht club, cocktail parties seven nights a week. Al had it all, and by God nobody was going to take it away. Nobody. Al was like that.

I went down once, just to see. There was a storm out over the Gulf, cumulus clouds to 60,000 feet. You could see all the way to Cuba. The water glistened like new coal in the moonlight. I had never seen lightning shooting out into space. "Do you worry about storms?"  I asked.

"Try the swordfish kabobs," Al replied. He was drinking Damson Gin at forty dollars a bottle. He'd built his house with two-foot thick reinforced concrete walls, two-inch thick glass windows that cost five thousand dollars apiece. "Hurricane," he snorted. "I didn't swim with sharks all my life for nothing. Let it blow."

Next summer a storm blew up and washed the beach away. All of it. Beach, road, everything. Except Al's house. Insurance wouldn't pay a nickel unless he rebuilt on the same lot.

"What lot?" Al asked. Even his lawyer said he was fucked. Al split for the Rivera. "No God-dammed storms there," he said.

You can see the house at low tide out in the breakers. The county put in a new road and put up a sign. There's a rest area there now, and tourists stop to gawk on their way to Miami. There's a man in a plywood hut selling orange juice and post cards. I heard Al's got a fifty percent stake in the operation. You could check it out if you wanted.

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© 2003 Melvin Sterne