Running Late

Abdul hit snooze, his alarm clock radio blaring Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” rolled over and pulled covers. It was fall and chilly. He sought to return to a dream. It was gone.

The digits read 7:07 as the radio alarm resumed and the DJ spoke: “Time to rise and shine!” The Beatles song “Good Morning,” began with a rooster’s cock-a-doodle and Good morning, good morning, good morning.

Abdul’s final interview at Fidelity Bank was at 8:30 a.m. His Abu who had passed last year wanted him to be a doctor, but he had no interest in medicine. After the funeral, Ammi left him and the house in Upper Darby, returning to Pakistan to mourn with her sisters.

Tossing the covers, he stood and stretched. He shivered as he walked into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, stepped into the tub, running water until hot then showered.

“Am I really going to become a banker?” Abdul thought, as he shampooed and soaped his thin brown frame. After rinsing off, he towel dried and combed his hair, shaved, and walked back to his room.

He pulled on pressed pants, sharply creased, purchased for interviews, worn to the funeral. Trousers to a gray, chalk striped suit. Knotting his red paisley tie, half-Windsor, as Abu taught, he buttoned each collar of his white pinpoint Oxford. He brushed each of the black cap-toed shoes to a gloss and stood to view himself, mirror inside closet door, still ajar. Forcing a smile, he closed the top button of the suit jacket. Masha’Allah, looking good, Abu would have said.

He bounded two steps at a time down the flight of stairs. Grabbing car keys from the kitchen counter, he stopped. No wallet? He ran back upstairs to check the top of his dresser. Nothing. Opening drawers, socks and underwear, he saw a handkerchief, took it, and wondered aloud, “Where could it be?” 

He consulted his wrist watch: 7:45, still plenty of time. Back downstairs, he checked the kitchen counter again, the breakfast nook, the coffee table in the living room, beneath the sofa cushions: No wallet.

Now 7:55, he knew he needed to go. “So much for an early arrival.”

Outside, he turned the deadbolt and opened the driver’s side door of Abu’s car, a 1987 blue Toyota Corolla. He cranked the ignition, and, out of the corner of his eye, saw his wallet on the passenger seat. 

“Allah ka boht shukar,” he uttered.

Shifting into reverse and gunning it, he was met with a screech and the blare of a car horn. He looked right and saw the driver, an angry woman gesticulating obscenely at him.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, pulling forward. It was 8:02. KYW was giving its weather report, “High of 55, currently 42 degrees, sunset at 5:45 today.”

“Gotta get a move on,” he accelerated through a yellow light as it was turning red. 

The route to the bank was familiar, but he had never driven it at this hour. At 8:15, he was still on the north side of the river. He sped through West Philadelphia, slot racing cars to make each light.

Should I have applied to graduate school after all? Does a philosophy major belong in a bank?

More than once, he miscalculated and ended up behind someone making a left hand turn, so he cut off traffic, causing a chorus of blaring beeps and angry gesticulations he ignored. 

He turned up volume of the car radio: KYW was giving the twenty-five minutes after the hour business report: “Stocks were mixed yesterday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up ten points, while the AMEX and NASDAQ were both down a quarter of a percent.”

He crossed the Schuylkill River on the South Street Bridge and made the left on Broad Street. The bank building would be on his right, but he needed to park. At several intersections he saw scantily clad women in high heels garish outfits. They must be prostitutes, he thought to himself.

Several blocks north, with green lights favoring him, he passed one lot, then another, trying to find the closest to the bank. There was no GPS, no cell phone, no Google map to guide him. The year was 1991. And the time: 8:32. He was officially late.

Finally, the bank building came into view, and, in the same instant he saw it, he realized he was even with the closest parking lot, only in the wrong lane, too far left. Compounding the problem was a queue of cars, half a block long, behind him to the right. 

He cut the line and pulled into the garage driveway.

“You get to do that one time,” the valet said to him in a South Philly accent.

“I’m very sorry, I’m just running late,” he grabbed his folio and wallet from the car and took the valet ticket. 

“And you’re making all these people late too! Fricking foreigners,” The valet said as Abdul broke into a run on Broad Street, dodging pedestrians along the way.

He ran two blocks. The Fidelity Bank building, made famous by the movie Trading Places, had ornate columns and a beautiful ceiling. Abdul only saw yet another queue: People waiting for the next elevator car. Abdul sighed. Handkerchief in hand, he mopped beads of perspiration from his forehead.

As elevator doors opened, he shimmied on to the elevator, heart pounding, sweat glistening on his forehead.

On number 9, he marched through unlocked gray double fire doors. He had arrived. 

A receptionist, middle-aged woman with dark brown dyed hair and gray roots, eyed him from above the frames of horn rimmed glasses. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, here to see Beth in the credit department for an interview.”

“Beth Crawford or Beth Huxtable?”

“Um, I have it here,” He opened his folio and papers fell out. Bent down on one knee, he collected the papers, hoping the one with Beth’s last name would emerge. Sweat trickled down his neck, and his face was flushed.

Minutes later, at 8:45--Abdul cringed when he saw the time on his watch--he was escorted into Beth’s office. She stood to greet him and shake his hand. “Abdul, right?”

“That’s right, very nice to meet you Beth.”

“I was worried you weren’t going to make it.”

“I’m so sorry, traffic was horrible getting here.”

“Just don’t be late on your first day of work. We’re going to make you an offer, but first we need you to take this test.”

She slid a workbook with a multiple choice answer sheet that required filling in. “You need a number two pencil. Do you have one?”

“I need one.”

“Okay, I’ll take you to the conference room and bring this back to me when you are done.” She handed him a freshly sharpened yellow pencil with an unused pink eraser.

Sitting alone in the conference room, Abdul struggled with the test. He was flustered, but also ignorant: Accounting and finance were foreign to him.

He completed the test and walked to Beth’s office. Handing her the test booklet, pencil and answer sheet, ovals darkened, he confided, “I am afraid I have not done well on this test.”

“Not to worry, this is a training program. Our purpose in giving the test is to assess the range of understanding of the entering class. I really wanted to hire you, but I needed you to take the test. Now we can make you an offer.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. That’s all for now. Have a great rest of your day.”

It was 10am. Abdul took the elevator to the lobby, now desolate but for the security guard and a manned shoe shine stand, and walked outside to Broad Street.

At the parking garage, he pulled out his valet ticket and handed a twenty dollar bill to the cashier. She gave him a receipt and his change, a ten dollar bill.

The same valet as before returned his car.

“What no tip? Fricking foreigners,” Abdul heard him say as he pulled away.

Retracing his path home, Abdul wondered, Will the prostitutes still be there?

No such women were visible. They must have been getting off work, he concluded.

Once home, he saw his answering machine blinking its red light. He pressed the button to hear:

“Hi Abdul, this is Beth. We scored your test and you got a 48. I think it might be lowest score of anyone so far, but, like I said, we wanted to hire you because we want at least one liberal arts major in this class. Keep an eye out for the offer letter in the mail.” Abdul saved the message.

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Changing clothes, he carefully hung each garment, preserving creases, and put on his white shalwar and kamiz.

Unfurling his prayer rug, oriented towards Mecca, he prayed the midday namaz. Afterwards, sandals on his feet, he reheated leftovers, basmati rice and dahl, in the kitchen.

Mid-meal, the telephone rang. “Hello?”

“Collect call from Pakistan, do you accept charges?”

“Yes, yes,” he said.

“Asalamalaikum!”

“Abdul, how did your interview go?” It was his Ammi.

“Okay. I think I got the job.”

“Masha’Allah, my beta! You know your father wanted you to be a medical doctor, but I never thought it would be good for you.”

Abdul remembered the sight of his own blood when he compound fractured his arm after falling from a tree at the age of ten. The memory of bone sticking through his skin sent shivers up his spine.

“Jazak’Allah, Ammi.”

The offer letter arrived the day before Thanksgiving, which he spent alone.  

Then it was Christmas. He walked around the block, smoking cigarettes, passing houses in which families were dining together. He ate alone at a Chinese restaurant.

Finally, on the first business day of the New Year, January 6, 1992, Abdul commenced his commute to work for an 8am start time:

He set his alarm for 6am, rose promptly, showered and dressed. After a cup of tea, he left the house at 7am, new briefcase in hand, a present from Ammi that arrived on Boxing Day.

The 7:11 trolley took him to 69^th Street Station, then the El to Suburban Station, arriving at 7:45. A brisk walk to Broad & Walnut streets yielded a 7:55 arrival to the now familiar credit department on the 9^th floor. He felt prepared, having consumed headlines from the Wall Street Journal while in transit.

The initial curriculum was financial accounting classes taught by Dale Broderick, the same man who taught the same class at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, but the first day commenced with Tom O’Brien, recently recruited from Chase, to present on credit culture.

Tom addressed the class of twenty. “Introduce yourself. Say where you graduated from, and what you majored in.”

There were two graduates from U Penn, two from Lehigh both already having also earned MBAs, several from Temple University, one from Bloomsburg, one from Villanova (Tom’s alma mater, he noted for the class), one from McGill, who also had her MBA from Temple. The majority, twelve of 20, were women. Everyone had majored in business of some sort: accounting, economics, finance, marketing.

Abdul went last. “Abdul Aziz, Haverford College, philosophy major.”

“A Haverford College philosophy major!” Tom said, with incredulity. “I’ve never met one before! We’ll see if we can make you into a banker yet.”

Laughter ensued, and Abdul’s smiling face turned red.

Tom lit a cigarette and proceeded to speak, and smoke, for another hour.

Two things stuck in Abdul’s mind. The first was Tom’s emphasis on profitability of borrowers. “Net income gets added to retained earnings, which are equity. The higher equity is, the lower the leverage ratio, which is total debt, or liabilities, to equity.”

The second also related to borrowers. Tom observed, “If you borrow two million dollars from the bank, and you can’t pay it back, then you have a problem. If you are Donald Trump and you borrow two hundred million from the bank and you can’t pay it back, then the bank has a problem.”

Studying the bios of the bank’s senior management, Abdul learned that the Chairman of the bank, Tony Terraciano, based in Newark and born and raised in Bayonne, had a philosophy degree himself: A Master’s degree, no less, from Fordham University. He wondered if Tom O’Brien knew this. No matter, he decided: A philosophy major could become a banker after all.

The curriculum advanced through weekly Friday tests, which required getting a score of 80% or higher, or “don’t come back Monday,” a fate to which three of his peers, all young men, fell prey.

Striving for perfection, Abdul finished with a 98%, the highest average in the class, now numbering seventeen, after entering with what was indeed confirmed to be the lowest pre-test score, the day of his final “interview.”

After initial weeks in the classroom, Abdul and his peers were to assist with “production,” typing figures from a borrower’s balance sheets and income statements into software that generated a cash flow statement for credit underwriting purposes. Abdul undertook the assignment with aplomb, often borrowing one of two departmental laptops to extend his efforts on the commute home, evenings, and even weekends.

He rarely attended happy hours with his peers, as a Muslim who did not drink alcohol, though he would enjoy the occasional cigarette with a Coke when he did. He saw dating as pointless, since he knew his mother and aunts were busy arranging for his future bride in Pakistan, requiring no action on his part, other than the journey to meet her when he was summoned. Given his age, twenty-three, he felt no pressure to accelerate matters in this realm, content to use the house he had to himself to rent videos that were behind the black curtain of the video store he would walk to when the urge struck him.

At the six month mark, in July, the entire class was promoted to Senior Credit Analyst, and given a raise from $25,000 to $26,000, as a new crop of trainees was inducted into the same regimen they had all just completed.

The role of Senior Credit Analyst encompassed the actual writing of reports, Credit Underwriting Analyses, or CUAs, that loan officers would take to Credit Committee for approval.

Abdul’s first CUA assignment was to renewing a one million dollar line of credit for Phillips Mushroom Farms in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. The concept of growing mushrooms did not excite him, though he was actually familiar with the geography, having worked a summer job in the vicinity laboring for a masonry contractor, mixing mud and stocking block and brick when in high school. The work was backbreaking, and all the career masons, old at the age of thirty-five, saw chiropractors, and seemed to resent that this was not his station in life. Abdul returned to school each fall grateful for the creature comforts of a classroom.

The CUA was successful: Phillips Mushroom Farm’s million dollar line of credit was renewed for another year.

After drafting a couple dozen such CUAs, some with much higher credit extension considerations: $5 million, $10 million, even $20 million for an M&A transaction, Abdul’s writing skills gained the attention of the chief credit officer of the bank, Peter Palmieri, who, like Tony Terraciano, was based in Newark.

The morning of the luncheon was a welcome variation to the routine: Abdul took Amtrak from 30^th Street to Newark, one stop short of what he had come to think of as Mecca in the United States: New York City, where all the really big banks were.

Peter Palmieri, who had come from one of those really big banks, said these words during the luncheon he hosted in the executive dining room, with his napkin tucked into the neck of his shirt, and a bowl of linguine and clams in front of him: “Abdul did a good job!”

Abdul smiled from ear to ear, pleased that he did not stain his shirt at lunch, and, on the train ride home, drinking a coke in the bar car, he had a sense that unconstrained potential now defined his future.

That evening, he decided to celebrate by ordering take out: Chicken Tikka Masala, his favorite, with halwa for dessert.

The phone rang as he was finishing. It was Ammi, to his surprise given the early hour in Pakistan. He shared the events of the day.

“Your Abu would be very proud of you. I am very proud of you. And now it is time for you to come meet your bride.”

Abdul hung up the phone, riddled with questions: Is now the time to get married? Isn’t there more to accomplish? How would marriage affect his career ascent? Would he ever make it to New York City or be feted in Newark again?

He did not sleep well, tossing and turning as these thoughts churned, and it seemed that morning came quickly. The alarm was going off, but he did not hear it, as the sounds melded into his dream: He was running on train tracks, trying to remain ahead of a train that was gaining on him. His only option was to jump off the tracks and roll down a hill, at which point he woke up. To his horror, it was already 7:45, and he knew, for the first time since that fateful final interview, he was going to be late.