Almost a year had passed since the HEB award from San Antonio and Garner liked the sense of continuity and belonging that he got from being at his home base again. It made him feel secure. Life was predictable and he was in charge. Yet, for all the comfort he gained from being there, it did not make up for the discomfort he felt from his increasing sense of restlessness. It was all that money he was getting. He could no longer make any sense out it. One day he felt as though he was buried under too much money. The next day he felt that his reserves were totally inadequate. He no longer felt like he had earned it. It just kept coming and he had to do nothing in order to have it. And worse, yet, he was getting very little satisfaction from the things that the money could buy for him. He seemed unable to calibrate his sense of wealth and connect it to the things that he wanted in life. There was no challenge in receiving the money. The things that he bought were no longer rewards for his cleverness or hard work. He was beginning to feel disconnected. And the more disconnected he felt, the more restless he felt. And every day, it seemed to just get worse.
But the money continued to flow. And just like the murky gray green waters of the San Antonio River the money flowed with harnessed power and a complete lack of concern. The money, like the water, would stay safely within its banks or not. And whatever happened to Garner, the money would not care. The river would not care. The only ones who might care were bobbing along in the river just like Garner equally as oblivious to the forces shaping their lives. But they did not care either. They were far too busy with their own lives and their own desires to worry about what was happening to Garner or who was really in control.
At first, no matter how hard he tried, Garner just could not come to grips with the quantity of money he had been awarded in the HEB settlement. If he took the annuity payments, deposited them in the bank and just lived off of the interest, he would have made more money than he had made at the construction job. But that was only the first year. In the second year the principle would have piled up for two years and the interest would be more than twice as much as he was making at the construction site. The third year it would be three times what he was making filling columns. Garner felt panicky over all that principle piling up. He felt like he was drowning in a flood of money and decided to think about it a different way.
After a quick calculation, he realized that he had to spend $1.50 per minute every waking minute of the day in order to consume the flow of cash that he was receiving. That didn't sound so bad. Then he realized that as he was pondering this, a couple of minutes had gone by and he was behind in his spending by $3.00. He felt panicky again. He looked around for ways to spend money. He could order more coffee, or a drink. Maybe he could buy a magazine. But that was silly. While he drank the coffee and read the magazine more money would pile up, and he would be further behind. Then he thought that if he slept late and read the newspaper when he got up, he would start the day several hundred dollars behind. So counting by the minute just wouldn't work, either.
Next he thought about it in terms of money to spend each day. That was a little easier to comprehend. He would have to spend about $1,400 dollars each day in order to keep the money from piling up. He couldn't eat that much food, but if he was living in some sort of a resort he could burn several hundred a day on a room and a couple of hundred more on clothes, meals and entertainment. Vacation places were always expensive and Garner saw this as the only way to keep all this money from piling up and burying him. So he had tried taking a vacation.
The first two weeks in St. Thomas were pretty nice. The sun was warm without being hot and the water was so clear that you could see the bottom. A cute girl with a brightly colored flower print skirt brought him exotic drinks made with rum and a variety of fruit juices. He went hiking and snorkeling and one day he even took a boat ride to the site of a sunken pirate ship.
But by the third week, the change of scenery was wearing off and the sameness of each day became an accumulating burden. He would sleep till ten, get up, and have a lazy glass of some sort of jungle juice that the resort had cooked up. After a while it just tasted like orange juice with some odd bits of other things blended in. Then he would walk down to the beach and rent a chair and umbrella. The cute girl would come over and ask him if he wanted a drink. It was getting annoying. He didn't want to start drinking that early and he started feeling suspicious that all she really cared about was her tip.
He would lay on his lounge chair looking out over the ocean and enjoy the warm sun on his skin. He thought about the pirates that controlled the area centuries ago. But that made him more restless. The pirates were always busy looting ships or hiding treasure. At least they had something to do. He was lying here on a rented beach chair with absolutely nothing to do but wait until mid afternoon when it would be O.K. to start drinking again. The boredom was consuming him and he wandered if it were really possible to die of boredom. So by the end of the third week, Garner packed his stuff and left the island.
He tired skiing but all that white snow with so few characteristic details reminded him of all that undifferentiated sameness in his life. Then, he took a cruise. But the vast expanse of the ocean, water everywhere you look, just felt like the vastness of his boredom. He thought he needed a change of scenery so he went sightseeing from one city to the next until they all looked the same. He began to get desperate.
"Maybe, I should be working," he thought to himself. But, when he thought about all that money, he realized that he did not need the money so there was really no point in working.
In a final attempt to find a satisfying distraction, Garner took a road trip through Europe. At first, he thought he had escaped his problems. The scenery was different. The language and customs of every country was different. There were castles, cathedrals and museums to see. And there were pubs and restaurants offering a wide variety of food and drink.
In northern Germany he had met a lovely young girl named Greta who was a student of art history at Humbolt University. Greta was on break for the summer and agreed to accompany Garner as he wove through northern Europe absorbing the vast quantity of European culture. At first, it was extraordinary. Greta had sparkling eyes, and a pleasant, confident, unassuming smile. And she was extremely knowledgeable about the history of the region. Garner thought it was like having a private tour guide. By the second week some of the luster was wearing off. Garner felt like he would scream if he visited another castle owned by some long dead guy who's name he could never pronounce. The more disinterested and listless Garner became, the more distant Greta seemed. By the third week, Greta had dismissed Garner as a shallow American and Garner saw Greta as a gold digger. So he drove her back to Berlin, returned the car to the rental agency and flew home.
Now he sat on his balcony in Miami trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. In a moment of reflection, which was most unusual for Garner, he realized that money, in itself, was not very satisfying. Money was just a way of keeping score, and the satisfaction that you get from having money is the satisfaction you get from having won. If Garner was going to be happy, he was going to have to keep winning and not rest on his accomplishments.
The wheels began to turn and the juices started flowing. Garner was beginning to feel alive again. A plan was beginning to hatch. And the more he thought about it the more alive he felt. If he was going to get out of these doldrums, he was going to have to put together a new scheme that would dwarf the con he pulled in San Antonio. And to sweeten the pot, he would cash in the HEB settlement and go for broke. He got up off his lounge chair, went inside, grabbed the phone, and for broke, he went.