After my younger brother died, I began to get calls from people who wanted to buy my parents’ house. As I write this, Conor has been dead for over three years. Nobody outside of family much asks about him anymore. My mother speaks to Conor on her hikes. My father talks to him early, when he putters in the garden, and last thing before bed, lauds and complines, morning and evening prayers. I lack that open line. Sometimes I nod internally to Conor’s soprano laugh; other times, in the shower, an unbidden fuuuuck escapes my front teeth. On a jog between magnolia trees leafless and blooming, I say suddenly to my wife: I mourn his lost possibility. Or I say: The present is against grief. It sides cruelly with what is.
The prospecting calls came four or five times a week at first. Was I the owner of the property on 1262 Braeburn Drive, and did I want to sell? The person on the other end, a real person, was a wholesaler or someone hired by a wholesaler. They might have known that my brother died. Closer to his death, one of them acknowledged it. It was a card in the mail: American flag stamp on the envelope, stationery paper, signed by hand. This must be a hard time. Apologies for writing this way. Sorry if you are not the current owner of the deceased’s estate. But if you are and want to sell the house, could you call . . . ? He gave me his number. I kept it among the few bereavement cards from colleagues and friends. After eleven months, I threw it out.
Conor died on January 4, 2020. A few days before, he’d sat for an interview on a video podcast, A Time Shared, to explain to Charbel Milan his success in building a roofing company. On the show, Charbel, a twentysomething immigrant from Lebanon, interviews emerging Atlanta entrepreneurs from the hustle economy. I watch it again. Conor is himself, handsome, smiling. He’s clad in a Sir Roof T-shirt and baseball cap, advertising his company. He sports a slight beard and breaks often into laughter, proud and at ease. He’s in his apartment, which he’s only lived in for a few months. It’s a swanky high-rise in Buckhead: glossy kitchen cabinets, quartz kitchen island, and a tiny balcony for showing visitors the rectangular blue pool small below. His Christmas tree stands before a wall of windows. He coughs a few times. He tells Charbel that losing everything when strung out taught him not to fear failure.
Two weeks after this podcast dropped, my father and I socked the tree in a giant plastic bag, carried it down the hall, and, foot-propping open the heavy door to the trash room, maneuvered the bag inside, then leaned it against the wall. My father asked again why none of Conor’s friends had stayed with him that night. Why had he himself not gone down to help Conor hang pictures, as they’d discussed? We went back, and I swept up the needles.
I watch another interview on A Time Shared. A young wholesaler, Jordan “Agent” Dooley, clarifies how the business works. Agent Dooley is in his early twenties, charismatic and on the make. Wholesalers, he explains, are people who source investment deals on houses. The wholesaler doesn’t want to buy the house; they just want a contract to buy it. They quickly sell the contract to a flipper, pocketing the difference in price. A flipper is someone who buys a house, renovates it, and then sells it again to what’s called an end buyer.
How does a wholesaler find these deals? Agent Dooley explains, “That means calling distressed lists. Where you’re calling, uh, people who have recently gotten divorced, people who have had their water shut off for thirty days, people who are in preforeclosure, probate, anything like that. People who are more likely to be motivated to sell their property for a discount, right? It’s a little bit, you know, more nitty-gritty. You’re dealing with homeowners that are usually . . . going through some bullshit.”
My brother overdosed alone. He thought he was taking Percocet, but it was laced with fentanyl. He was twenty-seven. Agent Dooley can’t have him in mind specifically when he talks about “going through some bullshit.” They didn’t know each other. But Agent Dooley knows that kind of thing. He suddenly remembers himself: “You know, we’re trying to help them out by buying their property without having to list it, or have an agent in there, or get foreclosed on, God forbid.” These words are his sandbags: distressed, help, foreclosed, God forbid.
The same words also describe Conor’s body in his final moments before and after overdose. We saw the signs in the apartment later, my father and I. Conor’s worried girlfriend found him early in the morning after he died. He had been texting her until 3:00 a.m. He’d found a framed expressionist artwork that someone had left in the trash room and, delighted, texted a photograph of it to her. When she arrived, he didn’t answer the door. Then the police showed up. Conor was landed face up alongside the bed. Then came the coroner, who removed his body. He wasn’t sure if Conor had choked or overdosed. My father and I, two weeks later, walked into the bedroom. My father threw a red towel over the brown stain of ejecta on the cream carpet. A giant eye, the stain watched us from beneath the swollen lid of the towel.
My older brother and younger sister had also been there before us, to clear out most of Conor’s things before the funeral: buffed Ikea pots and steel-rimmed glass lids, a gleaming knife set, six each of a few types of glassware, hanging clothes. The haste was unnecessary. Conor had paid January rent. But grief likes order. A drawer of sex toys elicited snark from my older brother. They found whippet canisters on the carpet, some weed. When they returned to my parents’ home, I stepped away from my tasks — deleting Conor’s vivid sex life from his phone and writing his eulogy — to help them unload the boxes into the garage.
We went down, my father and I, in Conor’s truck, the doors emblazoned with “Sir Roof,” to fetch his furniture, what remained. We were going to close things out before February rent and get the deposit and cleaning fee. We stopped by Publix and rented a Rug Doctor. We signed a contract on the counter that said we would return it clean.
The Sir Roof logo was a composite, Conor had explained to my wife and me six days before he died. Part Monopoly man (his top hat and walrus mustache), part Mr. Peanut (his monocle and tuxedo). He laughed at the plagiarism. He told us he was starting another business in water remediation and restoration. But that line of work is harder. You can’t just go knock on someone’s door to show them that they have water damage.
“Homeless to 50K a Month in One Year” Charbel headlined the interview with Conor, as if my brother were a walking infomercial. But we had all started to believe the story Conor told the podcast just days before he died. Conor had built a roofing company over the prior twelve months, and it was gushing money. That was true. He’d learned the ropes fresh out of rehab from a friend in southern Georgia. But the friend was getting high and sleeping through long days when Conor was knocking on doors and scoring contracts, so Conor split to go solo in Atlanta. He settled on the name Sir Roof and licensed the business as an LLC. He designed the logo on Fiverr. He brainstormed slogans, settling on “The Only Thing You Have to Lose Is Your Old Roof.” From VistaPrint, he ordered business cards. That’s the fun part of a business, he explains on the podcast, imagining it into existence. Next, he connected with subcontractors who installed roofs — teams made up of mostly Mexican immigrants who billed per one hundred square feet of shingle.
Then the other work of building a company began. He hustled relentlessly, persistently, rapping on doors until he finally signed his first contract. He called into Atlanta radio stations on other pretexts, then plugged his company. He quickly mastered Xactimate, the insurance adjustment software. Business grew, and he hired someone to keep the books. He posted successes online, pushing Sir Roof into public view. The CEO of an established company contacted him to wish the young man well: there were so many damaged roofs after Hurricane Michael, there was work for everyone.
More months passed. Conor trained up or poached another half dozen semi-independent sales agents. Most were former addicts themselves. Camera drones came next: On an iPad, he showed owners footage of their missing shingles. Afterward, the drone panned the new roof from the sky. Folded over the hips and ridges of their suburban castles stretched scales of tucked asphalt shingle, hides of slain dragons.
Conor made it easy to say yes. It’s illegal to pay a customer’s insurance deductible. But you can upgrade to Owens Corning designer shingles, pay for referrals, or compensate someone for appearing in your Facebook testimonial. In one, Conor beams before the camera, slapping his fist into his open palm as he explains, “I’m here with Sir Roof in Roswell.” He names the family beside him and asks if they’re happy with the job. They are indeed: the professionalism, the crew’s speed, Conor’s attentiveness to every detail. Conor beams with boyish pride when his name is mentioned. He shakes each person’s hand. He shook the money tree as well.
Charbel’s “homeless” claim in the headline is harder to believe. Conor had spent a few days on the street before getting clean the last time, it’s true. His dealer had nabbed his car — whether as payment or punishment, loan or theft — and it was impounded. It had all of Conor’s clothes and belongings. After stravaging about, Conor had found his way to the bushes outside our older brother’s driveway, where he knew he could skim the internet. The cops and medics had found him splayed on the driveway asleep. He was just tired, he’d told them. Conor had used an old phone to call me on Viber, crying and bewildered. Our older brother had come home from work and wouldn’t give him a glass of water. Tough love, my brother called it at Conor’s funeral, idealizing his shame. He treats me like I’m some kind of creature, Conor had wailed. It was the knell of the bottom. I’d been on the other end of this call many times before. And I knew my role — to reflect back Conor’s own beleaguered self-love without outrage, evasion, or disappointment. Brother, you want me to tell you it’s time for rehab: it’s time.
I know, he’d said.
Wholesalers build distressed lists by scraping the data from county probate records and other places where private foibles and failings are made public. Data websites make it easy. On PropStream.com, you can pull five thousand vacant properties, then take that list to a data mining site — NeedtoSkip.com — and cross-list it to buy “relationship reports (the phone numbers of the relatives & likely associates of the homeowner).” For fifteen cents per entry, skip-trace the last three or five most-used phone numbers for the person connected to the property. Download Mojo Dialer. This app speed-dials numbers one after another, leaving a prerecorded voice message if no one answers, instantly calling the next number. Once leads are combed, they are sold to other aspiring wholesalers. If you die and have lived at a house, anyone can find your closest phone contacts, then call to ask them if they own the property and whether they want to sell. So the only people who call me about my brother are property wholesalers.
This is loss. Memory, damp and compact as clods of earth, is dried out in the marketplace and burned as turf. Phone conversations with my brother lift like thin smoke, ascending without body or detail into the afterlife of radiant data. Conor calling, nervous that his dear friend Mandy wants more than he can offer and not sure whether he should go with her to Peru. Conor quietly confessing to a breakthrough in therapy, remembering himself as a child hiding in a bathroom cabinet from the neighbor’s father. Our fortnightly call from my walk home from work to hear the monthly roof count, to honor the growing normalcy of sobriety, advising less, sharing more, a growing friendship. These calls join the angelic choir of phone contacts near to the deceased, whose former address, harmonic algorithms suggest, is primed to go on the cheap.
I work my way up to it, sheepish for some reason: after a while, I tell the wholesalers about Conor. I know, I say, that you are a wholesaler who purchased this list of numbers. Yes, one says genially, that’s right. But I’m only on there because my younger brother died. Suddenly exposed, I blurt, The house is not for sale, then end the call. My name is on there, I tell the next wholesaler, because my younger brother died of an overdose at twenty-seven. Silence. To the next caller a week later, I add, The house wasn’t even his. It was my parents’ house, where he lived until three months before he died. Do I tell them that I encouraged him to move out because my parents, who’d lived half-time back in Northern Ireland since retiring, were returning? He had to learn to manage on his own. It was time. He told me that he found it hard, that he got lonely and bored. My parents have already sold the house to my younger sister, I tell the next caller. I don’t explain that they sold it to move back fully to Northern Ireland. That they think lives are hammered too thin here. It’s no use. Once the wholesaler hears that the house has been sold, she keeps to the script. Do I have another property I wish to sell? No? Well, do I know anyone else who wants to sell a property?
On Conor’s episode of A Time Shared, Charbel refers to an interview on a different podcast, this one between Grant Cardone and host Jordan Belfort. These two figures, Belfort and Cardone, influence the talk of the young men interviewed on A Time Shared. Belfort, remember, was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s biopic The Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort rode his way to obscene wealth in the ’90s by founding a brokerage house that hustled pink-sheet penny stocks with few prospects to naive investors. He swam in waves of quaaludes and surfaced for gulps of cocaine. He was convicted on charges of securities fraud and money laundering, and his scam brokerage was shut down. He rebounded from prison to authorship (the movie was based on Belfort’s book), then to motivational speaking, then to sales training, and now to podcasting. He interviews famous salespeople and lawyers for advice on how to behave if arrested. He sits down with FBI agents to get the inside track and with other characters whose occupations link up to the Scorsese version of his capitalist-criminal-celebrity life.
Cardone is a sales trainer and motivational speaker who poured profits into rental real estate. He published a few books, founded Grant Cardone University, and used social media to spin gold for Cardone Capital. Cardone Capital crowdsources funding on the promise that smaller investors can participate in the real estate deals from which Cardone has gotten rich. Investors pool their money into equity funds that Cardone Capital manages, and those funds then buy rental properties. Then, on top of normal commissions and management fees, Cardone Capital immediately owns up to a 35 percent equity share in each apartment project without investing its own capital for the purchase. According to Cardone himself, what’s more, he already personally owned some of the rental complexes these funds have bought. As one online investment review, since removed, cautioned, the fusion of brands creates a conflict of interest, since “Cardone is your asset manager and the seller of the property being acquired by your capital.” When Cardone flips his own apartment complexes to his investors, will he take their side in that conflict? Celebrity branding is by definition self-dealing: take care.
In the interview with Belfort, Cardone is defensive, quibbling, squawking, a mockingbird before his rival. By the end of the hour, he resorts to challenging Belfort to a cage match to see who’s the better sales titan. Despite that Cardone advertises himself as a world-class expert on selling and a trainer of salespeople, when Belfort asks him about sales strategies, Cardone speaks confusingly. He spouts pseudo-profundities and sham metaphysics. He insists there is “no trick in this game”; you just need contacts and a pipeline of products. He’s direct about what he offers, and if someone says they aren’t interested, “I move on.” When a lead says, “Not interested,” this in fact indicates “a level of interest,” since they used “not” to describe interest. He says the secret is not moving on but coming back, recanvassing. Belfort interjects to say that his listeners are young salespeople and entrepreneurs who need more practical advice about how to turn a no into a yes, how to persuade someone. Cardone won’t budge: you don’t need to persuade people; it’s about the funnel of products you offer and the number of people you ask.
Charbel puts this contradiction to Conor as a question: When a potential customer says they are not interested, is this a level of interest, or does it indicate you should move on? Conor sides with Belfort: You have to persuade. Sales is a hustle. It’s an inception. You have to compel people to view things how you want them to be seen. Your home is your most important asset. You need to protect it with a good roof. Currently your roof is missing shingles. Not interested in me going up on a ladder? How about I show you an aerial view of your roof from a drone so that you can see the damage. Look, it will cost you nothing. The insurance will cover it. And if you go with me, I’ll even upgrade the shingle with a longer warranty. No? Well, consider this. If you allow preventable water damage — if you knew your roof was damaged but didn’t file a claim to replace it — that’s negligence. And the insurance company will not cover the additional repair cost for the water damage when you do decide to get around to it. Conor sold more than half the roofing projects for his company, as much as the other six agents combined. He was going to be wealthy.
I don’t think Cardone’s defensiveness is insecurity before the better salesman, as the internet cornermen have it. Belfort threatens Cardone because Belfort was an astonishingly successful huckster who got rich, first on the back of working people, then on wealthier clients — all of whom were convinced that the mediocre companies he dressed up could make them money. He went to jail for fraud. If Cardone admits to competing tactics, it could suggest that he’s also peddling a scam. The danger is real. Cardone’s product is mostly versions of himself, emulation he sells with simple neoliberal messages: Success is individual, not societal. You must work harder than others, take responsibility for your own failures, and be positive. Imagine yourself a billionaire (commit to the notion), surround yourself with people who have more money than you or people who have less money than you but are willing to give it to you (“your network is your net worth”), and then figure out why they should give you money.
All of Cardone’s advice leads directly to money in his pocket. “It’s foolish to own a house and better to rent!” says the man who makes money on rental housing. “Surround yourself with wealthy people!” says the man who increases the price of tickets at his speaking events the closer you are to him onstage. “Forget college education — it only produces average people!” says the man who offers three-day seminars at $12,000 a seat. “You must develop passive income!” says the man who dismisses money in workers’ retirement accounts. What’s an investor to do? All other avenues cut off, all that’s left is Cardone. Get close to him, learn from him, and join him. In May of 2021, Cardone bought himself Tommy Hilfiger’s mansion in South Florida for $24 million.
One reason Belfort and Cardone are so popular with young men is that they romanticize the leap from the working class directly to the wealthy elite, skipping entirely the mundane dreams, political modesty, and slow accumulation of the middle class. This leap is coded in machismo that binds both classes with an invigorating and Nietzschean will to power and a daring and heroic exposure to risk. In The Wolf of Wall Street, the young sales brokers whom Belfort recruits are childhood friends, some working-class “middling pot dealers.” Such men, the implication is, are superior to the college-educated at the hard sell. They remain loyal and unfazed by criminality. They don’t give a toss what people think. For Nietzsche, the will to power means rejecting middle-class morality for a nobility that values living vitally, with pleasure. It means repudiating free-floating guilt and overcoming others’ resistance to your view of the world. Cardone and Belfort are salesmen of such an aristocracy. As Jordan Belfort puts it in the movie: “I also gamble like a degenerate, drink like a fish, fuck hookers maybe five times a week, and have three different federal agencies looking to indict me.” In Wolf, drugs and orgies transvalue middle-class morality. And the invigorating wealth — for those who work for you and for those you need to take care of — justifies the exploitation that can lead to multiple criminal investigations.
Podcast Belfort no longer needs to bolster a criminal ego so now staidly abjures drug use. Cardone claims to be no fan of drugs either, having found a cure for his earlier drug addiction in hustling. But both seem to be aware that what they peddle requires some psychic care. “Invest all the money in yourself first,” says Cardone of his rules of investing. Belfort, who intuits Cardone’s university grift, responds: “Yourself being educating yourself?” Cardone quickly moves past the dig: “Education, brand, clothes, looking good, teeth, whatever, whatever, whatever you need to make yourself feel good about yourself.” I went to business school. This is unusual investing advice.
The young men in Charbel’s interviews follow the script. Feeling the sting of hierarchies of inherited power and wealth, these men, either from the working class or, like my brother, once removed but without college, find Cardone and Belfort’s repudiation of the middle class intoxicating and liberating. Agent Dooley, who tweeted that “I’ve read less than 5 books ever,” opened his own university to teach people how to make money taking surveys for corporations. Two of Charbel’s other interviewees, both Latino immigrants, humbly explain how to set up arbitrage schemes for passive income by drop-shipping on Amazon, by flipping secondhand cars, by reselling shoes. In addition to podcasting, Charbel hustles an online course that teaches punters how to turn a yearly apartment rental into an Airbnb without running afoul of the lease. These men all seek strategies that carve some arbitrage value for themselves, then sell courses that teach others to do the same.
Cardone’s worldview led to confusion for Conor. In his interview, Conor admits that he’s followed Cardone for years. “I’ve had his 10X planner since I was, like, eighteen,” he says. “I don’t know, he’s just, you know, he’s confident . . . like an embodiment of parts of myself.” Cardone elevates getting rich to a triumph of manhood, as if failing to bench a weighty income bracket is disgrace: “If I made four hundred grand a year, I’d be embarrassed of myself as a husband, a father,” Cardone asserts. Conor parrots the tough talk. He boasts that he will know he has made it when he makes one hundred thousand a month. Our father, I should add, left school at fifteen, and by the time he was seventeen, our grandfather, a shipyard caulker, put him into a trade. Over more than five decades of working, he ground his way upward from welder to supervisor, from superintendent to construction manager of power plants. Conor says that by the end of our father’s career, he was successful, “but to me my dad was not financially successful.”
Yet the spell dissipates the longer Conor is interviewed, as if he becomes aware that the masculinity on offer orbits a familiar dead planet of desire. Charbel asks Conor if people are poor because they have the wrong “mindset,” failing to save, to work hard, or to focus on moneymaking. “Do I think that’s why people are poor? I think it’s a poor state of mind,” Conor says. But he points out that people are poor because there’s not a lot of money for the working class, even if someone works three jobs. “It’s a two-way thing for poverty, to be honest.” Conor had talked to me with respect for the immigrants who worked for the subcontractors and roofed the houses. He spoke of their dogged work ethic and the relationship between the subcontractor rates, based on unprotected labor, and his own profits. He admits to Charbel that “being a drug addict” distorts his view of success. “I’m always going to want more, more money and more girls.” He is “aware of it,” watches the pull of his ego to “rationalize it.” Our father, he adds, stood by him through the hell of addiction, when he was strung out, stealing, “being a piece of shit.” Our father continued to love him, I would add, when Conor was, as a young teen, out of control, abusive. “Just being a good person, that is a form of success as well.” He settles into a vision of loyalty and moderation. If his business could be just the size it is now and he had a family, he would find that successful.
The morning before Conor died — his last day — he had a procedure to get hair plugs, what he needed, to use Cardone’s words, to feel good about himself. Conor was a handsome man. But his insecurities went to his high forehead. He’d been to North Atlanta Hair Restoration once before, refusing all pain medication at the time. In that context, did they discuss Conor’s drug addiction? Seems likely to me. But I don’t know. This second time, Conor was driven by his friend Nic, another Sir Roof sales agent. According to Nic, when the doctor debated whether to prescribe Conor pain medication, Nic told him no, that he and Conor met in rehab. The good doctor, in any case, prescribed ten pills of Mallinckrodt-manufactured hydrocodone, an opioid painkiller. Walgreens in Dunwoody filled the prescription. A complaint on Healthgrades.com says that “years ago, [the doctor] prescribed me opioids and slowly upped my dose until he had me taking 120 milligrams of Oxycontin twice a day, several Dilaudids and Percocets daily, and other medications as well. This caused Severe Physical Dependency. . . . Stay away from this ‘man.’ He destroyed my life!”
Nic stayed with Conor late into the evening as Conor wolfed the pills and they did whippets together. Then Conor had a text exchange with another friend and sales agent for Sir Roof. Years back, the friend’s father and Conor had started a short-lived limousine service from Atlanta to a Native American casino in North Carolina. To Conor’s request, the friend replied that he had found some “RP 10s,” or oxycodone hydrochloride, and some “bars,” or Xanax. He said they were overpriced, but “it’s not my main guy.” RP oxycodone is made and distributed by Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, which is owned by Perdue, the company found criminally liable for spurring an addiction epidemic.
The friend knew that Conor was an addict. He knew that Conor had fought for his life to get sober, that his proud two-year sobriety had given the friend himself a lucrative job. But Conor was also his boss, asking for a favor. Whatever his doubts about the dealer, the friend left Conor with the pills that night. They were laced with fentanyl. Someone — the dealer, the supplier? — killed my brother. But the coroner and the police never considered the scene a crime, as if the liability of overdose is erased by accident or limited by just desserts. The coroner took six months to provide my family with the cause of death, preventing action on our part as well. Action? What action? I don’t know.
At the viewing, not ten feet from where Conor’s cold face was still being warmed periodically by women’s hands, that same friend’s father approached me. I put out my hand, expecting his condolences, as with the others before him. He and Conor had been working jointly on a new business, he immediately said. Oh, I see, I said, not fully understanding, still shaking his hand. He said there wasn’t much, a Facebook page, an idea, some small investment. I’m sorry, I said, no longer shaking. Could he have that business now? he asked. Was it his business now?
A year or so after the funeral, that man’s own son, the friend, died from a fentanyl overdose. Two other young people who mourned Conor at his funeral have since died from fentanyl overdoses. The daughter of my brother-in-law has since died from a fentanyl overdose. I don’t know how to grieve or accept when the whole is grievous and unacceptable.
Distressed. I show my father by raising my left arm. Against the mirror, Conor’s forearm had printed a patch of warm flesh and hair: left arm propped, head bent. He was vomiting. I clean the bits from the sink. My father plunges it and rinses the rest.
Help. Around the toilet bowl, my father points, vomit is splattered. I can do that if you want. No, no. He goes down on his knees and wipes the outer cliff and floor.
Foreclosed. My father unslots the empty dresser drawers. I stand them like dolmens in the empty closet, swarded with fresh carpet. We angle the dresser out from the bedroom, down the hall. Foot prop, next man through. It’s easy going down the hall to the elevator. Two floors down, we cross over to the steel door. Foot prop, next man through. In the parking deck, the dresser slides along the truck bed. Back. The drawers. Back.
The wobbly mass of mattress hefts into a soft collapse against the wall. The bed disassembles easily with an Allen key. The slats roll to cylinders in fabric straps. Flimsy diagonal supports, unscrewed, are pinioned. The frame, unbolted, lands in splints on the floor. We angle the frame down to the truck. Lamps and night table. To his truck. The drunk mattress. We heave it to his truck.
I feel the stain watching us from under the eyelid of the towel. At the kitchen island, together we fill the plastic reservoir of the Rug Doctor with warm water and carpet fluid. My father wets a scrub brush and takes the rest of the cleaner. Mute, we divide. He kneels, pulls aside the towel, and, with the wetted brush and more carpet fluid, scrubs. Starting from the window’s edge, I mow carpet strips like it’s any Saturday morning, dragging backward, dredging, row by row, until I am beside him.
God forbid. I leave the room, dizzy, and chance to the kitchen sink. My father’s curved back rises and falls. Freed from the carpet come the last bits of his youngest son.
