Stolen Stories

Warning to friends: Su cuento es mi cuento

“Stolen Stories.” All graphics by Robert Graboyes (with AI assist).

Su cuento es mi cuento. Your story is my story. Be warned—if you tell me a good story, there’s a high probability I’ll be repeating it long after you’ve forgotten it. My brain is stocked with anecdotes acquired over a lifetime, ready to summon forth to make a point or entertain. Below are examples from nine friends, colleagues, and casual acquaintances—including four from my friend G**, a semi-retired French diplomat who is the single greatest source of anecdotes I’ve ever met. I’ve been stealing his material for nearly half a century. There might be a factual error here or there, but such is the Oral Tradition.

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IMPERIAL DECORUM

Jean-Bedel Bokassa was one of the three bloodthirstiest tyrants in post-independence Africa, along with Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada and Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macias Nguema. J-BB was President of the Central African Republic and later crowned himself Emperor Bokassa I of the temporarily rechristened Central African Empire.

One of G**’s colleagues was meeting in the presidential/imperial palace with Bokassa. A member of the president’s/emperor’s cabinet walked in to ask Bokassa a question. The two got into a squabble. Bokassa opened a desk drawer, took out a pistol, and shot the cabinet minister to death. With the protégé dead on the floor, Bokassa turned back to his guest and said, “I'm so sorry for the interruption. Now what were you saying?”

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HOOO-WEEEE!!!

G** was flying from Paris to New York on the Concorde. Just as the sleek, supersonic plane was about to leave the terminal, the door reopened. A final passenger bounded up the aisle and sat next to G**. After catching his breath, the late-boarding fellow struck up a conversation with G**. He was an oilman, with Texas accent in tow.

They chatted for two hours—till the captain instructed passengers to prepare for landing in New York. Confused, the oilman looked around and said, “I don’t understand. We just took off!” G** said, “Yes. That’s the miracle of the Concorde.”

The oilman’s eyes widened and darted about the cabin; after a pause, he bellowed, “CONCORDE???” He had scurried into the airport, too late for a prior flight. He had handed the ticket agent his credit card and said, “I’m in a hurry. Put me on whatever the next flight you have is.” That flight was the Concorde.

The oilman took out his credit card receipt and saw that the charge was perhaps eight times the cost of a normal ticket. G** expected the man to be upset. Instead, he let out a Texas whoop: “Hoooo-WEEEE!!” he said, “I LIKE this Concorde.” He laughed and said he should have noticed that the craft was pencil-thin, with only four seats per row.

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FAHRVERGNÜGEN

G** attended a European Union conference on aid to impoverished African nations. He stood in the parking lot, watching the delegations arrive. Up drove a motorcade centered on a flag-covered limousine; out stepped the ambassador from, let’s say, the desperately poor Chad. Then, up drove another motorcade, and out stepped the ambassador from somewhere like Burkina Faso. On it went, impoverished country after impoverished country. Finally, he saw the German ambassador arrive—driving himself, solo, in his own Volkswagen Rabbit.

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DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY

G**’s flight made a stopover in Entebbe, Uganda. With no explanation, soldiers boarded and said the plane would be detained indefinitely. Passengers sat in nervous silence as the tropical sun heated the plane. After a while, one elderly passenger, also French, waved his passport around, loudly declaring, “I am traveling on a diplomatic passport, and I DEMAND that you put me on the next flight out of this country. The passengers watched with terrified expectation. A soldier walked back, looked at the passport, and said, “Come with me. And anyone else with a diplomatic passport, come with me, as well.” G** and several others got up and followed, uncertain of what would happen next. As demanded by the older man, the soldiers put them on the next flight out, and off they flew. Meanwhile, the other passengers spent an unpleasant few days waiting for a resolution.

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MAÑANA

S** lived in Colombia with his wife in the 1970s. One day, they were flying back to the U.S. Flights were never on time, so they usually felt no compulsion to hurry to the airport. That morning, however, S** felt an inexplicable urge to be punctual. “Why?” his wife asked, “They’re always late.” “I don’t know,” he responded, “I just have a premonition that we should be on time.” They arrived at the gate ten minutes before the scheduled boarding time and found the plane already pulling away from the gate. They begged to be let onto the plane. It rolled back to the gate, and they ran on and quickly found their seats. After catching their breaths, S** asked the flight attendant, “Why was the plane pulling out before departure time? She responded, “Oh … this is yesterday’s flight.”

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GHOST TICKET

J**, a woman I knew back in the 70s was from somewhere in South Texas. She was heading home from Virginia to visit family and had booked a two-leg trip. The first leg was on some name-brand airline—American, perhaps. The second was on a small regional airline—“Del Rio Airlines,” if I remember correctly. She arrived at the transfer airport, with a very small window of time to get to the Del Rio gate. She barged off the plane, towing a small child, a pregnant belly, and lots of luggage, and looked at the boards and the gates. No sign of the flight. She began getting nervous. She ran hither and yon to no avail. Finally, she barged to the front of some ticket line and begged the agent to look at her ticket and advise her where to go. He looked and said, “I’m sorry ma’am, but Del Rio Airlines went out of business four years ago.”

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¡MILAGRO!

A fellow I met in the late 1970s hitchhiked from the U.S. to South America. At some point, he was in a remote village high in the Bolivian Andes. He was very Anglo looking, and the locals eyed him with suspicion. At some point, he noticed an older lady staring at him from a distance. She didn’t take her eyes off of him. Finally, she wandered slowly over to him and looked him in the eyes with an intense stare. “Is it true,” she asked, “that in America, they have buildings as tall as pine trees?”

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MATERIALS

C** is a Midwesterner, and his father and grandfather were architects. For years, my family and I regularly visited buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the early 2000s, we visited Fallingwater, his gravity-defying Pennsylvania masterpiece. During construction, Wright had bickered furiously with the general contractor, who thought the great cantilevered porch needed more steel reinforcement, while Wright insisted on less. The contractor snuck extra rebar in during the night, but by the year we visited, the house was verging on collapse and shrouded by scaffolding.

We also visited Wright’s Kentuck Knob, just up the road. During construction, Wright made one unannounced visit to the site, where the general contractor, Herman Keys, was poring over the plans. When Wright walked in, Keys glanced at him, looked back at the plans, and said, “This house is going to fall down.” The notoriously self-important Wright reared up and said, “Do you know who you’re talking to?” Keys said, “Yeah. I know. And your house is going to fall down, Mr. Wright.” Keys showed him that the framing was inadequate against the mountaintop’s strong prevailing winds. “I’ll fix it,” Wright said. Returning to his studio, Wright bellowed to his assistants (who had done much of the design work): “I have just had architecture explained to me by some mountain contractor. FIX IT!” They added steel beams. (Apparently Wright so admired the contractor’s insolence that they became lifelong friends.)

When I told C** about our visit he said, “My grandfather knew Wright. He always said, ‘Great architect. Never understood materials.’” On a more somber note, the morning of September 11, 2001, watching the Twin Towers just beginning to burn, C** muttered to his work colleagues that his grandfather had told him that skyscrapers are far more fragile than people understand. “If one of these towers ever has a major fire,” he had told C**, “the whole thing is coming down.”

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FOREIGN EXCHANGE

Some colleague—can’t remember who—told me this back in my banking days in the 1980s. His friend worked for a financial firm in Greece and was secretly planning to quit his job. They were engaged in foreign currency futures, and his boss told him to devise a one-year forecast for the exchange rate between Greece’s Drachma and Germany’s Deutschmark.

After work, he went to a bar, and as he sat at the counter, a prostitute sidled up next to him. He said, “Thanks, but I’m not in the market.” Then, he thought for a moment and offered to buy 15 or 20 minutes of her time—just to ask her some questions at the bar. “How much,” he asked, would you charge me for an hourlong encounter, if I paid in Drachma?” She gave him a price. “Now,” he continued, “How many Deutschmark would you charge for the same services?” Without missing a beat, she gave a price.

“Okay,” he asked, “Suppose I come back a year from today. How much will you charge me if I pay in Drachma?” She thought for a moment, factored in Greece’s 20%-ish inflation, and gave him a considerably higher number. “Now suppose I come back in a year and want to pay you in Deutschmark.” She gave him a number, reflecting Germany’s much lower inflation. The guy thanked her for her time, and paid her.

He used the four numbers to calculate the expected inflation rates in Greece and Germany and to forecast the one-year-out exchange rate between the two currencies. He gave the boss this “forecast,” resigned from the firm, and left Greece.

A year later, a old coworker in Athens called to ask a favor. “I need your forecasting model,” he said. “What forecasting model?” “The one you used to forecast the Drachma/Deutschmark futures the week you quit here. Your predictions were spot-on accurate. He wants me to find out how you did it and use the same technique.” “[laughter] Wellll … First, you’ll need to go to that bar we used to frequent … …”

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FIVE-STAR

While we’re on the topic of the World’s Oldest Profession, here’s another tale. B** was living in an impoverished Third World country. While there, he heard about a most peculiar local market arrangement. Prostitutes and clients generally determined the price after their encounter. She argued that it had been the best ever and warranted a high payment. The customer argued that it had been profoundly lacking and deserved a much lower payment. The two would argue and haggle until agreeing on some mid-range level of satisfaction and price.

Like me, B** is an economist, and we both have a strong interest in the workings of markets. How, we wondered, was this particular arrangement feasible? The customer would seem to have an overwhelming edge in determining the final price. All we could figure is that this system works in a situation of ongoing, repetitive transactions. If the customer is unduly stingy, she won’t invite him back again and, perhaps, she will spoil his reputation among her colleagues in town. For years, the closest analogy in my own life was paying for landscaping services. The gardener does a job and gives me a price afterward; maybe I say, “Well, for that much, you should trim the bushes, too.” He does, and we both walk away happy. In more recent years, I’ve thought that the prostitution market in B**’s village might well have resembled Uber’s two-way rating system, where passengers rate drivers and drivers rate passengers.

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BOOTED

K**, an older colleague at Chase Manhattan, told me he once turned down a perfect loan application because of boots. The applicant’s business proposal was spotless and persuasive. But then, he noticed the guy was wearing purple cowboy boots. He declined to make the loan, and the borrower was furious. He went to another bank, which quickly lent him tens of millions of dollars.

Why the problem with boots? Chase had famously lost a fortune when a big borrower, Oklahoma’s Penn Square Bank, collapsed. Newspapers giddily recounted that when the loan agreement was struck, a key Penn Square officer took off one of his purple cowboy boots, poured champagne into it, and passed it around the table for the lenders to sip from. When K** saw his applicant’s cowboy boots, he said no because he did not want to take the teeniest, tiniest, remotest chance of being the second Chase lending officer to lose money to someone wearing purple cowboy boots.

Some months later, the boot-wearer’s business failed, and the other bank lost the money it had lent. The lending officer who made the deal called K**: “That was as good a loan application as I’ve ever seen. What risks did you see in that guy that I failed to see?” “Did you tell him?” I asked. K** smiled and said, “I just told him, ‘When you’ve been in business as long as I have, you develop a powerful intuition—a sixth sense about loan applicants.’”

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F’TRUE

J** was a character who went to a conference with a friend in New Orleans. The friend was arrested for some traffic violation. Later, J** and his other friends worried what had become of him and called the police. They said he was in jail. J** went to bail him out and asked why he hadn’t called. He said he had only one call and thought it best to cancel his dinner reservation at Antoine’s. J** said, “Well, why didn’t you call me instead?” He said, “Cause I knew you’d eventually find me, but I also knew that if I didn’t call Antoine’s, I’d never get another reservation there again.”

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BASTIAT’S WINDOW publisher Robert F. Graboyes is an economist, journalist, and musician whose five degrees include a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, he received the Reason Foundation’s 2014 Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His musical compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.