(Consultant (Business English; n. from Latin: consultare "to deliberate"): A person whose pleonexic appetency compels a ruthless bamboozling of the common buffoon, by offering sensible financial advice.)

In moments of shame and boredom, with breath drawn from whisky vapor and the recycled respirations of planemates, I recite the only prayer ever written for the graverobbing class. We have all seen this part of the movie: the bad guy barks an accidentally well-received mantra—“greed is good”; “coffee’s for closers”—that reveals his superiority is mostly just stupidity. To graverobbers this is obviously an insulting caricature, if only for the fact that we see ourselves more as the heroic wanderers of poem and song, driving through midnight to shoot dead another town’s second horse.

The real prayer—the one that all consultants speak with different words, whether they know it or not—comes from William Carlos Williams: “Morals are memories of success that no longer succeeds.” And if I look too long across the flying hull of corporate shills, dispassionate boyfriends and better halves, regionally competitive youth breakdance troupes, and infants crying in anger at life’s meager banquet, I won’t remember whether it’s the morals or the success I was hired to stamp out.

With that being said, please keep in mind that the following is not in any way useful as a travel guide and likely has no narrative reward; if you find yourself relating to any form of human experience, I promise there is nothing worthwhile to go by and am a bit disgusted by you. Remember, these are stories of alcoholic maniacs wearing stained suits and hurtling toward divorce, cirrhosis, badly furnished second homes by way of Saginaw, Texas, and as much depravity as can be disguised by success that no longer succeeds.

The Bounty Hunters of the Courtyard Marriott

Charlotte, North Carolina was once a contestant for God’s country, before a healthcare services industry and repository of regional banks decided the town wasn’t big enough for the Lord to keep His parking space. Nestled between well-maintained 2014 Toyota Highlanders and the occasional bigshot’s 2019 Mazda CX-5 are the town’s vestigial natural beauties: the verdant Catawba River, meandering as though lost in a shopping mall; Lake Norman, whose inclusion on a natural beauty list is naturally ironic; Kings Pinnacle, a genuinely delightful mountain of modest elevation, in suitable proportion to whichever dumb asshole rules as King of Gaston County.

Looking further inward, the residents of Greater Charlotte (the city itself is of lesser salvation and has comically decent urban planning for how monumentally unnecessary it is) are of surprisingly placid stock. For this is the home of the masters of duty—those with a talent for winning each of the four trophies in the game against life: family pleasance, fertile seasons, financial satisfaction and fornication.

The soul of this fecund land finds itself manifested in the Courtyard by Marriott Charlotte Southpark, which is where I then found myself, newly thirty, recently dumped, and determined to drink bourbon until I could no longer drown in the still. My client was an equipment manufacturer with enough of a pulse to survive the private equity snare trap and to bore my vulture bloodlust. My days were unfuckupable and praised by the clods of my profession (I wore a suit, C-suite wore slacks, and Valerius beat Pyrrhus). My nights were equally Pyrrhic, as I won arguments with myself over who to blame for the ex’s ‘ski trips’ while losing an unscarred liver. The noble business park née hamlet of Charlotte could handle a few bruises.

So much of life is timing. A good consultant burns out invisibly; a great consultant calculates the line and gets within a molecule of crossing it. On the night of my line’s last chance, the Courtyard Marriott Southpark hosted a conference for one of the most lowdown, broken nosed good old boy clubs in America: the U.S. Marshalls. The feds’ own bounty hunters, duly sworn to find and bring to justice the scum of the earth (i.e., people who owe the government money). The proud men and women for whom no khaki is too tight, no forest ranger-looking hat too torn at the seams, and no insistence that a thumb can’t impregnate an egg too scientifically supported for their heads not to look like a thumb fucked an egg. These, dear reader, are the people you want to sit next to when every choice in life has led you to drink half a bottle of Makers in a Marriott in Charlotte.

Bounty Hunter Boofus (names changed for the privacy of all professional kidnappers involved) was first in a crowd of 30 conference attendees to oppress my neighboring barstool with an ass that stopped being a tight end on account of his bum knee and clandestine army romances. As I have the consultant’s talent to think I’m incredibly good at people, I made small talk while he commanded that we each have a ‘shot of brown’ (he meant whiskey). I went on to identify myself as a fellow member of the Republican Brotherhood of Evil.

It was then that the other adjoining barstool was invaded. I turned my head left, expecting to see Bounty Hunter Dumpty, and instead found myself face to face with the Persephonic North Carolina mountain woman of war: Agent Olivia Benson, an early forties, battle-hardened and muscle-clad dom of an officer, bearing a resemblance to the television lady the U.S. Marshalls are no longer allowed to call striking; and in that moment of charcoal-filtered degeneracy stood the most terrifying cyclone of sex and authority my cold, young, blackening heart could ever want.

Bounty Hunter Boofus, keen in sight to the human condition, slapped me on the shoulder and waddled away with a single warning: “Careful, boy, she’s a maneater.”

I eyed my target.

If you’ve never experienced the kinetic whiplash of someone who despises you so much that she can’t help but desire you, congratulations on inheriting the Earth later, and imagine having a stick of dynamite for an alarm clock. Blasted awake was every remnant of sinew our ancestors honed to fight dinosaurs in that one minute it took for us to hate each other. She cut off the conversation with an insult loud enough for her conference room friends to believe I had no chance, and in this moment I slid her the spare key and cardboard sleeve needed for a late night SWAT team raid of my hotel room before departing under cover of a buffoonish pas de bourrée.

The waiting game commenced. The first thirty minutes of solitude were squandered trying to negotiate my body’s priorities for blood alcohol redistribution. The second thirty minutes more or less lined up with an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. My door swung open, and I knew in an instant that gentlemen who don’t kiss and tell are better men than I. Bounty Hunter Olivia Benson took off her pleated slacks, leaving only her sportive ranger hat, button-down shirt, belt and holster, with deadly terrifying firearm left on. The night was young and she was a George Strait song about rodeos, wrestling the upper hand from the saddle, her gun’s aim swaying menacingly between my first and second favorite body parts, until she finished her run.

As she was leaving, she peremptorily instructed me to tell no one. The feeling of threat lingered as she departed quietly, leaving me with about two years of yearning heartsickness.