A Truck Full of Money, Page 5

  Paul said that he had grown up soaking in Catholicism. So had Tom. The experience had left Tom devout and Paul devoutly anticlerical. On other scores, though, they shared a lot, including a psychiatrist, an elderly man named Jack Green.

  Paul hadn’t known of this connection. When it came to light, Dr. Green said that Tom had given him permission to tell Paul about their sessions. The doctor said that Tom often spoke about Paul during therapy, and often said how glad he was to have Paul as a friend. Evidently, Tom had been struggling with a bout of depression when Paul had first met him for lunch. “And you really helped him,” said Dr. Green. Paul felt he had been handed an obligation, ill-defined but welcome, an obligation of affection.

  He felt that he and Tom had become like brothers, and he also felt that in some ways they were like father and son. When he read the autobiography, it took him back to Tom’s living room, and the pain in Tom’s face when he talked about the homeless people begging on the corners around Harvard Square. Tom knew most of those people and their life stories, and he never left home without a wad of cash to distribute among them. One homeless woman told Tom that she would like to have a wagon to carry the bottles and cans that she collected for the deposits. The next day the aging tycoon was seen pulling a brand-new red wagon through Harvard Square to her corner. He gave much larger gifts to homeless programs and also to various charities, more than a hundred charities over the years. He did this partly for himself, he’d say: “I knew that one way to get rid of any depression was to do something for somebody else.” He would also say that he’d learned there was no such thing as a self-made man, that all are born into conditions beyond their control, and that having money to give away to the unfortunate is a privilege born of lucky breaks.

  Tom told Paul the stories about his first trip to Haiti, and how it had inspired him to finance the creation of Partners In Health. He told about the first time he saw a child with the symptoms of starvation, the reddish hair and bloated belly of what is known as kwashiorkor. “Put in a feeding program here,” Tom had declared to the co-founders of PIH. He remembered encountering a child with big eyes and a memorable smile who was living in a dirt-floored hovel, and saying, “For Christ’s sake, put a tin roof on and pour a concrete floor. I’ll give you the money. Holy shit!” Speaking of his donations to Partners In Health, he told Paul much the same thing as he later wrote down: “I can’t say that I never had a few qualms about giving but they were very few and as I went along I realized what great joy there was in seeing a child half dead and six months later seeing him running around having a good time with the other kids.”

  Paul didn’t give away a great deal of the $8 million he got from Boston Light. After meeting Tom, he started writing $10,000 and $20,000 checks, mostly to organizations that Tom supported, mainly homeless shelters and Partners In Health. Later, after the founding of Kayak, the size of Paul’s checks grew, however. PIH’s chief fundraiser remembered the day in 2005 when Paul asked him to come over for breakfast, appeared at the door disheveled, and said, “I’ve been thinking things over and talking to Tom, and I’m going to give you a million bucks.”

  Over the next few years, Paul started running low on cash—he spent more than $2 million remodeling his house—but he borrowed against his shares in Kayak and went on donating money to his own and Tom’s favorite causes.

  Tom, meanwhile, was busy enacting a plan for self-impoverishment. He would say he didn’t believe in “wearing a hair shirt” but had come to realize that stockpiling money was the equivalent of burying it, as a servant does in the parable of the talents. “I feel sorry for people that are wealthy and sitting there with millions—some of them billions—just making more money. I ask myself, ‘For what?’ Why don’t they take a few million and give it to the very poor and marginalized people all over the world who suffer so much, in great part because of the greed of the wealthy?”

  When Tom sold his Cambridge apartment and moved to a house in Newton, Paul felt bereft. He called Tom from Kayak and said, “Don’t think you’re going to get away without serving me gin and tonics. I’m gonna hunt you down and figure out where to get my drinks.” An hour later, one of Paul’s team came to his desk and told him there was someone at the door asking for him. It was a burly man in workingman’s clothes, a tough-looking guy with a huge brown paper bag in his arms. He growled, “I’m lookin’ for Paul English.” He handed over the bag. In it Paul found seven bottles of gin, bottles of all sizes, from a nip to a gallon jug.

  Tom was the person who made gifts. It could be hard to talk him into receiving one. One winter day, Tom’s wife remarked to Paul that Tom would like to go to Florida but felt too old for all the rigamarole of a commercial flight. The next day Paul called Tom and said, “I went to this fundraiser and there was an auction and I won time on a corporate jet, but it’s about to expire. Do you know anyone who could use it?”

  Tom said, “You’re full of shit,” and hung up.

  Paul redialed. “Tom, I didn’t win it at a corporate auction, that may have been an exaggeration, but please will you let me fly you two to Florida?”

  It took a while, but Tom eventually agreed. Then Paul called a friend in the aviation business, who told him he could rent a really nice jet for $18,000. Paul was aghast. He had entered his period of borrowing money. But he rented the jet and also a limo to take Tom to the airport, and just for the sake of Tom’s company, he flew with him to Florida, returning the next day.

  Tom had told Paul, among others, that once he had provided for his family’s future, he would give the rest of his possessions away to worthy causes and die without a nickel of his own. By around 2009, Tom had been enacting this plan for most of a decade. He had grown very thin and frail, and full of worries. When he ran out of money, what would happen to the causes he had helped to finance? What would happen to Partners In Health?

  By this time, Kayak was thriving, and Paul’s stock had become a fortune, if only on paper. Paul told Tom not to worry. He would make sure that PIH didn’t fail. “I don’t have a hundred million dollars yet,” Paul told him. “But I will.”

  Tom wasn’t alive to see that day. He died at ninety, in January 2011—not penniless but close to it, Paul heard. Paul didn’t have to rescue PIH, which had many other large donors by then, but he pledged to keep on giving money to the organization—another million once he had his Kayak winnings, and a hundred thousand a year for ten years after that. He had also joined the organization’s board.

  The year after Tom died, Haiti suffered its dreadful earthquake and ensuing cholera epidemic. When PIH’s board was deliberating over ways to stanch it, Paul suggested that they use one of the expensive cholera vaccines, and then declared, “I’ll backstop it.” He added, “And let’s vaccinate a hundred thousand people.” Choosing a number simply because it sounded impressive was an old move of Paul’s—“the big-number strategy.” And it worked. It helped to get a vaccination campaign started, which helped to slow the epidemic and indirectly to increase the world’s supply of cholera vaccine. In the end it cost Paul nothing, because the Red Cross ended up paying for the drugs. But the gesture—“I’ll backstop it”—was one Tom would have made.

  Paul’s conscience had been affected by Tom, much in the way one’s conscience is affected by one’s father, by what one’s father says and does. When Paul was asked why he wanted to give money away, you could hear something like an echo of Tom’s voice, both in the quick reply—“What else would you do with it?”—and then in Paul’s explanation: “I’m a little bit communist in that I don’t think money ever really belongs to one person. Money’s supposed to move around. I mean, money’s a fiction, right? Money’s this fictitious thing created to facilitate trade and for building things, so I think hoarding it is a disaster, because it goes against what money was created for.”

  Tom had agreed to let his name be put on a building only once—on PIH’s Thomas J. White Tuberculosis Center in Haiti. Like Tom, Paul had been making most of his donat
ions quietly, often anonymously. The boy who, like Tom, had felt it was his job to make peace in his childhood home had also, in recent years, become his own family’s go-to guy. And since Tom’s death, Paul had made repeated vows that he, too, would end up giving away everything he owned.

  Often when Paul said this, he would add: “I just don’t want to give it all away yet.”

  5

  On November 9, 2012, the morning after the sale of Kayak was announced, Paul woke up to find his picture on the front page of The Boston Globe. “Priceline Makes a $1.8 Billion Deal for Kayak” read the headline. The caption added: “Kayak cofounder Paul English shaped apps that compare travel searches.” All this in the newspaper that he used to deliver on his bicycle. In his place, of course, many hometown-boys-made-good would have been delighted. Paul felt like going into hiding.

  Emails, texts, phone calls, even knockings on his door. All his channels of communication were flooded, less with congratulations now than with requests for money: pleas for help from pathetic-sounding strangers who might or might not be con artists; from old friends and new acquaintances representing worthy charities; from a doctor who had been treating him, now asking, on behalf of his hospital, if Paul would mind being contacted by the development office. Also from a friend of a friend who wondered whether Paul could spare fifty thousand for a real estate investment. The woman arrived at his door a few nights later, wearing a tennis dress though the night was chilly. Paul turned her down gently, simply saying that he didn’t invest in things like real estate. He put off most of the petitioners by saying that he’d get back to them, that he didn’t have any of his new fortune yet, which was true. His current therapist had warned him about giving money away recklessly. To resist seemed like the right thing to do, but it was painful saying no.

  Like Tom, Paul had a knack for making money and didn’t seem very interested in keeping it. Now he had an absurdity of money. True, some things remained out of his reach. He was still a member of that 99.995 percent of Americans who can’t really afford a Gulfstream jet. But $120 million is exactly 120 times more than $1 million—a wholly different category of money for Paul, the kind of money that got one’s picture on the front page of the Globe. Seeing his face there was like waking from a troubling dream, the dream of the unnamed crime. You wake up knowing you didn’t do it, but the feeling lingers that you did.

  When Paul first saw the article, his chest tightened, and it stayed that way as the emails and texts and calls kept coming. He had one main memory for explaining his discomfort, to himself and the therapists he’d seen over the years. He was five or six years old, and his ailing mother was in bed in the house on Perham Street, and his father was telling him and his six brothers and sisters that they were “all the same.” Some of his siblings scarcely remembered this, and some thought their father had been trying to tell them they were all equally valued and also that none of them should get big heads. But Paul never heard his father’s words that way. He felt his father was saying that Paul ought to be the same as everyone. His father’s telling him not to make noise in the house—“You’ll kill your mother”—meant that Paul should stop practicing the piano. Being all the same meant there might be something wrong in standing out, in trying to learn the piano at all, in trying to excel.

  In a recurring fantasy, Paul was sitting in Tom’s Cambridge apartment, drinking gin and tonics, and he was saying, “I made the big score, Tom. Let’s figure out how to give it away.”

  It was too late for that. Without Tom to advise him, Paul went looking for substitutes. About a week and a half after the announcement of Kayak’s sale, he drove to downtown Boston to visit a fellow member of the board of Partners In Health named Jack Connors. Jack was Boston born and bred like Paul, but a generation older and a great deal wealthier, a founding partner and former chairman of the huge advertising agency Hill Holliday. Jack had retired to a “family office,” a suite of offices devoted mainly to his family’s finances and charities, situated in the John Hancock Building. It is Boston’s tallest building, and Jack’s suite was at the top of it, on the sixtieth floor.

  Paul arrived fifteen minutes early and lingered in the vestibule outside Jack’s inner office. Paul was dressed like a construction foreman, in jeans and boots. He looked out of place and restive in the expensive stillness of the hallway, surrounded by blond wood and beige carpeting. At the end of the corridor stood a giant floor-to-ceiling window. He walked over to it. From that elevation, the landscape was a diminutive model of itself. Off in the distance he could make out shapes of real mountains, in New Hampshire presumably, and closer in, Boston’s northern suburbs, and closer still, bridges, waterways, highways, railroad tracks, and finally, far down below his feet, the redbrick buildings and black-tarred roofs of the Back Bay. Gazing out was like looking at a painting, and Paul felt lost in it, until he realized again that he was looking through a window. Then he stepped back.

  In this building windows had a notorious history. Soon after they were first installed, in the 1970s, they started falling out. Paul remembered the events well. He was probably seven years old when he saw the pictures in the Globe of the falling two-ton sheets of glass. No one had been injured yet, the paper said, but Paul felt so worried that someone would be killed that he set about trying to figure out the problem, and then, once he thought he had the answer, he felt even more worried. Maybe the owners of the building didn’t know what was wrong. So he wrote a letter to the president of the John Hancock insurance company, explaining that metal and glass expand and contract at different rates, as his father had taught him. Not very long afterward Paul received a letter from the company’s president, thanking him for his concern, and also a large book about the U.S. presidents.

  When Jack Connors appeared, he greeted Paul with a firm handshake and a hearty slap on the shoulder. Jack was gray-haired and short, at least compared to Paul, and he was impeccably dressed, in slacks and jacket and necktie. He didn’t comment on Paul’s jeans and boots; the older generation of suit-and-tie America had long since learned to tolerate techie informality.

  In the Kayak engineering office, Paul seemed always in command, even when he was being teased and contradicted. Now, sitting on a sofa inside Jack’s office, his words came fast but disjointedly. He kept touching his chin and lower lip as he talked. “And it’s been awful and I, basically, I need to think about how I plan my next decades and how can I use this money and how do I say no to people,” he said. “Every nonprofit you can imagine sent me emails: Oh, what good news, we’ll meet you for coffee. Every five minutes I get these and I’ve literally had chest pains since last week and I need to start, it’ll probably take me a year, I just need to put a plan together how I’m going to deal with this.”

  In a calmer moment Paul could easily have given himself the advice that Jack administered: Get a lawyer, get a buffer between your money and your supplicants, above all take your time. But sometimes you can hear sane counsel only if it comes from a disinterested party, in this case someone Paul could count on not to need his money.

  The ride down in the elevator was so smooth and swift that it seemed as though there was no transition between Jack’s aerie and the street, where the demented Boston drivers were making the usual ruckus with their horns and a man dressed in jeans had many compatriots. Walking to his car, Paul talked about how uncomfortable he often felt at fundraisers for Partners In Health’s work in Haiti, where “rich people” got dressed up and talked about the poor. Rich people. He used the term as if he still didn’t believe he was one of them.

  PART II

  THE FIRE

  1

  A week after his meeting with Jack Connors, Paul said in a musing tone, “Money. There’s a degree to which it’s a burden and a responsibility. But mostly it’s nice.” Clearly, he was reassured by the spirit of Jack’s counsel. He followed only some of it. He tried the buffer strategy briefly and found it didn’t suit him. But he did employ the advice about taking his time. He put Kay
ak stock worth $40 million into an irrevocable charitable trust and resolved not to worry for the time being about making a plan to give the money away. No doubt this was wise of him, given the rate at which his life was speeding up.

  You didn’t have to be around Paul long to get a taste of his vigor. He didn’t walk so much as stride, moving so quickly that it was hard to keep up without performing a combination of jogging and racewalking. His speech could accelerate to the point where you had to strain to understand him. He tended to repeat himself, telling the same stories to the same person, forgetting he had told them. To many of the people around him, all this was “just Paul”—an energetic, confident, talented guy who happened to be “hyperactive.” But in Paul’s case, hyperactivity was likely just a symptom of his deeper problem, his “bipolar disorder.”

  The general term denotes what used to be called manic-depressive illness, now broadened to include intermittent, alternating, and sometimes mixed states of depression and mania, varying widely in kind and severity. In the past, Paul had suffered from near-immobilizing depression but not from the psychotic states of full-fledged mania, in which one is consumed by delusions. He was subject instead to the oddly, vaguely named “hypomania,” which means less than full-fledged mania.