He began to encounter downtown—a place he had avoided before his lottery victory—plenty of men who were homeless. They hardly fit the stereotype, the image of the type likely to become so downtrodden, so down and out. He met a former bank manager who reeked of rubbing alcohol, wearing a suit that looked as if it had survived a natural disaster, sleeping on a park bench, with flaking paint, rusting metal bars, and crumpled and crushed beer cans beneath the bench. A young woman who looked as if she should be modeling swimsuits and lingerie slept in the cement doorway of an advertising agency and refused his offer of takeout coffee and a pizza slice. After she shunned him, he decided he would try to figure out this homelessness issue, if that was actually possible, if it was feasible for him to conduct his own brand of ethnographic research. He warned his stockbroker he would be taking a vacation, a sort of anthropological research field trip, and he asked him to look after all his investments while he was gone.
“Wait a minute. What are you doing?” his stockbroker asked.
“It’s sort of a fact finding mission.”
“Why don’t you leave that to the academics?”
“I’ve always wanted to go to university.”
“Well, we can arrange for you to attend university.”
“They probably wouldn’t give me admission. I dropped out of high school.”
“So you can apply as a mature student.”
“I applied as a mature student to university three times before, and they rejected me each time.”
“I can’t believe they refused you. Did you try business school?”
“No.”
“The university business school would accept you.”
“You think?”
“I’ll write them a letter.”
“But I’m interested in doing my own research.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“On homelessness?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you watch the evening news and a few documentaries on homelessness? It would be a lot safer, probably.”
“I feel like I need to get up close and personal. I mean, I’ve been asked to donate some money, and I’d like to make a few investigations.”
“We can do some in-house research. We can run a background check and financial analysis of any organization, which asked you to donate and determine their reputation as a charity. This firm has the resources.”
His stockbroker was insistent, but Durke was equally as stubborn.
“I’d like to do my own research. I have a personal interest.”
“A personal interest? I don’t quite understand.”
Durke could see his stockbroker was upset. “I’d like to do it—maybe more out of a sense of social responsibility?”
“Social responsibility?” queried his stockbroker, who simply felt uneasy with this type of personal philanthropy and participatory journalism, if that is even what you could these activities, since he thought madness or insanity might be a more appropriate word. He didn’t know what to make of the idea and always thought his client was “touched.” This time, he thought, his usual inoffensive eccentricities had reached a pathological level. Yes, Durke was his most financially astute client and the most intelligent stock market investor he knew, but, at the same time, he thought he was a little “off.” This idea of going undercover to investigate homelessness in inner city Toronto struck him as definitely over the edge, over the top, irrational. But who was he to tell his client how to spend his money or his time, particularly since he was turning out to be his largest single source of income in commissions and fees.
“Social responsibility isn’t a bad way to describe it, I think.”
His stockbroker shrugged and sighed, as he thought his client was intelligent about economics, but naïve about sociology.
“Yeah, social responsibility. That’s big in the corporate world right now.”
“I think you understand then.”
His stockbroker nodded, even though he didn’t comprehend and thought his client was behaving irrationally. Meanwhile, Durke again warned his trusted advisor and stockbroker he wouldn’t be needing any cash or funds. That Durke wouldn’t be requiring any payments from his money market funds when he wasn’t working really made his stockbroker wonder what type of venture his client was planning.
