My Philosopher King

"I don't know how many times I've told this story. I remember using it at my anointment, and I used it when I became a political party, and I believe I've told it to ordinary people on the street so many times I cannot make a sum of it. It all started with a dishwasher. See, my wife and I were living in this basement apartment some quarter-century ago. One evening, we had friends over. I remember that Pete and Nancy were there, but I don't remember who the other two were. Make note that I started telling this story a good fifteen years later, when the time came for my to write my first autobiography. Anyway, we had a lot of dishes to be washed, so we decided we would try the dishwasher on for size. I believe my employment of idiom just there did not work right. We decided to use the dishwasher. We loaded all the dishes up into the dishwasher, which we almost never used since back in those days it was just the two of us, how times change, I closed the door of the dishwasher, I swung the lever over, and nothing happened. I said to my wife, 'I guess it's broken,' and shrugged. She looked at me quite crossly and said, 'So fix it.' It was two in the morning and I was pretty drunk, so I foolishly took up the challenge. With the strict attention to method that comes naturally to the inebriated I ran through every combination of buttons in existence, one configuration at a time, and each time I opened and closed the lever. Nothing worked. So I figured there was an electrical problem. I opened up the cupboards on either side of the dishwasher and, using a flashlight, I tried to find out how the darned thing got its juice. And would not you know it: the plug--a heavy duty three-pronged monster--was not fully inserted into its corresponding socket. Therein all our troubles were laying. Did I use that right? I can never remember what lies and what lays. I guess it is surprising that here I am at the top of the world not knowing the difference. It could be called my aporia. My one and only aporia. I guess it all goes back to those idioms. English, so I know, is packed with more idioms than any other real language. In Middle Earth, do hobbits employ idioms? How many languages are spoken in Middle Earth? Someone get me some answers on this. Queue. If you have two languages, will you necessarily have idioms? Is an idiom a word or is it something else? I'll get to the bottom of this. I have access to everything, and I'll will settle it all once and for all. We can do anything here at the top of the heap. If I say something is so, it becomes so. I'll not go so far as to ban idioms from our noble and majestic language. Instead, I'm going to clarify the rules we use. This is all descriptive, and not proscriptive. That's the kind of guy I am. I make the world: a world of description. Sorry: thinking out loud there.

"I plugged in the dishwasher correctly and climbed out from the cupboards believing I had corrected the problem. I was breathing heavily, I was out of shape in those days. I pushed over the lever and, sure enough, the dishwasher started up to churn loudly to wash all those party dishes. My girlfriend came down the stairs crying: 'You did it! You fixed it!' I wiped my dirty dusty hands on my pants and made like I was cocking a ten gallon and smiled. The dishwasher was a thorough dishwasher and it ran for over an hour and a half while we left it alone to watch a black and white film whose name I never bothered to recall. The dishwasher shut off finally and all the glasses and plates were wonderfully clean though too hot to put away. My girlfriend and I bade adieu to the dishes, promising to attend to them in the morning. We went up to bed and I turned to face the wall to think a bit more soberly than I had been able to think while fixing the dishwasher. That was when something like an epiphany hit me full in the noggin. I had actually managed to figure out how to get a machine to work. I had never been able to do that before. I continued to wonder. What else can I fix? Do I have a handyman's genes? It had been so simple, but still it had been a challenge. I felt like I was in the higher percentiles of ability. Surely, I had other skills which I had not ever exercised. I thought about the busted VCR. I pictured it, and I pictured myself fixing it tomorrow. I saw it opened like a patient. I saw myself knowing exactly what to do.

"We put the dishes away in the A M, and they had never been as clean since the day we happened upon them deep-discounted at Bargain Village. Next on my to-do list was that VCR. You see, waking up that morning, something, from somewhere,--I have to look into this someday and settle it once and for all,--told me it had something to do with a 'servo.' I did not then know what a servo was, but I was certain that as soon as I saw one I would know it for what it was. After breakfast I announced: 'I'm fixing the VCR' and I got laughed at. Just like that! Well, I felt insecure then. Yes, me: I felt insecure. What if I couldn't fix the VCR? What would I do then? I cast aside these anxieties and sat myself down in the living room with the VCR and a screwdriver. I flipped the thing over on its back and opened it up. You know, there's a lot of empty space in a VCR. I wonder why. Okay, now it is on my list of things to find out. I poked around inside and then I saw it: the servo. I had not the faintest idea what it did or how, but I knew it was definitely the problem. Undoing a couple screws I got the thing out. It was made of rubber and steel, and it was clearly designed to roll, which it did not. Do not all go rushing home to check your VCRs, if you still have one. I am certain your servos would not at all be like the one I have described just now. In the end, yes, I fixed the machine, but no, there wasn't any supernatural interference. The way I see it, that I knew it was the servo was simply based on a knowledge of the world--including the workings of VCRs--that I didn't know I possessed. I had somehow tapped into all the unused brain you hear about so much these days--and I am the cause of all that knowledge of the brain you all have these days! By thinking about the problem of the inner workings of VCRs, and adding to that everyone's general knowledge of electronics and mechanics, I was able to deduce, sight unseen, the problem. However, none of that came to me at the time. Rather, I screwed the VCR back together, hooked it to the TV, slipped in that tape of Blue Velvet that had cost me $59.99, and pressed play; and sure enough the reels started moving and then, there, on the screen, came that dark blue curtain that starts out the movie. My girlfriend came down the stairs and said: 'Wow, you fixed it.' I said: 'I seem to have a knack with things like it. Anything else you got needs fixing? Anything at all?' She said she couldn't think of anything and went back up the stairs. I shrugged then, and my mind followed this train of thought about why was I still living in such a scuzzy place, and I added up all the years I'd been alive--twenty-three--and I wondered, hypothesized really, why this wall was that colour and that wall this, and so on and so forth.... Hang on, gang, my Chief of Staff wants me to sign something. Give it a quick read. Sure. This all makes sense. Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. Okay, right.

"Next morning, I woke up from what you might call a prophetic dream. The strangest thing was I'd never even been close to caring about symbolist poetry, but there I was, piecing together all the parts of their biographies and creations and coming up with the explanation for it all. As I walked to the streetcar corner--alongside thinking I got to learn to drive--I arranged the entire edifice. You see, for some time people have been wondering where exactly did symbolist poetry come from; and there I was, pathetically schlepping along, with the truth in my head. I wasn't sure who I was going to tell: some professor or critic or poet. So anyway, here's the truth that came to me. Symbolist poetry started with Charles Baudelaire's cocker spaniel. He was hanging out back in those days with Verlaine, Valery and Mallarmé, and they got to working on how they would go about writing poems about dogs: cocker spaniels most notably. They figured they could write about cocker spaniels so long as it wasn't obvious to anyone in the world their poetry was all really about cocker spaniels. For this purpose, they came up with symbolist poetry. A dog, after all, can be all kinds of different beasts. He's man's best friend, and he's also a vicious killer. He is cunning, and he is speechless. He is wit and he is base passion. What better creature to stand in for everything in the universe? Flowers, rain, mountains, rats, buildings, genitalia: the dog can mean any and all of these. So off they went to write their poems, laughing to themselves all the while. It would have ended well--if not for Mallarmé, who spilled the beans to an American painter named Cash Coolidge. Coolidge--and it is proven he was visited by Mallarmé--decided to make a painting about these poets and dogs. You know the painting. It's called Poker Game. It depicts Baudelaire, Verlaine, Valery and Mallarmé playing poker--but also devising symbolist poetry at the same time. And they're depicted as dogs. Everything's there, bundled up nice and neat, ain't it? There's the inspiration, the poets, the game, the gag, all in one image. And surprisingly, I was the first person to notice it; plus the revelation had its roots in a dream. I felt again I had special abilities--not just fixing dishwashers and VCRs, but also understanding deeply the history of well, just about everything.

"I continued to play with the revelation while avoiding the sharp elbows of my fellow selfish jerks on the streetcar, and I figured, What the Hell, I should write it all down when I get to work. It's not like I ever even come close to my potential in my job, in my dead-end job, in that job in which I worked some three hours a day and goofed off the rest of the time. When I got to work I sat down in my cubicle, opened up the mail in my inbox, entered some data, and then wrote up some of my ideas. I was nagged, nibbled, chawed at by the notion my potential was well-nigh bottomless, and probably topless too. So: what did I have to lose? I saved my work and went into the boss's office. He wasn't there yet, of course, so I sat in his boos chair just to get the feel for it. I lit up a cigarette and went through his papers. So much of it was useless makework. I saw then a dozen improvements to be made and I wrote them down in point form (which turned out to be point-less, ha, since I remembered them all so easily later) for my presentation and argument. I heard the sound of Mr Bossman coming in. He looked at me and said: 'What are you doing in here, in my chair?' I told him straight out: 'You're getting a demotion. We're trading places.' 'Is this a joke?' he asked, winding up that fury we'd all seen so many times in the past histories of companies. I said: 'It's no joke. Things are going to change around here, mark my words.' 'You're going about this the wrong way. I suggest you go to human resources, and get the fuck out of my chair.' 'I vow never to abuse you like you're doing to me when the time comes that you are my underling.' 'This is outrageous.' We went back and forth like this for some time more, and I ran circles around the geezer. By the time my boss's boss got to the room he'd broken all the plant pots and there was dirt and greenery everywhere. So we all marched off--this all happened on June 18th, 1995--to the office of my boss's boss's boss, kind of like my great-grandfather, to sort it all out. I showed him all the evidence of mismanagement and malfeasance on my boss's part, and I was plum nelly persuasive, having some gift of tongues probably brought about by my attention to symbolism earlier that day, and my 'grandfather' was suitably impressed--it was almost painful when I de-throned him two weeks later--such that in the end--you know the tale, it's famous, it's in the history books--my boss got my cubicle, my boss's boss got my boss's office, and I got my boss's boss's office, a nice corner of the building number with two girls assigned (or assignated, if you know what I mean). All that got settled by noon, and I set to work re-structuring my whole department, and it all paid off in the end, by all the measurables and quantifications and qualifications. I was cock of the walk by day's end, and on that stupid streetcar ride home I came up with a couple dozen other schemes. This is how it all really happened; it seems I'd been using only a tenth of my brain till then. My brain's gonna go to the national museum when, and if, I die. Boy, those morons'll have a heckuva time making up new words!

"While I was wool-gathering up brilliant ideas on the transit I happened to glance at someone who I caught looking at me. She was a young one, wearing a fedora like she was some kind of an art student, but aside from that she looked tidy and clean. She looked away immediately, so I whistled through my teeth at her. Once I had her attention I patted the seat beside me and mouthed Come on over. She hesitated for a moment, then moved to sit beside me. I asked her name, What should I call you? She said Rebecca and I said So Rebecca, Where you heading, Do you want a boyfriend? You look lonely to me. She laughed a little, said A bit. Not often. I got a place. I asked: And you're going home to be alone? She nodded. I said: That doesn't have to be the case. You should come over to my place. My girlfriend's probably cooking up something good for us to eat. She said: I don't even know you, and you're inviting me to your house? I said: I'm a great judge of character, and I can see you, and what you want. There'd be more than a meal involved.

"That night, as we were all hunkering down to sleep in the big bed we had--it was almost premonitional that we had bought such a big queen two years before, though we would soon grow out of it and have to go for a king--I got to thinking about teeth; teeth and dentistry. And it came to me then that all the principles of dentistry were totally wrong. It's like the premises were based on witchcraft or sorcery or something like that, you follow? Of course you guys probably can't remember the days before my modern dentistry, but like it was so crazy the things we believed back then! No longer, though, you know, not since everything got re-formed top to bottom. So about the teeth, I thought: What if you considered it this way? And I proceeded to make up some kind of a dialog in my head about teeth are not what we think they are, though you could think they were that way but only if you thought about them in a backwards way. I made my imaginary interlocutor pose problems and give me generally a hard time, but I fought him off effectively and showed him the error of his ways and eventually he said: 'Uncle! You got me there! You win!' And so I figured that if I could beat myself at the argument about dentistry I could beat just about anyone, that's what I was feeling then, after all, I'd fixed the dishwasher and gone sky-high from there. Now, don't think--this is all a matter of the historical record--that the whole world of dentistry changed the next day. It actually took a couple weeks for it all to go differently, because I had gotten a different idea in my head as I rolled over to be more efficiently sandwiched between the girls, and it had something to do with sex. Now I haven't written any of this down yet; I've always figured a more complete, more sensual, more detailed statement of the facts as they stand can always wait until after my retirement--if that ever comes!--because at that time, in my foreseeable dotage, I'll probably get a thrill up my spine just thinking of it, in the days when my cock stops getting hard at the drop of a hat. I put my arm around Rebecca and the inside of my elbow rested at her waist, nestled there right on top of her hip, and I put my hand lightly on her vulva, with the tip of my middle finger in her vagina; meanwhile my girlfriend's arm was over me, and I moved just so that her hand began to rest on my wet dick. She put her hand around it, and we were nicely nestled there, all smiles in the darkness, and that's when I got the big idea I'll take down some day, the explanation for it all, about the impossible border between sex and everything that's not sex. I'm telling you, once you clue into how the border is impossible, though it exists when it shouldn't exist and doesn't exist when it should--when you see things in that way, which I'll more fully get into some day maybe, and about how you can feel someone smiling at you in the morning on a moonless night, well, if you can answer that then you've almost caught up to me. We all fell asleep there, in that position, like it was the most normal thing in the world. I'm telling you, we were blissful.

"Next day, as no doubt you know or are able to figure out, was a Tuesday. But what am I doing here? Are you expecting some kind of a diary? 'Dear Diary: cancer is now like polio: eradicated.' Naw--we'll get to that though--I don't have to give it to you like that! Tell you what, let's, like, fast forward through the next while. I found Suzy in the office, and she joined our happy home. I got a learner's permit for driving and I was driving like a dream first time round. I moved up in the company, to an exec level, and boy was that office sweet for a couple weeks! Lots of booze, lots of fun, I never got tired. I figured out Fermat's Last Theorem, that's to say Fermat's original one, not the phone book that Andrew Wiles came up with, instead it was elegant, no more than five lines long. See, that had been conjectured about for a long time. I got my driver's licence but crazily enough by that time I didn't need it because of all my chauffeurs. I got a couple more girls, then I figured it was time to stop. I had enough. I invented a couple-three new musical instruments and new musical scales to go along with them which were like calculus compared to the algebra of Johann Sebastian. Geez, it's hard to count the fields I revolutionized. It was like I was finally coming into my own. I got to be the CEO and I ran it solo because the board found that anything they'd want I'd already given them. So they became a kind of silent bunch of folks who sat back and enjoyed the ride. I didn't care. I had coat-tails a-plenty for everyone to ride upon.

"Now I know, okay, you want to get to my rise, finally, I know, you want to hear about my rise. All that was prologue. Pardon me if you've heard this all before. I took an interest in astronomy, you know? and I did some math about exoplanets and the odds of intelligent life. I took a look at Moore's Law, and I saw there had to be some adjustments made. Moore's Law just didn't look right, you see? I found myself with a natural gift for numbers, like that Srinivasa Ramanujan dude. I could see them floating around in the air. So I adjusted the calculations, and wouldn't you know it? I determined that the aliens--intelligent life, first contact--was going to happen within a year. I knew I had to do something. The world had to have a genius leading everyone in our fight against them. 'Cause, you know, it was going to be us against them, eat or be eaten. So I got together a whole pile of followers, folks who couldn't but see that I was the one to lead everyone in the fight. All my followers convinced their friends, families, whatever, that I was the leader for the battle. Our movement became worldwide and wouldn't you know it I was chosen without even a single vote cast to lead the whole world. It was in the nick of time, too, because not a week later I was hanging out at the radio observatory and there it was, we heard it, a definitely non-random bunch of noises coming from the right hand side of Jupiter, and calculating the Doppler Shift we could read they were coming at us fast. We weren't sure at the time how they'd figured out we were there--but it was dollars to doughnuts they did. I knew, and consequently everyone in the world knew, the bastards had hostile intentions. I quickly drew up some schematics for advanced subatomic propulsion systems, plutonium synthesis, and nude carbon polymer manufacture. We had our defensive spacecraft in the air in a week, all with cool lasers on their noses, ready to yell out: 'Halt! Who goes there?' to the things that I figured were embodied and sensible (and hence so did everyone else). We all watched the confrontation. I listened in, and managed to translate, having done some ground-breaking work in the first of exolinguistics. The aliens told us they were just explorers, out for joyrides, exploring the local sites, surprised they were to find so much action seeing as the last time they passed through it was all just dinosaurs and stuff. 'Can we land, check out the scene?' I gave our permission, and their ships landed in the Mojave Desert. I flew out there to greet them. I shook some of their hands even. They were polite and all, but I knew what they were up to. 'So,' I said: 'You're here to eat us, like you did to our dinosaurs?' They got nervous then, and pulled at the collars around their necks. 'We come in peace,' they said. I laughed in all their faces. 'Yeah, right. Anyhoo, we'll get to that later. C'mon,' I said: 'Let's be decent for now.' Five of them, something like their executive class, came with me to a tent. I sat down, though they had to stand: they had no waists. I lay it on the line. 'You're not going to eat us. We are going to eat you.' Long story short, we captured the lot of them, and started harvesting. They're half-plant, you know? Chop off an arm, it grows back in a week. Perfect for sustainability. Food crisis all solved, and now we got more pet cattle than we know what to do with. But guys we still got a lot to do. The stars are our destination, and we're getting deeper and deeper into it all the time. Frankly, I don't know what you'll all do when I'm dead four hundred years or so from now. Weep and wail all you want, but I won't be back. We've got my stem cells making gametes, sperm and egg, all over the place, but I got a hunch you're not going to get anything like me ever again. I know it's four centuries, but still, if you got some problem you want solved, now is the time to step up, 'cause each question begets another dozen questions, I hope you've noticed. We're trying to bend time to make my life longer, but I dunno I got a feeling that's not really going to work either. There's only so much I can do, you see. Really: I'm not some god," said my Philosopher King.

This Deserves a Letter, Let's Call It [P]

To cool things off, George quietly walked out of the lobby of the We-Ko-Pa casino into the arid Arizona air around hour 1700. If Nance couldn't tear herself away from the roulette table to go for a stroll in the desert, so be it. If she wasn't interested in what the guidebook said about flora-fauna like 'organpipes' and 'Couch's spadefoot toads' and 'ocotillos', then there was little chance she would become so, when she might have been down off the highway on Fort McDowell Road, so George struck out on his own, solo, trotting over the divided highway (the 'Beeline', pronounced 'Bline'), past the gas station on the left--and then he was surrounded by quiet, on the grey concrete cracked, and the only sound was the unseen insects crying desperately for insect love and affection.

In the bright airless buoyancy of the slow friendly wind, a gravel road running up a slope obliquely brought to George's mind better days, namely, his younger days, when he, in similar situations, would go up just such a gravel road simply to see what was at the end of it, in search of the treasures that naturally lay at the end of any road or likewise at the source of any creek. End of road, source or creek, was there any more likely source of jewels and gold? He remembered digging through mud with a friend (since deceased), certain the little glisters were golden; experience had corrected that impression, and the only gold that really mattered always seemed to line the purses of others.

For five minutes he walked south. No matter how he strained, he could no longer hear the Bline's traffic. He felt like the only person for miles and miles. It was him and the cacti and the insects, and the poisonous snakes who must've been around, hiding behind sage and scrub. The ground either side of the road was sand and dry. He came over a rise and looked into a shallow valley. Off to the right, some hundred yards away, sat a trailer, colourfully painted with words on it too distant though to read. A picnic table sat there under a blue tarpaulin. George walked towards it, along the road, wondering if it was a trailer that housed a seriously inbred family of cannibal murderers. Nance would have turned around; but George walked on.

The words on the side of the trailer became legible. CARTER-CASH COUNTRY ESTATE it read. George smiled, thinking it had to be a put-on of some sort or another. Some music was coming from it. It was country music, though not much more could be demonstrated or extrapolated from this aural fact. George stopped at the point in the road closest to the trailer and pondered his next move. Should he pass it by to see more of the road's sights, should he turn around and head back to the casino, or should he find out about the real Arizona? He shrugged then, and walked to the trailer. He didn't know the song they were playing, but it sounded like his namesake George Jones. You can recognize that tone control anywhere.

George walked past the picnic table, noting that upon it sat a haphazard stack of messed paper plates and some plastic forks and knives. A barbecue was open, but empty. The trailer hitch had a chain hanging from it. Three windows with rounded corners on the other side had torn curtains blocking the view. He went around the rear with its wide curved window and a harsh voice called: "Who's out there?"

George quickly moved to near the picnic table under the tarp, having circled the trailer one whole orbit. The trailer door rattled, and opened. A man's head, white whiskers and salted hair, appeared, to look at George. "What are you doing here?"

Innocently: "I was out for a walk. Staying at the casino up the road. It was the words on the side that brought me over."

The man opened the door wider and hopped down. He was rail-thin and almost the image of the ancient and emaciated prospector. "It's not true," he barked. "We just want some peace and quiet without all this fuss."

"So, this trailer's got nothing at all to do with the Carter family?"

A woman's zonky voice from in the trailer: "Is that another relic-hunter, Bush?"

Bush (for so the prospector appeared to be dubbed) called: "Naw, it's just some passer-by." Bush returned to George. "The sign's a bit of humour that came from its last occupant. I mean, what would the Carter family, Johnny Cash included, ever have to do with Arizona? Maybelle was born in Nickelsville in 1909, Sara was born in Copper Creek in 1898, and A.P. was born in 1891 in Maces Spring. Virginia, Virginia, Virginia. No Arizona there."

It was starting to get cold. George pulled on the jacket he'd had tied around his waist. "So. What's the joke?"

"Who knows? Look at this thing. Obviously, it's from the '60s."

George gave the trailer another look. He was skeptical. It looked older than that. "You sure it's from the '60s? It's pretty plain, and all that aluminum. It looks like world war two fighter plane."

"Nope! It's not! It couldn't have belonged to the Carters even though it would have come in handy to them when they were doing Mexican border radio roundabouts 1939. It's not what you think it is. It's totally different."

Just then the woman came out of the trailer with a beer in her hand. She cried to George: "You can't have any of it! We got so little left! Thieves everywhere!"

Bush gestured at her like he was calming a big dog, with hands sweeping down, down, in gentle arcs. "Now Mabe, I'm sure you got some supper close to burning up in there. So go! I got everything in hand."

Mabe snarled and slipped back into the trailer. Pots and pans rattled like scaredy cats in there.

Bush turned back to George. "So you see, whatever it was you came for, just go on back the way you came. There's nothing here for you."

George shook his head and unified his eyebrows to say: "Look, if you've got some stuff that belonged to the Carter family, or even Johnny Cash.... It doesn't even make sense, I don't see he can have anything to do with it.... Well, it's your business. I'm just walking around!"

Bush reacted to this display of belligerence, and how. "Goddammit," as he reached into the trailer to come out with a shotgun. "You get off my land!"

George put out his hands and backed up. "Jesus Christ almighty! I'll go, I'll go! What's your problem?"

"Move those feet faster, sonny. Get on back to your nickels and dimes."

George backed away, back toward the road, turning his head to see he didn't stumble, till he was on the road and stopped. "Have a nice day!" he yelled.

"Not everything's for sale!" was the response.

George's heart was racing, his head and hands were shaking, his thoughts were full of the things that may have happened, and he couldn't help but see himself, as if he was in a dream, getting his head blown off. At some points during his walk back to the casino, he laughed out loud. What a weird world! Bush and Mabe had their history, and they valued it above anything in the world, a priceless history. Would anyone ever know what it was they had? Should I have been threated like that?

He couldn't bother the innocent people in the casino parking lot with his tale to stoppeth, so when he came upon the casino porter he simply had to unload. "I went out for a walk, and I almost got shot!"

The well-trained porter unflappably said: "Did this happen on the grounds?"

"No, down that road over there. Fort McDowell Road."

The porter dared to contradict. "You could'nt've gone down there."

"I went down there, and a guy, like, guarding some country and western treasures, chased me away!"

Still daringly, the porter said, "You could not have gone down there. It's a military base below the Bline. There's a gate and guards. You must have ... gotten disoriented." Charitably.

"I went there, though. Off the highway. A trailer and an old couple."

The porter said: "If you give me your client number, we'll look into it." Condescendingly.

George told the porter his room number, and went onto the casino floor. Nance wasn't at the roulette table. He went into the bar and there she was, drinking something orange with a straw. He sat down beside her and said: "Hi. Weirdest thing. Are you okay? I went for a walk and I got to this trailer that had something to do with the Carter family, and they almost shot me. Then the porter guy said it was all impossible." Nance smiling sipped a little and nodded. "Oh, okay," she said. George sighed and calmed. "We have to do some exploring tomorrow. There's really only one road...." He sighed sleepily and asked: "So--how did you do?"

Nance looked him in the eye and said: "I won $250,000, more or less."