Carl the Death Driver
Chapter.3: Love’s Lasting Ride • Part.2
Introduction: Welcome to the twelfth installment of “Carl the Death Driver”. We introduce a new character who will become an important figure throughout the balance of this story. We’ll begin to discover dark moments in the new character’s background and compromises at his new place of work. As this character strives to improve his life, he’ll find that change often brings about unexpected challenges that test his resolve to overcome his past.
So Far: Carl is dead. He died alone in his home, and with his death a mysterious vehicle was launched into the neighborhood. The vehicle bearing the license plate “LUVCARL” proved to be a menace to the community. After disrupting a homeless encampment and luring some night crawling teens to their own tragic death, the mystery car returned to the garage from where it first emerged. With the car resting and recharging, Chapter 3 opened with a poignant backstory about two young undergraduate students finding love and how their relationship ultimately led to the origins of LUVCARL.
On a Wednesday night, a little over 72-hours after Carl’s death, a young man by the name of Victor Porter sat in the driver’s seat of LUVCARL. Things were moving fast along a busy boulevard far from anywhere Porter might have recognized. Up ahead two cars moved to the turn lane and the path was clear. Rapidly closing in on a busy intersection the light overhead changed from yellow to red. LUVCARL never hesitated. The vehicle accelerated with a burst and barely avoided a broadside collision from both directions. Porter was unfazed. He had his left hand on a half empty bottle of whiskey while his right hand rhythmically slapped his thigh to the beat of Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice”. He reclined in the bucket seat and tripped on the near miss caught in his peripheral. The blare of car horns rose and fell, blending beautifully with the harmonic Hammond B3 organ driving the music. “You’re a badass ride for sure. How ‘bout you take me home now.”
Victor Porter was a troubled twenty-eight year old working at the Taylor Branch of First Fourth Trust. He joined the bank as a loan officer assistant and had remained in this role for almost two years. His path to this position had been anything but straightforward. Coming out of a local community college with an associate degree in business administration, Porter worked in fast food and pop-up retail, among other minimum wage jobs. For a couple of years, he found a good balance between shift work, regular substance abuse, and asymmetrical sleep. The balance was broken when his roommates put him out for disruptive behavior and one too many valuable items gone missing in their shared space. Porter couch surfed for the next two years before he arrived at Open Arms Sobriety House. Throughout this tenuous period, he never had an issue with work. No matter how much he drank, no matter the volume of prescription or non-prescription products he consumed, Porter showed up and was diligent in his every effort. No matter the task at hand, he got it done. Porter continued with his shift work at two fast food franchises and supported himself in the sober living arrangement by serving as a part-time janitor to the facility. Through the support of compassionate individuals who led routine therapy sessions and career workshops, Porter found the clarity to believe in himself. Utilizing his associates degree credentials and fabricating a history of goodwill, Porter applied to an open position at the First Fourth Trust bank.
Porter never experienced true remission with regard to his substance use. In the end, he had never achieved true sobriety in all the time he was living at Open Arms. With maturity and exposure to the seriously bad habits of addicts who were overtaken by their single drug of choice or highly toxic combinations, Porter refined his intake and timing. He most definitely gamed the system of seemingly random drug testing at sober living and could go clean for extended periods. By the time he was intent upon putting shift work behind and moving toward a salaried position, Porter brilliantly presented himself as a poster child for rehabilitation and recovery. With no criminal record and only a history of steady work, there was some admiration expressed for the uphill battle Porter waged. This praise came from Richard Boyar, the senior loan officer who ultimately invited Porter to join his processing team at the bank.
Each morning in the bowels of First Fourth Trust, Porter faced a backorder of loan applications for prospective borrowers. These applicants had not reached out to the bank nor their loan officer point person for any financial assistance. The loan applications Porter worked on were fabricated requests based on the whims and reasoning of his boss Mr. Boyar. Richard Boyar eventually dangled the attractive terms of these unsolicited applications before the borrower prospects as a teaser refinance package. If a bank customer bit, they’d realize ever-increasing fee structures and a host of other indirect costs. Before the borrower could come to realize the loan was not in fact a sweetheart deal featuring a discounted market rate, Mr. Boyar was hustling the next refinance package.
With a regular noon deadline, Porter combed multiple data resources to piece together the current financial status of each prospect. A race to gather and verify data. Then complete the standardized application forms composed of clusters of compliance laden sections for each would-be borrower. The morning stack appeared on his desk just before he ran his security card to access the inner offices at First Fourth Trust. At noon, there was a 30-minute lunch break, followed by the loan officers’ pipeline review meeting. This compulsory meeting was also attended by all support staff in the department. After that, another stack of loan applications was slopped on Porter’s desk. The second serving of applications for the day was to be processed into completed forms and submitted before departure time for Mr. Boyar, which was 5:00pm prompt.
When Porter first arrived at First Fourth, his intake of drugs and alcohol was near a five year low. He was taking 10-milligram tablets of gray market Ritalin on his drive into work followed by generic Adderall XR during his lunch break. In the last hours on the job, Porter supercharged with a Rockstar Original and a burnt black courtesy coffee he could fetch by the customer service counter. As he was learning the processes, protocols, and regulations essential to his new role, Porter struggled with mental focus. In the first weeks at First Fourth, it was essential for Porter to perfect his self-medication regimen of ADHD drugs with a potent caffeine cocktail in the final hours.
He was productive and absorbed everything he needed to know in order to become a valuable member of the First Fourth Trust Loan Department. Porter’s substance routine often led to some hard crashes in the immediate hours after work, accompanied by an occasional spiking headache that rattled his brain. After a few months at the bank, the routines and rules started to become second nature and implicit. Porter studied the names of everyone within the Taylor Branch and key team members at the regional office. He wanted to understand the hierarchy of his work environment and build awareness for who he might trip him up in any way.
Porter had temporarily sidestepped illegal drugs in favor of ill-gotten therapeutic agents and mass consumer stimulants. This served him during the heavy lifting of learning on the job and becoming indoctrinated into the unique culture of banking. But the early challenges of banking had subsided. A new personal plateau was reached in which proficiency dulled the excitement of small achievements. With less to learn, the endurance of working through the sameness of each day’s tasks became the focus. The upside of the synthetic stimulants and energy shots and what they could achieve started to wane. Porter’s mind shifted back toward internal conflicts and the uneasy anxieties only highly potent illegal drugs could help suppress.
Teaser: In the next installment, we delve deeper into Victor Porter’s precarious balancing act between professional facade and personal demons. As his carefully managed substance use begins to spiral, a chance encounter with the sister of a co-worker leads to an evening that will dramatically alter his path. Porter’s carefully constructed world is about to come crashing down.
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