Brian moved to New York three years ago to work for Morgan Stanley, a major Wall Street investment corporation. The stress was too much for him and hit him where it hurts: his prostate. Just when he had to concentrate on all those numbers & analyses the most, his prostate wouldn't so much as let him add a column of numbers. He resigned from Morgan Stanley and worked for Fuji Bank for a couple months, until his prostate flared up again and he had to think about moving back to Colorado, where the finance industry stress levels were tolerable. When I talked on the phone with him during this time he had no jokes; he would sit and say a few words, I would reply, there would be silence, I would think of something to say, he would reply. There were no hilarious accents, no ethnicity was made fun of, there were no masks over masks, joke personalities under joke personalities. There was just this frightened man struggling through his darkest moments, speaking to me as if we were strangers--he had been drained of his boisterousness and all that was left was an exhausted, sober, grave & melancholy shadow. He said at Morgan Stanley he sometimes left off work at 3:00 a.m. and was expected to show up again at 6:30 in the morning during the busy seasons. "I've been doing some soul searching," he told me back then, "and I'm not sure I want to be in finance anymore." All he had ever wanted, since he gave up on becoming a rock star at 21, was to become a top financial analyst. Later when I would read Capital it would seem to me that the world had turned Marx on his head: no working-class man works a 20-hour day anymore, like those in the highest places of the capitalist class such as Brian was in at Morgan Stanley.