 How to raise funds, in the hardest of circumstances. Business icon Hody Granger’s new book, Hard Money: How to raise funds in the hardest times, reads more like a diary of some of his most intimate moments with investors, employees, and semi-famous acquaintances than it does a book about financial freedom and strategy. Nevertheless, it makes for an energetic treatise on what one might call “life with business,” or what happens personally when deals and billion-dollar meetings are either in the background or not there at all.
Granger opens his book with a standard explanation of why and how he got into the business world—a mother who demanded he be the “best” and an opportunity at one of the country’s biggest investment firms that led him to go out on his own and create wealth for himself. The only thing missing from this opening story are the details surrounding his mysterious ascent to prominence and power. Nowhere does Granger name the investment firm that gave him his start, and nowhere does he explain how long he worked there or how it directed him towards making his fortune. One would expect that all this would come to light as the book progresses, but it does not. In fact, Granger speaks in vague terms when it comes to money matters and leaves his specificity for his stories about personal interactions (many of them sexual) and relationships (also mostly sexual). At times, readers may think that Granger’s life is nothing more than one awkward, priapic encounter after another, each one more degrading (for Granger) than the last. In Chapter Three, “I grow my hard-on for money,” for example, the only mention of money is that Granger has oral sex with a stranger and is paid $17. To this, Granger celebrates: “Not bad for thirty-eight minutes work!” Granger seems to take great pride in his sex-in-exchange-for-money arrangements, and this is perhaps the crux of his pecuniary advice—that a simple blowjob for cash is a pretty good deal for the blower. By the time one gets to chapter seven, “My advice on how to build wealth,” one believes that Granger will finally reveal his money-making strategy, but a few paragraphs in, we are treated to yet another oral sex for money story—this time involving an organ grinder, but not, thank goodness, his monkey, who merely watches the act play out while he dances. Questions have been raised about Granger’s actual wealth, and whether there is any real proof of his success in business. He has boasted that he is “off the books” when it comes to wealth rankings in publications such as Forbes. Granger has suggested his “system” is “non-taxable” and that he has “immunity,” whatever this means. One thing for certain is that he never discusses this in his book. Instead, it is blowjob story after blowjob story. The title Hard Money could have easily been, simply, Hody Granger Blow Job Stories, but that was probably rejected by editors. Instead, readers are brought on a wild goose chase of following Granger and hoping he will impart actual wisdom about how to make and manage money. Even the final chapter, “Now I’m really going to tell you how to make and manage wealth” falls short of doing any of that and instead, as you may have guessed, goes right into a story of how Granger ran out of fuel and sucked off a gas station attendant so that he could continue his road trip, the destination of which is never explained, probably because it’s irrelevant. Following this tale, Granger gloats that, “With gas at almost five dollars a gallon, a twenty-three-and-a-half-minute blowjob comes out to close to seventy-five bucks. Not bad for a fifty-eight-year-old man!” If you’re looking for business advice, this is probably not your book. But if you want to hear an eternity of graphic descriptions of a middle-aged man performing oral sex on random people, then this is what you’ve been waiting for your whole life. Despite the criticism Granger will undoubtedly receive for his book, there are moments when you will find yourself rooting for him. As the stakes rise, and Granger is forced into darker and more dangerous situations, it becomes apparent that he has only one trick to get out of it all—blowing people for money. In an excerpt from page 425, Granger ponders: “Is that the wind I feel as I drive down highway 35 at sunset? Nope, it’s somebody’s dick rubbing against my face.” In an abstract sense, Granger’s story is about America, capitalism, and what happens when almost every interaction with another human being is a negotiation about how much someone will pay to get sucked off. In this sense, Granger is perceptive, if not precise. Near the middle of Hard Money Granger questions his own abilities and whether his mouth is so overused he may be unable to hold it open for more than a few seconds in a future encounter. He lets us in on a secret in which he dislocates his jaw and is able to proceed. It’s not pretty, but this is as raw and unfiltered as it gets. This is a story of a man, his mouth, and a mission to do something, whatever that may be. Perhaps the road to success in lined with a million blow jobs. If so, Granger must be imminently close.  Hollywood writers have reached a point at which the only way they can formulate a plot is to include the death or kidnapping of children. Gone are the days when adult characters simply got cancer or died in a war. Now, for anyone to have an emotional pulse, he must have suffered the loss of his progeny or at least their kidnapping.
Series like All Her Fault, His and Hers, and The Beast in Me, all rely heavily on child abductions and death to maintain any semblance of a plot. See below: All Her Fault: Son is kidnapped and possibly dead. Things will never be the same. His and Hers: Jon Bernthal’s daughter died of SIDS. He and his wife have never been the same. The Beast in Me: Claire Dane’s child is killed in a car crash. She’s never been the same. Untamed: Eric Bana’s son is dead. He’s never been the same. Task: Mark Rufallo’s child died. He’s never been the same. Severance: Adam Scott’s child died in a miscarriage. That made him do the whole “severance” thing. Fictional or not, the slaughter needs to end. And these are just a few examples of the mayhem wrought by writers who sacrifice kids so they can infuse their protagonists with dark energy and an edge. Today we make a plea to anyone involved with writing, greenlighting, or producing new streaming series: Stop the killing. Use your imaginations to come up with something more original than a dead child. This doesn’t mean we’re advocating for the killing of someone or something else—dogs or other cute animals for instance. Please don’t. We’ll even look the other way when you do the “one month earlier” thing. That sucks, but we’ll allow it if it means saving one kid from death or abduction. In a futile attempt to save future fictional children, we do your jobs for you and redo your plots so no kids are involved. Plots of streaming shows if they didn’t rely on child deaths to motivate their characters. The Beast in Me. Writer Aggie Wiggs and her wife Shelley move in near psychopath billionaire Nile Jarvis. Same basic plot only the marriage isn’t over and they are childless. But not because one died. They just don’t have any kids. Niles still kills people, but just not the guy Aggie blames for her kid’s death, because she doesn’t have kids, so Niles has to find another reason to kill people. And he does, because he’s a serial killer and they don’t need a lot of reasons. Task. Tortured FBI agent Tom Brandis investigates a series of robberies. He has two kids. Both of them are alive. Severance. Mark Scout entered the severance program and now has two completely different lives—one where he’s at work and one where he’s not. He thinks his wife died in a car crash but maybe she didn’t. Something for sure that didn’t happen: a miscarriage. Untamed. Eric Bana keeps having conversations with a skanky woman who gave him syphilis. It’s like she’s there and we can’t tell if he’s actually interacting with her or if it’s all just a hallucination. Later it’s revealed that the woman died (of syphilis) and it’s all just in his head. One thing that’s not a figment of his imagination is that the syphilis made it impossible for him to have children. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, he can go on to solve murders in the forest or whatever. His and Hers: Jon Bernthal and his estranged wife, Tessa Thompson, both try to solve a murder and suspect each other of the crime. He’s a small-town detective. She’s a reporter. They’re both from the same small town but nobody seems to know that? And the people who keep getting killed were Tessa’s best friends in high school. But nobody seems to know that? It’s like nobody in the small town where she grew up even know she’s from there? She holds a fucking press conference and talks about all the murders and nobody in the whole fucking auditorium even says to her, “Weren’t those people your best friends, from the school you went to, and didn’t you grow up here?” Also, she and Jon Bernthal’s character never had kids. All Her Fault: Wealth manager Marissa Irvine and her fucked up husband Peter live in a mansion in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. Michael Peña is a Chicago cop and they’re totally out of his jurisdiction because they don’t live in Chicago. Marissa and her husband also have a son named Milo. And Marissa’s disabled brother-in-law Brian lives in a guest house on their property. Brian goes missing after he boards a mysterious party bus that picked him up one afternoon. They report him missing and some police show up, but not Michael Peña because he’s busy doing shit in Chicago and would never show up to the suburbs because why would he? Marissa must figure out what the fuck happened to Brian, who, it turns out, might actually not be brothers with Peter and was kidnapped by his REAL brother, Michael Peña, who’s a cop in Chicago. So much better, right? |
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