Book review: Hard Money: How to raise funds in the hardest times. By Hody Granger.

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.

Tees that make you hard.