"The Lost World of the Late Nineties"

How a book reviewer went from rags to Amazon riches to slightly better rags. An excerpt from "Amazonia."

By James Marcus

Jun 14, 2004 | I have before me three 100-ruble notes, issued in 1910. Each is imprinted with an identical portrait of Catherine the Great, who's got a healthy head of hair, a tiara, and a rather Nixonian hint of five o'clock shadow. The Empress is not smiling. The bills are crisp, as if freshly ironed, and the ink -- green, black, rose -- has lost none of its intensity.

Why, nearly a century after they rolled off the press, do these notes look so new? Well, my ancestors sewed entire bundles of them into the lining of their clothes when they departed Russia, one step ahead of the Cossacks. These closely held assets rustled in their suits, their vests, their topcoats. Shielded from the elements, the bills made their way from Odessa to Bucharest, then to Belgium -- where they were becalmed for some months in Antwerp while passage was arranged -- and then to England. From there they traversed the ocean to New York in style, on the Cunard Line's RMS Berengaria. Having miraculously evaded thieves and sticky-fingered immigration officials, they were cut loose from their swaddling and spilled onto a table in Queens. They were bright, uncreased, and consecutively numbered. They were also worthless.

There's no use blaming it on my ancestors. As they studied the sizzling wake behind the ship, or waited patiently on line at Ellis Island to have their names anglicized, they probably didn't know that the October Revolution had wiped out their savings. They must have felt prosperous as they walked down the gangplank. And why not? They were wearing the fiscal equivalent of Kevlar next to their skin. History, alas, has certain armor-piercing qualities -- and it was history, not greed or sloppiness or bullish optimism, that pulled the rug out from under them. They didn't deserve to be paupers.

Still, their dalliance with paper wealth can't help but remind me of my own. I'm going to shed my chronological straitjacket for a moment, the better to recount how the Internet boom took me from rags to riches to, well, nicer rags. As I've noted before, I received 1,000 stock options when I was hired by Amazon, with a strike price of $1 per share. Observing some personal difficulties I was having during my first few months on the job -- and, quite frankly, out of the goodness of their hearts -- my bosses gave me an additional grant in December. Meanwhile, the stock split twice before the company even went public. In retrospect, I assume that Jeff's silver-tongued testimony on behalf of his brainchild had been almost too effective: with the IPO oversubscribed, he now needed to increase the size of the float and create more shares. At the time, though, I had no idea why such an event would happen. All I knew was that you got a little slip of paper via interoffice mail, and suddenly you had more options. It struck me as a natural process, like the propagation of salt crystals.

Now I had my little heap of options: a few thousand of them. Needless to say there was no physical evidence, not even an engraved certificate of the kind Daddy Warbucks used to pull out of the safe. Yet they existed. They represented my miniscule share of ownership in the company. And on May 15, when Amazon went public, I suddenly gained several hundred thousand dollars in paper wealth.

Some of these shares I owned: in the weeks leading up to the IPO, the company had allowed employees to make advance purchases of stock. Since none of these shares had yet vested, nobody could sell them. Still, it was supposed to be advantageous to snap up at least part of your grant -- for tax-related reasons I couldn't quite fathom -- so my parents loaned me a couple thousand dollars and I became an honest-to-god stakeholder. Most of my hoard, however, remained in the form of options. I could watch their value rise and fall, teeter-totter style, on the nifty Internet streaming thing Rebecca had showed me. I could make furtive, embarrassing calculations on a piece of scrap paper, then cover up the figures with a drawing of the little old man I always drew when I was nervous. At this stage, though, there was something fabulously theoretical about the whole business. You had potential riches, Platonic riches, but no cash.

Next Page: "I've got a hog, a house, and a hot tub!"

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