"The Lost World of the Late Nineties"

If I had been more flush, perhaps I wouldn't have felt the contradiction so keenly. But my finances had gotten even shakier during the winter. Persistent illness sent my wife to the hospital on two different occasions, and Amazon's rather skimpy insurance package covered only a fraction of the costs. Each time, I found myself in the business office at the hospital, cobbling together installment agreements that could easily take me years to pay off. The account managers, young guys who positively radiated good health, were so reasonable that I felt like crying. I kept shaking their hands. I couldn't stop thanking them.

All that gratitude had a sedating effect on me. For the next few months I did my best never to think about money. I paid my bills, the ones I could, and ignored the rest. I charged everything on my last remaining credit card. I borrowed more money from my friends, promising to repay them out of the proceeds of my chimerical stock sales -- which is to say, I not only built castles on air but then erected a penthouse and solarium on top of the castle.

In this fashion 1997 dribbled away. Then something amazing happened. In November I picked up the telephone and told my broker (I had a broker!) to sell a block of shares for me. A few days later, $53,913.20 materialized in my checking account.

For better or worse, this phone call permanently changed my relationship to money. True, much of that cash vaporized within the next week, as I wrote checks to friends, doctors, hospitals, banks, and babysitters. Yet in some subtle way, which I was reluctant to admit even to myself, that call had screwed up my basic conception of getting and spending. Beforehand, I did a job and was paid for it: a simple equation, a zero-sum game. Sometimes I earned more, sometimes less, but the sums always seemed vaguely proportionate. Now that sense of proportion was gone. Don't get me wrong: I was delighted -- glad, as Emerson would say, to the brink of fear -- to have these arbitrary riches dumped in my lap. I loved my newfound pot of gold. The fact that it had issued forth from a career as a nickel-and-dime journalist made it all the more precious and paradoxical. Still, there was something freaky about the whole train of events.

And over the next two years, it was going to get a lot freakier. Why? Because we were now smack in the middle of the dot-com boom, partaking of (in a memorable phrase coined by Kleiner Perkins honcho John Doerr) "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet." Amazon's share price kept climbing. Less than a year after converting my first batch of options into cash, I had another transubstantiation on my hands: I turned into a millionaire. Sure, it was all, or mostly, on paper. So what? The stock split three times between June 1998 and September 1999, and after each split the price continued to levitate. There seemed to be no end to it. When CIBC Oppenheimer analyst Henry Blodget set his celebrated target of $400 per share on December 15, 1998, the price jumped more than $46 that very day, and hit the stratospheric bull's-eye just a few weeks later. There was no end to it. Doerr's phrase had begun to look like an understatement.

At the peak of the frenzy, my remaining options were worth nine million dollars. I can hardly type such a sentence without a preemptive shudder: I can feel a towering wave, a regular tsunami of irony, about to break over my shoulders. The bubble, as we all know, eventually went bust. What had resembled a cosmic joke -- striking it rich as a book reviewer -- turned out to be a cosmic joke, as the price of Amazon stock collapsed. Locked up in the form of unvested options, which I couldn't sell, most of my fortune disappeared. Hold on, though. For the moment, I'm going to look resolutely backward, and ignore the tear-stained, wallet-busting denouement. That will make it easier to convey what it felt like to be among (as Tod put it one day) "the best paid editorial staff since the invention of moveable type."

Next Page: From "What Is To Be Done?" to "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

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