The gorilla on the warehouse floor is twenty feet tall and only half awake. Its blower roars, its head lolls toward me, and every few seconds a fist the size of a loveseat swings past my shoulder and taps the concrete.
"Ignore Kong," Lonnie says. "He does that. Sit, sit."
I sit on a folding chair between two pallets of deflated bounce houses, piled up like laundry. Castles, a shark, a pirate ship with a slide. The whole building smells like vinyl and the inside of a tire.
Lonnie rents inflatables, tents, and dunk tanks. Forty-one units, three trucks, a calendar that runs from backyard birthday parties in May to corporate picnics in September. His summer deposits ran $70,000 a month. He wants $60,000 for what he called, on the phone with me last week, "a county fair contract." Forty inflatables, two tents, five weekends.
I got it approved at a 1.38. $82,800 back, $552 every business day. My cut is $4,800. The funder sends me about forty percent of my deals, which is the part I keep reminding myself of, because if a merchant takes the money and stops paying in the first month, they claw my commission back and stop answering my emails.
Lonnie wanted the verification call done in person.
"I like to look a man in the eye," he said. So here I am, looking at a gorilla.
The wire cutoff is 3 p.m. It's 2:20.
Lonnie's other phone buzzes on the table. He glances at it, smiles at me, and holds up one finger.
"My wife. Two minutes."
He walks into the little office in the corner, plywood walls, a window with a bedsheet over it. He shuts the door. The gorilla's blower is loud, but not loud enough.
"Yes, ma'am, I'm the owner," I hear him say. "Correct. One hundred percent ownership."
Then a woman's voice, tinny, on speaker. I know the rhythm before I can make out the words, because I've heard it three hundred times. A verification script. "This call is being recorded. Can you confirm the use of funds?"
"New warehouse," Lonnie says. "Expansion. We're bursting out of this place."
Last week it was a county fair.
I take out my phone and text him through the plywood. Who is that.
The door opens a minute later. Lonnie reads the text and laughs, easy, like I'm the one being weird.
"That's my wife's company. Same address. She does linens. Relax, buddy."
My phone rings. It's Odette, the verifier at my funder. She has the voice of a woman who has heard every lie a business owner can tell and has stopped finding any of them interesting.
"I have you and the merchant?" She asks.
"You do."
She runs her script. Name, address, ownership, no other advances, no plans to close the business. Lonnie answers each one leaning back in his chair, one boot on a deflated shark. The gorilla taps the floor. 2:31.
"Last thing," Odette says. "Please read me the last four digits of the account you'd like funded."
Lonnie reads four digits.
I look down at the bank statements in my lap. Those aren't the four digits.
"Sorry," Lonnie says, before I can open my mouth. "That's the other account. Old habit."
Then there's a silence on Odette's end, long enough that I check the screen to see if the call dropped.
"Sir," she says. "That's the account we wired sixty thousand dollars into at 11:14 this morning."
Nobody moves. The gorilla's fist swings past my ear.
"Through a different broker," Odette says. "On a file that says you sell linens."
Lonnie doesn't even look embarrassed. He looks at me the way a man looks at a waiter who brought the wrong soup.
"Different desks," he says to me, not to her. "They never talk to each other."
"We're talking now," Odette says. "This file is declined. I'm escalating the other one."
The line goes dead. 2:34.
Lonnie stands up, stretches, and walks over to the wall. He reaches behind the gorilla and yanks the blower cord out of the outlet.
The roar stops. In the quiet, I can hear his phone buzzing on the table again. And again. Two different ringtones.
Kong folds in half, very slowly, and his face comes down over the folding chairs like a curtain.
"You want a water for the road?" Lonnie asks.
Monday morning I drive by on my way to a different merchant. The trucks are gone. The roll-up door is open a foot. Through the gap, I can see a long black arm lying flat on the concrete, still pointing at the office.
My phone buzzes at a red light. A text from a number I don't know.
"Hey buddy. New company, new account. You still my guy?"