Sam was nauseous. “What!” he exclaimed. “How could it go up? It’s been going down, why the sudden turnaround?”
Jim explained that like the times these were, volatile markets and predictions were not as simple as in more stable days.
Sam considered buying eight contracts in the morning. “While I’ll lose 170 points on four, I’ll have made 200 points on four.”
He asked Jim what to do. Jim told him to wait for the opening price. Gold was down, things had cooled off in the Middle East, and cocoa was bound to be sold off in the morning, therefore coming down in price as a result.
After a nervous night of sweaty palms, fears of a coronary, which were dismissed as foolish for a young man, and acquiescence to a Valium at four A.M., Sam woke at 9:30 A.M. to phone the broker. He was told that the London cocoa exchange indicated selling from large liquidation accounts and a falling price. Jim told him to get some sleep, not to worry, and to phone him in the afternoon.
Sam, feeling less pressured, got back in bed and resumed the relaxed sleep the drug had brought for him, interfering with nervous impulses to his muscles. In such a counterfeit restfulness, the investor drifted off to a pleasant series of dreams.
Just before awakening at 11:30 A.M., Sam saw a large white bird of prehistoric proportions out flying with two bird companions of the same species. Over an estuary in an African setting, they each dove for long thin fish, which was very scarce. Sam felt an unlimited strength in his breast and wings. As if he could fly by flapping them endlessly. Suddenly one of his bird companion’s feet was clamped in the mouth of a hippopotamus. Sam dove to his rescue and pecked the hippo until his friend was free. The three large white bird friends soared over a beach where hundreds of schoolboys, dressed in little blue shorts with shoulder straps, were pouring buckets of those delicious fish into machines shaped like hippos, which consumed the fish by the thousands, their bones spilling from an opening in the side. The bird and his friends swooped down on the boys, who scattered in fright, and consumed the delicious fish while the mechanical hippos clanked on and on, denied their food, until the village elders appeared from afar with shotguns. The three birds easily escaped and gained great altitude looking down on the fading scene.
Sam awoke and waited a moment before calling his broker. By habit he analyzed his dreams each morning. This one, he thought, was particularly easy. “The fish were obviously money—money, which was being wasted by being poured by stupid boys into those machines. I was a bird of prey because my new powers in business give me a feeling of freedom.”
Sam had it partly right. He failed to realize that he was a little boy pouring his hard-earned capital into a shredding machine.
Cocoa was trading very slowly and the price remained at 65:50.
When Sam phoned his broker again, at 3:10 P.M., he learned that a flurry of trading had occurred in the last thirty minutes of the session and May Cocoa had closed up a hundred points at 66:50.
Positive that the price would come back down, Sam decided he would wait another day to act.
May Cocoa opened up the limit on Friday at 68:50. Buyers greatly outnumbered sellers, and only sixteen contracts would be traded that day. One thousand contracts per day was the usual number traded. At the close on Friday, the price had stayed at 68:50 and a pool of 643 buy contracts remained unexecuted. Sam decided to place his buy order then for eight contracts. Better he should limit his losses than let them run. Jim explained that although he would submit the order to buy eight contracts at the market price on a “good till canceled” basis, the large pool of buyers were ahead of him and his order might not be executed.
“You mean I might not even be able to get out at this level of loss?” he asked.
Jim treated the new investor brusquely. “You might have to wait eighteen days to get out if no one wants to sell.”
Sam came as near to cursing the broker as possible. “But you never implied this. You never told me I could not get out when I wanted,” he yelled.
“Look, kid,” said Jim, “I don’t make the market. All I can do is submit your order, which I’ve done, and hope that it’s executed.”
Switching tones the broker told Sam to forget about cocoa for the weekend and enjoy himself. He advised, “A good baseball game on TV, bowling, even a little sex,” and asked Sam to call him on Monday.
Sam did not get “executed” on Monday. As he learned over the weekend by staying glued to the portable radio, the Egyptians violated the truce in the Middle East, and heavy shelling was reported by both sides. Only twelve contracts were traded, while a pool of 1,089 buy orders remained unfulfilled.
By Wednesday afternoon Sam learned he was still trapped. The price was now at 74:50, he was losing $300 for every one-cent rise per contract for a total of $2,400 per one cent, or $4,800 each day the price closed up the limit. Frantic, he smelled a fraud on Jim’s part, guessing the broker was in collusion with a floor trader. Then Jim gave him the horrifying news that at least explained the unprecedented rise in price and the refusal to sell on the part of so many speculators. A report from Ghana, which would be mailed to him that day, indicated a smaller crop than expected. Wholesale buyers were grabbing every pound of cocoa they could get in the seventy-cent range, and keeping all contracts they had bought at lower prices.
Sam considered leaving the country with the remainder of his assets. Margin calls began to come in with each morning’s mail. Each day cocoa closed up the limit, he was required to add $4,800 to his account or face liquidation. By Friday he had added $14,400 to his account, mainly from cash sources that could not be shown in a bank transaction. The paranoia of bringing $4,800 to a different agency each day and requesting a cashier’s check made out to the famous brokerage house required four tranquilizers daily to keep the speculator from breaking down.
After one more torturous weekend, he learned that at last he was out. His eight contracts had been executed at 80:50 each.
He dreaded the arithmetic that followed. The four contracts he had originally sold at 67:50 each were fulfilled at a loss of thirteen cents each, for a dollar loss of $3,900 each or $15,600. The other four contracts, which he sold at 63:80, were bought at 80:50 each, for a loss of 16:70 cents each. At $300 per one cent, per contract, Sam had lost $5,010 each or $20,400. All told, Sam’s investment in cocoa futures contracts had cost him $36,000, less the few hundred he had made on the first few trades.
AFTER THE LOSS SAM WAS A CHANGED PERSON. THAT IS, HE reverted to a former self. The fallen ego could only pick up where it found itself and that was where Sam had been about ten years before, when he was a struggling poet. Not unexpectedly, he began to think and feel as he had during that time. He now hated all capitalists and capitalism and believed those in poverty were the only people capable of understanding life for what it is. He felt somehow ennobled for having gone through such hell and, in a way, was somehow more content with his life than he had been before his investments crashed.
But it was not always clear in Sam’s mind that he was better off for having lost than gained. In the days following his loss, he would lie in bed each morning running through the figures. The profits he would have made, had he not sold those first three contracts, soon gripped him like a fetish. Had he only held on to them, he would have been ahead over $28,000. Cocoa was at its all-time high. Every few days Sam would phone a different commodity broker at other companies, introduce himself as an investor just in town from Honolulu, and get the closing price for cocoa. It was still closing up each day. Oh, how it hurt him those mornings when the figures would rudely gallop across his mind. His pain traced the following thoughts: “Why didn’t I keep those contracts to sixty-eight and then seventy-eight as the analyst predicted? Oh God, I know it was a mechanical error that gave me that low closing price, but why didn’t I have the faith to wait and see if the price was really turned around? Every rule in the book told me to ‘let my profits run and limit my losses.’ I did just the opposite. I limited my profits and let my losses run. Oh God, oh
God damn it! All my life I waited for a lucky shot like this. I even picked the area on my own intuition. Then to invest, just at the right time, to see the contracts rise over thirty cents each in a few weeks’ time. Oh God, why did I sell them? Why did I fail? Oh, if I had only waited. At last I would have done something right that was really big.”
At this point in the self-torture, Sam’s conscience spoke to him.
“What would you have done with the profit, bought yourself a 300 SL? Would you have used any of that money responsibly, to help others? You would have been hooked for life. All you would have been able to do is trade commodities. Is that what you wanted for yourself? Would this have fulfilled your dreams?”
After the conscience came the reasoning voice of his father.
“Maybe you would have made a couple hundred thousand over the years and built a new life. But where would you be if you lost everything then? SUICIDE? At least now you have the bookstore and a life for yourself.”
Sam continued to speculate on what might have been. Coupled with images of King Midas in a room filled with gleaming gold coins came other images from his childhood.
As a child Sam had often wondered about nature and especially the complexity of the human body. His father initiated this wonder with many stories about the world of nature. In particular Sam remembered his father telling him that men could not create a human in a laboratory. No matter how much they thought they knew, the sperm and the egg would be required. From that time onwards in his life, Sam wondered about the intricacies of the body. Not only about how much could go wrong and did not, but about such simple things as the infinite possibilities of motion in a human hand.
Throughout his high school years and even into his years as a biology student in college, Sam would often drift off at his desk by gazing at his right hand. Slowly moving his fingers through a maze of motion he would marvel that even in an age of electronic miracles, among a species that was sending a projectile 91 million miles into space, accurately coming within a few miles of the planet Mercury, no one had been able to create a machine capable of duplicating all possible movements of their own hand.
Once again Sam inhabited this world of wonder. As a result of his loss he ceased speculating for capital gains and began once again to wonder about those everyday occurrences that, in fact, are the only true capital of everyman.
Seventeen
My Silent Brother
I REMEMBER THE DAY THEY GAVE JEROME AWAY. MY UNCLE Murray was crying like a baby in front of the South Bronx tenement we lived in. All the neighbors were out watching; think Calcutta, a Satyajit Ray film. The little blond boy with blue eyes was only five. I was seven; my sister was nine. He was packed off like an animal to live and suffer and die in silence, alone in one New York snake pit after another. The “doctor” told my parents he would only live to age seven—he lied. The great man also told my parents “it would be better for the other children” to give him away. This created a lifetime of shame and guilt for me. I became emotionally responsible for discarding this helpless little boy, whom I loved more than anyone else in my entire life!
How I loved my little defenseless brother, born blind and deaf and unable to hold himself up! All those times I would secretly sneak into the kitchen where he sat propped up in his high chair.
“Don’t go in there. Don’t bother him. He can’t see you or hear you anyway.” But I would go and whistle to him, and his eyes would light up! I would see a sparkle where the “doctor” said there was only darkness. So I knew he could hear me whistling to him and see my shadow or smell me. He was alive, and they were told to exile him, for my sake!
After he was gone, the little apartment became more silent than when the silent boy was there. For years afterward, I would sneak into the dresser drawer where my mother preserved his little clothing and eyeglasses (they tried to see if they would work). I would hold one of his laundered shirts to my nose, pressing the fabric right into my nostrils to glean a few molecules of his scent. I even wore his eyeglasses, making the room all blurry. My brother! They took him away.
For decades (not just the two years she was told he would live) my poor mother took buses and subways all the way out to Staten Island or up to Poughkeepsie to visit him. Sometimes my sister went with her, but mostly she went alone. The new clothing she brought for him, on each and every visit, was never seen on him. They wheeled him out in the same institutional sackcloth. She would come home wrecked and hopeless for days afterward. The arguments between my parents started to get very bad after this, with both blaming each other, when it was really the doctor’s fault. There was some kind of medication given during pregnancy that damaged my brother’s central nervous system during development.
Finally, after about twenty years in one hellhole after another, he died, after being attacked and bitten on most of his body by a maniac, housed there with helpless, innocent souls unable to defend themselves.
Jerome is buried in the same cemetery as my mother and father: in hard clay soil, in an old, Long Island potato field. He was the Jesus of our family, who died for my sins.
Eighteen
The Electric Blue Saddle-Stitched Pants
IN THE SEVENTH GRADE, MY MOTHER BOUGHT ME THE MOST incredible pants. We didn’t have a lot of money, but she knew I wanted these pants really bad. It was the “Elvis era.” Mama Savage saved and bought me a pair of electric blue saddle-stitched pants. I wore them to school—I thought I was Elvis himself.
On the very first day, a bigger, older kid just happened to be wearing the same pants, and naturally, we got in a scuffle. He pushed me down and my gorgeous Elvis pants were ripped in the knee. I thought it was the end of the world because these were the most expensive, beautiful pants I had ever had in my life. So, the rest of the day, I couldn’t sit through the classes. Whatever the teacher said, my mind was somewhere else. My heart was pounding: How am I going to tell my mother? How am I going to tell my mother?
So, I came home with the pants, hiding the rip under my coat. I said, “Ma, I ripped my pants.” She didn’t get mad. She said, “Let me see them. Don’t worry about it.” I said, “You’re not going to tell Dad, are you?” She said, “No, don’t worry about it.” So, all night long I couldn’t sleep.
The next day the women were talking it over, sitting around the little table in that little house in Queens, and they were moving the crumbs around with their bread knives and talking. They decided what to do: They took the pants to a certain tailor, and the word came back: “Don’t worry, Michael. The pants can be weaved.”
Now, I didn’t know what “the pants can be weaved” meant. I don’t think they do that anymore because clothing has become something different than it was then. We throw everything away. But I knew from that moment on that everything would be good—and it was. The pants were weaved.
That’s what a mother’s for, I guess: to fix everything but a broken heart.
Nineteen
The Fly in the Tuna
WHEN I WAS A WEE LAD, THAT WOULD BE BETWEEN THE ages of eight and nine, my father stood up for me. Skinny, polo shirt, dungarees, spring or summer, Saturday, probably working with Dad in the little store down there on New York’s Lower East Side.
He would send me for lunch out on the mean streets in order to toughen me up, because he thought I was too soft growing up in the suburbs. He insisted that I go walk alone in those horrible streets and learn how to fend for myself—dodging the garbage, the rats, the thugs, and whatever else was in the street. It was only dangerous up to a point. It’s not as dangerous as some kids face today in the average housing project, but it was a bad neighborhood in those days—and certainly different than the “Garden of Queens,” in New York, where we were living.
So, he would send me for lunch. There was a dairy restaurant, where they had dairy only and no meat. They would serve tuna fish salads, whatever. It was filthy dirty. If you didn’t want the meat from Katz’s Delicatessen that was down the street, this place was a “no m
eat joint.” So he sent me for a tuna sandwich. I came back with the tuna sandwich, and my father opened it up and there was a fly in it. He was enraged, so he took me by the hand. He was mad that they would give this kid, his son, a sandwich with a huge fly in the middle of it. He assumed they did it on purpose. They probably did; they were spiteful.
He took me by the hand, put down his work making lamps or whatever he was putting together for the day, dragged me up the street, with his neck bulging, veins bulging, eyes bulging. He went into the dairy restaurant and screamed at the guy, “How dare you give my son a sandwich with a fly in it!” The guy said, “Let me see the sandwich.” He opens it and sees the fly in it. He says to my father, “I didn’t charge him any extra. What are you yelling about? I didn’t charge him for the fly.” You know, it’s an old joke, but it wasn’t funny.
In a way Dad was standing up for me, I guess. I think that’s the one time I could say “quasi” standing up for me, because, other than that—truthfully, I mean—he even took our dog Tippy’s side after the dog tore my leg open, now that I think about it. It was like an Abraham-and-Isaac relationship: I think if he had the rock and knife, I wouldn’t be here today. Thank God he didn’t collect box cutters and that there were no large rocks in the backyard. That’s all I can say.
Twenty
Tough High School Geometry Teacher: Two Fingers on His Right Hand
I HAD A GEOMETRY TEACHER IN HIGH SCHOOL WITH ONLY two fingers on his right hand. He was a tough guy. He was an Irishman and real tough, but a very good teacher—the kind of teacher who made you come up to the blackboard and perform. If you didn’t, he ridiculed you. He didn’t curse you out, but he called you a dummy. As you stood there sweating, he might say, “Now what’s the matter with you today? Is your brain not functioning?”—that kind of thing. Believe me, you didn’t want to wind up in front of that blackboard not knowing your stuff, because you didn’t want to be humiliated in front of your peers.
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