And then poor S grabbed for his oversize piggy bank, an object I had envied for years.
Holding it up in the air for what seemed like a very long while, I sensed his life as he knew it ebbing away. His eyes were torn and confused, filled with rage and self-doubt, eyes I would not see again until years later when I would visit him in the psycho ward at Fort Dix after his breakdown.
But then, on that horrid night in Queens, he was just an unlucky kid who threw his glass bank to the floor with a crash, a childhood of coins flying every which way on the cool turquoise carpet.
(As the truth later came out, his drug-maddened mother, it seems, had beat her own wrists with the dog chain earlier in the day! Even going so far as to have cried to the postman at noon, telling him what her son had done to her!)
FIFTEEN
Pennies for Beethoven
Morning sleep, afternoon wine . . .
Much idle gossip with women
JEWISH ADMONITION
Women talking around the kitchen table. The sound of a serrated bread knife gently caressing the fallen crumbs across the thick plastic table cover. Back across the plastic cloth, the crumbs sifted and sorted, women’s voices, didactics towards the ever-changing truths.
I, the male child, listening from the living room, or from the refrigerator. Listening to the women talking. Not businesswomen, nor career women, but housewives, later called “homemakers” (and were they that!), now again, “Mom!”
Addicted to that sound, and today’s men too busy cheating each other to bother with such chitchat. No matter how I’ve tried, I seem to find myself listening to people listening to my voice . . .
It is late afternoon, very late.
I am very well dressed aboard the Larkspur Ferry. A high-speed, yacht-like vessel, mind you, not a dumpy Staten Island plow horse, with a lusty mustachioed Greek concessionaire pouring giant drinks at three in the afternoon. Soft plush seats, but I sit and walk outside gazing at the cormorants and gulls, the windsurfers who’ve recently discovered this channel, the Redwood rowing team dreaming of the Charles, and, to my satisfaction, the beginning of the early evening traffic crawl on 101 halfway up the low-rolling hills of Marin.
Sighting the haphazardly buried shore pilings with algae growth I think, “God, but I love the water.” Always with a sense of loss, for something not quite present. If I love the water and I’m at the water, why feel a sense of incompleteness that I ought to be living on the water in order to enjoy the water? Why not “be here and now” and have the water.
So I take my big drink to the upper deck, observe the bay’s green tint today, sigh for the weaker prisoners, reflect again on the remarkable piece of real estate under San Quentin State Prison, and settle down to enjoy the ride.
Clear to Vallejo and beyond, the rich, volcanic wine lands.
A looping gull riding a wind wave not rippling a feather. His sense of energy total and not classroom bought, Russell, my son, eighteen in May, enjoying his last few months of his senior year at Redwood, driving his perfect old Mustang, stealing perfect white bases, enjoying his popularity as the all-American boy.
Tomorrow night’s the junior prom. He’ll be taking a “rich” girl from San Francisco to her school’s dance. She’s been calling him for about a week; he’s sort of avoiding her, because he told me last week on our drive to the shooting range at the Circle S Ranch, out in Tomales, she’s not quite pretty enough.
Yes, she’s fun. Yes, she’s intelligent. Yes, she’s kind to him. But not quite pretty enough.
I tried to suggest that perfect looks come at a high price, that the less-than-beautiful women are often the best friends . . . and then let it go. Our interest soon shifted to the thrill of killer rifles ripping paper targets. The smell of gunpowder, the frightening report of large bore guns, and the crazy types who always appear.
Since early on, I’ve known I would be no good at business. I lacked the Midas touch, the ability to sell, the desire really to cater to people. Maybe I’m basically the “lazy Mexican” my father thought I represented. He often told me I reminded him of a Mexican with a sombrero falling asleep against a wall. Sunny, I hope, and besides, all the Mexicans I’ve met have been remarkable, hard workers! They work like ancient Israelites with uncanny stamina, uncomplaining.
Lawyers love to fee me $275 an hour, or $4 a minute while driving through the Sausalito tunnel. Their car phone, cellular Captain Marvels. The higher the fee, the wiser the man, right?
“Pennies for Beethoven” is how Janet put it, when I complained about my lack of hourly consulting fees. SO I stopped as soon as I started. Melted the plastic shingle.
Now I just dream like the biblical prophet my father confused with a cartoon “lazy Mexican.”
SIXTEEN
The Speculator (in a Garden of Numbers)*
He was not of a wealthy family. His father, a small shopkeeper, now dead, had managed to rectify his penniless immigrant childhood position but never managed to attain what was known as a “comfortable” status. The son was warned about investments at an early age. On one of their many summer rides in the Catskill Mountains, they both watched a raceway being dozed and carved out of a distant cornfield. The small father lectured the smaller boy, “Sure, they move a little earth around, get you to invest in their scheme, and after they’ve milked the public for all they can get they declare bankruptcy. They can keep their racetrack.”
The small boy believed his father’s every word. He worshipped the forceful, handsome man for his ability to say loudly what he felt, not just within the confines of the household, but outside as well. The man knew what he was talking about and told you so.
The raceway was slowly but certainly constructed and eventually operated very successfully. Those who had purchased “shares” in the embryonic raceway corporation were rewarded for their faith with substantial capital gains. The son never mentioned the completed track to his father, though they would pass it each summer over the years. There would be no point in proving his father wrong; he was right about too many other things for this error to have any impact on their relationship.
As the little boy became a man, his father grew neither more rich, nor more poor. His income remained the same throughout the years, rising just slightly with inflation. The small family home was always secure, the children had enough money to attend a municipal college, and the two parents, with simple wants, were able to “go away” every summer to a bungalow in the mountains. The family dry goods shop was managed with honesty and without credit, and provided a moderate but secure income.
The father would justify his moderate position from time to time. As one friend or another would move to a more expensive home, take a cruise, or purchase something truly showy, he would lecture the boy, his daughter, and his wife about his friends’ foolishness. He simply did not believe in the American Dream. He smelled a fraud, but was unable to prove his suspicions until many years later.
One of his friends, a corpulent man he had grown up with on the Lower East Side, went bankrupt. The journey back from his expensive home “out on the island” to one room in a poor relation’s apartment with his three children took less than one year. It seems that women no longer knitted as they did during and after the second war. The little man’s children were pulled out of school to earn their food while the once-prosperous yarn merchant became a clerk in a competitor’s shop.
Sadly, the boy’s father took pleasure in his friend’s plight. “I told you he was overextending himself. All the years he came in here and shot his mouth off. Look where it got him . . . all the time borrowing from Peter to pay Paul . . . I knew all along it was no good.”
The bankruptcy of the yarn man served to shore up the
position of the dry goods man against investments and credit borrowing. The boy learned to respect his father’s position even more firmly through this lesson in reality.
Another of his father’s successful friends came to ruin in a different way. His daughter died from an overdose of heroin in an infamous New York hotel frequented by unsuccessful artists.
Once again the man’s moderate approach to life seemed to be the right one. Though his children would not distinguish themselves in any great way they would not bring shame to the family, either.
As time would have it, the dry goods man died in middle age of a second heart attack. The boy, named Sam, now a shaky man of thirty-one, had on his own managed to accrue what would have been a small fortune to his father. The capital was not exactly earned illegally, but it could not be said that the money had been earned from legal endeavors, either. It seems that taxes were not paid on income derived from a bookstore that drew substantial profits by selling books purchased from illegitimate sources.
The young man managed to save between eighty and ninety thousand dollars in a little more than three years. The cash sat in a safe cemented into the basement floor of Sam’s mother’s house. The young merchant let it sit there without making any investments. He distrusted Wall Street as a result of his father’s indoctrination over the years and never learned much about any other financial “opportunities” available to the small investor, either. However, he always heard that real estate was good. A nice, safe way to build a fortune. But each time Sam would make an offer to purchase a small parcel of land, the deal would not be consummated. He would make an unrealistically low offer, which would be rejected. On receiving back his deposit, he would feel as though he had somehow made money, simply because he had not lost any.
The five or six parcels he failed to buy increased two or three times in value over the three years he kept track of their prices. This confirmed Sam’s appraisal of his business sense; he was a shrewd buyer but lacked the faith necessary to put his money into an investment. After three years of testing himself, he was ripe for making a dramatic move. He would no longer wait around to die, like his father, while enormous profits could be realized by signing his name to a few slips of paper.
Sam was an avid reader. He not only sold books but inherited that love for the written word that was woven through the fabric of his people. He had just read a small book about useful plants of the world and was convinced that coffee and cocoa were highly underpriced products of the soil.
Cocoa, he thought, is an agricultural product with good associations. It mixes well into a nice steamy hot drink, is easily whipped into chocolate, and in general seems to be loved in some form by most people. Sam reasoned that the cocoa growers would soon unify their positions demanding much higher prices. Coffee and cocoa were both grown only in the tropics; and the industrialized nations, which happened to be concentrated in the temperate zone, would learn to pay more for their addictions.
Through an acquaintance in the shop, Sam learned of the commodity exchanges, where products of every kind were bought and sold by both those who utilized the products and those who merely speculated or invested on the rise or fall of prices.
By making a few phone calls, he learned the name of a commodity man at the largest brokerage house in the city. After a few cordial conversations with the broker, during which he learned the rudiments of speculating in cocoa, Sam the speculator was anxious to cash in on his hunch.
The broker told him that a minimum amount of five thousand dollars would be required. Anxious as the young man was, he did not rush over with the money. For several days he just phoned the broker to get the opening and closing prices and ask a few new questions. Finally, the broker pushed him a little. He suggested that the market appeared ready to rise and told Sam to get his deposit in an account.
That evening the speculator decided to go to the safe and withdraw five thousand cash.
In the morning he failed to open the bookstore for the first time in three years. Instead, the cash was converted into traveler’s checks in six separate banks. Sam thought this would throw the tax people off should they be following his cash flow. He also did not want to alarm the broker. The exchange at each bank went well with the exception of the fourth transaction, where the teller asked Sam why the money had such a peculiar smell. He acted dumb, muttering something about a trip to Spain while remembering that the years in the safe had probably caused his “dough” to mildew. Leaving the bank, he was sure the dumb clerk would report the incident to her superior. He only hoped the supervisor had become used to mildewed bills in this time of inflation, when many people were removing their stashes from little corners of their world.
After the final transaction of traveler’s checks into the cashier’s check, a brief subway ride took him to the center of world finance. Following a few directionless meanderings, he found the brokerage house. It occupied an entire city block, was of brown glass and steel, and rose higher than any other building in the district. The young man felt better about his decision when he surveyed the magnitude of the structure. New thoughts came pouring from his brain. “So that’s how such buildings come to be.” He was thinking: “Men buy and sell, sell and buy, all over the world and this company takes a commission whether the investors make or lose. Either way the brokerage houses profit.”
He was amused by the cleverness of the scheme but still felt positive about his decision to “get into it” as he weaved his way through a maze of people in the lobby who were glued to changing stock prices flashing above their heads. At once, he no longer sneered at these people. He understood them, was part of them for the first time. Those phony artist friends of his would not need to know about his new attitude towards them; it would be sufficient that at last he was part of reality.
Once on the twenty-seventh floor, he found his way to the commodity broker. They both acted intimate with one another, as though through the telephone conversations they had discovered they were brothers and were now, at last, meeting for the first time since their separation at an orphanage.
For a while they both just sat and watched the gigantic board, where prices for wheat, corn, soybeans, live cattle, hog bellies, coffee, cocoa, silver, platinum, and other items clicked and changed with mechanical excitement.
Sam noticed that the broker was not alone before the big board. He was one of a dozen or so brokers in the large and well-designed room. As the young man casually glanced at the other faces, the cigarette-stained fingers of this very thin broker tapped nervously on his desk. The thin man whispered, “You see that man in the back . . . at the last desk? He earned over one million last year, just in trading cocoa.”
The young man was impressed but not astonished. He knew people made that kind of money and here was one of them in the flesh. That the million-dollar earner did not look different from anybody else made him all the more believable. As the young man imagined what the rich man’s home and wife looked like, the kind of dinners prepared for them by their cook, and the manner in which they entertained themselves, he asked the broker, almost in a whisper, “He makes that much just from speculating in cocoa?”
The thin, nervous broker educated him. “No. No. We are not allowed to speculate for our own accounts. He makes that on commissions alone. He is the man who handles the Hershey account. He buys and sells all their cocoa for them.”
“So that’s how they get their chocolate!” Sam felt much more involved with the rea
l world than ever before. He realized that soon he would be participating in the buying and selling of chocolate, just as this international corporation did from right there in that office, simply by having his broker watch the changing figures.
He gave the check to his broker and watched him walk with it to an accounting office at the far end of the room and place it in a pneumatic tube. Jim, the broker, returned and said, “It’s done. Down the tubes, by now. Your account number is zero-one-three-seven.”
The young man was made a bit nervous by the broker’s choice of words, but he immediately realized the expression “down the tubes” probably originated in such investment houses to describe the passage of messages, checks, etc., through pneumatic tubes, which traversed the building. He further reassured himself by repeating the many names of the partners of the famous company.
Sam made no investment that day at the suggestion of his broker. He was advised to wait “for a dip” in the rising price of cocoa and then “get in.” During his visit he was shown around the offices on the twenty-seventh floor, the rudiments of the cocoa market were explained and a packet of materials handed to him, explaining in more detail the nature of the commodity business.
The broker led him to the elevators and told him to phone the next day at 9:30 A.M., one half hour before cocoa began trading, when they would “make a battle plan” for the day’s trading.
On the subway ride back uptown to the bookshop, the investor felt elated. He glanced through the booklets, hoping somebody might see what he was reading, but decided to wait until that evening to carefully study each word.
Propped up on three pillows in the large four-poster bed he had crafted some years before, the speculator devoured the facts of his life. He learned that the New York Cocoa Exchange operated from ten A.M. to three P.M. and that each “contract” consisted of 30,000 net pounds of cocoa beans in shipping bags. For $2,300, he would be able to buy one contract of cocoa on a margin account basis. This sum represented less than 10 percent of the approximate cost of the 30,000 pounds of beans.
Train Tracks Page 8