Train Tracks (11 page)

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.

A
fter
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.