Train Tracks (10 page)

Sam asked in an uneven voice, “But where is the
price now?”

“Well, it's gone down and up so fast, but right now
it's down to 62:50, so you've done OK. Look, phone me when the market's closed
and we'll make a new battle plan.”

“Well,” Sam thought, “a mechanical error. Oh well,
I made some money on this anyway. I knew my instincts were good for investing.
Look at this. Even with a mistake, luck stayed with me. I sold just right. It's
now lower. Who knows where it might fall.”

With these comforting thoughts, Sam snuggled
against Joanne and settled back for another half hour of sleep. They would have
time over a slow breakfast to discuss Sam's new victory.

At the bookstore, later that day, while looking
through a new selection of paperback books just received from a trendy West
Coast publisher, he was arrested in his meanderings by a new title about
Kabbalah. He flipped the pages, enjoyed the layout and line drawings, and
examined the rear cover for the promotional blurb. He read,
“Somewhere there is an Adam within each of us in need of restoration, in
exile from the Garden
 . . .
”
At that moment, Sam, elated from discovering his newly found
powers in the financial world,
felt
like that Adam
within himself. He was one, united within himself, in complete control of his
universe. No longer wishing for another time, another job, another girl, Sam was
all together. Fleeting but strong images of his maternal grandfather who'd died
before he was born rose up from within Sam's breast. He had only heard stories
about this man, whom he was named for, from his mother. With great respect in
her voice, the woman had often described her father's great wealth. Though he
had owned several key downtown blocks of Toronto real estate, at his death his
new heirs were denied but a few thousand each by a former wife and her children.
Sam was in many ways supposed to take up where the wealthy grandfather had left
off. If this had not exactly been said to him, it had been implied. He bore the
man's name, both in Yiddish and in English, was told that he looked remarkably
like him, and often felt, even as a child, that one day he would be like the
grandfather from Toronto whom he never once saw. That moment, in the bookshop,
reading those words about the lost Adam within, “in need of restoration,” Sam
felt his grandfather's presence within his body. His own self-image was altered
to accommodate the feelings. Sam felt broader in the chest, more powerful, more
simian in posture and deeper in voice.

Sam felt other changes. In the short while since he
had become totally absorbed by his new reality, he was no longer tortured with
questions about his adequacies as a man.

Threatened by a growing healthy son, his father had
chosen the most sadistic of attacks to control the boy, all in the name of
“fatherly love.” The man was, of course, blind to his motivations, yet a keen
observer would have noticed the small man's tendencies years before. When his
boy was just five or six years old, he often told him about the farmer who
lifted a newborn bull over his head every day. “This way,” he would explain to
the boy, “the farmer was able to lift the animal when it became a bull. By
lifting it as it grew a little more each day, the farmer was able to keep up
with the bull's growing size and weight.”

Like the fabled farmer, he would prod the boy, from
time to time, just to make sure his son stayed on the right track.

All of these thoughts and gripping feelings had
mysteriously disappeared when Sam began his speculations in cocoa futures. Now
his fears could only be activated by a falling price, his triumphs on a rise.
The speculator was no longer preoccupied with his obsessional questions about
himself nor anything but his investment. For the first time in his adult life he
could honestly say he was happy.

O
f
course, his bliss was not to last. Somewhere within, a self-monitoring sensor
began to signal alerts. “Can Adam have been created to watch numbers and make
phone calls?” Then came this thought: “How real is a garden of numbers? Is this
what you have been seeking all your life?”

These questions were soon replaced by others more
direct. “Do you really want to use your years watching numbers? Is sitting in
front of a big board making buy and sell orders the best you've dreamed for
yourself?”

The answers came in a series of images rather than
in words.

Sam saw himself a gray-haired man, quite on in
years, at the head of an oak dining table, surrounded by his smiling family.
Even his smallest dependents were protected by the tapestry-covered walls, and
Sam was the wisest elder of the tribe. “How I achieved my wealth would be
immaterial to my heirs, even the occasional poet among them, so long as they are
remembered in the will. After all,” the reasoning continued, “the money won't be
earned illegally, will it?”

But then Sam also saw himself as a doctor, doing
research in a lonely corner of a lonely room. Like so many Jewish men of his
generation, somewhere within there was a latent healer. He had also considered
devoting himself to becoming a serious writer who would write popular books
about the right foods to eat, how to avoid being swindled, corruption in
government, and even a series of instructional science books for children.

While evaluating these possibilities, Sam glanced
at the clock in his shop, then picked up the receiver of his phone to call his
broker for the day's closing price for cocoa.

“It closed 1:75 for the day, Sam, at 65:00 even.”
Sam was sickened. Had he waited a little longer that day, he would have profited
by $300 more per contract, or $600 more for the day. “Oh, what a nervous fool I
was,” thought Sam. “Damn, what if it goes up tomorrow again?”

Jim interrupted this self-destructive sequence and
asked Sam to phone him the next morning.

All through that afternoon and evening Sam brooded
on his quick sale. “That fucking moron of a broker” went the thought at one
point. “If he hadn't given me the wrong closing price on Friday, which made me
sweat all weekend on a false assumption, I never would have sold this morning.
Oh, that bastard.” He wondered if there might be a lawsuit in it for him.

On Tuesday, Sam made no moves, or “took no
position.” May Cocoa closed up by 150 points at 66:50. Sam counted the $900 he
would have made that day and watched it fly away from the pockets of his mind.
He now feared that the original estimate by the cocoa analyst of the brokerage
house would become reality, and he would miss out on a profit of several
thousand dollars in a few more days' time. “What a bitch that would be,” he
thought, “to get into a thing like this on my own, at just the right time, take
just the right position, and fail to make a fortune because of a rotten
electronic error.”

The next day, after going up and down several
times, May Cocoa contracts closed unchanged from the previous day, at 66:50.

Sam went back to the original report of the analyst
and studied it carefully. “It should go to 68:00 and encounter resistance at
this level. If it breaks through 68:00, it will go to 78:00.”

On Thursday, May Cocoa closed up 150 points at
68:00 cents.

On Friday, it was down 50 points to 67:50 by two
P.M.,
when Sam discussed the matter with his
broker.

“Well, it looks like it might be encountering the
resistance level of sixty-eight cents predicted by our analyst,” said Jim.

Sam asked him what to do. The broker did not advise
the investor; he merely suggested—to avoid litigation, should he be wrong.

“Well, look, Sam, it might correct itself to
fifty-eight or sixty and then go up again to sixty-eight, maybe even
further.”

Sam said, “So I guess I oughta wait for it to turn
around again and get in when it goes up.”

Jim advised, “You know you can make money when a
contract goes down in price, don't you?”

“No,” replied Sam, “I didn't.”

Jim explained the mechanics of taking a “short”
position. It was the most difficult part of the operation, explaining to new
investors how they could sell something they did not own.

“Look, Sam, it works like this. Say you think the
price of cocoa is going to go down. You sell X contracts of cocoa at a certain
price, and then when it goes down you buy the same number of contracts to
fulfill your obligation at a lower price. Your profit comes in by subtracting
the price you buy from the price you sell it at.”

Sam was confused and Jim went further in his
explanation.

“Let's say a farmer has a crop of corn due for
harvest in a couple of months. There are a certain number of wholesalers who
want that corn but must make arrangements well in advance. Since prices go up
and down during the months before harvest, they usually buy at what they
consider to be the lowest possible prices. Now, assuming they think the price
will go up from the price a contract is selling for on a specific day, they will
buy at that price. If you have reason to believe the price will go down, at
least for a while, you sell those bushels of corn and buy them at a lower price,
at some later time. You profit by the difference between the price you sold and
bought. It's the same as buying low and selling high in anything, only the
sequence is reversed. You sell first and buy later, hoping the commodity is
lower in price when you finally buy it.”

The mechanics finally fell together in Sam's
mind.

Since he believed the price of May Cocoa had
arrived at a peak, at least temporarily, he told the broker to sell four
contracts for him at 67:50. The broker repeated the order, asked him if he knew
it would require an additional $460 in margin payments, and wrote out the ticket
for Sam's account. Sam was sure he would make a bundle this time, and wanted to
make up what he had missed by selling too soon.

On the way to the bank for the additional funds,
Sam counted in his head the profits he would make.

“Let's see, for every cent cocoa goes down, I make
$300 per contract. On four contracts, that's $1,200 profit for each cent. If it
goes down to 62:00, I'll buy at that price and make 5.5 cents per contract,
times $300. That's $1,650 times four, or $6,600. If it goes as low as sixty
cents, I'll make $9,000. Then I'll buy four more contracts and wait for it to go
up, making $1,200 for every one-cent change.”

On Monday, May Cocoa closed down just 20 points.
Sam did not feel too good about the small downturn, as he was banking on at
least 50 points or a half-cent decline. He comforted himself by counting up how
much he had made that day.

“Let's see,” he figured to himself, “at $300 per
one cent, or per 100 points, that's $3 per point, per contract. So since it went
down 20 points, I made $60 per contract or $240 for the day.”

On Tuesday, May Cocoa showed a steep decline,
falling down the two-cent limit from the previous day's close to 65:30. Sam
added up the $2,400 he made that day and allowed his long-suppressed dreams of
wealth to fly freely from his brain. “Oh, how fantastic,” he thought, “I've
finally found myself. I always knew I had it for business. Who wanted to work
all these years in a company and hope for some schmuck position with a stupid
title. Ah, I've got it now. I'll just keep the bookstore for the hell of it and
make a few calls each day and live real well.”

While the investor was mentally redecorating his
study in his apartment, having the most sophisticated electronics installed,
should he deal with several brokers and need a separate line for each, a guilty
thought broke through his ego-defense system. “All this money and you spend it
on yourself? You don't think of giving something?”

Immediately, Sam placated his god with a fully
equipped medical center for the hill tribes of New Guinea. He would also give
the clinic a good doctor, a nurse, and an anthropologist, should they want one.
Placated by this offering, the god resumed his other business, leaving Sam to
his redecorating. Now a perfectly designed sound system, then an expensive
antique-tufted leather couch he had seen seven years before (it cost $6,000 at
the time!) for the occasional visits by his broker, who actually liked Sam, not
just for the size of his account but because he was a really good person, and on
and on.

On Wednesday by 1:30
P.M.,
May Cocoa was down 150 points to 63:80. Sam quickly counted
the $1,800 he made and was gunning for a real killing, and was sure the
contracts would continue to decline to the sixty-cent level, at which point he
would buy eight contracts to fulfill his short position, and then buy ten more
to profit on the rise in price.

Everything seemed right. The situation in the
Middle East was growing calmer each day. A truce had been signed on one front
and negotiations were to begin on another. The nervous speculators were no
longer as frightened by an unstable world and were selling their gold. As gold
came down in price so did other precious metals and cocoa, which had been
treated like a metal by investors who were running from paper money. As the
broker put it to Sam that day, as he wrote on the ticket to sell four additional
contracts, “Well, Sam, I guess you're wise. Cocoa is acting like cocoa again,
and it'll probably continue to fall awhile before it turns around.”

Sam speculated that between the ups and downs, he
might make eighty to ninety thousand in only a few weeks. His was a true
euphoria those ninety minutes between 1:30 and 3:00
P.M
., when trading closed for the day. At exactly 3:10
P.M
. he phoned Jim for the day's closing prices.
“Well, Sam,” began the voice, a bit quieter than usual, “your four contracts
were executed at 63:80 and closed at 65:50, up 20 points from yesterday.”