Ricky James worked Wallyball, Inc. next to Bill Muir's cubicle. Bill put his feet up on his desk and watched two monitors to his right. Wallyball, Inc. was one fucking dreadful investment. Bill stared at his wing tips and listened to old Ricky.
"That's right Dumphy," said Ricky with his hush alcoholic throat. He breathed piercingly into the telephone. "There's a risk involved with this little baby, but at three bucks and a quarter, what are we investing here? Are we investing tommorrow, a dream that stepped into the light? Blondes with tits flopping jump out of the biggest white cake you've ever seen."
Bill laughed loudly. Ricky poked his head around the gray partition. He held his hand on the speaker. "Bill, will ya shut up? I got the Dumphy on the line with ten thousand shares."
Bill had already lost interest. He had the aftermarket for a ton. His clients were going to get a gift. Wallyball, Inc was going to shoot. He packed the dummy account of his U of P, football buddy, Willie Romero. Willie's family owned five McDonald's franchises, and they were greedy, if not desperate, for the score. A Jew lawyer had them over a barrel for an old lady's broken tooth. The tooth cracked on a nail packed in a breakfast muffin. The woman took it in her pallet and nearly bled to death. McDonald's was in the deal, too, big pockets. Billy looked at the monitor. Mickey Dee went up a quarter.
"I'm tellin' ya Dumphy," shouted Ricky, "man to man, and more than that if ya know what I mean, and I know you do—sometimes a little filly will take a dump on the trot to the gates. That's when I run to put a bet on her smelly ass."
Billy listened now because once in a while Ricky told the truth without realizing it. The whole firm worked a legal Ponzi scheme. The first bunch got a discount on the new issue and sold at a premium to secondary investors. The initial pop was a gift to favorite customers. These shares might be sold again and again within a broker syndicate. The last investor holding the bag lost or at least had to wait a year or so to find out if the stock idea had wings. Mostly they had no wings.
"Ya see, Dumphy," said Ricky into the phone, "a pony that drops manure is trim to run. Run like hell." Ricky wore a loud red tie that hung over his old fashioned vest. He had a pocket watch with a chain, which wasn't just old-fashioned: it was prehistoric. The old guy could sell like a con man, but that's the definition of a broker. More than that, Ricky often said he had been a stud before he got fat. He had three ex-wives, but since one died of breast cancer he only had to support two. He claimed his old ladies were in their botox forties; he said they latched on to pretty boys here and there to avoid giving up alimony and settling down with a poor man.
At closing, after the market got choppy and Wallyball opened unimpressively, Ricky and Bill stood at The Old Ale House bar with scotch and cigars. Bill sipped his drink, but Ricky took a gulp and slouched over the bar.
"Fuck it," said Ricky. "It'll happen tomorrow because bears make money. Bulls make money. And pigs make nothin'."
Ricky laughed alone and felt hurt that his protégé wasn't amused."Pigs do all right," said Bill. "I've been around the desk a few times since the U of P, I'll tell ya. It would break my heart to see the Conner's widow take a fall for four grand, but worse than a guilty conscience, Old Ralph at Mickey Dees will call his brother-in-law, a friend of Little Tony, down in South Philadelphia. I'm gonna throw myself over the Ben Franklin Bridge. How high is it?"
Bill had been free like the birds once. His father had twenty acres near Blue Ball, Pennsylvania. Bill wasn't Amish, but he played with the young ones till high school. Then it wasn't cool to play anymore and it wasn't cool to hang with inbred dorks. Those childhood friends grew up to marry their own and raise a family. They were industrious to a fault and murmured strange prayers.
Start each day with a fresh beginning; as if this whole world was made anew. Tell me the way oh lord. Let me be humble, attentive to thy wishes, I but a humble servant, where for do I go my lord. Where be they heaven's gate?
Bill's Lancaster County father was old German. And he warned about big city dreams during Bill's Penn years. Success would degenerate into avarice and various vices. Bill had been warned. Everything in moderation son. Bill hadn't listened and he half smiled now.
"Whatya worried about?" asked Ricky. "A sure thing, baby. By the way, it's a couple hundred feet to the soup. If the fall doesn't kill ya, the chemicals will."
Bill's father had passed away before he saw his son's success. It was an old story, thought Bill, but the prodigal was not going home, not the kind of home where the doilies were laid under the plate, but for sure he didn't want to end up like old Ricky.
Bill looked to the tall, spectacled brunette with the partly unbuttoned blouse and a hint of black bra at the end of the crowded bar. She had a brief case on the floor by her three-inch heels. "They got carp in the Delaware," said Bill.
"Swim on fish," said Ricky.
Bill strolled to the tall chick. Her name was Joan Philbe and she was a lawyer. Bill wanted to buy her a drink, but she bought him one instead. She lit a smoke and her cherry lipstick smeared the powder white filter.
"Ricky, catch you later, bud," said Bill without introducing Joan. "Gonna get some dinner at Maurice's down near South Street. You know the place?"
"Yeah," said Ricky. He knew the place and Ricky waved while he watched Joan's ass as she followed Bill's stocky suit through the door. Somebody's getting laid tonight, thought Ricky. He hoped the kid didn't have troubles with the awful females.
Maurice's was enclosed by smoked glass, and the patrons could watch the punks, freaks, and tourists shop at the leather and hot undie boutiques that lined the street. There were plenty of clubs and tattoo parlors too.
Bill sawed at his well-done. He looked into Joan's dark eyes. "Rough day?"
"Yes," said Joan. "You probably watched it on the news, but my client got even, I guess."
"Whatya mean?" asked Bill. He noticed a piece of rice on her chin. He took his linen and nabbed gently at the offending kernel.
"Is it gone?" Joan took out her mirror from her purse. She examined herself critically, and approved after moving her head about.
"So go on," said Bill.
"I defended a little old Russian man from Bridesburg," said Joan. "For thirty years he did odd work, taxi driving, kitchen renovation, grunt laborer, and toilet attendant. He lived in a small room and apparently had no bad habits. He saved two million dollars and kept it in suitcases in his closet."
"Holy cow," said Bill. "Wish I had a chance to help him make some investments." Yeah, right, thought Bill. His wall of cynicism had developed over time and now it was a mile high. Not that he projected personality ticks that expressed obvious doom. In high school, he had been an athlete and a backslapper. He alone of his class was accepted into a famous school. His new friends were loaded and Bill played on the football team, a linebacker. In his mid-twenties he had became a Master of the Universe and money flowed. There was not enough cash to say he was rich, but there was enough ready money to give him a swelled head. Now he was fucked, but he needed to internalize the dread. He needed to make a statement and regain invincibility.
Joan wiped her mouth. She didn't know if Bill would turn out to be an ass, but she felt so lonely, if he acted decently over diner, threw a few complements her way, he'd get lucky. She accidentally on purpose brushed his leg with her knee. Her nylon made a distinct swishing sound.
"Anyhow," said Joan, "Katrina had agreed to marry him by proxy and arrived a year later with little more than her passport. She was eighteen, he was seventy-two. As it turns out, by testimony, the old fellow was spry enough, but he picked his nose in bed. The one-sided honeymoon lasted a few weeks. She had been alone in a dreary room with rose wallpaper from an earlier era, so she started to poke around. She opened the suitcase and fell back in surprise. Katrina called her mustached American cousin in Baltimore, and they ran off. The old man went crazy. Philadelphia detectives caught up to the offending pair in Panama City, Florida."
"You're kind of beautiful," said Bill. He had never jumped a lady attorney.
Joan smiled and her knee was firmly against his thigh. "Ivanovich had ended up in my office," said Joan "after the partners upstairs had decided it was my feminist turn for face time. The story landed on page two of the Daily News, so we considered it high profile."
"Do they pay you well?"
"Very."
"Guess it helped your career," said Bill, "but all this lawyer lady stuff must have taken away from your social life."
"I have no life," said Joan. "I've worked like a slave since law school. Now I'm over educated for…" Her hesitation was transparent and she blushed.
"I see," said Bill. "I understand completely." This chick was a gift. He hoped she would leave her glasses on. "So why was this Ivanovich guy on trial? Shouldn't his teen-con wife and her, creep, cousin go on trial?"
"They can't," said Joann. She smiled at Bill and then drank from her wine glass. Here was another butthead in a hurry to go nowhere, thought Joan. It's all the same in the big city. Nobody had any time. Take a lunch and get serviced in between appointments. Somebody tell America to stop. "In the hall with lawyers and derelicts, the old man pulled a glock and shot Katrina between the eyes. Then he crippled the cousin, Sergey Mokotoff. Mokotoff had an upturned mustache that seemed comical in the courthouse hallway. Ivanovich put bullets through his left testicle and right kneecap. He bled to death. I'm still taking Xanex."
"I could use one right now." Bill felt queasy all the way to Joan's twenty-fifth floor apartment on the Delaware. The rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows. The twinkling lights of Philadelphia and Camden charmed along the wide river. Ships floated at anchor while cars snaked along a city grid.
"Down there," said Joan, "along the Delaware, like Rocky, early in the morning, I run miles."
Bill would have taken her in his arms, but what she said about the old movie character made him hesitate. "You run down there?"
"In the morning," said Joan, "when the city is still dreaming and before the commuters are crawling over their loved ones like worms in a can, I run like hell."
Joan grabbed a bottle, a corkscrew, and two stems from her narrow kitchen, while Bill slowly turned to observe Miro reproductions on her walls along with some original abstracts. He was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. The paintings were horrible. Then Joan took Bill's hand and led him into her bedroom. She stepped out of her skirt. Bill admired her legs, unbelievable, long legs. She ran all right, for there was not a cell of fat on her athletic frame; however, her boobs were quivering and afraid. Joan's fingers reached to her glass frames.
"Don't take them off," said Bill.
"You like the librarian look?"
"Hell yeah."
When Bill opened his eyes in the morning, he saw his shirt hanging over a lampshade. His cell phone played "It's Only Rock and Roll" under her clothes on the floor. Daylight streamed through the high window. The air outside would be cold in November. The phone rang again. He reached for the offending device under a frilly bra.
"Where you been," shouted Ricky. "God all mighty, Bill. The floor's fallen out. Clinton was on TV telling the fools not to panic. My god, my god, four years of only one direction. A trillion dollars floating to the heavens. Hey, are you listening?"
Bill rubbed his eyes and dropped the phone. Her scent was everywhere. He found a note on the kitchen table: Hey, loved it. Called in sick. Went for my run. Probably stop for coffee or something. Be back after eleven if you're still around. If you're not, then my mistake! Love Joan.
Bill pulled on his pants and looked frantically for his socks. He inadvertently kicked a bottle of wine under the bed. He held his aching head in his hands all the way down the elevator. He took a taxi to the Fallow Building on Chestnut. He stumbled into his trading room to see a scene of wailing and woe. His colleagues normally dressed in buttoned down elegance. Today they had shed their jackets and ties. Sweat was upon their brow.
"Jesus, Bill," said Arthur Turner. His gray hair flared from his head. Arthur was a slight, vain little man with a society wife and a house, an imitation of an English Tudor; it was located in swank Devon. Bill had attended company socials there. Thoroughbreds grazed in utter tranquility on the greenest grass in Pennsylvania below the patios and pools. Now Arthur looked like a soaked rag.
Arthur held Bill's shoulders. "Where the fuck have you been, you stinkin' louse?" Bill pulled away. The tycoon's eyes sagged and the whites were jaundice. Arthur's cheeks had always been pink and puffy, confident, but now they were shallow and white. This idiot will return to dirt soon enough, Bill thought. Arthur had rarely talked to the young broker, which made his ranting and physical proximity so strange. Once Bill had a cocktail in Arthur's office after Bill had snagged The Sunbright Company, a twenty-million small account, but not the kind of work young men scrambling for a widow's pension might normally pick up. "For god sakes," screamed Arthur Turner. Bill became very afraid and he raced to his cubicle. The phone lights twinkled like Christmas.
"Oh, fuck, Dumphy," screamed Ricky to the phone, "the Fed freaked out, so what am I supposed to do? I didn't think the Fed Chairman had the guts. Bubble, what bubble? Has Greenspan gone nuts? Stop loss orders don't work in a free fall and you know it… Call the fuckin' SEC and don't call me that. I mean…"
The phone alerts buzzed through the room. Men looked away as they passed between cubicles. A sadness had descended. One of the partner's secretary's, Myrtle, a tailored woman with wide hips waddled towards the ladies lounge in tears.
Bill picked up his phone. It was Ralph: "Ya know you're gonna have to cover me."
"That's below board," said Bill. "Brokers don't cover their clients losses."
"I'm goin' to have your balls ripped off with a plier," said Ralph.
"I got a hundred and twenty-five grand, Ralph. I'll borrow the other twenty-five. You okay with that?"
"You're a good dude, Billy," said Ralph. "I knew you'd be okay."
"Sure," said Bill.
Ricky stood by Bill's side. He sat down on the desk. His socks had fallen around his thick ankles. "Ya know kid, it was like this back in '87. Grown men howled for government intervention. Reagan was too smart for that, and the market came back like dynamite. If you're just patient ya…"
Myrtle began to scream. "Oh, Mr. Turner!" Shouts rang out from delirious men in the corner of the great room. Ricky and Bill ran to the commotion, and men peered down from the raised windows.
Arthur Turner lay lifeless far below. He may have flattened into a bloody puddle from the long fall, but Bill could not say for sure from that far distance. Twenty seconds and twenty-five floors was a tough antidote for depression. The Fallow Building was built in the 1930s and, at the time, and for the next forty years, it stood as an Art Deco scraper, taller than all downtown buildings, but not as tall as City Hall for the City Fathers forbid it with decree.
"That was one good broker," said Ricky. Ricky actually didn't like Arthur. A promotion to partner never materialized. It was the old carrot on the stick. Ricky long ago had realized that Arthur Turner considered great endeavors a norm at a crusty silk-stocking firm, but Ricky would not be worthy of consideration without massive doses of customer equity. This day billions had evaporated as the brokers escaped the misery with scotch. In fact the bars downstairs did banner business.
"Lend me twenty-five grand," said Bill.
Ricky stood away from the window. Pigeons flew by as he closed the windowpane. The morning was blue for a thousand miles. He hated to lend money to brokers, no matter how chummy they had become. They never paid loans back. Young brokers, their dreams of financial glory broken; they resigned from the firm soon after the debit. Then they disappeared to another city or their girlfriend's apartment without so much as a postcard.
"No fuckin' way," said Ricky. "Let that be a lesson to ya and no hard feelings?"
That evening Bill tied one on. He started in Old City by the Seaman's Home and worked his way from bar to bar. Four years of being a stock jock had evaporated. When he wandered towards the river on Market Street, he braved the crowds in front of the Continental Diner, which looked like a middle-America roadside diner, but the silver exterior actually was a spot for martini addicts. Bill sucked on a martini with three olives. The city chicks and probably a bunch from the burbs were dressed for a Friday night, and a black Friday it was too. His clients had screamed hate through his headset and sold their positions all day. Since brokers made money both ways, sell or buy, Bill had a windfall. The trouble was, it wasn't a big enough windfall, and those nurtured clients weren't coming back.
He wandered to the Tropicana, where Latin dances could be viewed along 2nd Street. The dance floor had been exposed with sliding doors. Café tables lined the pavement, and revelers spilled onto the cobblestones of a street that was three hundred years old. He ordered a beer in the Tropicana to wash his dry throat. A Rican chick took his arm.
"I'm Rita and you're dancin'."
Bill didn't dance Latin, but he whirled the girl after some preliminaries. Rita had a wasp waist. She felt all right. She laughed like crazy. She had a beauty mark on her cheek reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe's. If he had a stemmed rose, Bill would have put it between her teeth. Rita led him to the ladies room where Rita's girlfriend Bonita opened her purse and laid out white lines on her compact mirror. The glare of the brass and bulbs nearly blinded Bill. Back on the dance floor the chicks tag teamed him. Rita, Bonita, whirl me baby!
After two o'clock they took a cab to a party on Federal Street. The neighborhood was in South Philadelphia, not far from Pat's Steaks where gentrification and public housing met. In the stand off, the races mixed in exotic arrangements. Philadelphia had shed its sodden image more than thirty years before. Even the sons and daughters of the crusty Wasps would get high and fuck a stranger or two.
Bill woke on a couch with moist chicks. He must have fucked them good, if he could only remember. They did not stir. Close by he heard couples moaning. Spilled booze stunk up the place. He gathered his clothes and closed the door gently, but he accidentally kicked a beer bottle on the granite stoop. The amber glass made a spectacular noise when it shattered on the pavement as he half-stumbled, buttoned, and jogged towards the river. The sun peaked above Camden at the end of the street. His apartment was back near 21st Street, but he was so disoriented by the remnants of booze and drug, he made a mistake.
He found himself in the morning light in front of a river pier that had been converted into indoor tennis courts. The plunk, plunk of tennis balls could be heard faintly along with the lap of the bay tide. The traffic on Delaware Avenue, and I-95 below to his left, was light on a Saturday morning. Thank god for Saturday morning. His throat was parched and his uncombed blond hair fell in front of his eyes like a veil.
Bill had not made a mistake after all. The mind works in such a fashion. Before him were the towers where leggy Joan had taken him. She had written that amusing note, but the market bombed since then quaking certainty. Bill had gotten stirred in a shaker and spilled into the crannies of Philadelphia.
Ahead in morning light was a jogging suit. The figure was revealed ultimately to be the spectacled woman, and she dazzled in silver. The river sparkled to her right. Joan leaned forward as she paced. Her hair was tied back in a black ponytail. Her face was white as he remembered, and she came to a halt but twenty yards in front of Bill's rumpled figure.
"My god," said Joan. "You look terrible."
"I don't feel too great," said Bill.
"I left you in fine condition," said Joan. "I don't believe I have this type of effect on my men." Joan hoped he was not a stalker. If he were a lonely-hearts stalker type, she'd have to call the police or kick him in the balls. The idea of seeing Bill along the river boggled.
"Let's go up to Ernie's on Arch Street," said Bill, "and get some orange juice or tomato juice. I don't care."
"Okay," said Joan. "I have to warm down, so keep up with me."
Joan jogged ahead and Bill reluctantly followed stomping with his wingtips. He knew he looked ridiculous and knew it was a chastisement. He was grateful the streets were empty. Joan looked back with a bemused grin. "Come on Billy. There's not far to go, so run your ass off!"