A Savage Life

by Michael Savage

  Jim told him, “These are crazy times, we’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Sam asked for a key to events that might occur over the weekend and that might influence the opening price on Monday. Jim said, “Well, if they start shooting again in the Middle East people will rush to gold, and cocoa should go up as well.”

  Being Jewish, Sam quickly retorted, “Well, I’d rather take a loss than see them shooting at each other.”

  Jim did not believe that.

  THROUGH THE REMAINDER OF THE AFTERNOON AND INTO the evening, Sam quipped to his girlfriend, Joanne, how adept he was at losing money. He felt bad about the 1.5-cent drop in the price of cocoa, which in dollars represented a paper loss of $1,030, plus commission. He reminded Joanne several times how good he was at investments: “Who else do you know who could lose $1,500 in a few minutes?” This form of self-effacement was characteristic of Sam during his poetry days. With his successes in the book business and the continual ego bolstering provided by Joanne, who had observed his trait over the years and decided it was not “honesty” that motivated Sam when he chose to bare inner truths to his friends, but a genuine need to be hurt, where hopefully, pity would follow. The sweet warmth of maternal hugging that followed his every childhood upset had made him like this.

  Now that he had hurt himself, at least on paper, he resorted to self-derision, hoping for reassurances, which, in fact, followed from his soul mate.

  “Oh. Come on, Sam. Don’t be too hard on yourself. First of all, you haven’t even given this enough time to see if you’re gonna make or lose. Second, even if you do lose money, it won’t matter to me at all.” These magical woman words had their effect on Sam’s expressive face, giving to Joanne her encouragement to go on. “Sam, you must learn to detach yourself from your ability to make money. You are separate from whatever you can do.” He nodded, she drove further, now slightly conscious of the thoughts he had taught her to believe he was thinking. “Sure,” she said, “I love your ability to make it in this rat race of a world, but that’s not the only reason I love you.”

  In such a way, Sam bore his initial mistake. He was still baffled by the drop in the price of cocoa and decided to listen very carefully to the news that weekend, to know exactly what to do Monday morning. If tensions grew in the Middle East, God forbid, he would keep his futures; if a truce were announced, he would liquidate and take a loss.

  AS A RESULT OF HEAVY WINE DRINKING AT A FRIEND’S HOUSE Sunday evening, the investor overslept on Monday morning. He jumped up at eleven A.M., startled by the time, and phoned his broker. The analyst told him cocoa was moving up and down, changing every few minutes. Sam decided to sell, rather than risk a loss, should the futures contract close down for the day. He told Jim to sell whenever the price was at least half a cent higher than his purchase price. Jim repeated the instructions carefully. “So you want me to sell at a price of 64:00.” Sam repeated the order. “Yes. I bought them at 63:50, and I want them sold at 64:00.” The order was confirmed and the conversation terminated. After placing the receiver back on the hook, Sam settled back in bed. He felt good. He assumed he would take a profit on the two contracts. As Joanne opened her eyes, Sam smilingly reassured her. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. I’ll probably make at least $300 today, less commission, and we’ll get back in whenever the trend upwards looks stronger.” Joanne lightly patted Sam’s hand and returned to her dreams. Sam felt wise. He estimated he could make several hundred a day just by buying and selling; a few phone calls each day, and he would become a very rich man.

  As he tossed the figures over in his mind, an alarming thought occurred to him. He grabbed the phone and dialed a familiar number.

  “Jim. Hello. This is Sam. A thought just hit me. I can’t get a price of 64:00 today. A two-cent increase over Friday’s closing price of 61:75, assuming it goes up the limit, would give me a maximum of 63:75. Only 25 points more than I bought it at.”

  Jim satisfied him. “Relax. I just found out that the closing price on Friday was in error. It actually closed at 63:25, not 61:75 as I told you. You know how those dumb clerks are. Come Friday afternoon, and they run home for the weekend leaving things hanging.” He continued without interruption while Sam fought a sickness in his stomach not apparent since those high school days when he learned that he had failed an important exam. “Besides, you make out OK. Your two contracts were just executed at 64:00, so you profited on the transaction.”

  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 investm
ent. For the first time in his adult life he could honestly say he was happy.

  OF 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.”