When spring classes ended, I rented a room above a pizza parlor just off campus. A note arrived on office stationery confirming an appointment with Mr. Halsey. I got my ear pierced the next day. I was nobody’s kid anymore.
I dressed down for the meeting, baggy pants and two days’ growth and naturally an earring. Outside Stalls Associates I bought flowers for my father’s secretary. In six years with him, Doris Zuppa had contracted her employer’s stately inscrutability: I judged her age around twenty-eight, her origins Italian or Spanish, her humor to be as prim as her dress. Her sexiness lay in its evident denial. In ambitious puberty I’d often fancied her having sex with me, and lately with my father. I was fitting him with flaws, some measly obsession to make him more lovable. The gentle patricide of deeming us equal was all that I was after, but still the cliché loomed: Some dads never die. “How charming,” Doris said when I handed her the flowers.
Taking a chair in Father’s office, I was confronted with my image. He’d recently redecorated. An oak-framed mirror hung on the wall behind his desk. When I gazed at him I saw his face—and my own, staring wide-eyed back at me from over his shoulder like a prankster in a group photograph. I looked like a rock star, moneyed and sloppy, also like a clown, the earring glinting in my lobe like a signal flash transmitting idiot, idiot, idiot. Father asked, “What’s new?”
“Mother spoke to you?”
“She did.” He hadn’t stood when I came in. We hadn’t shaken hands. “I’ve been looking over your trades. You should have been paying me allowance all these years.”
“So deduct it.”
“No, but I will ask for my original stake. As interest, I’ve averaged the prime rate since 1976, plus two points.” At my wince he asked, “Is that a problem?”
“No problem.”
“And since I’ve been paying taxes on your gains—”
“I had losses, too.”
“I’ve credited you those. But overall, I’m due a refund.”
“Plus interest?”
“At the same rate, yes.”
He paused, distracted by my distraction, my eyes flitting from his ambiguous face to a sharper target in the mirror behind him, a backview of his head. I had thick hair (Mother’s genes; Stallses lack for nothing) so as my father tallied his cut I was nonetheless consoled, for though he had my money he would never have my hair.
He slid a computer printout across his desk. A bank check was clipped to the corner. The printout listed sales prices on the stocks and options held in the account, less commission, less margin debt and interest, less capital gains tax, less a dollar-fifty for drafting the check, which (I well remember) was in the amount of $7,866.12.
It sank in. “You dumped it all?”
“As you asked,” he said. “As your mother asked.”
“I didn’t say sell! You could have quit-claimed the whole portfolio, as is. I mean, chisel me, call in your loan—but don’t sell me out. Those stocks were mine!”
“In fact they were mine. I didn’t have to give you a dime.”
Well, I should have torn up the check right there, flung the bits in his face. But I’m weak on spontaneity. Throwing a punch, making a pass—possible downsides occur to me instantly, and I generally reconsider. Where I’m deliberate is where I get into trouble. I’ve never sinned by accident.
My hand was steady as I signed a receipt for the money. Next I signed a waiver releasing Stalls Associates from all liability in my past and future affairs, then another waiver releasing my father from same. I leaned back in my chair and felt literally high, a queasy rush that lifted me over this scene like an airship over a battlefield. On the no man’s land of my father’s desk lay oblongs of legal paper, each carrying our names, Father’s and mine, and though I admit I imagined the papers as headstones and the names on them carved legends, it wasn’t a morbid vision nor sad, for even then my viewpoint seemed many years removed. Everything felt inevitable.
He tossed something else on his desk, a ticket or a playing card, it looked to me at first. It was a small photograph. “Found this the other day,” I heard him say.
Pictures of my maternal forebears are common in the homes of my relatives. From paintings and daguerreotypes dead Stallses gaze reprovingly upon once-familiar rooms peopled now with layabouts disguised in the family likeness. Despite their studied, imperious poses, the subjects of these portraits cannot hide the fact they have died. It plays on their faces like distraction, like a secret on the face of a child. The picture in my hand told a similar story.
I still have it, a black-and-white passport photograph of a man in a coarse wool suit. I know more about him now. That his baldness was premature; that his heavy brow did not falsely suggest stubbornness; that to call his expression haunted would have been as true as it was presumptuous. I know more about him now, but then, at first glance, I knew that since the picture was taken this man had died. It was there in his face, an incipient shadow. And if perhaps the photograph had simply discolored with age, the shadow was there all the same, in his face and in my father’s, too, when I raised my eyes to look at him. “That man is my father,” he explained. “His name was Philip Holscheimer.”
“A German?”
Did he smile then? The memory changes with my mood. “A Jew.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“He was indeed a Jew. As am I.”
“And me?”
“By blood, half.”
I thought for a moment. “And no one knows—”
“But you.”
“Why are you saying this now?”
“A man should know who he is.”
If that was Father’s purpose, to tell me who I am, the revelation worked in reverse. Part Jewish, evidently, I was born and raised a WASP. A legacy of centuries of dispersal and struggle had nothing on a short life lived under an opposite persuasion that the world was mine to lose. It was too late now to change, to turn my eyes to the past in search of clues to myself. I’d take my chances on the future. “Why have you kept it secret?” I asked.
“It wasn’t a pleasant thing. In the British Army during the war, being David Holscheimer was not an advantage. So I changed my name to Halsey. I let the past—and my troubles—go. It was rather a capitulation and rather a triumph. My father took it personally, however. We never spoke again.”
“Imagine that.” My voice was sarcastic. His confession was a weapon, given to me. I was still clumsy in its use.
“When I left the U.K. in 1946,” he continued, “it was the last we saw each other. He died twenty years ago, in Palestine—Israel, I should say. My mother also died there. I learned they were dead when I tried to contact them, to tell them they had a grandson.”
“Me.”
“It wasn’t to be. But I loved them better gone, that always had been the case. So truth was served, you see?”
I was foggy. It took a moment for me to recognize this was the perfect finish to our little play of filial woe. I folded the bank check around the photo of Father’s father and put them in my pocket. My manner may have been downcast but inside I was flying, for I’d been rescued from a fate I’d always thought would get me. Something in my spirit saw redundancy everywhere. Each path looked beat to me, each aspiration lame. A drowning man on his third descent supposedly goes calmly. I’d resigned myself to going the same way. To sink, I mean, with lungs full of irony and pockets full of gold. But now—my money mine, my heritage obscured, my father transformed to a son—I was like nobody I knew. I wanted to be out of there, out of Father’s office, not another word exchanged lest the blessing be revoked.
As I made to leave he said, “No reaction?”
“It’s your life.”
“I thought it would interest you. Your roots.”
“I don’t believe roots matter. Changing your name, your religion, you must not either.”
“The change was cultural, mainly. And emotional.”
“You chickened out.”
His eyes narrowed
. His hands flattened on his desk. “Sold my soul, is how my father put it.”
“He must have felt humiliated.”
“Certainly that. He was very proud.”
“A Jew!”
“A harsh-sounding word, I’ve always thought.”
A question occurred to me. “Would Stalls Associates have hired you as David Holscheimer?”
“In 1952? No.”
“You’re here as a fraud, you’re saying.”
“I’ve become what I set out to become.”
Looking back, it’s clear Father was working out a personal issue of little connection to me. He received my snipes graciously, as if pleased I was saying all the right lines unprompted. Throughout our exchange I’d felt on the brink of spoiling it with, say, an invitation to lunch, my treat—together we could have walked to a local deli, confessed our petty motivations and noshed on congenial foods. But I had issues of my own to work out. I’m a child of fortune, a circumstance from which it isn’t so easy—because ultimately it doesn’t seem worth the effort—to rise and make one’s mark. Now, having been lucky enough to be victimized, I was loath to let it go. I started for the door.
“Where are you going?”
I couldn’t resist: “The promised land.”
“You’ll be back.” His assertiveness faltered. “Philip, do you think you’ll be back?”
I considered but came to no answer, leaving there with my money and my grandfather’s photograph in a pocket over my heart. My first impression of the photograph had held oddly true. If a playing card, the game between Father and me had ended in a draw; if a ticket, if this was theater, then the curtain fell on a question, not opening again until four years later when I returned to his office in a pinstripe suit and serious trouble. By then I was broke and being investigated; also, I was a father. I’d never seen my baby boy, didn’t know his name. Still he was pure dynamite in the hands of a desperate man.
5
In other times, twenty-year-olds have shipped out on merchant steamers or joined the seminary, burned their draft cards or enlisted, all in a sort of enthusiastic despair that is the hallmark of intelligent youth. That’s how I justify chasing profit like a madman, likewise chasing women whom I should have left alone: I was acting my age in the fashion of my age in hopes that I, like countless twenty-year-olds before me, might forge a past worth bragging and worth blushing about. I’m not a spontaneous person. These things must be created.
The women I’m referring to were married, though each was separated from her husband at the time I knew her. Far more disorienting than their marital states were their perfectly opposed personalities. Dating them simultaneously, I was squeezed like grease between two gears; knowing them together made Sisyphean the quesion, What do women want? One was dim and inquiring, the other bright and jaded. Sexually one did, while the other liked to get done. And spiritually their guilt derived from God looking down and the dead looking up, Catholic and Jew respectively. If women were atoms these two would have integrated instantly, forming something altogether rare while spitting me out like a waste product, an unneeded neutron, the castrato of nuclear particles.
I was living over Nick’s Pizza about five blocks from my college. My room was small, smelled of pizza, and came with a garage for my old VW. (I’d sold the Buick my folks had bought me, investing the difference.) My biggest monthly expense was for leasing the Quotron terminal I kept on my kitchenette table. A lovely machine, it fed me Dow Jones news, stock and option data, bond prices, money rates, all the major indexes, and of course the market ticker.
Daily my finger was on the crucial pulse. Take the price of gold: Fears of war, fears of peace, are reflected in its fluctuation. The stock market in 1980, drifting sluggishly, told me recession was coming. When the Dow shot up in August ‘82, I knew the worst was over, good times lay ahead. Reagan was sure for a second term, and why not? He was perfect for the job. You want complexity, you get Nixon. You want a workaholic, you get Carter. Ford was my favorite but I was too young to vote for him.
In those days the market opened at 10 A.M. I’d phone in my buy and sell orders, then track them through the day on my Quotron. Conventional wisdom said keep your money in high-interest instruments. I went for options and speculative issues, shorting the dogs and going long on glitzy technologies. I studied newspapers and newsletters, received financial reports on cable TV and the radio. Midafteraoon I’d eat a pizza, and at 4:01 I’d drink a beer as postclose announcements came in.
Sometimes I went out at night—to parties on campus, till it grew too strange. As a dropout I was mistrusted by my classmates. This was 1980. The high-rolling entrepreneur wasn’t as exalted in collegiate circles as he would be several years later; we were still hung up on education as an end in itself. My classmates in turn seemed like children to me, complaining of “pressure,” unaware of the Disneyland college really is. Time is a tailwind once you’re out of school. You still don’t feel it, but now, like beacons to a harbor behind you, it can be measured in landmarks slowly disappearing from view.
I ate at local restaurants, cozy eateries of a type common around expensive urban colleges. Like bars around a ballpark, these places know their clientele, which here stressed casual good taste. My first few times alone on the town I requested a second table candle to read my Fortune by; it seemed such a pose, I became self-conscious and couldn’t digest my food. In a quiet corner I would down three courses with wine, cognac, and the Gold Card following, then I’d linger drowsily over coffee till came the time to get this body home. At home were diversions of TV and difficult novels, a little marijuana, a rented video movie; or business—strategies to plan, receipts to collate and mail to my accountant. This was my life for over two years, and I’ll tell you it wasn’t bad.
I didn’t go to church, didn’t go to temple. I mention my abstinence not to brag but to acknowledge the dilemma of having been conceived part Jew and born all WASP. I never got around to changing my name to Holscheimer. It would have been presumptuous and technically hard to pull off. I donated regularly to B’nai B’rith and appeased my heritage that way. To be a Halsey, of course, a pseudononymous fiction, I had only to be myself.
6
The hardest part of independent investing is coming up with new companies to consider. (I’ve heard of men throwing darts at the business pages, betting fortunes on the firms impaled.) The company names blur as you scan the financial literature, and those singled out in columns and newsletters are old news by that time. You can follow your favorites and buy if they’re undervalued, but there’s nothing like the embryo grown, splitting three for two, to remind you you do it for love. Separated as I was from the swirl of opinion that a business office affords, I sought my leads elsewhere. A bountiful source were the published minutes of Stalls Associates’ quarterly trustee meetings. Prior to our falling out, I’d received these on Father’s directive. Evidently he’d neglected to scratch me off the mailing list.
Where else I got ideas a professional would laugh at: in the lobby of a branch office of a retail brokerage firm. It was laughable because such places are basically off-track betting parlors designed to serve rubes and addicts. The firms often provide in their reception lobbies, like toys in a toy store window, a Quotron and a wall-mounted ticker as enticement to customers, a contingent of whom you’ll find there every workday, retirees usually, grist in the combine of institutional trading, whose talk varies inversely with the size of their portfolios, and who are never so impressed or charmed as by a fellow trader’s disaster.
Now in my third year alone, I’d recently established a separate stock account expressly for impulse purchases. With $50,000 as seed money, I was day-trading entertainment stocks on the basis of movies and TV shows I’d seen the night before. I based investments on the day’s weather. If sunny, I’d buy Sun Oil; if stormy, Black & Decker. And I was making money.
One morning I woke as the radio played Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue.” So at the market opening I bou
ght a hundred IBM calls, in the money, for about $40,000. As a test, I left my apartment vowing to ignore my Quotron until the final hour of trading. But at noon I found myself outside a downtown branch office of an internationally-known stock brokerage (here nameless, pending litigation), unable to resist going in.
Opposite the receptionist’s desk was an upholstered bench and a Quotron on one end table; above her head stock quotes sped right to left across a black screen, vanishing at the end like boats off the earth’s edge. Three men and a woman sat together on the bench. She was punching out quotes at their command and relaying bid and ask, the men conferring, nodding, crossing their arms, deadpan disgust on their faces. The woman looked fifty, the men twenty years older—geezers all, a decrepit tribunal before which I, unshaved and ill-nourished, no doubt seemed a wandering street person or the guy who cleans the ashtrays. I felt them shift uneasily as I knelt to the Quotron, tapping “I-B-M send” on the keyboard.
The stock was down a point and three-quarters. Its size indicated a backlog of sell orders, meaning worse to come. An asterisk indicated there was recent news on the company. “IBM announced a bunch of price cuts,” the woman said over my shoulder. “They’re giving it away.”
My option would be moving with the stock, putting me $15,000 down. I punched out the code. Make it $17,000.
The woman peered at the screen. “What month?”
“September sixties.”
“Say again?” said the man beside her. He was hard of hearing, I later learned; thus loud.
“IBM options,” she all but yelled. “Getting crushed!”
The old man whistled admiringly. “Big Blue. She’s a hummer.”
“Not today,” I said.
“Gimme steel,” said the second guy down, an ex-navy type with white socks and heavy black shoes. The woman tapped “X” and relayed the result. “Now Perrin,” he said, and she hit “P-R-R-P.”
“What company is that?” I asked her.
“Perrin Products. Hair tonic, shampoo.”
Up, Down and Sideways Page 2
