Watch the "Video-Novel" of Lunacy

Lunacy...  Continued

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Later, alone, I returned to my private poverty.

Poverty can be a lonely business for, with the exception of lunatics like Winthrop, few wish to share the joys of poverty with miserable acquaintances. In my humble habitation passing the time consisted of staring at an empty cereal box or day dreaming to radio music. The cure for this, I believed, was to become RICH and FAMOUS, thereby curing poverty and loneliness.

I started practicing to be rich and famous by rehearsing lines for the TONIGHT show at odd moments in-between making faces at myself in the mirror or inventing sexual fantasies engaging enough to fall asleep with.

I discovered I could be a witty and charming fellow while lounging in my foyer. This led to bouts of nagging depression.

How does one become rich and famous beyond the adoration of the hypothetical masses not found in one’s foyer or bathroom? My fantasies had come up with no workable solution. My Vietnam experience was over so there was no chance of me winning ten medals of honor; those who did had become insurance salesmen or derelicts anyway.

I would have to do something on my own. I dusted off my three unpublished novels but found nothing to my liking, Panic. I tried to write a masterpiece in the next two hours. My aim was to create the greatest novel in the world. After an hour and a half I only had 30 pages completed. I quickly killed all the characters in a surprise ecocide and made it into a short story. Who buys short stories?

In the next hour I converted it into a teleplay and ran out into the street ready to become rich and famous.

First, I showed it to my gas station attendant who admitted he couldn’t read, so I offered it to a fellow having his Cadillac filled with premium gasoline. "I don’t read this shit. It ain’t about money," he bellowed.

I attempted an on-the-spot rewrite intending to change the lead character’s name to ‘Money’ But the Cadillac-fellow drove off waiving his right to a window wash.

A Volvo pulled up. There was a pensive fellow with a slight beard at the wheel.

"I have a story here about charactericide in a threatening environment."

He looked at it briefly. "You should have this typed and spell the words correctly," he advised.

"Fuck you, I’m an artist! Next time I’ll use crayon! I won’t be compromised by rules or machines!" I shouted idealistically.

"I happen to be a television producer, I insist on certain standards, If not met I will not consider the property which is probably stupid anyway." In moments he was gone.

"Talent needs work," one of my semi-senile professors had once told me at the state teacher’s college for women I attended on the G.I. bill. I would just have to work!

I looked up all the words I couldn’t spell in a thick dictionary and changed the ones I couldn’t find to words already invented. Then I typed the piece laboriously on my 1905 Underwood at the pecking rate of  ten-words-a-minute. In two weeks I was ready.

I took a train to New York City and went straight to NBC. (Having decided to go commercial all aspects of oral sex and genocide were underplayed in my revised teleplay). I debated upon an approach to suggest the best time slot for my creation.

The elevator operator asked me what I was doing there. "Take me to your producers," I said, confidently.

I made it to the Personnel department where I applied for a position cleaning latrines, a field of endeavor I felt eminently qualified for.

"Should I leave this script with you?" I asked the one who handed out the employment application forms.

"No, You need an agent."

"I’ll sell it to you cheap," I said.

"No NEXT PLEASE!" She called out over my shoulder. A line of people were pushing and shaving forward, hungry for a prestigious elevator operator’s job or even to clean toilet bowls and urinals. Hungry for $ 2.75 an hour in $ 6 an hour world.

Slightly daunted I went to the William Morris Agency. A trainee receptionist there glanced at the first page of my work.

"At least you can spell as good as me. The morons might even like this," he giggled nervously. "Got to remove this risqué language" The trainee said with an effeminate air.

"Oh really?" I tried to put some swish into my voice. Maybe he would represent me at NBC, I thought.

"But then again if it was really any good someone would have done it already, or stolen it." He returned my manuscript.

"What would you suggest?’ I asked.

"Get a job."

"I want to be rich and famous."

"So do I." His blue eyes fluttered at me. It was time to leave.

I asked Winthrop to read my manuscript. He suggested adding sodomy and nuclear war. "Try filming this yourself with a rented home movie camera. You never know, silent black and white pornos may be coming back."

Winthrop had been right, They were all right, ‘Get a job.’

I became interested in the concept of money because I had none. I eventually found work in low finance, specifically as a salesman in the Insecurity Business. (The film version of ‘LUNACY’ will present my initiation into the Insecurities Business in the most surreal fashion, as a rite of baptism into the pagan Mithraist brotherhood of the Bull. The blood of one’s clients tasted as lies upon the lips as they commit financial suicide at one’s beckoning. All taste the blood or find another job quick!)

The initiation into the world of Insecurities was reminiscent of basic training. We learned to sell, sell, sell before learning what, or to whom or more importantly, why. It was kill, kill, kill the enemy for money… who was the enemy? Everybody with bucks.

The training regime was made starkly realistic by the vast multitude of managers who were former military officers. The concept of expendability was thoroughly drummed into us. Everyone save the firm, was expendable. The firm was sacrosanct --bodies were to shield if from harm (fall before the sword if need be).

In months I was considered ‘trained,’ assigned a number, given a desk amid a row of desks. A telephone was provided.

They said unto me, "Make us commissions. We will pay you 30 % of the 2 - 6 % we charge your clients for the privilege of doing business with us. Sometimes, when the charges are inscrutably hidden we will pay you 6 % of the 10 % you bring in to us - or often times pay you nothing. Remember, if it is easy we will pay you nothing.

The harder the sale (and more imponderable the product) the more you will receive, If you are not successful you will be terminated and your seat and phone given to somebody else - perhaps even your number! Your name will be held up to ridicule and for us you will be considered dead."

"What was I to sell?"

"Insecurities."

"What is an Insecurity?"

"Something that is not secure, that fluctuates in value."

"Specifically what? A product?"

"Yes and no. Not a product that we make, but one that we SELL. Shares of dubious equity in corporations, or items of debt sold by sellers who are our best clients to those who are buyers usually our millions of piddling clients that like you, are expendable."

"You’re talking about stocks and bonds, right?"

"We are not talking about stocks and bonds. The stock market corrected for inflation (and with a real dollar value) has since 1968 returned to where it was 50 years ago. The bond markets have crashed three times. Fools who bought long term bonds (from us) have suffered paper losses of 1/2 TRILLION dollars while they wait for maturity (usually after they’re dead) of depreciated dollars worth one tenth of the real dollars they invested. No, we have repackaged these simplistic concepts into 56 unique products and services."

"All related to the stock, bond and short term debt markets, right?"

"Naturally."

"Why would anyone buy this shit?"

"Because we’ve hired you to sell it. If you don’t, we’ll fill your place in ten minutes. If you do well, you can make a good living here. And then, of course, we’ll LIKE you. FACT: For you in this corporation -(smile)- we don’t want you to THINK about anything other than SELLING. We have already done your thinking for you. If we ‘make’ (devise) a product, it is good. And you shall sell it or be gone. A thought about the goodness or evil of a product is a forbidden thought to you. It is unclean for you to think forbidden thoughts."

"Remember, people buying the things we have to sell to them will at some point feel they have lost money. They might become angry with you for making them feel insecure and naturally, they will blame you for this. Continually prospect for new clients always expecting to lose the dissatisfied ones you currently have. Use your phone, the more calls the more prospects, the more prospects the more clients, the more clients the more commissions, the more commissions the more we like you, the more we like you the better you will feel."

"A hundred thousand calls should yield a thousand prospects, a hundred clients, $ 60,000 gross commissions $ 20,000 for you. Make THREE hundred thousand calls and we might START to like you.

"It’s a NUMBERS game -(smile). It’s so easy."

I had my doubts over how easy it was going to be for me. True, some salespeople didn’t make ANY calls and strangely, were the best liked, but…

On the other hand, if the process of selling the unknown to strangers was viewed as legal thievery perhaps it could be accomplished in massive quantities.

In order to morally justify this numerical chicanery to myself I thought it best to take from other thieves: 1) Physicians who made a half million dollars per year doing God’s work and ripping off Insurance Companies. 2) Lawyers ripping off Insurance Companies. 3)Accountants ripping off the government and their own clients. 4) Insurance Companies ripping off the public.

Soon, however, I would find out that the above mentioned were used to guys like me trying to rip them off and would have nothing to do with my futile efforts to gain their confidence so I could do to them what they would rather do to me. Secretaries, answering services and unlisted home phone numbers made my calls an impotent menace, My ‘prospecting universe’ had shrunk to the foolhardy and unwary ‘Let the buyer beware.’

Rather then face reality I embraced the quest for the elusive Mr. Big. The zillion dollar fellow, with unlimited financial resources, who would take a liking to me and become my benefactor. Then, I too could cease making silly phone calls to strangers AND become well liked.

GILLHENSKY’S LAW

Lunching under Winthrop’s carport (he had no car) as a light drizzle fell I tried to share with him my ambivalence, Yes, I felt exuberance over my fantasy of capturing a Mr. Big to lead the way toward big commissions in the Insecurity game. Yet, I also brooded over the moral correctness of mixing with such high stakes foolishness.

Winthrop had difficulty following my conversation. "Well, if you’re raising new capital I guess it’s all-right," he mentioned.

"That’s not exactly what we do. Mostly we maintain a secondary market to provide liquidity for existing Insecurities."

Winthrop shook his head, not comprehending.

"We buy and sell things for the commission. Or my firm, Mostly Bull, makes money shoring up failing utilities who are unable to make monopoly productive."

Winthrop was appalled. "That sounds like stealing!" He exclaimed.

I said hopefully, "Maybe you could get a job with them."

"Certainly not. Quit this instant! Stealing people’s money is immoral," he said.

I lost my temper. "Quit and do what?" I shouted at him, putting down my banana-butter sandwich. "Go back to unemployment? Writing teleplays in my kitchen and throwing them in the garbage after a brief performance in the foyer? I’ve got responsibilities I need money!"

"Calm down," he urged.

I calmed down.

"What about the people’s hard earned money you’ll be subjecting to squander? After all - you, no offense, don’t know anything about Insecurities except what Mostly Bull tells you."

"Hard earned!" I snorted. I bit furiously into my sandwich only to see a terrorist banana slice fall in slimy glory onto the pant’s leg of my best and newest suit. The banana slice had insulted the dress code of Mostly Bull.

"Winthrop, money is only hard-earned by those who don’t have any of it," I said and then paused to consider what I had said. Unfortunately, it made sense. In a poor society 100 % of the population works at staying alive. In an affluent society 20 % of the people grow the food and make the products. everybody else angles to sell a service or get in on the action (like me). More clarification came to mind. I stared at Winthrop’s humble face. My emotions were benevolent. Something was happening in my brain. After only a short term in the Insecurity Business I could formulate rules of economic behavior. My jaw fell open. I spoke, "Thems that works the least hardest makes the most money."

"What? Excuse me?" Winthrop asked.

"Thems that works the hardest makes the least money," I finished.

Winthrop looked concerned. I rubbed the banana stain on my pant’s leg, "That’s Gillhensky’s law." I said. One of them, anyway," There would be more. I finished lunch quickly. Mostly Bull required my presence into the evening hours.

MOSTLY BULL OFFICE

There was a cosmos of individuals in the Mostly Bull office that employed me. I was a ‘new guy’ or one of the hundreds of baby turtles not expected to survive the scramble toward the sea, let alone, two years to adulthood. As such, most of the bigger denizens of Mostly Bull didn’t bother to learn my name. Thought they were thankful I was there with a handful of other ‘new guys.’ I was a potential meal. Every failure of a new guy who was prematurely flushed out of the system had stumbled over at least one good account that some other salesman would stand to inherit. So, while no one cared what my name was they nodded at me near the urinal in the men’s room, with a glint in their red, shark eyes, ‘Welcome aboard, food. When the going gets rough, we’ll eat you.’ On my part I could wish that strokes or plagues of typhus would decimate their ranks opening up their excellent accounts to the likes of me.

At the top of the pecking order were what was known as the Big Hitters or just the Hitters. Not that they played baseball. They didn’t. They wrote ‘tickets’ which consisted of putting digits into little boxes on a multi-carboned order form. This was the purpose under heaven for the existence of Mostly Bull.

Sumner was the biggest hitter in the office. He possessed a special obnoxiousness that few people could match. His tie knot was so tight I thought it had been surgically implanted in his throat. A brass bone of same sort insured that his collar could not be opened by some curious onlooker wondering how a man could live with a hang-noose roped over his windpipe. But Sumner not only lived, he thrived. His hair was short and lips perpetually puckered. His call words were, "On the phone! Work, work, work! Mostly Bull! Make cold calls!" Though Sumner did not have to call cold strangers. His valuable time was always taken up handling the large number of orders that his wealthy friends, relatives and accounts phoned in.

Sumner’s view of things was simple: "Those who had the most should get the most." Many of the better leads referred into the office went to Sumner so, obviously, his view prevailed. And, already, his account-holding books numbered more than two sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Sumner’s volume of business had become so huge that he needed two assistants to help him answer all the calls and write all the tickets, Yet, the more he had, the more he wanted. Others complained "Give us some of the good leads and we can become big hitters too!" They said to management.

Management said, "Shaddup!" and began reviewing the complainer’s records suspiciously, "Aren’t you happy here at Mostly Bull? If not, then you can leave and we’ll re-assign YOUR accounts to Sumner. We like Sumner. He aren’t even sure of what your name is."

Other complainers tried logic. "Sumner can’t possibly service that many accounts in an effective manner. Some of the accounts he presently has can yield more numbers to the FIRM if placed in the hands of those with more time to devote to those accounts."

Management was not swayed by logic. "Taking away Sumner’s accounts would be communism And we hate communism," they replied.

"But, you threatened to take away our accounts and give them to Sumner!" They cried in anguish.

"That’s different. Taking away your accounts is Free Enterprise because they really aren’t your accounts; they belong to the firm. Sumner is part of this firm. We like him. We don’t know your name, and we don’t want to know your name till you do more numbers and start acting like one of us. Stop complaining and produce!"

Sumner believed with all his heart and soul that the firm and the Nation must ‘feed the fat and starve the weak’ anything less was a vision of the anti-Christ dancing in hell with Karl Marx and Joe Stalin.

Not that Sumner was religious, mind you. The wafer would never fit into his mouth past the tight pucker of his lips. I suspected that either his anus had been misplaced on his body at creation or perhaps the latter was even tighter (kept his shit together). Sumner said little about politics knowing money to be a greater mentor. Once he ventured the opinion that an individual be allotted votes according to the amount of money he had. After all, Sumner reasoned that was the way corporations worked. And why should the people who actually owned everything put up with the careless votes of the weak and stupid who wanted Sumner to pay taxes to support their lazy, indolent ways?

Sumner hated paying taxes. "I work hard all day writing tickets and making money. Why shouldn’t I keep all of it? (After the firm got it’s huge cut) Management agreed.

Another super-hitter, Spencer, was less strident than Sumner. Spencer was full of confidence in himself and less patriotic toward the firm. He not only begrudged paying taxes, he begrudged the firm the lion’s share of the commissions they always got for HIS conniving,

It was suspected that Spencer might eventually go to another firm to get a better deal but since he did big numbers management was polite to him. Yet Mostly Bull counterintelligence kept close tabs on him and was prepared to step in and seize his accounts and records the moment they sensed a separation.

Spencer was aware of his situation at Mostly Bull. His attitude was, "Fuck them. Fuck everybody." Spencer was non discriminatory in his view toward all men - he could care less about any of them. He was a fatalist too, "The cream always rises to the top. And I’m the cream, so why should I worry about it. Fuck ‘em all."

Spencer never left Mostly Bull. The thought of Sumner taking his accounts away gave him nightmares. The thought of losing his accounts and cream status to become warm sour milk caused him great concern. So he stayed and snarled and management begrudgingly fed him too. After all it was expected of them.

Pierce was the least offensive of the big three producers. He often admitted "I hate prospecting I hate making cold calls, I’m lucky I don’t have to." Then he would smile.

New guys anxious for the secrets of success beyond the dictum ‘work-on the phone-make cold calls’ would ask Pierce for advice.

Pierce would shrug. "I was friends with a big hitter. He got sick and asked me to look after his top accounts. They’re my accounts now (smile)."

"What about your friend, did he get well?" Sensitive, new guys asked.

"His business is his business and my business is my business. He would have done the same thing to me, unless he was stupid and if he was, why be friends with him?"

New guys would try to become friends with Pierce but the hitter was too smart for them, "I’m busy! I’m not here to socialize. I’m here to make money!"

If an eyebrow was raised to his brusqueness Pierce would defend himself, "It may not be nice or fair but I didn’t make the system. I’d be foolish to defy it and lose everything wouldn’t I?"

Below the big three hitters was a category of lesser hitters and then a middle-ground full of question-marks. Schopenhauer was one of those question-marks. He was the only one of the old timers I got to know well. He was a brooder.

I often shared a beer with old Schope and listened to his morose, though truthful, observations about the Insecurity business.

"Let’s face it," he would admit, a sour unpleasantness besmirching his face. "We could be fired tomorrow and see our hard efforts (and slender rewards) given to that bastard Sumner. It can happen, There’s those who have a silver spoon and those who chew the cud and the miserable rest of us."

"It’s not fair," I would offer to seem agreeable.

"It’s not supposed to bee The big fish eat the little fish. - I know that. Guys like you and me got to be careful. It’s treacherous waters out there."

"Why don’t you leave this crazy business?" I’d implore, expecting to either be fired or get lucky and find Mr. Big, myself.

"And do what? Scramble in some other line, This is all I know. I’m not a kid anymore. This is it. Life is meant to be tough on most of us. I’m gonna stick it out and go down swinging. They won’t get me easily."

Determination setting in, he would sip the rest of his beer in quiet solitude.

Toward the end of the question mark category were the salesmen who were madmen. Fellows of different ages and backgrounds with varying dependencies on an assortment of drugs or (usually) unlimited quantities of alcohol. Lacking motivation to be pimps or plain crooks they were drawn to the Insecurity business by the thrill of being able to swindle the foolish. They came and went, abandoning firms and clientele with the same ease they abandoned wives, children and silly girlfriends. On any given afternoon between the hours of twelve and three these wild cards were ‘out on appointment’ in some strange bar where they would be just as apt to deal for stolen merchandise or try to screw hookers for-free, as perform any other duty. Lady luck or a senile widow with a small fortune growing smaller seemed to always come through for these guys. Though, even here, family connections to money could be detected. Schopenhauer had warned me to avoid running with this pack. A new guy could get himself terminated in a hurry if he wasn’t careful.

Most new guys didn’t make it anyway. Within months this became obvious to me. However, one new guy became a Mostly Bull star. His name was Mike (Make) Good. His success story was a case of great dumbness married to a total lack of scruples. This plus a cocaine connection to an ex-college buddy whose father was a crooked Mr. Big put Mike far out in front of me. While he knew very little about Insecurities beyond the commission-getting he was a persuasive salesman. He would happily sell cancer to a perfect stranger for the right pay-out. His better qualities included a charming candor concerning his attitude toward hard labor and sincere effort, "Work rhymes with jerk!" If he had nothing better to do he would waste time amusing and intimidating his co-workers with tales of all the guys he’d beaten up and women he convinced to put out (him first and then his buddies).

The people I became friendliest with were the new guys who did not make it. These were the troops whose names were lumped at the bottom of the monthly production runs posted on the wall.

Carlyle should have made it. He came from a well-to-do family and had a splendid and expensive education. Unfortunately for him he was too much of a snob to scramble for money. "Really, -- capitalism should be symbolic of the creation of the finest product, not in the selling the sublime to the ridiculous. How absurd. This business is the epitome of the failure of the modern technocratic marketing mess. A person of proper breeding should not subject himself to such a lowly and unproductive task."

Carlyle preferred to solicit the patronage of his mother so he could do no work while drinking imported liqueurs and criticizing with cruel passion the vulgarities and chicanery of the corporate mob. He was a friend of mine and was fired early in his career.

His buddy, Rushkin was also a failure at the Insecurity business. Rushkin was both more idealistic and more practical than Carlyle. He often lamented the unfairness of the business and re-planned it on a utopian model, "Those leads should be distributed equally to everyone. If they hire a man they should help him as much as the next man, who ever he be." Rushkin discussed that point with the manager once. He was fired shortly after Carlyle.

Neither Morris nor Thoreau could give two shits about the serious plight of anyone including themselves. It was difficult to see why Morris had come into the Insecurity business. Possibly some impulsive burst of curiosity had led him to Mostly Bull. He had a degree in Horticulture and looked forward, warmly, to the prospect of being fired.

Thoreau also welcomed the getting-fired-opportunity as a crazed soldier seeks death-his-bride. When Thoreau decided to put in an appearance his arrival was timed to coincide with the start of the lunch hour. His departure to the conclusion of the lunch hour. Perhaps he was shamed by the lack of variety in his wardrobe though I doubt it. It was true that Thoreau owned only one suit, a charcoal gray thing he inherited from his grandfather.

The bunch of us would often gather for beers. The conversation was lively with dangerous ideas, If Rushkin happened to plead some dictum of utopian management Thoreau would sneer, "Management is best that manages not at all!"

"But it can’t work that way!" Rushkin exclaimed.

"I know," Thoreau declared and laughed. Then he and Morris would raise their beers and toast each other, "To getting fired!" God knows what they’re up to today.

Time went by in the Insecurity business. I learned valuable lessons. I saw the not-so-bright, virgin in everything except greed, get lucky and become successful. I watched their constant, empty-handed, trek into the manager’s office and then out with handfuls of leads and re-assigned accounts.

When Carlyle, Thoreau, Rushkin and Morris left most of what few accounts they had went to Good and Sumner. Schopenhauer felt so threatened by this he took to locking his desk drawer every time he went to the men’s room. "Watch out for Good." Schope whispered to me. "He’s on the feed." His pained eyes bobbed a bit before mine. He debated internally over whether he should have shared that confidence with me. He threw caution to the wind, "Don’t mix with him. Don’t say nothing negative ‘bout the business. What ever you do don’t breath a bad word about the firm. It’ll get back."

"To who?’ I asked.

"Management. He’s on the feed. -- Got to go," Schope took off in a fast hustle. I followed.

 "Schope!" I called.

He wouldn’t acknowledge me till we reached the train station. Once there he checked to see if anyone was watching.

"He’s on the feed. Be careful or he’ll have your accounts -- or mine!"

We walked together a moment.

"Doesn’t it piss you off that he’s on the feed?" I asked.

"Naw, you get used to it. See it all the time. New guy comes aboard, runs across a client ready to self-destruct. Churns his balls off making big commissions. Doesn’t get sued. Management likes the act, puts the guy on the feed. That’s the way it is."

"But they bomb out eventually, don’t they?" I asked.

He laughed. "Are you kidding?" He stopped walking. "The last fast-track guy to go through here is now the assistant regional manager! With his eye on me; that bastard!" His face curled into dark anger. We walked quickly.

"They won’t get me that easily," he warned.

Something else was falling into place, Something known a long time ago but obscured in the democratic myopia America had been before I had gone to Vietnam. I had returned, confused, to a society that was plunging through an orgy of absurdity and was unable to suspect it.

It was a lesson my foolish schooling hadn’t taught me, possibly because it was something that hadn’t ought-to-be, -- ‘Thems that don’t needs, gets.’ Thems that needs don’t gets,’ It was a hard lesson to swallow. Using beer as a medium, I swallowed.

S.F.

Perhaps as early as 1965 Dr. Winthrop may have dabbled esoterically into the relationship between sex and money as part of his great dissertation. But no evidence of the essay remains. The Doctor dimly recalls his mother, Dr. Winthrop, finding a crumpled mess of papers in the washing machine back in those Great Society years.

None-the-less, I claim credit for discovering (or re-discovering) the social- economic phenomenon known as SEXUAL FINANCE.

I happened across it accidentally, while on a visit to company headquarters situated scenically near the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

I was elevatoring toward the training department in order to have my conscience lowered and brain re-propagandized with Mostly Bull’s six month follow up for new Insecurity salesmen (Account Inexecutives).

The firm wished to parade our more successful comrades before us for praise, ridicule the 15 % of us who had already failed, and warn the 10 % of us on probation to get with the program or die. Then they wished to re-instill the optimism they had left us with a half year earlier.

Soon, they would have us rising to our feet, chanting happy choruses of "SELL! SELL! SELL!" as speaker after speaker told us that all markets were heading up and we should tell our few clients to Buy, Buy, Buy whatever products that Mostly Bull was sell, sell, selling.

As usual, I had my head up my ass, was daydreaming and used the wrong elevator bank. Eventually I found myself on the wrong floor.

As soon as my wing-tip shoe sunk into the plush, red carpet I realized I was in the wrong place. But disguised in a three piece suit and with a tie knot that penetrated my esophagus I could pass for almost anyone. Falling back on military experience which had taught me to pretend I knew what I was doing (that’s how I got hired at Mostly Bull). I reconnoitered the area.

What I came across was the exclusive lounge for Big Commission Producers known as the Charlemagne Bull Circle of Big Hitters. There were pictures all over the walls of the late Charlemagne Bull and his top sales people playing golf at Baltrustrol, lunching with mere Presidents of the United States and just smiling wealthy smiles. Here and there were plaques honoring this or that big hitter who topped a million dollars in commission income (trading $ 50 million of Insecurities).

The halls were silent behind met I slid into a leather lounge chair and listened carefully to the hum of conditioned air. One of Charlemagne Bull’s private sayings was inscripted in brass on the arm of my chair: ‘We’re already the biggest prostitute on Wall Street, let’s become the biggest prostitute on Main Street!’

There were mementos of CB, all about, Every square yard contained some saying or bit of apocrypha concerning this shaker of the Insecurity World.

I could imagine his voice as a braying bull violent in its sexual lust intoning orders for bullishness.

Absently I picked up a magazine from the mahogany coffee table. The periodical was titled, ‘Exclusive Wealth’ and the lead story was, ‘How to corner the market in money!’ Interested, I flipped to the story.

On page 34 I was able to open the magazine only two fifths of the way. Part of the subtitle assaulted me, ‘Using a TRILLION dollars…’ Part of a second subtitle was also visible, ‘Drove short term rates up 500 %…’ Yet, some vile substance had stuck the pages together. It was certainly not chewing gum.

Aggressively, I snapped the magazine open. There before me was a color photograph of stacks of money interlaid with gold bars and Treasury Certificates. The ruinous adhesive had been supplied by some Big Hitter who had ejaculated in ecstasy over so stimulating a scene.

Could this be possible? Then it fell into place. Yes, this demand to accumulate wealth had little to do with familial responsibility, capital formation or other ideological nonsense. There was something biological and instinctive to it.

I envisioned Institutional Bond Traders, Merger and Acquisition Specialists, Underwriters having priced their pre-sold, over-subscribed offering above the market price brimming with the enthusiasm of their victories, congregating singly or jointly to imbibe quantities of expensive alcohols think vibrantly of profits, commissions, bonuses, after-tax-revenues, net income per share, drop their trousers in unison, flip through pictures of bonds and foreign bank accounts as they rolled thick green wads of fresh dollar bills around their extended phalluses and shrieking with the call of mortal doomsday masturbate themselves to kingdom-come giggling and shouting in their euphoria for sweet death and final destruction. Finally, they would shoot their creative juices forward in swinging elliptical arcs where it splattered harmlessly on washable wall paper to dry into oblivion. Yes, that was the scene conjured up, though, it would be difficult to prove.

I dropped the magazine onto the table, considered wiping off my fingerprints but decided that doing that would make ME look guilty and rose to leave.

An attractive woman of 32, probably an executive secretary was there. My face reddened, Did she know? I was flushed with shame as if I had been caught committing a sexually financial act. I almost admitted only having ambitions of sexual finance while I still clung to naive virginity.

"Hello," she cooed, eyes full of glistening wonder. She was ready to serve me. The battle was won.

"You must be from out of town," she said approvingly. Obviously she believed me to be a big hitter, a million dollar a year man.

"Yeah," I growled. I was from hopeless Newark across the river. Of course, to her, out of town was Houston, Denver, Anchorage or Tokyo.

"Cocktail lounge opens in ten minutes, if you care to stay…" The smile on her face was stronger than nagging wife or screaming kids. But I was only play-acting to avoid embarrassment.

"Got to get on the phone. Do Numbers!" I croaked. She approved. I strutted toward the elevator my legs slightly bowed to accommodate the huge set of Bull balls I had suddenly been mistakenly gifted with.

The down elevator arrived immediately. I stepped in. Her warm eyes were saddened at my leaving.

"See you next time I’m in this town!" (Town? Nothing was too big for me, small clients were major banks to the likes of me). She waved forlornly as the doors closed.

Two floors down I broke into a sweat and repulsed a wave of high-pitched giggles. If she only had known who I wasn’t, had seen my three-line excuse for a sales production run flashing a few minor digits that an idiot couldn’t confuse with NUMBERS.

I hoped she wouldn’t see me sitting in the auditorium with the other new guys. I wanted the sweetness of success to linger awhile

I was getting into the "Learning Curve’ as Schopenhauer would often say. His face usually screwed up with repressed displeasure he often remarked about such things. I briefly outlined my thesis concerning Sexual Finance. He shook his head slightly, his gaze a thousand light years away, his emotions better understood on some lonesome prairie or forgotten forest.

"Maybe that’s why I can never pee when Plutus (our manager) is up there hosing down the urinal," he said.

I had been vindicated! Almost…

"So you agree?" I asked rushing after him in the grimy train station where the derelicts gathered between rush hours.

"Well," he shook his head, "All I know is that it’s rough. It’s supposed to be." His mind moved on to new territory. I withheld conversation evaluating the evidence.

But, it made too much sense. For year after year amorphous management types warned happily that BIG, BIG changes were coming to the Insecurity business and America. They weren’t advertising there own M.B.A projects of middling and piddling proportions. They were doggy-style miming and aping their betters.

And their betters were ensconced in the ‘SMITH-’ room or -JEFFRIES’ room at some exclusive club. Only creative license could beam me inside past those mahogany panels. There, the inheritors of the financial world cast aside their dour faces and raved like the ambitious maniacs they were. They cast aside the picture of that ‘hippie’ Jesus Christ and danced nude around a model of a giant Bull while pouring animal blood upon themselves.

In final fits of ecstasy these barons of the Insecurity and Usury businesses began a hideous drum beat as they banged their boners on the table.

"MONEY!" They croaked.

"MORE MONEY!"

"LESS DISCLOSURE, MORE MONEY!" The religious chorus

continued.

"Piss on the 1933 Securities Exchange Act!"

"Piss on the 1934 Glass-Steagle Act!"

"MONEY!" The chant went in rhythmic horror, "MORE MONEY!"

Then in frenetic cadence ‘SELL! SELL! SELL!"

It grew wilder and wilder and incomprehensible till the chant unmistakably became "KILL! KILL! KILL!"

I couldn’t take it anymore and fled to something recognizable; my desk and inconsequential position behind it. My immediate concern was simply to survive to the next payday.

Yes, there would be big changes for the Insecurity business and America, America would become insecure.

**

I found Winthrop sipping a warm glass of water beside his dandelion bed. 

"They’re coming up pretty nice," he remarked.

I made a grimace. "I’m surprised roses aren’t coming up instead," I said, facetiously.

Small talk aside, I asked his opinion on my Sexual Finance Theory. He wholeheartedly concurred and claimed he had discovered it first.

"Anything that is exciting but creates nothing is masturbation. Speculating and gambling are forms of masturbation," he said smugly.

"I think Freud said that."

Winthrop’s brow furrowed. "He did?"

Poor fellow - Winthrop. I thought. "Maybe he didn’t. Maybe you did." I said, trying to perk up his flagging spirits by giving him some meager credit for his long lost essay.

He dismissed the entire conversation, Standing clumsily, perhaps his head dizzy from too much intense thought or the incubation of some future, fatal malady slowly guiding him to the ultimate manifest destiny, he pronounced grandly, "Come, let us go fuck America."

At first overwhelmed by his magnanimous gesture, I rapidly became excited. Had the good doctor finally stumbled across some new and unique scheme to defraud a significant proportion of the population and make me wildly rich?

I followed him into the cluttered bungalow. In the gloom all things took on the surrealistic otherworldly quantity which Winthrop’s habitations usually had.

We found Lisa stirring about in her half slip as she searched for more wine.

"Hello America," he addressed Lisa respectfully.

"Go fuck yourself. I need something to drink," America said,

"She IS America," Winthrop instructed in case I was too dull to get his point, "And I love her."

We were quiet for a moment and then standing at attention broke into a rousing off-key rendition of ‘God Bless America.’ Winthrop and I had that kind of repartee with one another (something one can have only with one’s LUNATIC friends).

Suppressing rage or disgust at our unproductive antics she pulled on a pair of dirty jeans and stuffed a sweatshirt over her head. The slip lay crudely bunched and rolled between this outer-garb. She padded outside in her filthy, bare feet, a cigarette hastily stuck between the lips of her sleep-caked face. Yet, I was sure she could hear the last piercing line oft "from sea to shining seat" through the broken windows of Winthrop’s messy place.

Winthrop felt melancholy so we went outside to sit on the steps and watch evening take over.

I tried to console him with my own stories. Once I had sought to love America. Perhaps a different America but I had burst with intent to love her all the same. Embrace her and make of her my essence. Drip her into my pores as It offering no thoughts of my own, bent on servant’s knee to take what she giveth.

I was still dumb in those days. Fresh from Vietnam and looking to join the shortest line serving up the fruits of plenty to Americas’ patriotic sons (and daughters).

I joined a new family, a hard working, blue-collar Anglo-Scandinavian, ten generations, sons-of-the-revolution, Methodist-Presbyterian family of veterans, hunters, farmers and faithful wives. It seemed that my inevitable search for kinsmen with a more easily pronounceable surname had been successfully ended. The centuries long quest of wandering Gillhenskys (from Eurasia) to find happiness in Middle America seemed almost at hand.

Summers were full of barbecued steak, chicken, corn on the cob, beer and sun at the pool. Weekdays were for work (it was the hard kind, but I thought I’d eventually get used to it). I even had a little wifey. It was the new me.

But things happened. People died or went away. Work in the building trades became scarce. No one could afford steak. The pool was sold. I studied mental insecurity in college and in time, found work creating financial insecurity. The new-new me lived upon the fringes of a superior class of people who disdained physical work except for recreation.

This tale of woe I related to Winthrop of how I had rushed to embrace my America, worship at her skirts only to lose the sense of what she was supposed-to-have-been while fumbling to find her.

Winthrop was not impressed with my story.

"I still love her, who ever she is," he said, "no matter what dirt she’s done to me, regardless of whether she loves me back."

Yes, it was crazy but we loved her together, neither of us knowing what had become of her,

Winthrop tried to shore himself up emotionally by discussing, in a hopeful tone, the coming Second Depression or World War III (or eight depending on who was counting). I asked if he had any plans toward either his great dissertation or perhaps of obtaining some sort of employment.

"Teaching, as you know, is out," he said, his eye weak and watery in the declining light. "I had thought of politics…" His optimism was edging up in the thin academic voice.

"I even attended a political event recently," he admitted, a smile blooming.

"Really?" I was amazed.

"Sponsored by the Free Enterprise Committee."

A shock of dubiousness ran through me.

"A fellow was up at the podium," Winthrop related, "asking the audience -- ‘What made America Great?’

I nodded.

"So," Winthrop continued," I told him! I shouted the answer up to this fellow, "Government Spending made America Great!" Winthrop expressed his simple smile.

"What happened?" I asked.

"A hush fell over the place. Some people snickered meanly. Eyes turned my way in disbelief. But, I sought to educate them, add my voice to the debate. I shouted out, ‘It’s true! It won World War II, secured foreign markets, built the aerospace industry, supplied credit for housing, built the highways for the auto industry and ...’ Then this fellow at the podium shakes with indignant anger. He points an angry finger at me and says, ‘We believe the answer is, individual initiative, - Throw that guy out of here.’…"

I laughed.

"Before I knew what was happening hands grabbed me and I was ushered out to the street. I don’t believe they were interested in debate at all. Why were they like that?" He asked, rubbing the remembered hurt off his thin arms.

"Winthrop, you’re a child - telling people like that government spending made America great."

"It’s true!" He defended, ready to run inside and grab sheaves of his thesis for proof.

"It’s also true that most people who buy Insecurities lose money and become insecure. But I can’t tell people that, Mostly Bull would fire me. I’ve got to tell them to buy Insecurities so they will make money and feel secure, or else I’ll be unemployed again and stuck here with you living in condemned housing."

"I hate lying," he said.

By now it was dark and Winthrop went inside attempting to find a candle and match to produce light. I heard much banging about from the untidy kitchen.

I entered at my own risk and recounted, gaily, a fiction about Mostly Bull putting up a religious shrine near Wall Street, "A giant Bull with an erection AND nipples, hermaphroditic like many other pagan gods. A billion dollar golden calf will suckle at it. It will accommodate a half million worshipers a day, twice that on 70 million share days at the exchange!" {A 1979 extrapolation; a typical trading day on the New York Exchange was about 20 million shares! –editor}

"Amazing," Winthrop mumbled.

We heard voices at the door. Winthrop lit his candle in time to see Lisa stumble toward the bedroom with a fat petty officer from the US Navy.

"She’s searching for the mode of expression that suits her best," Winthrop said.

"Just trying to find herself," I added.

Winthrop laid his face into his arms upon the food encrusted tabletop and sobbed wretchedly.

"I’ve got to be going home." I said softly,

Covered by night I urinated in the uncanny Professor’s dandelion patch. The rush of my meager stream onto the earth brought me to philosophical thought. Without any great familiarity with Hegel I found I could rephrase him: ‘The only thing that man learns from history is that man learns nothing from history.’ - Gillhensky’s law once again.

Lisa spoke harshly to her companion, her words assaulting me outside, "Get off!"

Nonetheless the old bed springs started squeaking filling me with revulsion in sympathy for my colleague and friend Winthrop. I wandered in the dark toward the train station humming a bar or two from ‘God Bless America.’

 **

Another day at Mostly Bull. My one good account, Billy Dirko, a young fellow with money and a penchant for throwing it at the market, was away on vacation. Probably getting laid, I guessed while I had to cold call strangers and debate the merits of Insecurities.

"The country is going socialist," one stranger warned. I had to humor the man, obviously he had money or wouldn’t care.

"Don’t you want to invest in America’s future growth?" I asked, attempting to remain buoyant."

"No. A giant depression is coming."

I felt like agreeing with him for different reasons. I wondered what Mostly Bull’s sales training program would suggest at this juncture.

"Well, let me refer to ‘Das Kapital’ and get back to you next year," I said.

"I won’t be back into the market for the next decade," he warned, "the market is rigged."

"Decade? Okay, let me mark it on my calendar…Ten years. I’ll call you on a Tuesday - about ten A.M."

"I might be dead."

"Have a good time."

Next phone call. I consulted my leads. I would have rather been doing almost anything else. Even watching radar scopes for the Air Force seemed more palatable than trying to part fools from their money for Mostly Bull.

Winthrop called (collect) from a pay phone. He liked to break up his day this way.

"Hello Mr. Big" I said cheerfully "Two thousand shares of General Monopoly at the market! - You got it!"

Winthrop laughed.

"Mr. Big, I suggest we buy into International Oligopoly here, at 50 times inflated earnings. It would make a nice addition to your portfolio. Let me pick up 10,000 shares for you. -- No? Then fuck you!"

Winthrop wanted to talk about sex and politics. I listened, I thought of jokes for him. "Listen buddy, what if the great comedian Karlo Marx had speculated more successfully on the London Stock Exchange like Ricardo and Keynes had? Maybe he would have ended up a liberal Republican and the Russians would be Democrats…"

Winthrop launched into his tirade on Soviet hegemony. It was loose talk like that which got him kicked out of liberal organizations years ago.

"Hey fellah - the Russians aren’t revolutionaries they’re conservatives," I instructed.

Foolishly he called my assertion absurd.

"Any nation that expects its citizenry to go to bed at ten o’clock is nothing but conservative. They just export revolution. Japan makes cars to sell abroad; the Russians make trouble -- It’s a good business though. Trouble is an easy product to sell, even I could sell it. It’s a giant step beyond Insecurities and more exciting too.

"Will the sunbelt always be Republican?" He asked.

"No. The South and West of drought and depression will always be Populist and vote for William J Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt. When people lose their money they always become Democrats."

"In America they might. In Europe when people lost their money they became Fascists or Communists. Could that happen here?" Winthrop asked.

"Yes, but, hopefully only after I leave."

"Where can you go?" He asked,

I can start making some calls and stop thinking about such things."

Winthrop was bad at political ideology. I usually had great fun getting him confused. "And also remember that it was the conservatives under Alexander Hamilton in this country who wanted a STRONG central government and a CONSERVATIVE in Germany named Otto Von Bismark who created the seeds of the welfare state."

"So what are you telling me?" Winthrop demanded.

"In the next depression we can blame everything on the conservatives again," I said with a laugh.

"You don’t make any sense."

"I make more sense than you -- claiming to love a prostitute." I volleyed back hoping he wouldn’t tear the veins out of his wrist with his teeth. I waited anxiously for his reply.

"You’re just jealous," he replied sanely.

"I am jealous. But not JUST jealous," I admitted and corrected.

"What are you doing tonight?" Winthrop asked.

"Going home early to be miserable."

"Oh," (Pause) "Why don’t you stop by here. Lisa is out."

"Wish I could." I considered it…"But heavy doses of misery await me on the home front. Keep up the good work and just remember."

"What?" He asked.

"The world is mad." We concluded our conversation and I considered going out to lunch with Schopenhauer for the next two hours.

THE WORLD IS MAD

Oh yes, the world is mad and always has been, Schopenhauer confirmed that at lunch. Plutus, our manager, was away somewhere, at a Mostly Bull management seminar probably had to do with intimidating the sales force for more production. With the cat away old insecurity himself, Schope, felt allowed to play.

"Well, I’ll do a shooter and a brew," he consented in fine style at the cheap, but tasty, little bistro we frequented when we frequented anyplace.

We ate and drank saying little. Schopenhauer distrusted too much conversation knowing the frailty of the human constitution to say what could not be unsaid or re-explained satisfactorily.

"Let’s face it, man is weak. The flesh is always willing," Schope would often remark. How right he was.

We took a little walk, he and I, to ward off the complacent buzz that had settled in our brains. He knew of an old, old bar hidden off the main drags.

"Built in 1915 and unchanged since. I was in there a few years back and beer was still ten cents a glass. Hope I can still find it, or it hasn’t been burned down."

Down the olden streets we went. Fruit was for sale outside of small grocery stores. Smells and sounds lent a strange long-ago familiarity. The sun streaked into my head and melted a grain of deja vu. I zoomed back into the 1950’s almost as if I had picked up the Kondratieff wave and rode it backwards.

We passed a two story, brick school built seventy years ago. Impressions painted themselves upon me. I had come back to where I had started. Despite all the distance I had tried to place between then and all the nows I’d seen, I was no further from myself then when I started my meandering journey. Why are human beings always running away from time when it is all they really have? Schope wouldn’t comment on that.

We found the bar and even there beer had tripled in price. But all was not lost. Memories came back. Memories of 1954 when the silent bombs fell. It had been my first air raid drill in kindergarten, Maybe in the very school we passed or one just like it. "Into the hall ways! Boys against the wall! -- Girls behind -- Don’t turn around! Don’t Turn Around!" Meanwhile, outside, the world was being blasted by the silent bombs.

And on this tour with Schopenhauer I could see the damage: decrepit buildings and two foot pot holes in the streets. The silent bombs had taken their toll, ‘Don’t turn around!’ What was there to see? What secrets did I miss?

So impressive was the magnitude of the unseen power that it had propelled me the next 13 years. Propelled me into the Air Force. Propelled me to the top of Monkey Mountain. Propelled me to listen to an ‘Arc Light’ mission. Yes, I wanted to hear the bombs. To know it was real.

Schopenhauer didn’t understand any of this. I tried to build an historical case but he took it for hysterics. "Well… This is Newark where you were born. Memories come back. I got ‘em too. Mind plays tricks on you. Some things are best forgotten."

I wouldn’t let go of it, though. I invoked the past, Schope couldn’t shrug me off. His kids had been small during the Vietnam war so he forbade the showing of television news for the duration. "It had to be," he said.

"What if your kids were older? Old enough for the war?" I asked.

Schopenhauer shuddered, "It’s a rough world. We’ve got duties, all of us." And he changed the subject,

Poor Schopenhauer. He realized that knowing something did not make life easier only more difficult to bear.

"I’m glad you brought me here," I admitted.

His pace began to quicken. "Listen," he said, "when we get back to the office let me go upstairs first. Give me a minute. You can come up the back way later. If we swagger up there together they’ll know we been drinkin’. It’s for our own good."

Schopenhauer had been right. Plutus returned early from the management seminar and was positioned at my desk asking everybody for knowledge of my alleged whereabouts.

"Where you been Geelenski?" He drawled, menacingly.

"Late lunch," I tossed off indignantly and picked up the phone in a rush to get the orders I had been working on all morning. My lack of deference was enough to convince him and he floated away satisfied. My nemesis had always been reality.

I had dialed Billy Dirko’s number. I knew he wouldn’t be there so I hung up before his secretary answered it. Schope was on his phone deep in serious discussion. Plutus was bothering somebody else. I was in no mood for cold calls to unfriendly strangers who would (rightly?) resent my intrusion into their lives, I flipped through the forty pounds of paper on my desk. Absently I thumbed through a preliminary prospectus on something that didn’t interest me in the least. The last few pages were left ‘intentionally blank’ for notes, I assumed. The urge to scream in revolt was sublimated into a stronger urge. I drew a little doodle on the top of the blank page. I looked around. Everyone was preoccupied with something. Oddly, and happily, I began to write: ‘Why am I on the phone dialing numbers I hope will not answer? Is this my (ha, ha) dialectic?’

Slowly a story began to form itself…

I read my story, Did I really belong in the Insecurity business? Did anyone?

Feeling pained with the tension and guilt of a spy, I slid the prospectus into my briefcase. Yes I would have to study it later. No one paid any attention to me. I was still believed to be a dutiful, new-guy, Account Inexecutive. I would have to be more careful in the future. Thinking was forbidden at Mostly Bull if it did not pertain to NUMBERS.

THINKING IS FORBIDDEN MOSTLY ANYWHERE

(unless it pertains to NUMBERS)

Life Goes On

Winthrop needed a woman. Lisa was gone again, and Winthrop seemed to be over his infatuation with her. Now instead of bothering me with his multitude of painful trivia concerning her he bothered me about politics.

Every minute, it seemed, he had a new cause to uphold, a new enemy to combat and I the only audience to bombard about it. He had no money, we both knew that. No will to organize; little knowledge of how to deal with ordinary people whom he feared were superior to him. So, his polemics became a constant stream of difficult talk.

One day he would re-invent scientific socialism the next day he dreamt up some Libertarian utopia for free-enterprise, agrarian contract-makers. On the third day he was a philosopher-clerk in some misconception of Plato’s ‘Republic’ probably at work in the Bureau of Tyranny -- annoying me.

"Winthrop, stop it," I pleaded being deluged with his manifestoes of aimless unhappiness. I lay his heated scribblings aside.

"But politics is important!" He shouted, shaking with force the piles of paperback books on his make-do bookshelves.

"Winthrop, there are only two political parties. There have only been two," I told him.

"Two?" He paused to count and in minutes was probably up to 150.

"Two," I restated, simply.

"What are they?" He asked in wonderment.

"Diarrhea and Constipation," I said.

He guffawed into gales of laughter.

"Hey fellah, why do you think Oligarchs-of-yore kept exhorting their comrades to display intestinal fortitude?

Winthrop didn’t know. But he was heady in his sense of victory. In a near screaming frenzy he counted them off in my face: "Barnburner, Know-Nothing, Anti-Masonic, Socialist Labor, Nazi, Periclean Democrat, Jeffersonian Republican, Menshivist, Revisionist…"

I rose to leave.

"Progressive, Communist Workers…" he counted on his eighteenth finger.

"Two," I restated and exited outside.

"Whigs! Liberals, Tories!" He screamed out at me from the broken window, his face half-hidden by coffee stains created when Lisa tried to assassinate him with a cup of decaffeinated.

I held up my two fingers and smiled in victory.

Poor Winthrop, I would have to demonstrate things for him. Perhaps I could obtain the bull and bear models that Plutus kept on his desk. Explain to Winthrop that the bull represented GREED and the bear PANIC. Then in clashing the models together as one tried to rape and kill the other Winthrop could possibly come to understand the Insecurity business as well as economics and politics.

A block away and I could still hear him yelling, "Dixiecrat, Federalist, Christian Democrat!" His voice was growing hoarse.

"They’re just names!" I yelled back to him. He stopped shouting.

"There are only two parties. -- It’s part of Gillhensky’s Law, ‘thems that have and thems that don’t, those in power and those who want in."

He said nothing, his faraway face lost and forlorn.

"Do you believe me?" I called.

"No, but come back anyway. I have no one else to talk to."

Being a fool, myself, I complied.

*

Winthrop was miserable. Lisa came back. She was off drugs and uninterested in either alcohol or promiscuous fornication. All she wanted was marriage and babies, and not necessarily Winthrop’s babies.

She disapproved of his asocial life style. Above all she wanted him to get a high paying job and move to a superior neighborhood. Why she changed and why she came back to Winthrop were mysteries to me. Perhaps consorting with oddballs like us had an effect on her intra-personal goal behaviors. Or maybe she tired of the ups and downs of chemical addiction. Or more likely it was the way-of-all flesh visiting Newark NJ.

I was afraid that Winthrop under her new and stern management may have undergone a personality change. Then I would have no one to loaf with. An even worse prospect was one of Winthrop getting a job making more money than ME!

But he didn’t. He just got very miserable. He called me at work and talked for twenty minutes about his resentment for Lisa; why couldn’t she accept him the way he was, etc.?

"Because you’re a jerk," I told him.

"Yeah, well I know that," he moped.

"Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with being a jerk," I added.

"I’m so miserable," he moaned.

*

Some people never seem to be miserable, cross sometimes, but never miserable. Mr. Easy was not miserable.

In the small hierarchies of the Mostly Bull office that employed me was a special and spacious office belonging to the elegant and gracious personage Mr. Randolph Goodwin Easy. In the chain of command he was simply one of the endless Vice Presidents of Mostly Bull and more specifically Plutus’ boss.

In reality, Mr. Easy was much more. He was a man who never worked. Born of money and schooled Ivy League. His father had staked him some money to buy a limited partnership in Mostly Bull when the firm was still a calfling during the exuberant days when the Insecurity business was actually making money for some people.

And it made plenty of money for Mr. Easy. For in the gigantic corporation of Mostly Bull Inc. Mr. Easy owned 100,000 shares. A percentage of all the commissions produced in our office went into Mr. Easy's large pocket. His life style was splendid. He had been a golf and martini buddy of Charlemagne Bull. Known mere presidents of the United States and more important folk too, like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and his perennial buddies who were Chairman of two massive utility companies, Public Monopoly and General Disservice.

Mr. Easy arrived for work at the crack of ten AM, lunched (imbibed gin) from noon till two and departed a satisfied man at four in the afternoon. His job was to watch himself get richer.

When new Insecurity salesmen were hired Mr. Easy had Plutus lunch them at his private club to give them a little taste of what exclusive wealth was all about. He generally had a smile and twinkle in his eye for everyone - like Santa Claus. But unlike Santa if Mr. Easy stopped liking someone he turned the situation over to his chief elf, Plutus. "Watch that one, maybe get rid of him."

Then Plutus would throw himself into the task of bringing unholy misery upon the neck of the poor Insecurity salesman of mention. "I shall come down on him with the wrath of Plutus!" Saith him as he marched into his own office to summon the victim.

"Your production is way down," Plutus would say, "I want you in here at 8:30 every morning and on the phone till 6 at night. No lunch. If your production doesn’t triple by next month, well, prepare yourself." (This usually happened to fellows who were not super-stars and approaching their tenth anniversary with the firm. After ten years their pensions were vested, Mr. Easy always liked to salvage something from an undeserving employee.)

Yet, no one hated Mr. Easy. In fact they would flee Plutus’ wrath and put themselves at the mercy of Mr. Easy’s wise and tolerant council (if only the king knew, then all would be right!)

Mr. Easy would nod and wink at the story of the harassed one’s plight before evil Plutus and then pat their troubled shoulder. "Take a few weeks to find another job," he counseled. "It’s all in the numbers. I’m only the boss around here. We all have to take orders, you know."

His supposedly magnanimous attitude won the heart of the oppressed and they would bow to their lord and offer humble thanks for nothing. Then they would beg forgiveness at having failed so great a humanitarian. Mr. Easy would smile and chuckle. "Better luck next time."

Plutus appeared at my desk. His beady eyes summoned my immediate attention.

"Mr. Easy wants to see you in his office," Plutus said.

My heart almost stopped, "Mr. Easy?" I questioned uneasily, "Why?" I wanted to know. I hadn’t sold 100,000 shares of General Disservice on the last offering. He wasn’t going to wink at me as if I were Sumner or Spencer and say, "Good job. Here’s 500 bucks, take the wife out to dinner and a show this Saturday. Join me for golf Sunday morning at the club."

Just as well, I thought, I couldn’t play golf. "Gee, Mr. Easy, I don’t know what happened to my game -- if only I could get that little white ball off the wooden stick."

"Well, Gill - if you can’t tee off, you can’t play. What did your father do for a living; how come you can’t play golf?

Perhaps Mr. Easy wanted to fire me personally. He only did that on the rare occasions when patriotic duty called for it, such as if a new guy proved to be skittish about risking other people’s money, was a communist, pervert or made a boo-boo that lost money for the firm.

"When?" I asked Plutus.

"Right now," he said.

My knees went weak. "What about?" I demanded.

Plutus didn’t know or seem to care. I shoved off.

The corridors were silent and carpets thicker near his office. The door was open. He sat behind his huge desk. Such a big, real wooden desk. So much room, I noticed. Room enough for half my house to fit into -- and this was only for him to sit around for four hours a day. How big was his house? (Huge!) He had the usual array of pictures featuring the late Charlemagne Bull and mere presidents of the United States standing easy like old buddies with Mr. Easy.

"Hello Gill," Mr. Easy said.

"Hello Mr. Easy."

"Yes?" He queried, humor in his gin eyes. What weird joke was this?

"Uh," I gestured.

"Oh," he smiled, "Didn’t Plutus tell you?" He asked.

"No sir," I was perplexed, yet ultra-polite in the face of intoxicated dumbness by my lord and master.

"He didn’t, huh? Just giving you a little raise against your future production which we expect will be up to snuff. Another hundred a month. - Thought he’d mention it to you." He peered at me from above his reading glasses.

"Yes sir. Thank you sir," I said (profusely) and shook his hand (heartily). I ran from his office feeling more bullish already. And feeling the pressure to produce more keenly.

I would have to discourage Winthrop from calling me and taking up my valuable time, I thought. Too many negative, non-productive thoughts. "On the phone!" I coaxed myself.

Back in the boardroom Plutus glared at me. His serpent eyes hissed selfishly. If he had his way, my pay would have been cut 200 dollars a month. And he HAD known what Mr. Easy’s message was all about. Plutus had hoped I would have stumbled in my nervousness and said something stupid to get the old boy mad at me. Then Mr. Easy could have told his floor manager, "-You’re right Plutus, Gill isn’t really our kind of boy. - Get rid of him for me," It was a Mutt and Jeff routine.

I sat at my desk. Made an aggressive phone call to a prospect and set up an appointment. Then I basked. In moments I stopped basking and called Winthrop at the pay phone near the comer of his block. In ten rings Winthrop was there.

"You have reached someone in the universe," he answered.

"Hi Winny, it’s me, and I’m miserable…" Then I bored him for twenty minutes concerning how low I had fallen to kiss the asses of such ignoble people just to assure my own puny survival, doing things I hated and thought morally wrong.

"Another hundred a month?" He asked.

"Yes."

"Gee, maybe I could get a job selling Insecurities."

We both laughed, evilly.

*

In the Insecurity business every day begins at zero on the production run. The ephemeral victories of all the yesterdays have evaporated and one must start all over again to prove one’s worth and earn one’s keep. Thus the battle to get above nothing an the daily production tally.

If one had made an error (financial boo-boo) then one began the day OWING money to the firm, So it was possible to start one’s day below zero.

Therefore, one could say that in the Insecurity business one is fired before one is hired: (‘Welcome aboard Gill, you’re fired. Things’ll be great as long as you produce. If you fuck up take the early train home.’) Everything was temporary. When Good’s production surpassed Sumner’s he could have Sumner’s prized office, even his phone and ashtray. In the Insecurity business everyone was insecure.

A typical morning in the Insecurities business:

Phone call: "Hello Mr. Gillhensky? I didn’t receive the monthly check you said I would receive from that thing (product) you sold to me."

(Correct Answer - Unspoken A) ‘I misunderstood that product - as did everybody else in this office - and inadvertently misrepresented it to you. Therefore you are not entitled to what you thought you were. However, I sincerely needed the sale to avoid being fired so your purchase did serve a useful, though temporary purpose.’ OR

(Correct Answer - Unspoken B) ‘Someone in this unknowable world or some cranky computer coded your account incorrectly. It will take at least a year to re-code your account correctly as no one, including me, is interesting in attempting to undertake this gargantuan task. In theory this could be done in seconds but since this is a lazy, stupid world where nothing works and no one cares, it would take me four hours and much aggravation just to locate the telephone number of the department that may be responsible for corrections (only to find a busy signal bleeping for the next three days). So we would all be much happier if you forgot all about this.’

Probable Customer Response to Truth: ‘I want my money! If you can’t get it to me give me back the funds I invested in the first place. Give me back what I gave you!’

Reply A: ‘I’m sorry but that can not be done. We can SELL the product (shares, units etc.) for you to someone else we could care less about. But since it has declined precipitously in value since you purchased it you would lose a considerable sum in doing so. In other words, you have already lost (a third, half, all) your initial investment.’

Probable Customer Response to Truth: ‘Thief! Crook!’

Reply B: ‘Just look at it this way, you took a considerable portion of your (discretionary income, inheritance, hard earned money, life’s savings, etc.) and threw it into a sewer. Thank you for your business. NEXT CALL!’ Cut to a Mostly Bull TV commercial of a grinning Mr. Big in a three piece suit waving a huge check, "Good job, Mostly Bull!" He says to the camera.

Answer to Customer (Sound surprised): "Oh? That’s odd." (You’re only the 80th person to complain this morning). "Maybe the Post Office lost your check. Damn government inefficiency!"

I had an appointment to keep. An appointment made in the haste of aggressive-lust but to be met in the pall-of gloom brought by reality itself.

I allowed myself an extra 45 minutes to find the place and spent over an hour lost in conflicting directions with cars honking at traffic snarls and trucks cutting me off because they could do so.

Feeling streaked with soot and choked by pollution I arrived in the drip of perspiration to my appointment. I was already out eleven dollars for gas, parking and tolls due to use of my auto. This made me all the more miserable.

My prospect turned out to be a young surgeon in the third year of his fledging practice and already grossing $ 400,000 dollars a year. He had eight secretaries in the next office typing up all the needed forms for the insurance companies who could afford his fees.

Office expenses and his pension and profit sharing plans had sheared the government’s claims down to 32 % of his take. Real estate shelters protected much of the rest. He thought he needed me for some ‘safe’ suggestions for his tax-sheltered pension plans. "…Not shares of equity," he warned, professing to know better.

I shrewdly advised Government-backed mortgage bonds. Knowing that rising interest rates would soon halve his invested funds in worth and inflation would reduce any maturing principle to a tenth of its original invested value thirty years into the cloudy future. But, I reasoned what was good for the goose was good for the gander. I made a mental note not to ever consult him for surgery so as not to be forced to eat my own gander, (Remember -- dealing with Insecurities makes one insecure).

We talked for a moment. "I should be earning over a million dollars a year soon," he said and then hesitated, "I AM a GOOD surgeon." He added in defense and then almost as if he were reading my mind he wondered aloud, "Sometimes I wonder if I should be making this much money. I just don’t know," he mused.

A nice fellow. Too bad. With perfunctory absoluteness I made my own surgeon’s stroke. I presented my entire table of battle and dazed him with heavy bombardment. Yes, damn it-to-Plutus, I could sell, sell, sell when I wanted to. I answered his every question and comforted his every concern without telling him anything. I got the order. For the task of subjecting-to-squander about $ l0,000 of his surgeon’s pay I made myself about $ 250. Mostly Bull made more.

I shook his hand and departed his office feeling both elated and guilty. The secretaries were busy mass-billing insurance companies as I walked into the street.

Outside cars honked their frustrated horns and trucks rumbled past cutting everybody off. The hot air stank of burnt and dead things. It hit me, Billy Dirko sued Insurance companies for lucrative contingency fees. He had a string of hapless, clients who suffered multiple whiplash traumas. Dr. X billed the Insurance companies for surgery fees no average person could afford. Who paid the insurance premiums?

Me. And who produced actual (real) products for the world while I and 250,000 other Insecurity space cadets ruined what ever spare capital that fell between the cracks?

Was half the world sitting on its ass in some corporate or government cubby hole fulfilling a purpose of dubious intent while a drawing a fat salary to accomplish nothing? Had everything worked itself into a huge circle? While the managerial bosses consumed society’s surplus they seemed to be justifying their existence (and covering their tracks) by ordering legions of secretaries to peck, peck, peck at battalions of word processors to fill out a zillion forms in quadruplicate all destined to be filed, lost and destroyed, was there anybody left to do anything useful?

Why was I stuck in traffic with an internal combustion engine choking me (and itself) with the stinking fumes of exploded, rare gasoline vapors? Why were all the bridges and roads in the city crumbling into rusty looking sand? (Because it cost too much to fix them!)

Everywhere was the physical corruption of decay. Things just worn out. The newspapers and television were full of the moral corruption of a world that could not fix itself.

So I was a stuck in traffic. If I hadn’t been in my obsolete auto I would have been stuck in an obsolete train conked out near a faulty signal or delayed by bad track. Or coming into an ancient station two hours late, all the aging men in business suits lining up silently in the aisles like paratroopers ready to descend into the oblivion of numbers.

The people who were growing rich were, most often, appropriating something from somebody else not creating anything new.

The new ‘experts’ were silly Monetarists who spent their working hours hollering about the money supply, "Whoops! There goes the money supply! MlB, M2, M3. We were constantly being warned that there were ‘too many dollars chasing too few goods.’ Didn’t they understand that only fools made goods when MONEY could be had by chasing money.

The old/new chant was, "More Greed! We need more incentive for the holy greed! Greed is good. Greed is god, The bull-god’s name is GREEEED!"

I inched forward in traffic. A realization, somewhat frightening yet almost comforting in its bizarre promise, wiggled to life in my fuzzy brain. No, the nonsense of the world could not continue in its present direction for ever. Once its proportions became completely unmanageable a new flood would come to wash all to its conclusions. It had happened every other time. Cars honked but all I could hear was the silent bombs falling and falling…

LISA IN THE THROES OF SEXUAL FINANCE

Lisa had changed her mind about finding a husband and producing an endless stream of human children falling like watermelons from between her sturdy thighs. She first, entered into a celibate religious order that worshipped Jesus Christ and Mani under the tutor-ship of the prophet ‘Dr.’ Andaro Ahmed, a former tree surgeon from Perth Amboy NJ.

After three devoted weeks in the religious fold Lisa moved on, The professional life beckoned and she entered a pre-med. program at a formerly prestigious university under their female/minority special admissions program. However, the proximity of the campus to Harlem offended her and Lisa moved on again.

Seeking both professional status AND big bucks without obtaining degrees in medicine or petroleum engineering Lisa answered an advertisement that posed the question, ‘Do you want to get rich by MAKING MONEY? -- An exciting field only for the specially chosen few who qualify … Not for everyone … dedicated… INDIVIDUALS… determined… goal-oriented … seek success… wealth… entrepreneurial personality, self-starter, eager-beaver, go-getter, BRITE, etc.’ Within four months Lisa was an Account Inexecutive with my firm, Mostly Bull.

In her first month of production her sales-commission numbers surpassed my first year. Lisa had found her niche in the world, selling Insecurities for the Sexual Finance Industry.

How had she become so successful so quickly, I wondered. I stopped by her desk to observe while she was on the phone. True, there was a tidy pile of account distributions and leads from her non-secret admirer, Plutus (who boasted in the men’s room that he would soon split her open with his massive shlong).

But I had to admit the feed was only half the story of her remarkable success. She had mastered the use of the telephone in SELLING.

I listened carefully to her low, sensual conversation spoken menacingly into the mouth piece of her hand set, "Yes, I know that your stock went down. I want you to sell it. Yes, that’s right, and roll the proceeds over to buy this other company, Acme Dynamite.

"Yes, this new stock is a truly explosive situation. -- Wait a moment! Shut up or I won’t handle your account! "-- I see this new stock FIRMING in the market. Yes firming nicely. Then, after some Base Building I see a slow but steady UPTREND. Tick by tick the volume growing BIGGER and BIGGER; the bid and ask climbing steadily, -Yes, now it’s pleasantly extended we can add to it making it a nice, full position. Perhaps we can add even more to it making it even BIGGER.

"Now suddenly news hits the trading floor -- a buying PANIC develops. It goes up quicker and quicker. LARGER and larger volume. All buyers, few sellers, The stock moves straight up. Four, no, six, no, eight … My God! NINE points in a day. Nine, full, beautiful sweet, thick, heady points. It’s staying up. Up, -- huh, excuse me? … "No, I can’t wwwait till you find a box of tissues. Your handkerchief will have to do."

I marveled at her. She shrugged off my marvel. "I’m a better whore than you. I’ve got the right equipment. What I like most about this job is it’s so clean. No mess on my hands, my mouth, or you-know-where. It’s all nicely left on the other side of the phone."

Shamed by my lack of business I returned to my desk and phoned Billy Dirko hoping for an order. Reluctantly, he accepted my call.

"Lar, I think they want me to use this other broker in your office. Much more experienced. A woman as a matter of fact. -- Not that it makes any difference to me."

I experienced anxiety. But an item on our news wire caught my eye.

"Billy! Listen to this!" I read aloud: "Acme Dynamite has just experienced an explosion in their warehouse that destroyed its entire inventory plus a nearby oil refinery. Trading of its stock has been halted DOWN thirteen dollars a share!"

Billy was destroyed. "Oh no!" He cried. "Why me?"

He took no more calls from Insecurity salespersons for the next four weeks.

Winthrop missed Lisa, if for no other reason than the dictate of Gillhensky’s law, ‘Man likes to be miserable.’

Winthrop tried phoning her at Mostly Bull but she refused to take his collect calls unless he traded 500 shares of a 25 dollar stock twice a day.

Bemoaning suicidal depression Winthrop turned to me for help. I advised him to date other women.

The first of his experiences was a creature named Wendy Breeze, a 35 year old former life guard finishing her Ph.D. in Decadence at the Old School. Excuse made for possible hyperbole and minor exaggeration in its recounting below follows a reconstruction of the Doctor’s first assignation with such a notorious femme fatale:

Winthrop strained through dinner to present her with intelligent options in convivial conversation. She suffered his attempts as she sloshed down one half of a bottle of gin blessed by the kiss of an olive and a promise of vermouth.

Winthrop was detailing his (my) thesis for massive debt default and financial collapse when she interrupted him with a belch and interjected, "Key look, I know more than you about almost everything because I attend a better school than you did. So let’s (second belch) cut the crap, go somewhere and fuck."

Winthrop obliged, paid the $ 200 dinner bill and made off with her to a hundred dollar-a-night motel room.

Prepared for sexual release the good Doctor disrobed. However, his lady interrupted his ardor by taking an hour long bath and then did her nails in a black, oil base enamel.

When Winthrop finally approached she sniffed the air and snorted in disgust. She ordered Winthrop to shower with Ajax chloride bleach. That done, Winthrop returned to find her posed rudely on her haunches before the television set with the volume turned up full as she watched a re-run of the ‘Gong Show.’ Seeing him balk she thundered.

"Get your ass over here! Make that puny putz hard and give it to me! Shit, buster, I went to dinner with you, didn’t I?"

Winthrop inquired politely of some oral stimulation -- to get him going again. That enraged her.

"What!? I don’t just suck anybody’s cock, only the one’s of guys I know and LIKE!"

Winthrop demurred.

"Hurry up before the commercial is over," she instructed.

"At least be nice to me," Winthrop mumbled, moving closer.

"Hey, wait! I like THIS commercial!"

Winthrop reported this tale during his therapy hour at a cheap tavern where we drank draft beer for 35 cents a glass. He wailed for a solution to his deep-seated inadequacies (or bad luck) with women. He feared the incident would render him impotent-for-life with anything other than his primary digits.

I applied my Fantasy-Exorcism Therapy to his vital need.

"Let us remake this experience in the image of the most searing psychic factor in your personality -- wish fulfillment!"

We ran Winthrop through my abbreviated version of basic training commando style. Left him with a shaven head and horrid tattoos across his body and face including blood-dripping fangs on his lips and chin, scorpions on his cheeks and a huge tarantula over his nose. There were snakes coiled around his arms in this imagery plus battle displays of Vietnam over his chest and shoulders including lists of profanities in 13 languages. A fierce bald eagle covered the top his head, clawed legs reaching over his ears.

We renamed the new Winthrop ‘Mighty Mental Meldrick’ and dressed him waist-down in the bloused breeches and boots of an Israeli Paratrooper.

Next we reworked the evening-in-question by starting out in Ms. Breeze’s apartment having Mighty Winthrop eat all the expensive food in her refrigerator and quaff down a case of beer in order to produce a noxious accident all over her fine rugs and furniture.

Then our boy started a cozy fire in Wendy’s Franklin stove using all the existing drafts and notes for her doctoral dissertation.

After quick sex with three unwashed prostitutes just off the boat from Haiti, Winthrop demanded fellatio of Ms, Breeze and upon successful completion added violence to the terrible degradation she had already suffered. (Supposedly-liberal Winthrop was cackling with drunken glee at the scenario I was creating for him). Prior to leaving the apartment, Sgt. Winthrop-Meldrick relieved the prostrate Ms, Breeze of all the money in her wallet and urinated into her collection of fine oriental prints muttering, "Here’s to you, zipper-heads!"

Winthrop was so pleased with the alteration of his Wendy Breeze experience that he ordered four more beers and giggled profusely while toying with the idea of painting a spider on his nose.

I pronounced him temporarily in remission recommended more therapy and another try at the opposite sex. Drunk, and weak-willed as he normally was, Winthrop eagerly consented, Such is the battle between men and women, continually waged in the mind.

Under the influence of alcohol Winthrop often suffers from Delusions of Adequacy. At all other times he is capable, under any circumstances of displaying characteristics of Ineffectual Personality, or IP.

When faced with a situation burning with immediacy that requires forthright and conclusive action an individual afflicted with IP, does nothing. Perhaps stammers something profoundly stupid, purses the lips, flushes or trembles but does nothing effective. Winthrop is of this type.

Moments later, after the circumstances have rolled over him he will flee to a deserted rest room and angrily karate-chop toilet tissue or glower threateningly into the mirror. At best, he could practice scaring people with a display of lunacy hoping to prevent circumstances arising that burn in immediacy and require forthright and conclusive action.

It was under the influence of IP, that Winthrop made the acquaintance of ‘Amelia Fuzzbusch,’ his next female Dienbienphu.

It began simply enough. Winthrop, in rare good spirits, had decided to compile some additional notes for his project and chose to do a bit of field work. His subject-for-the-day was decadence.

After a casual tour of the go-go bars he turned his attention to ‘quaint’ Greenwich Village located on the whereabouts of Manhattan Island due north of the Sexual Finance District.

Feeling chipper and full of vim he even tossed off a casual ‘Hi’ to some female denizen of those odd streets.

"Hoi." Came the response.

"My name is Dr. Winthrop and I’m finishing my stupendous dissertation."

"Love to talk to ya, hon, but I’m in a mad rush. First got to cover the Intermediate, Mad, Gay Songfest and then dash off a quick piece on oral sex."

"A journalist?" He inquired.

"I write." She snapped gum behind the defense of her ample lips as she squinted at him.

"You know," Winthrop began, "my friend, patient, client, patron and therapist, Mr. Gillhensky also writes. Scribbles really into a little notebook."

"Sounds cuckoo. Love to stay and chat. Discuss your whole family," she said facetiously. "But got to run, See ya. Bye."

She made no attempt to hide her negative appraisal of Winthrop, rolling her eyes up as a signal to the world -- creep behind me!

Winthrop wasn’t upset. He wandered the Village, happily, hoping the big nuke wouldn’t land while he was there and retrieved from the garbage a copy of an underground paper called ‘Diarrhea Now!’ (as if it can wait). Finding a cheap establishment with a sidewalk table, Winthrop splurged and ordered a cup of hot water. He had his used tea bag in a pocket and with his newspaper would settle down to a quiet bit of study and reflection. After all, it was a nice spring-like afternoon.

Within minutes the female writer was there. She plopped into the seat next to him.

"What ya got in there Wingtips? Any acid in there?"

"Only tannic," Winthrop cautiously explained.

"Oh wow!’ She was thrilled, "I thought you might be an all-right dude, Are you tripping?"

Winthrop, in from Jersey, nodded yes.

"Wow!" She smiled. "No wonder you came off as an asshole. You’re whacked." She patted his knee. "Is my face running?"

"No." Winthrop felt concerned for HER sanity.

"Do you know how stupid I am?" She asked.

Winthrop had no idea of how stupid she was and felt embarrassed to ask. After a hesitation he yielded to his need to be polite. "How stupid are you?"

"Oh, shit, I had the Intermediate, Mad, Gay Songfest on my schedule for today! How dumb! It’s next week. Or last week. But not today. And that piece on oral sex? I could (snapped her fingers) knock it out faster than," she looked at Winthrop, "you."

Winthrop choked on his lukewarm, weak tea.

"Well not that fast maybe, but fast. Moi God, what a week it’s been. –Hey, you into Death-Trip-Explosion Music?" The satchel she carried contained a portable stereo which she turned up to l0,000 decibels.

Winthrop thought it was the big nuke coming to get him. Uncontrollably, he bit into the Styrofoam cup that held his liquid refreshment. His nose bobbled in tea water allowing his brain to conclude that he was going to die of drowning. So his brain opened his mouth to gasp for air and the remaining contents of his cup splashed onto the crotch of his trousers.

She turned the volume down. "Hey what did you do, blow your nose and piss on yourself? You’re bad, man. Ate your cup too, I see."

Winthrop was in a coughing fit.

"Hey, neat-oh. You do that good: You’re fucko-all-right, Jack.." She playfully punched his shoulder.

While he coughed she prattled on, this ‘Amelia Fuzzbusch’ (Winthrop’s name for her) whose real handle was Henrietta Tattles but was called ‘Tatz.’

She thrust her big knockers up toward Winthrop’s face. "Whatever you do, DON’T call me TITS! It’s Tatz!" Then she touched upon 20 different subjects in five minutes. "I like Negro men because they are sooo Negro, if you know what I mean. You straight or gay?"

"Winthrop," he corrected.

"Don’t matter, I don’t find you a turn-on anyway. But Negro, Negro? How could I? Such a throw-back word from the 60’s. Uh, how awful the 60’s were, the war and all!"

"My friend was there," Winthrop interjected.

"How awful. Boy, you even have creeps for friends. I should say Black but that doesn’t sound right. To say Black men are so Black is weird. I don’t mean that. Besides, most are really brown - where it counts too! (explicit laugh) I could say, Black men are so Negro but that sounds racist. And I am not a racist."

"This friend I mentioned to you?" Winthrop said, "He has a friend, Schopenhauer who says ‘Regardless of race, creed, color or national-origin -- I don’t trust anybody!"’ Winthrop laughed, "He’s an equal opportunity paranoid."

Tatz stared at him, "You’re really weird. Ugly weird."

If Winthrop hadn’t had IP, he would have gotten up and left. But Winthrop blushed and sat quietly as she ranted further.

"I mean about racism; it’s not the color of a man’s skin that interests me. It’s the size of his penis."

Winthrop cringed.

"Where can I get in touch with you Wingtips?" She asked.

Carelessly, he mentioned his street address and when pressed for phone numbers gave mine at work and the pay phone near his house (shack).

"You never know when vandals will bash the public phone in, so you can get in touch with me through my friend…"

"What does he do, murder people?" She inquired.

"He’s an Insecurity salesman."

She guffawed. "That’s worse. A pig!"

"He’s not like that. He’s troubled by…"

"Sure he is. Oink ta you!" She rose, "Got to run. If I’m ever in the mood to talk asshole-talk I’ll contact you. Bye." Scurrying with her weighty satchel she vanished into a side street.

Winthrop fled the big city, hoping to never return.

But bad luck followed. That evening he was summoned to the nearby pay phone by an elderly wino who lingered with his brown paper bag-hidden bottle of low-class spirits while Winthrop took his call.

"Hoi, Wingtips. What a day! Got propositioned by an 80 year old guy. He kinda reminded me of you except he’s more virile. Hey, want to come over and watch me have sex with a wall? Ten men of mixed races? Only kidding… Sometimes I come on too strong. Sometimes I cum too strong (shrieking laughter). Wingtips, (low sensual tone) I got a hot, juicy spot for you-ooo (laughter)."

Winthrop was both attracted and repelled by her great awfulness. If for no other reason, he felt that he must experience her to the end of his academic satisfaction. His work called for it.

"Do you mind me?" She asked in a flash of self-awareness.

"No," Winthrop forced, sealing his fate.

"Oh, good! I can ring your chimes, Wingy (laughter)."

After the one-sided conversation was concluded Winthrop had his personal shame and sorrow to contend with, and the unshaven grin of the grizzly wino who asked for money. Winthrop handed him a nickel.

"A nickel!" The ingrate shouted.

"It’s all I have."

The wino dashed the coin to the sidewalk where it rolled. Chuckling with maniacal glee the old bum loosened the rope that held up his voluminous, beggared trousers. Then, he aimed in targeting fashion his stream of pee to intercept Winthrop’s evasive nickel.

"I can’t take much more of this." Winthrop confessed to the dark night.

Having exhausted his supply, the old wino trotted off. Winthrop retrieved his nickel. Money to Winthrop, was too precious to waste, though he felt consigned to rinse it before re-pocketing it.

Alone, the tormented Professor trooped down aged, gaping sidewalks toward home. He wondered if he had l0,000 dollars at risk in Insecurities in the care of either Lisa or myself (so that Mostly Bull could make commissions) whether he would feel any more insecure then he already did. He concluded not and went home to sleep a troubled slumber in a bed full of damp newspapers.

BERTRAM FINLEY

In the annals of Mostly Bull there are many stories. The tale of Bertram Finley is just one:

Bertram was an average hire who came to the firm not long after I. He had no special skills other than the usual ability to talk with out drooling and sign his name properly. He had the sort of training one expects from a typical college graduate turned out at a non-splendid, Protestant college. He had no family connections and was expected to either linger near the bottom of the production list struggling to open up new accounts that would be re-assigned to big-hitters upon his termination, or be fired immediately. (Remember, in the Insecurities business one is fired when hired, and every day begins at zero or less.)

The strange rigors of the Insecurity business often proved painful to the new recruit. Finley was no exception. His spine would curl and eyes flit before him in near desperation when he heard the sound of sales-managers striding the earth behind him.

The sales-managers and assistant sales-managers were usually former West Point, Regular Army Officers who left the service in disgust once detecting that total discipline had fled the military in the early 1970’s, (Interesting note: Most of the salesmen born after 1946 had avoided military service entirely, having decided that there was more to lose than gain,)

These sales-management-peoples would prowl the boardroom shouting: "On the phone!" To any new recruit pausing in his omnipresent obligation to Mostly Bull. Sometimes they would corner a new guy and yell into his ear: "Quick! Give me your ten best sales ideas!"

If the recruit stumbled for answers they would yank him from his seat. "Perhaps you don’t belong here. Let’s take this one to our superior," they would say.

The new guy, tearfully, would explain how his wife was sick, mortgage payment due, had cancer, bankruptcy, psychosis and how much he needed his new-guy-salary-check. "Then, get on the phone!" They would shout and as the new guy began dialing phone numbers to find the customers to produce the commissions that Mostly Bull liked, the sales managers would smile to the rear of the room where Plutus or Mr. Easy would grin and wink back.

Bertram and I either made ‘cold calls’ or pretended to make calls usually to each other.

"Hey, Ski-boy, Plutus is watching your ass," he would warn me, whispering into his phone extension from across the office.

"Thank you for calling back Mr. Big. Shall I put those 1,000 shares into a joint name? --Is he still there?" I would whisper.

"Whoops, talking to Sumner now. Smiling. Go to lunch you son-of-a-bitch so I can read the sports section," Finley would relay.

At other times we were forced to call strangers at random to try and convert their money into Insecurities or their existing Insecurities into other Insecurities or even back into money if that was still possible.

"Ask for the order!" Another sales-command-officer, or prick like Sumner, would shout threateningly to a new guy who made phone calls all day but did not have the balls to stick the nice (few) people who actually talked to him with dubious Insecurities.

"What do you think you’re here for, jerk-off, to run up our phone bill? Ask for the order!"

And if a new guy was on the phone, and asking for the order but not getting it they shouted the final truism of the Insecurity business: "Get the commission! What’s the matter? You don’t know how to close the sale? Get the commission!"

With tapes running noisily on the wall, squawk boxes squawking, phones ringing, orders and instructions being shouted urgently, people peering into cathode ray tubes to see the ‘big picture’ my office reminded me of something. If the lights had been turned down any lower I would have been subject to flashbacks, believing myself to be wasting my precious time with the useless air war in Vietnam. Yes indeed, our large, windowless office reminded me of that concrete bunker on top of the mountain.

Suddenly there was a call to battle. A vice-assistant commander (Sumner) was on the loudspeaker:

"Achtung! Attention! Attention all troops! We are pricing General Disservice Tonight! Due to weak market conditions we must move this offering quickly!"

Aha, I thought, more shares of this weak utility to be foisted upon the public. Were it’s nuclear reactors ready to explode? The folks in the Insecurity business had jokes about that: "Sorry, Mr. Jones, your dividends are not retroactive; they’re RADIOACTIVE! Ha, Ha."

More than likely, General Disservice was just coming to market to get more money so it could continue paying out more to its shareholders then it could expropriate from its captive customers. Soon, however a new state utility commission would be appointed, one that favored free monopoly enterprise and the electric and gas rates would be jacked up dramatically. In celebration of this future infusion of capital General Disservice’s Chairman would give himself a hefty raise and treat his buddy Mr. Easy to a thick steak and a gallon of gin.

Surprise utility offerings were a call to action. Insecurity men all over the planet would begin to gird themselves for duty. First, Insecurity agents had to ascertain where above its normal trading range shares of General Disservice (GD) would mysteriously close on the equity market. Then, they would have to guess how high above the market’s closing price the Syndicate (headed by Mostly Bull big-wigs) would price the offering so they could phone everybody living, breathing and willing to buy GD, that this blessed event was soon to happen.

"On the phone!" Sumner shouted, anxious for us to sell GD. because the more HE sold the more leads HE got for getting us to sell it. The more leads, the more prospective customers, the more shares of GD sold. It was a numbers-game to Sumner. And the offering promised a potential number ELEVEN thousand dollars high for him. Not to mention dinner and golf with Plutus and Mr. Easy at the latter’s club.

"On the phone! Get out to your accounts. Sell GD!" Sumner orated us.

Finley was perplexed. He had never fought a surprise utility-offering-engagement before and had little idea of what to do. Poor guy.

I got on the phone. "Mr. Jones, your electric utility bills have tripled this year. Here’s a chance to own a piece of GD, before it owns you!" So what if there would one day be a billion shares outstanding. "Buy it!"

Phones rang, sweat poured. Mr. Easy roamed the back wall near the big hitters, worry in his jowls. He was sniffing the wind, hoping the offering would be over-subscribed. That way if the Syndicate (which was beyond Mr. Easy’s sphere-of-influence) priced the offering outrageously above the market price they could still find buyers for the shares. If fools were eager to buy l0,000,000 shares of GD, the syndicate anticipating the sale of only 4,000,000 shares would price the issue as high as it liked. Again it was a numbers-game, and only the syndicate knew what those magic numbers were. Supply and demand in black & white before it happened.

Mr. Easy listened carefully to orders the big-hitters were piling in on GD.

"How’s it going?" He asked Spencer and Pierce.

"Thousand share ticket right here," Pierce said. "Got l0,000 in since ten o’clock," Spencer said.

"Good, good. Give ‘em to Sumner to call in to the Syndicate. Don’t hold back, boys. Send ‘em in -- so we can get more," Mr. Easy said with a sharp wink.

The big-hitters were doing all right, Mr. Easy concluded. So he turned his eagle-eye attention to the boardroom floor. He spied Plutus moving among the troops. Schopenhauer’s head was bent low over his desk, phone to his ear, while writing a ticket.

"Hope that ticket is for GD, Schope," Mr. Easy joked with a point.

Schope was quick. "Yes sir. Two hundred shares, I have fifteen hundred in already." He was a survivor.

"Good, good. Don’t hold back now. Tickets to Sumner," Mr. Easy said and moved on.

Plutus doubled his efforts. I felt his breath on my neck.

"Got five hundred done. Still working. Hope to do three (thousand)," I said rapidly, dialing my next call. He moved on without saying a word. I glanced over to Bertram. He was watching the tape. I winced for him.

Mr. Easy and Plutus conferred quietly mid-floor. Mr. Easy grinned and patted his pocket. He was already counting his money, I believed and bellying up to the promise of even more GD shares to be allotted his highly worthy office in any future offering.

"Let’s show we can move that offering," the old boy said.

I was getting a busy signal on my next call. Relishing it, I used the opportunity (head glued to the phone) to spy out the rest of the office. Sumner was working with the dispatch of the grim-reaper during a major plague. He was talking on three phones at once, his face gray-grim with a sense of great duty to Mostly Bull and himself. Bertram Finley was idly sorting through his bond leads.

By 3:50 PM the tension mounted. It seemed as if we put on our helmets and clustered about our radar scopes. "There!" Someone shouted, pointing at a target on the scope. GD’s shares, which had not advanced more than 25 cents a day in months, were miraculously leaping forward 12 1/2 cents, 25 cents, 37 1/2 cents!

At 4:00 PM the market was closed. Mr. Easy left for the day and Plutus bolted the door behind him so no one else could leave. We began to work harder in our telephone solicitation for the sale of GD.

"We gonna sell every last share of GD, at least once before anyone of you goes home tonight!" Plutus declared to the office.

Bells and buzzers sounded. Sumner went on the intercom. We could see the thin edges of a nasty smile about his tight lips. "Attention! Attention all troops! As you know, GD closed on the market at $ 22.50 a share."

There was an audible groan from those salesmen who felt that their customers would suspect larceny in such suspicious goings on.

"Attention!" Sumner reiterated sharply. "The syndicate has priced GD at $ 22.75 a share."

There was a louder groan from these same salesmen. Plutus moved among them brusquely. These were the men he despised. "You! How many shares have you taken down? How many have you done? -- You!" They fell silent.

"What are you men waiting for?" Plutus rebuked.

Forty phones were viciously attacked by fearful Account Inexecutives.

"Sell the damn thing!" Plutus ordered.

I burrowed deeper into my foxhole calling any potential GD buyer I could think of. My mind was whirling. I could suppose that behind me Plutus and Sumner were putting on their black, storm troopers, dress uniform. Yes, with knee boots, dagger and swagger stick! I wanted to search for them but something told me not to turn around. "Who you looken’ at boy? Suppose you in Vietnam during a ground attack when heads supposed to be down and you start looken’ around like a fucken’ jackass?" --My military training sergeant had once screamed at me.

Jackboots stomped in the aisles. I tried to imagine what was transpiring.

"Salesman Finley!" Plutus shouted.

"Jawohl, mein Uber-Salesmench." I heard Finley snap to attention beside his desk.

"Finley, how many shares of GD have you sold?"

"None my Uber-Salesmench!"

"None? None! There is no excuse for this!"

"Sir, my clients do not want this lackluster utility in there portfolios while interest rates go up, making this item shrink in value."

"No excuse!" Then I heard the swagger stick slowly flipping through the holding pages of Finley’s meager account book. "Hmmm. You have this client Frau Jones. I think Frau Jones would be needing some HIGH YIELD shares of GD." (High Yield ranged from 8-17 % interest in dividends. GD was worth 9 % during the current offering. Future yields would get much HIGHER).

"Sir, Frau Jones is an unfortunate widow with little funds to risk at this time."

"Shutup! Is not GD high yield?"

"Jawohl!"

"Is not high yield good for widows?"

"Jawohl!"

"Then sell it!"

"J’awohl, mien Uber-Salesmench!"

"And Finley -- do not dare to question the firm’s intentions. You can not out-think us. We are smarter than you. If we say it is good then you shall unquestionably obey - or face immediate and painful termination."

Finley must have snapped a vigorous salute. "Heil Bull!" and sat down to dial the widow Jones’ unfortunate telephone number.

Battalions, regiments and divisions of Mostly Bull salesmen fought the ground war in this way, slugging it out in hundred share combat. Above us in the Institutional Office squadrons of our elite zoomed out to drop immense blocks of GD into the portfolios of Insurance companies and pension funds with money to waste.

By 8:30 PM most of us drifted from the office to the train station. By 10:30 PM I was home, asleep by 11 and up at 5:30 AM to return by train and be in place by 8:30 to fire the final salvoes. It felt as if I had never left.

At some point in the long day’s-night’s struggle I lost. Yes, I had my shares in. Sumner had even given me a verbal compliment and a small lead he didn’t have time to call. But a resignation had crept in. I realized that this would not be the only battle, the final mission. There would be countless others. General Disservice and Public Monopoly would each be back with new offerings and our office would be duty-bound to carry forward our increased honor and obligation to sell even more shares. There would be hosts of additional products and hard pressured sales campaigns to ‘move em out!’ It would only be a matter of time before it caught up to me.

Bertram Finley’s mind also snapped during his first GD offering, though I couldn’t tell toward what end at the time. But pressures to conform with unnatural acts can have strange repercussions.

The offering was concluded by 11:00 AM and over-subscribed to the delight of Mr. Easy who, incidentally, was back in fine fettle winking and grinning once again.

It was left up to Sumner to decide whose orders would be turned back and whose production run made all the more naked. I was spared. Those who Sumner and Plutus disliked had some or all of their orders canceled. These salesmen came to Sumner in anguish.

"I promised this account some GD," they pleaded.

"Over subscribed! Next time start working the offering earlier!" Sumner warned the complainers.

"Earlier? GD. was 21 and 3/8-a-share two weeks ago. My accounts could have done better an the market!"

"Tough!" Sumner had no sympathy for complainers who were not 200 % for Mostly Bull. In fact, he had no sympathy at all.

The Account Inexecutives who hadn’t had their orders filled sulked bitterly. They would have to go back to all the arms they twisted and make excuses. If they were fed up with doing business this way they could always terminate themselves leaving their top accounts to Sumner. Then they could suffer in some more miserable line of work they were even less suited for. Sumner grinned at the prospect.

Once the actual offering was over an absurd ‘Tombstone Advertisement’ would appear in the important newspapers bespeaking solemnly of the dead and bygone offering. It would list all the Insecurity firms who sold GD, how many shares were finally sold, and contain the lie (in accordance with the Securities Act of 1933) that the sale of GD was never solicited but offered by prospectus only.

The firm would, eventually, pay its Account Inexecutives up to 16 cents a share for their diligent sales efforts provided the money now owed to Mostly Bull by the folks who claimed they would purchase GD, was collected.

"Make ‘em pay for it!" Mr. Easy told Plutus who resolved to carry out the will of Zeus.

Plutus rushed to the boardroom happy with his new mission of intimidation. Mr. Easy visited Sumner to massage his writing arm. "Good job on GD."

"Thanks Mr. Easy."

"Stop by the office at noon. We’ll have lunch. Got a little something for you."

"Thanks," Sumner said, knowing it was a $500 check for a night on the town and dinner with Mr. & Mrs. Easy. Mr. Easy winked and walked away. Sumner’s eight phone extensions lit up as a blaze of incoming phone calls fought their way to his attention all with orders for him to execute.

Plutus sensed an air of laxity among the troops as he walked the aisles. Finally he’d had enough. "On the phone! Get the money in! You there, Did you sell GD?"

"Yes I did. Five thousand shares in all." The salesman boasted.

"Is it paid for?" Plutus demanded

"Well no, not yet."

"Get the money in before the stock drops and they don’t want it anymore. And another thing. Five thousand shares is nothing for a Mostly Bull Account Inexecutive; Sumner did seventy thousand shares," Plutus declared. The man burned with indignation. Humbly he picked up his telephone.

"Get the money in!" Plutus ordered.

Everyone picked up their phones. I dialed the weather forecast. Across the room Bertram had a dull glaze in his eyes. He was dialing his phone mechanically.

Within twenty-four hours GD’s shares were down one dollar on the market. In a month the shares were $ 21. By then Mostly Bull changed its official opinion of GD from neutral to poor. Mostly Bull then forbid its salesmen from soliciting customers to BUY GD, though they could solicit their customers to get rid of GD, by SELLING it.

"You aren’t soliciting anybody to buy GD, are you Geelenski?" Plutus inquired.

"Nope."

"Cause the firm hates GD," Plutus informed me.

Within a matter of additional months GD hit $ 15 a share. My customers were not ecstatic about that, it was certainly no way to keep ahead of inflation by watching money disappear in the market. Mostly Bull had seen to it that its client made money. Its client was General Disservice which received $ 20.05 a share for something worth five dollars less nine months later. Was it my responsibility if all my customers got screwed? (I was only obeying orders). Whose responsibility was it?

During this period Bertram Finley had changed. He rarely talked to me and never interrupted his real phone calls to accept my fictitious ones. He was making it to the top. The spark of humiliation suffered by having to succeed at Mostly Bull was carrying him forward to triumph over his superiors. His unrelenting determination was working for him. His inhuman phone work uncovered leads. His aggressive salesmanship opened accounts. His star rose. He got lucky and received a large order from some silly lunatic waiting for a call -- some rich idiot with a desire to lose money to Bertram Finley and Mostly Bull.

With one small feather of gain in Finley’s scalp Plutus brought the former’s name to Mr. Easy’s attention. "I hired him," Plutus bragged.

"Good, good. If he’s our boy give him something."

He was given.

Finley then put on the ‘act.’ He knotted his tie super-tight and had his shoes shined every day. He never let a day go by without loudly praising some policy of Mostly Bull’s.

"They only FEED the FAT!" Some complainer was heard mumbling.

"Who should they feed, the weak?" Finley challenged, angrily.

During the next offering of GD (at $ 17) Finley’s total of shares was surpassed only by Sumner. They liked his act. Next came the ‘feed’.

"Give him good stuff," Mr. Easy advised Plutus. "Good stuff, I like his act. Mostly Bull likes his act."

Plutus smiled. Once someone did the act convincingly they became the act. "I will make him RICH!" Plutus declared.

Plutus began visiting Finley’s desk twice a day. "Finley, here’s something I’d like you to work on. Small manufacturing company -- needs a profit sharing and pension plan. The owner called me this afternoon. I want you to move on it."

Finley would not even say thanks, just take the lead from Plutus’ hand and call. That was the thanks Plutus wanted. In ten minutes Finley would stop by Plutus office. "Closed him. Bought $l00,000 in bond funds for both accounts." or "Opened the owner’s personal account, put $200,000 in tax-frees."

"Good," Plutus would say and hand him more feed.

By feeding success they insured it. The more successful Finley got, the even more successful he would become. Soon, everyone forgot that Finley had once put on the ‘act.’ Everyone naturally assumed that Finley was successful and had always been so, "Went to Wharton, didn’t he? -- He’s a private placement, old man owns a shipping line, lot of family accounts," they whispered about him.

When management took the super-stars out to Lunch at Mr. Easy’s club, Finley was a half step behind Sumner as they headed for the escalators.

Soon, Finley found himself filling in for management. He would often shout, "On the phone!" to new guys reading the sports section when Plutus was not on the floor.

Recognizing talent, Finley was asked if he’d like to switch over to management. Without a word o