Saving Alice (13 page)
O
n Wednesday I worked later than usual, but Larry still outlasted me. It was nine-thirty when I got into my car, reluctantly shedding the protective world of work. I started the engine, considering my options. I hadn’t yet returned to Joe’s. Paul hadn’t heard about Donna’s and my marriage separation, at least not from my lips, and Susan, if she was back by now, would be full of consolations, conclusions, and exhortations. In the end, she’d probably throw up her hands with, “Men! Can’t live with them, can’t kill ’em.”
I sighed into the darkness of my vibrating rattletrap and thought about Alycia.
“Leave her alone,”
Donna had said.
“I can’t,” I whispered above the annoying buzz of the car heater.
I put the car into gear and took the long way home, then backtracked, driving around and around the back streets of Aberdeen, until I found myself on the street leading to Sally’s one-room apartment. As I drove slowly past the window, I peered up at the dark and uninviting curtains. Where was Donna sleeping? On the couch? Where was Alycia? On the floor? Or in the sleeping bag I now recalled seeing in the backseat of the car?
I’m sorry,
I whispered, words they’d grown tired of hearing, words they no longer believed. I stopped the car in the middle of the street where Donna or Alycia, or even Sally for that matter, could peek out the window and recognize me. I considered calling Donna and begging her again to take the house. But as quickly as the thought came, I knew Donna would reject it as she had our bank account. Besides, she’d already moved everything.
Back during the humiliating court proceedings related to my trading fiasco, during which Donna had loyally stood by my side, I’d never felt like this, as if I were falling through a black cloud, searching for any kind of silver lining.
Go home,
I told myself.
Go through the motions. Prepare for bed. Wash the dishes. You’re not the only one who’s staring at a divorce. Tomorrow’s another day
.
I gazed at the window again and imagined Donna behind the curtains. I pictured Alycia talking on the phone, probably in the bathroom where no one could eavesdrop. I put the car in drive, released the brake, and headed back home.
Later that evening, I pulled on my pajamas, then reconsidered the bedroom. I hadn’t slept in our bed in nearly a week and hadn’t turned on the TV because I couldn’t bear the superficiality of canned lives.
I trudged out to the living room and threw a clean sheet over the couch. I stared at the phone on the floor and resisted the temptation. How easy it would be just to call her.
Come home!
I’d be tempted to beg her. But why? So I could torture her with another fourteen years of my insidious poverty, not to mention the emotional vacuum we seemed to have created? Maybe she’d be better off without me. Maybe Alycia would as well.
I sighed with frustration at my own descending self-pity.
“I’ll be praying for you,” my mother said recently. “Are you praying, too, Stephen?”
“Sure,” I said, but she knew better.
Reclining on the couch, I reached over to the lamp table and turned out the light. As usual, I lay awake for hours. I played the memories over and over in my mind, and my mother’s words seemed to echo in the back of everything:
Miracles happen to those who pray and believe
.
For a moment, I even considered trying again. I stared up at the ceiling, felt the words forming in my mind, then gave up before they crossed my lips. I turned over on my side and doubled my efforts to fall asleep.
Trusting God is a recipe for disaster
.
That settled it, but it didn’t bring sleep. About two o’clock, the notion crossed my mind:
The least you can do is win your daughter back
.
I sighed into the listless darkness and shrugged it off, but the thought persisted, growing larger until I finally entertained it: What would it take?
“She’s in her embarrassment phase,”
Donna had said.
Money,
I thought.
It would take more money
.
“I keep my promises,”
Alycia had declared.
I modified my appraisal.
Money and dependability
.
That thought jumped the curb and landed in the strangest place: Maybe I could finally begin trading again. The idea was ridiculous … and yet tremendously appealing. Trading is how I lost it all; trading is how I had to find it again.
I turned on my side and tried to mentally force sleep to overtake me.
“Leave her alone!”
Donna had implored me.
Would it be so hard?
I knew what to do, didn’t I? I knew all the methods, the systems, and the process. I’d been studying it for years, methodically searching for the magic indicator, but didn’t it all come down to one truth? Hadn’t I already found the magic bullet? The perfect system wasn’t a system at all: It was
me
—consistent and disciplined.
Bottom line: I’d been afraid to pull the trigger again. That’s all. This time I could do it right. I could ride out the inevitable losses without losing my head.
I sat up and smiled into the darkness.
I can win her back
.
My body shivered with the thought. Hours earlier, I’d been at my darkest moment, and now I was suddenly exhilarated with the possibilities. I thought of poor Donna living in her friend’s tiny place, living below poverty level. She deserved a decent alimony. In fact— and by now my brain was blazing—I could pay them
all
back—every single investor I’d wronged.
The small flame became a fire. I could redeem the last fourteen years of my life. I could parlay a life of failure—like a magician creating a rabbit out of thin air—into a life of success. I could fulfill a lifetime of broken promises. I could finally finish the journey I began in college.
There I was, wide awake in the middle of the night, days after losing my wife and daughter, and suddenly I was beginning to believe again.
I can pay them all back,
I said into the darkness.
The fire became an inferno. I burst from the living room couch and headed downstairs to my cave. I already had the system, didn’t I? It wasn’t perfect, but if implemented consistently, it was good enough.
I turned on the computer, pulled up a recent spreadsheet file, and began reviewing my old data, thousands upon thousands of past instances, proving to myself yet again that my divergence trading system could work. I studied for hours, examining screen after screen of stock charts until I was too bleary-eyed to continue, and then at dawn it hit me, and suddenly I flicked the computer off. The monitor’s light buzzed into oblivion. I pushed away from the desk and stared at the blackened screen with newfound disgust.
“Enough!” I whispered.
I picked up the second Market Wizard book and read one of the passages I’d underlined years ago. “All the great traders gained and lost small fortunes before finally succeeding.”
It’s time to act,
I thought. I felt another surge of adrenalin and considered my resources. At the moment I had seven thousand in the bank that I had intended to split with Donna, in spite of her refusal.
What if I traded with it instead?
I continued reading: “Most of the great traders turned small sums into millions—not doubling, or tripling, or even quadrupling their money, but multiplying their money
one hundred to one thousand times
.”
My mind was ricocheting like an aimless bottle rocket. Forget the seven thousand. What if I had
thirty
thousand? And then … what if I employed derivatives? With options or futures, I could turn it into a million bucks in a few months.
I felt the first pinprick.
It’s not the knowing, Stevie boy. It’s the doing. And the doing has always been the devil
.
Even Larry didn’t believe in the possibilities. He didn’t even believe in a predictable market. Years earlier, he’d admonished me: “You’re bending the historical data to match the trading system. Your results are bogus. The stock market is haphazard, Stephen. You’re finding patterns where they don’t exist. It’s like an ink-blot test: You’re seeing what you want to see.”
Wrong,
I now told myself.
Hundreds of successful traders have proven him wrong
.
My heart beating like a galloping elephant, I lay down on my cave couch and closed the cover of my book. I repeated to myself over and over:
I can do this. I can do this
.
I went to my CD player and inserted the cheesiest collection of tunes I could find.
“For you, Dad…” Alycia had once exclaimed, “cheesy is a way of life.”
“Slipping Through My Fingers” broke the silence. I sat back down on the couch, my hands laced behind my neck. The song reminded me not only of my childhood but of one year ago.
I’d played the song three times, raising the volume with each repeat, and finally elicited a response from my next-door neighbor. Alycia pounded on the door, then entered the inner sanctum of my cheesy empire, her hands over her ears, her eyes full of mock anguish. “Please make the bad music go away.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you have to ask?”
She stood there, hands over her ears, but listening to the words in spite of herself. Her expression changed. “Tell me that isn’t about me.”
I shrugged. “Why would you think that?”
“It
is
about me.”
“C’mon, it’s a sweet song about how kids grow up too fast.”
She sighed with exaggeration. “If I hugged you, would you make it stop?”
I shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s negotiable, I suppose.”
“I need some commitment here.”
“Okay, I suppose if you hugged me I’d shut it off.”
She closed her eyes and sighed again as if she were making a deal with the devil. Lately, variations of sighing had replaced her elaborate eye rolling. I turned in my chair, faced toward the wall, and folded my arms to indicate the strength of my position. “Slipping…” continued to play. After a moment, I sensed movement behind me, and then a kiss on the back of my neck.
Alycia stepped back as if I was harboring parasites. “There. Now shut it off. We had a deal.”
“We never shook on it.”
“Dad…”
“Besides, no one said anything about a ‘kiss.’ Wasn’t there something in the Bible about a betrayal ‘kiss’?”
“Dad…” She raised her eyebrows and twitched her pinchers, but the usual mirth in her eyes was missing.
“Okay, okay,” I replied. “I suppose for a kiss I can turn it down.”
She harrumphed loudly—another variation of sighing—and stormed out. That might have been our last civil conversation.
That’s the past,
I thought, smiling tentatively.
I can do this
.
I can win her back
.
My smile broadened.
And maybe I can win Donna back too
.
F
ive long years ago, at the behest of John, another high school buddy, I had accepted an invitation to the business department of Northern State College. John was an assistant professor at the time and needed someone in the arena of investing to give a one-hour lecture to the Investments 101 class. Unfortunately, the class began at seven-thirty in the morning.
Taking my place in front, I looked out at the twenty-five or so sleepy, indifferent students. I had contemplated how I might get their attention. John, in his professorial bow tie and white shirt, took his seat in the far corner and gave me a halfhearted
do-the-best-you-can
shrug.
I’d considered opening with a general philosophy of money.
Right or wrong, making money is how most Americans live their lives. Opportunity and wealth are on every side of us, like apples ripe for the picking. There’s no reason to be poor in America….
Instead, I came prepared with something more dramatic. In spite of possibly overplaying it, I removed a fake one-thousand-dollar bill from my pocket.
I held it up. “Mr. Robbins asked me to talk to you about the world of investing.”
Waiting for everyone’s attention, I didn’t say anything more. Slowly, the room awakened. Their eyes expressed their thought:
What’s with the big bill?
When I pulled out the cigarette lighter I’d picked up at the local 7-Eleven, their eyes widened further. I now had everyone’s attention.
“Is it real, Dude?” A spike-haired surfer-type asked from the back.
“Investing is boring,” I said. “Let’s talk about trading.” I placed the thousand-dollar bill and the lighter on the table on a front desk where it would tantalize them further.
A serious-looking brunette in the front row frowned. “What’s the difference?”
“Good point,” I replied. “The only difference between trading and investing is the time frame. Instead of months, or even years, you’re dealing with days, hours, even minutes.”
The brunette seemed fascinated.
“Everyone is an investor,” I continued. “For example, everyone will eventually buy a house and hope to sell it later at a higher price. Short-term trading is the equivalent of buying a house at one in the afternoon for fifty thousand dollars and selling it three hours later for fifty-five thousand.”
“People do that?” someone exclaimed.
I nodded, then asked, “How much did I make on the house sale?”
“Five thousand dollars,” the brunette replied. “Ten percent on your money.”
“Ten percent in three hours,” I confirmed. “Pretty good return.”
Everyone nodded.
“It gets better,” I added. “What if I purchased that fifty-thousand-dollar house for only five thousand?”
The brunette smirked. “It’s called a down payment.”
I smiled back. “In the trading world it’s called an option.” I opened my hands in a questioning manner. “So now how much did I make?”
A red-haired girl with blue-tinted braids frowned. “The same.”
The brunette broke in again. “Well, not exactly …”
“Actually … I doubled my money,” I finished. “With just five thousand invested, I made another five thousand. That means … one hundred percent…”
“ … in three hours,” someone else finished.
“Dude!” the surfer said in an awestruck voice.
The brunette flashed him a look:
How ignorant can you be?
“Happens every day,” I said. “But that’s only the beginning.”
Unbelief moved across the roomful of faces.
“Good traders are making one
thousand
percent on their money.”
More incredulous frowns.
“Trading is the gold rush of today,” I continued. “It’s the final financial frontier, but unlike the old days when commissions were high and access was difficult, today anyone can trade. Because of the Internet, everyone has a place at the table. All of us can put our pan into the water, sift out the rocks … and find gold!”
“Keep talking,” another boy with a crew cut said.
“The trader is the gunslinger of today,” I said, mixing my metaphors. “Independent. Beholden to no one. No boss, no employees. You and you alone decide how much to pay yourself.” I paused. “But there’s a catch.”
Several narrowed their eyes. They’d been expecting this. “Imagine with me,” I said, “that you’ve got a thousand dollars in the bank.” I picked up the bill from the table. “Think of all the things you could do with that thousand dollars—down payment on a car, new shoes, fancy watch…”
“Shopping spree!” one girl giggled.
That was the perfect moment. I picked up the lighter, flicked it, and set fire to the bill. Mouths opened wide. Gasps escaped their lips. Gloom and frowns descended upon their faces. I held it up as it disintegrated into ashes, then placed it on a saucer of water I had ready. “How did that feel?” I asked.
“Painful,” the brunette replied, her face ashen. “Hope that wasn’t real.”
“That’s trading,” I told her.
Another hush of silence before someone squeaked: “But I thought you made money?”
“You have to burn money first.”
Their chagrined faces turned confused.
“It’s like counting cards in blackjack,” I continued. “For every hand you win, you lose a hand. Same with trading. For every thousand you make, you’ll burn another thousand. For every good day, you’ll have a bad day, but sometimes you might not burn any. And that’s how you get rich. The key is knowing when to bet and how much to bet. And if you get attached to your money, if you start counting it before the day is finished, you are finished. The inevitable bad days will so debilitate you that you’ll have nothing left for the good days.”
Sitting in the corner with his arms crossed, my buddy John grinned.
“Only those with stellar character survive. Only the most courageous persist. Trading is the purest form of psychotherapy known to man.”
I pointed to the surfer dude. “Want to know what you’re made of?”
He shrugged with a smile.
“Then trade,” I said.
“Want to test your limits of emotional fortitude?” I asked the brunette.
“Date?” she asked slyly, and the room filled with laughter again.
I grinned, then asked the entire room: “If you want to determine the extent of your mental pain threshold? Trade. When it comes to fear, skydiving is easy. When it comes to risk, surfing is easy. Trading is the scariest activity ever created by humankind.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
“Take a man or a woman of towering self-confidence, yet inexperienced in the world of trading,” I suggested. “Lock them in a trading room. Make them trade their own money. In a few hours, they’ll be sweating. They’ll turn red. Panic will be leaking out of their very pores, and they won’t be able to hide it. Eventually, they’ll ask—no, they’ll
beg
—to be allowed to stop. In a matter of hours a person who seems to have total confidence and inner strength will have been turned into a quivering fool.”
“Why?” someone ventured.
“Because the market will cause you, force you, intimidate you, into doing the opposite of what you should do. It will play you like a fool, then spit you out. It will take your money and give you nothing in return.”
“So what’s it take?” someone asked.
“Faith,” I replied, slightly noting my own irony. “Faith in your ability to withstand pressure. Faith in your market research. Faith in yourself.” I dropped the final bombshell. “The truth is: only one percent of one percent succeed.”
“It’s that hard?” the surfer asked.
“Not technically,” I said. “This isn’t rocket science. You don’t need a college degree to figure out the mechanics.”
“So … how much do the good traders make?” someone asked, getting down to brass tacks.
“What is your major?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Accounting.”
“As an accountant, you’ll make, in today’s dollars, about two million dollars…”
He seemed intrigued.
“ … by the time you die,” I finished, and his face fell.
“You’ll spend most of it on your house mortgage, on your wife’s hobbies, and your daughter’s shopping sprees.”
“Hey!” the lover-of-shopping-sprees objected, then smiled. But the accounting major wasn’t pleased.
I finished my comment. “But a good trader can make a million every year.”
“Just by sitting in front of the computer?” a blond girl asked.
“In your bathrobe,” I added. “In fact, if you wanted, you could live anywhere in the world. You could drive the nicest cars, live in the biggest houses, and attract maintenance-free men!”
The brunette flushed.
“So how does it work?” someone else asked, and a few others nodded in agreement. I smiled with approval. Now that I had their attention, it was time to get on with the fundamentals of how Wall Street operated—as if anyone in the world really knew.
I began with the bottom line: “The value of all things in life, especially stocks, is based solely, and exclusively, upon perception…”
My lecture went over so well that John invited me back the next month, but I never made it.
Two weeks after my classroom lecture, I burned three million dollars.
