“How about not yelling in my fucking ear,” he says over his shoulder.

“How about you suck my dick ‘til my ass caves in,” I say.

Everyone gets a laugh out of this, including the Hongmeister.

“When are you gonna get a badge and start swinging it around?” he asks. Not long ago he was a clerk like me.

A sore point. “Pretty soon, man, pretty soon.”

“Bro, you better get one quick, trades like this don’t come around often.”

I grimace at Hong, thinking of the opportunity cost of being a clerk. I could make my annual clerk pay in a single day in this pit. Motherfucker.

Just as I look down to hedge some stock, that T22 guy comes ranging past me, greasy hair and hollow eyes, and I see him look over at W83, and I see W83 look back. They hold their gaze, for a second. There was a glimmer of danger on W83’s face—I saw it—and if I didn’t know any better I would say that one of them owed the other money, or something like that. Or: somebody knows somebody’s secrets. I’m not happy about this, because T22 is a legendary douche and is tangentially connected to the drug-dealing Filipinos. All I hear about is T22’s parties, and it’s a wonder the police haven’t broken up one of those yet, I don’t see how his Russian Hill neighbors tolerate a bunch of skeezy hookers going in and out of that place at all hours.

It’s getting really hot. I’m starting to sweat, principally down the crack of my ass, starting in the small of my back. And it smells terrible in here. And there’s this weird energy building, kind of like when you go to see Helmet or some poor man’s version of Nirvana, and you’re there for the opening act, and they kind of suck, but people are starting to pogo around and slam into each other to try and get a mosh pit going. And I’m standing in the back and hedging odd-lots of stock while the Bay Bridge guys yell about palming their pilot and Janice bounces her boobs at me. I am trying to keep my eye on the minx MQ because now W83 is starting to sell some book orders with her. At last he turns to me and tells me to sell 2,000 COMS.

“Sell two thousand 3Com!” he yells at me.

Trading stock with this piece of shit handheld is like a monkey fucking a football. I hit the button for COMS, good, but can’t enter in the quantity, I hit 1,000 twice but it says 4,000 on the screen. The stock is 3/8 bid for now, but I am running out of time. Finally I get the quantity right and enter 3/8 as the sell limit and launch it. I do manage to sell 3/8 stock, I am not a dipshit. Meanwhile the moustache Hawaiian shirt dickface guy is really giving it to W83 for selling that book order. He’s calling him a piece of shit motherfucker or something like that. But W83 is not there to make any friends, just to pick up his bag of money and leave. Then I see him standing next to Richard, one of his old buddies from the WCOM pit, and Richard looks back at me, and whispers something in W83’s ear.