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Getting up early has never bothered me, the world at what is essentially nighttime pleases me because all the world’s assholes are asleep. I give girlfriend a peck on the forehead on the way out the door, like I usually do, which always makes me smile, she’s a snorerocket, a real buzzsaw, it’s unladylike and endearing at the same time. I used to have to get up at four-thirty to swim, so getting up at four-thirty to catch the 2 Clement bus down Bush Street is no big deal, my silent, daily ordeal with the Chinese woman carrying plants.

“’Sup,” I say to her. She looks at the pole.

So I sit on the bus, doing my fractions in my head, girlfriend will catch up later, she spends 45 minutes on her hair, which has the physical property of always looking hot and wet, and doesn’t have to be at work until seven. Everything is cool until the bus lurches to a stop right in the middle of the fucking TL and unceremoniously ejects us out onto the sidewalk and Chinese chick with her droopy plant does not look happy about this at all.

The streets are pretty much deserted, unless you count the two transsexuals beating each other with rubber hoses. I am not afraid.

I was a math major at Berkeley, and it was great for the first two years, and then it sucked, because one thing you learn in math is that you reach a certain point where it’s just not fun or useful anymore, you’re not even dealing with quantities anymore, just abstractions. The whole reason I wanted to be a math major was because I could do this fancy arithmetic in my head, like I can square two digit numbers in a second. Like, 81 squared is 6561. I did that in a second. And 44 squared is 1936. And I can do some three digit numbers sometimes if you give me some more time. And I can do cube roots and some other stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten laid offering to help with Calculus homework, those were some hot times. Calculus is the sexiest thing in the world, let me help you integrate this from zero to infinity while I smell your hair and watch your eyelashes. I’ve differentiated the same polynomials with a damn woodrow a dozen times now. So my grades started to suck after a while, for obvious reasons. I graduated last year with a 2.9 which was not obviously good enough to get one of the really good trading jobs, either in New York at one of the big banks or even here in San Francisco at a place like Robbie Stephens or H&Q, so I got this job with a market maker trading on the floor of the P. Coast, trading options, because they didn’t give a flying fuck what my grades were.