Obviously TRE never interviewed me.

So the clerk brings over the breaks. He looks pretty terrible. Does anyone sleep around here? That is the thing with working market hours on the West Coast. You have to go to bed at 8 to get a reasonable amount of sleep. Of course nobody ever does. The guys that like to party, they just stay out all night. Night, after night, after night.

“No breaks,” he says.

“Right on.”

“What were you doing last night?” he asked.

Sniffing blow. “Nothing. What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

We look at each other.

“Breakfast?” he asks. “The usual?”

“Please.”

My head is still buzzing but I am strangely exhausted at the same time, so I decide to get a coffee. I should have just asked the clerk to get it, but I forgot. So I am not going to Starbucks, that is for sure, in case I run into Purple Hair Girl.

Purple Hair Girl.

* * * *

So T22 gave me a look on this party he had last night. I don’t know why. He never gave me a look before. We run in different crowds. He has parties all the time. Jackson, the King Filipino, supplies them. I’ve always wondered where these guys come from, these guys that have no boundaries in their lives. There’s no drug this guy hasn’t taken, in large quantities, but to the best of my knowledge he’s never been arrested, never had any serious consequences. He’s probably worth ten million, maybe more. There are a lot of people like that in San Francisco. Not in New York. There are deviants there, but they are boring. Hookers-and-coke-Rangers-fans, clones of each other. They are all the same. T22 is just an agent of chaos. He’s not even predictably looking out for himself. He’s just having fun, randomly, with no consequences.

I’ve been on the floor for four years now and I don’t know T22 that well. We give each other the head nod. That’s about it. I know that he’s killing it, that he does business with all the big banks. It just goes to show that it makes more sense to handle the order than to trade it. Just like it is better to sell the pickaxes to the gold miners than to actually mine the gold. I’ve made a total of four or five hundred thousand dollars since I’ve worked here, but it was all on one trade. Back in the beginning I was in the RMBS pit and someone sold me about five hundred teeny puts. Right before earnings. I was off the floor and I heard the stock was down fifty-seven bucks. I was up more than five hundred grand. I was on the computer trying to trade stock to hedge the delta, but the machine wouldn’t accept the order because I was entering in the wrong big figure. Just dumb luck. It easily could have gone the other way. I think about that a lot. Who sells puts for a stink right before earnings?