The dude just winked at me.

I don’t feel good about this. I’m regretting last night already, like some blacking out at some frat party years ago and throwing myself on a grenade. It was futile to hope that my coke-sniffing episode wasn’t going to get around the floor. Brokers talk, especially T22. I never got the impression that TRE really cared about any of his traders partying, but still. Then it occurred to me that T22 might not talk, that he might actually need something from me. What, I didn’t know.

There’s a commotion behind me. It’s the Bay Bridge guys yelling about palming their pilot and pretending to fist each other and generally being boneheads. I look back at the clerk and he looks kind of freaked out, which is not like him. He seems to be completely hemmed in by market makers and stock jockeys and he knows he’s taking up space. I should just take the handheld back from him and trade the stock myself, but it’s too late now, he’s trapped back there. I’m not sure he could even hear me if I yelled an order at him.

The spinoff hasn’t even happened yet and already I’ve made a month’s worth of P&L. I’ve watched people fall ass-backwards into money every year I’ve been down here, and it’s never happened to me. But now the buzz from the coke is starting to wear off and a sense of dread appears and takes up residence in my abdomen, and spreads throughout my arms and legs, which begin to soften. Failure is a sensation, not an event, and already I am feeling it even before it happens. Two thousand miles away, their disappointment is telegraphed.

I look up at COMS and the stock is starting to really rip around. It was at 78 when I walked in here but now it is at 86 and it is moving around three bucks at a time. The normally unflappable cute MQ girl is getting a little rattled; most of those book orders are now gone and she’s been haggling with the crowd for the past ten minutes. They are bringing in more MQs. I look around, and for a moment, the sense of failure subsides and I think about where I am in space and time. This is the biggest pit I have ever seen. This has to be bigger than the bond pit on the CBOT in the eighties. This has to be the most sublimely insane market in financial history. What would people think if they knew that this existed? For a second, I am proud to be part of this group of people. Even the clerk, the Bay Bridge goons, and even stinky Fat Dave. I sense that we are at a unique place and time in history, a time that is not going to be repeated possibly for decades, if ever. I feel like I am witness to something big—and special.

I have to share this with someone.