“You don’t say it very much.”

“Don’t I show it?”

“We have sex a lot.”

“I enjoy it. Don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“You don’t say it very much.”

We look at each other. The ferry is docking.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Isn’t it great?

* * * *

I am a clerk. My job is to fetch shit, to print shit out, to get lunch and shit, and to learn to be a trader. In practice, that means standing in the back of the pit, staring at the screen, and adding fractions together.

I walk briskly back to the booth to meditate on some option pricing theory with my Natenberg book, which is tucked between the computer monitor and the partition. Natenburg wrote the bible that every option clerk carried around with him. Everyone used it, from the physics PhDs to the bozos who dropped out of college. But It’s not all smart dudes on the trading floor, there are a bunch of rejects too, like all the Filipino stock clerks and stock jockeys, these guys are literally fucking monkeys, half the time I am standing in the back of MSFT these animals are swinging from the handrails at the back of the pit, laughing like hyenas. I am pretty sure they are on drugs. I am pretty sure they are dealing drugs, in fact, I think this whole stock jockey thing is just an act, a front for some massive drug dealing operation. I am pretty sure about this. And then there are the potheads at Bay Bridge Trading next to my booth, these guys are always taking trips to Mexico and coming back with photos of themselves smoking six foot bongs, they are stoned half the time at work, which is why we don’t use them for stock, the poor bastards, they’re probably in their thirties and they can’t even think straight anymore. No, we use Edelman for stock, which is a one-woman operation. Janice is a ballbuster from Philadelphia who berates her Filipino clerks constantly at the top of her lungs, standing on her chair, shouting things like: “I could shit, piss, and CHANGE A TAMPON in the time it takes for you to walk your fat ass across the floor.” She’ll then go back to flirting with me. She talks about sunbathing on the roof of her condo complex and taking her tits out, and she is nothing special for sure, with that 1971 schoolteacher’s haircut and tampon talk, and I bet her vagina has teeth in it, but that rack is fucking fantastic and it is enough to feel myself hot against my leg when she brushes against my ear. The Bay Bridge guys get a big kick out of this, they know it turns me on, and when she’s out of earshot, they’ll make this obscene fist-going-up motion with a raspberry, ppplplplplpl, and say, Right Up In There! I don’t think it is such a hot idea. I’ll end up in a dumpster somewhere, severed balls stuffed in my mouth.