Chapter 20: Passing a Test

October 8, 1982, Chicago, Illinois

“You know this won’t do any good, right?” Mr. Nelson asked when I handed him my analysis of the cost of the office moves on Friday morning.

I shrugged, “Maybe, maybe not, but that is real money that stays in Mr. Spurgeon’s pocket or buys more gold pieces for his Scrooge McDuck stash in his basement.”

Or gifts for underage teenage girls, if I believed the rumors, which I did.

Mr. Nelson laughed, “I haven’t been in his basement, but I’d suspect he doesn’t have a pile of gold he swims in!”

“OK, I was joking, but that’s real money.”

“Your mentor will disown you.”

“For pointing out that we can save close to forty grand by putting his new people on 29 and moving just four, instead of moving a dozen? And then he gets to design the space exactly the way he wants it, and we don’t have to screw around remodeling on 32. Hell, pitch it to Spurgeon and have him split the savings with Mr. Matheson!”

“These numbers are real?”

“I looked at the costs of remodeling offices and the numbers I have on the spreadsheet are conservative. And if we only have to move four, the mailroom guys can do it for $35/hour less, each, than union laborers, and we’d need six, not four, because, you know, Outfit fuckery. I bet the number is closer to $50,000, but I can prove $40,000.

“The benefits to Mr. Matheson are obvious — a custom-designed space for his team, exactly the way he wants it, with room to grow, all new furniture, and nobody else around to complain about anything he or his team want to do. Not to mention, say, ten grand in cash in his pocket. Yes, I know it’s pocket change, but it’s still real money. Hell, it would pay him back the cost of my car with a profit! All in exchange for being three floors lower in the building.”

“And if Matheson decides to have your balls for breakfast because Noel Spurgeon decides to do it your way?”

“There’s one flaw in your analysis,” I said. “And that is that it would be Mr. Spurgeon’s decision. I just did the analysis, and you are going to hand it in.”

“Throw ME under the bus? Fuck you, Kane!” Mr. Nelson said, but with a grin.

“I’m sure not in a position to go into Mr. Spurgeon’s office and propose it! Hell, tell him I did the analysis and brought it to you and you felt you had to bring it to him. What I don’t understand is why this kind of analysis isn’t done.”

“Because guys like Matheson get their way, no matter what.”

“So, then, the job is to convince him that the benefits of being on 29 outweigh the dick extension of being on 32!”

“It really does come down to that,” Mr. Nelson said. “I’ll show this analysis to the Big Boss, but be prepared for blowback from Matheson.”

“Right now, this is the only way I can put money in Mr. Spurgeon’s pocket and increase profitability. If he wants to get on my case for that, fine. I still have the supervisor’s job here, and I can still move up on my original timeline, even if it’s as a runner for another team.”

“You got some balls, Kid! I’ll let you know.”

I didn’t think the risk was that great, and I honestly believed that at worst, Murray Matheson would dress me down for daring to suggest he move to 29, but I didn’t think he’d do more than that. And in the end, moving was beneficial to everyone and everything except his ego.

“I’ll go back to work.”

“Fucking troublemakers!” Mr. Nelson groused, but it was said in a good-natured way.

I returned to the mailroom, sat down at my desk, and began entering the previous day’s courier records, as well as the inventory information and requisitions that Sandeep had provided. My estimates of the time it would save were off by a small amount, but I was still saving significant time each week by being able to generate reports with the computer rather than by hand.

The rest of the day was busy, but uneventful, and I left right at 5:00pm. I had decided to wait until Jeri’s dinner to see Marcia, so I headed home to hang out with Shelly and Bianca. There was nothing playing at the theater that we all wanted to see, so Shelly had suggested ordering pizza and renting a movie or two, and inviting some of the girls to join us. I thought that was a great idea, and when I arrived home, Esmeralda, Ellie, Sally, and Julianne were all at the house and the pizzas had been ordered.

“What movie did you rent?” I asked Shelly.

“The Godfather 1902–1959: The Complete Epic, which is based on a TV miniseries that combined The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II in chronological order. The only problem is that it’s six hours, so if we start right now, we’ll finish just before midnight.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously. Or we can watch it in two parts, tonight, and tomorrow. The girls can all come back.”

“Or stay!” Sally exclaimed.

“I have to be at the computer lab tomorrow morning at 10:00am,” I said. “And I’ll be home late-afternoon, probably around 4:30pm.”

“Why don’t we watch half tonight and half tomorrow night?” Bianca suggested. “Jonathan, are you going out tomorrow night?”

“No. I don’t have any plans before I see Huifen at 11:00am on Sunday.”

The football players were still on strike, and Stuart and Tom were both on shift, so Huifen, Kristy, Jack, and I had decided to spend Sunday together.

“If there are no objections, then we’ll put the first tape in when the pizzas arrive,” Shelly suggested.

There were none, so that’s what we did. It didn’t surprise me at all that Sally sat next to me on the sofa, and when we’d finished our pizza, she snuggled close to watch the movie. There were three tapes, so we chose to watch the first two, which took us to around 10:00pm.

“Do you girls need a ride back to Loyola?” I asked when Shelly turned off the TV.

“Now?” Julianne asked, licking her lips. “Or tomorrow afternoon?”

“What did you have in mind, Julianne?” Sally asked with a knowing smile.

“If Jonathan’s game, he fucks all of us and then you can sleep with him.”

“Jonathan isn’t sure he can go seven times!” I chuckled.

“Shelly and I have plenty of opportunities,” Bianca interjected. “So five. Or six if Sally wants double for sharing!”

“Sally does!” Sally declared. “Sally goes first and last!”

It was nights like this that made me reluctant to commit to anyone at this point in my life. The counter-argument was that Huifen and I got along really well, and I could see us being together long term. At nineteen, though, I couldn’t be sure about what was best for me long term, and I wondered just how long Huifen would tolerate me putting things off. I suspected, strongly, she’d push after I visited Bev, as my indecision about Bev was the reason I’d given for not being ready to make a commitment.

“Then let’s go upstairs,” I said, taking Sally’s hand.

October 9, 1982, Chicago, Illinois

Sally and I had fallen asleep spooned together just before 2:00am, and the other girls had sacked out with blankets and pillows in the living room on the sleeper sofa. Sally and I slept until 8:45, then showered together. After our showers, I grabbed two doughnuts from a box on the table, then headed to Circle to meet Violet so we could work on our semester project.

“Work for about two hours, then lunch?” Violet suggested after she greeted me when I walked up to the building which housed the computer lab.

“Sounds good to me,” I replied.

We went into the building, went to the lab, sat down at a free Apple II. Violet typed faster than I did, so she was at the keyboard and we discussed the code we needed to write before she typed it in. We made good progress on the subroutine that would control the graphics, and by noon, we had a decent image of a slot machine using line graphics and fill colors. We saved our work and broke for lunch.

“What’s the scoop for Wednesday?” I asked after we ordered.

“Pick me up after you get off work and we’ll head to Chicago Stadium. I have a pre-paid parking pass that goes with the season tickets, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

“Cool.”

“When’s your exam?”

“A week from Wednesday. I should pass, and once the license is issued, I’ll talk to my mentor about sponsoring me for the second license.”

“How long will that take?”

“If I take a course, probably six months; if I just take the exam, I should have it in January. I think I’ll skip the class, so long as Mr. Matheson agrees, that’s OK.”

“Did you decide on a class for next semester?”

“Math 105,” I replied. “Basically, a refresher for algebra and an introduction to calculus. I need that before I take a statistics class.”

“I don’t need that class,” Violet said, frowning.

“I understand, but there’s no reason we can’t meet after class. And if your schedule is different, we can still meet after my class. What classes are you going to take?”

“Well, since you have to take math, I think I’ll take sociology and composition. That fulfills an elective and a core course. Then next Fall we can take statistics together.”

“That sounds good,” I agreed. “We can go to the Registrar next Saturday. We’re making good progress. I was sure the graphics were going to be the toughest part, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Scott warned us about the random number generator returning the same numbers in sequence. Did you ask Bianca about it?”

“Yes. She showed me an article about it that explained how to get around it, at least for our purposes. When the program starts, show a title screen and use the ‘wait’ command so the user has to press a key to start. Once they press the key, the next command does what she calls ‘seeding’ the random number generator. I wrote it out.”

I pulled a paper from my folder and showed it to Violet.

100 WAIT; X=RND(-1✶(PEEK(78)+256✶PEEK(79)))

“What does that do?”

“Uses those two memory locations, which change while waiting for input, and aren’t really predictable. That way, every time the program starts, the numbers are different. She said there are something like four billion possible ‘seeds’. That’ll work for our purposes.”

“And that’s not cheating or anything?”

“No. She gave me a copy of the article, so we can show that to Scott if he asks.”

“Awesome!”

The waitress brought our food, we ate, then headed back to the computer lab to work on our program. By 3:40pm we had the equivalent of the ‘spinning reels’ working, and decided that was a good stopping point, as the next thing to do was write the code for the bets and the payouts, which we’d do when we met on Saturday. We saved everything on three diskettes, and then I walked Violet home.

“See you Wednesday around 5:30pm,” I said.

“I’m really looking forward to it!” Violet replied.

She gave me a hug and a peck on the cheek, and as I walked back to my car, I once again wondered what she was thinking and what I’d do if she decided she wanted to take the next step, whatever that might be in her mind. I liked Violet a lot, but I had no idea what a relationship beyond friendship would be like with her, given the emotional and psychological trauma she’d undergone.

As with every other thing in my life, all I could do was take each day and its challenges as they happened, and make the best decisions I could about the future. I continued to think that perhaps the answer was to wait for Bev to graduate before making any final decisions. It would be roughly four years before she could move to Chicago, depending on how she arranged her student teaching.

Four years would make me twenty-four, which, the more I thought about, seemed about the right time to think about getting married. Had I gone to college full time, that would be about the time I would be settled into a job and ready to start a family. Of course, with Bev, that would be instant in that Heather would be four. We’d have at least two of our own, but that might need to wait until Bev had taught a few years.

None of that concerned me, and as I got into my car, I realized the only ethical thing to do was to explain to Huifen that I wasn’t going to make any decisions soon, and possibly not until Bev graduated. The only question was when to tell her, and after Thanksgiving made sense, as that would give Bev and me a chance to discuss our future face-to-face.

When I arrived home, Sally, Julianne, Esmeralda, and Ellie were at the house, and Bianca had ordered Chinese food. When it arrived, we put in the last tape of The Godfather 1902–1959: The Complete Epic, and ate while we watched, though instead of Sally sitting close, it was Julianne, and, unsurprisingly, when the movie ended, the girls made the same offer as the previous evening, though this time with Julianne doing double duty.

October 10, 1982, Chicago, Illinois

On Sunday, after the girls left, I drove to Loyola to pick up Huifen, then to Jack’s place to pick him up, along with Kristy, and then drove to the Chicago Botanical Garden so the four of us could spend a quiet afternoon leisurely walking the trails.

“What’s all the ‘hush hush’ at the office?” Jack asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I replied. “But it’s nothing bad, and will very likely generate overtime in January.”

“Expansion, right? I heard rumors about us taking space on another floor.”

“Those are the rumors,” I replied.

Jack laughed, “Not going to say a word to give me a clue?”

“One thing I’ve learned for sure and that’s confidentiality is important. If you want to move up the way I have, and the way it appears I’m going to, you have to know when to stay silent.”

“The Suits gossip more than my mom and her friends!” Jack exclaimed.

“Oh, I know! And they talk about clients, too, which is a serious problem. If some of that stuff got back to the clients, they’d be pissed and Mr. Spurgeon would have somebody’s ass in a sling.”

“My dad hates that kind of talk,” Kristy said. “The floor traders are even worse than the brokers and money managers, and they all work for different firms, so the gossip can be pretty juicy.”

“I think I’ll stick to math!” Huifen declared.

“Lawyers can’t talk about their clients that way, even to other lawyers,” Kristy said. “It would be an ethical violation.”

“It’s a total of seven years of school for you, right?” Huifen asked.

“Yes,” Kristy replied. “Four undergrad and three in law school.”

“I’d go crazy,” Jack said. “When I got out of High School, I never wanted to see the inside of a classroom ever again! That said, I’ll make an exception for the classes towards my securities licenses.”

“I would hope so!” I replied.

“Any idea when they’re going to start playing football again?” Kristy asked.

“Stuart thinks mid-November at the earliest, and they might actually end up canceling the entire season. I suspect that won’t happen because losing the Super Bowl would cost the networks and the league a ridiculous amount of money. Somebody will fold, and most likely it’ll be the players because they aren’t getting paid.”

“Who do you think is right?” Kristy asked.

“The players want 55% of the revenues allocated to salaries, and I don’t think that’s outrageous. That said, there’s no chance the owners are going to agree to that.”

“Are we watching the so-called ‘All Star’ games next weekend?” Jack asked.’

“We could, but I suspect very few big names will play. I heard John Riggins say something that basically tells me I’m right about the players folding — he said he’d do anything for money.”

“Is there a way you could make money from that intuition?” Huifen asked.

“Only if I thought they weren’t going to settle, in which case I’d consider shorting TV networks, and I’d have needed to do that before now, as the loss of football revenue is already priced in. The loss of the Super Bowl isn’t, so that might be possible, but as I said, I think the players will cave. It’s the only thing that makes economic sense, given the owners seem unified.”

“Any idea what the settlement will be?” Jack asked.

I shook my head, “I have no idea what the owners will actually go for. I suspect a bit more money to the players and a few other concessions, but not a percentage of the revenues. That’s a non-starter.”

“Where do you get your information?” Kristy asked.

“Mostly the Press,” I replied. “I don’t have any contacts in pro sports at this point, and given where I’m headed, those kinds of contacts aren’t all that important because the teams are privately owned, most stadiums are publicly financed, and much of the revenue comes directly from TV networks through advertising revenue. That’s the more interesting area, because that involves publicly traded companies dealing with other publicly traded companies.

“Fundamentally, for my current plan, government contacts are more important because currency trading depends so much on government actions. That said, contacts in regulatory agencies can provide useful information for equities trading. I already have a contact in a Congressman’s office who could, in the long term, prove valuable.”

“Is that legal?” Jack asked.

“It can be,” I replied. “You just have to be careful. For example, asking detailed questions about the process is OK; asking for information from an unpublished draft is not OK, unless it’s reported somewhere else, first.”