Chapter 5

When the alarm went off, I gave it a warm, friendly smile. It wouldn’t be too long before I would never, ever have to listen to its tiny tinkling terrorism again. I lay there basking in that thought. Then I remembered another happy thought. For me, it had been a pretty good evening.

I had eaten a delicious repast of the best Chinese takeout my credit card could afford. Then I had looked at both the following night’s closing stock quotes, as well as those for three days into the future. I wasn’t sure how far I could go with any accuracy on this limited machine. I decided not to stretch its effectiveness, as well as the power supply good ol’ Sol had warned me about, any more than I had to.

And there was really no need. At this point, I had tremendous faith in my future heir. I was going to make a fortune. Maybe not overnight. But, just as surely as the cockroaches in my apartment would survive a nuclear war, I was someday going to be rich.

Having slept very well and being in good spirits, I moved much more briskly than usual that morning. I strolled into the office fifteen minutes before being due. The Old Toddler gave me a glare no doubt meant to send shivers down my spine. It was clear he was torn between the desire to pull me in and read me the Riot Act for the umpteenth time again that month and to just let me be, fearing my parting shot on our previous day’s phone call might be more than just bravado. As I stepped into my cubicle, I gave him a glowing smile. Let him stew about the meaning of that one for a while.

Throughout the morning, I wasn’t even tempted to look at the quotes on the net. I felt confident I already knew the results. At noon, I stepped out to get a sandwich and withdraw my meager savings. I took the money down to the local Schwab office and put it into my investment account. I went back to the office and logged on to my Schwab account while wolfing down my sandwich, just making certain my buy orders had gone through. Naturally, they had. I finished my sandwich, washed my hands, and went right back to work. I’m sure Toddlemeyer thought I was trying to make up for the previous day’s insouciance, and in a way he was right. I still needed my job, at least for a few more weeks. I wanted to use all of my current funds for investment until the profits could cover my modest expenses.

Arriving home full of enthusiasm, I was extremely surprised to find an eviction notice taped to my door. Given the opportunity, I would have bet serious money the super had wanted to hand me the notice in person, just to see the look on my face. It made me wonder why he hadn’t. Thinking of betting, that’s when I decided to try sports. It was Friday, and I would be able to see the results of Sunday’s football games.

Oh, yeah, I meant what I had said about heeding Sol’s warning to steer clear of the kind of people who ran most gambling operations. I was not exactly Mr. Kung Fu. But, to make serious money on the stock market quickly either took serious money to begin with or you had to find one of those wildcats that just shot up overnight. Not only was my machine inadequate to help me find them, they come along very rarely. And I couldn’t wait for one of those.

In the first place, I was now being forced to find other quarters within two weeks. Moreover, I was sure I would soon be in a position to afford something much nicer than the dump I had been living in for the past two years. However, it meant I would have to plunk down some very serious money, at least for me. It would take a bundle to cover first and last month’s rent, security deposit, and all the miscellaneous expenses that go into renting a fairly nice apartment in San Francisco. So all of this meant I would have to make some real bucks very quickly in whatever way I could.

Since I was not in to dealing drugs, and certainly had no intention of committing any kind of robbery, the quickest way I could think of was betting on sports. So I fixed myself a sardine sandwich and headed for my trusty computer.

Within five minutes, using the keyword ‘betting,’ I had found a number of online sites where I could bet on anything from horse racing to cricket in practically any country in the world. Can you say, “Yahoo!” It only cost ten bucks to join one international site, but the problem was they required real cash to open an account. You could open the door with a piece of plastic, but you had to pay if you wanted to play. I searched a couple of other sites, and they all seemed to have the same policy. Well, that put a little damper on that thought, at least for this weekend. As I had put every penny I had into my stock buys, I would have to wait until Monday to liquidate them and get cash. That would only leave me one week in which to generate the money to cover moving into a nice place.

That next week was nerve wracking. Having decided to believe in the unbelievable, I asked the personnel department to have the investment company close out my 401K, penalties be damned. I wanted every dollar I could get by the end of the week. After more than two years here, that amounted to just over three thousand dollars.

I feverishly combed all of the markets looking for a promising stock and ‘peeked’ at the ones that seemed to have the greatest short-term rise. However, I didn’t want to use up too much power in my machine. It had to last for a few years, and I would really need it down the road when I had some serious investment money. On the other hand, I had less than two weeks in which to gather about eight thousand dollars in spare cash. That doesn’t count what I wanted to use to keep investing in the market, or for other investments. I managed to find a couple of stocks that actually netted a couple of hundred dollars each on the amount of shares I could afford, but the market was maddeningly quiet that week.

I had done some apartment hunting in the evenings. I found a couple of pretty nice places, without getting too carried away by my dreams of future wealth and luxury. I knew that eight grand was about what it would take to get in the door. And that didn’t include any new furniture, like this La-Z-Boy I’d had my eye on for a while. Given my relatively small income, the landlords were reluctant to rent to someone who might stop paying within a couple of months.

In the meantime, I did what I could to set up for my intended gambling activities. Using my credit card, I joined nearly half a dozen online gambling sites. The plan was to spread the bets around so as to minimize the alarms going off from winning too much, too often. I don’t know what kind of red flags these people looked for, but I didn’t want to raise them. I decided to ‘preview’ sports results only on the weekend. That would let me see most of what had happened in pro football as well as college football and basketball by ‘watching myself’ read just one or two sports pages on Monday morning. On Thursday, I liquidated every single share of stock. On Friday, I ran down to Schwab’s local office to pick up the check, then ran down to my bank to take a cash advance up to the limit on my credit card. Then I deposited the entire amount in order to cover all of the checks I had already sent the online gambling places to fund my accounts.

This made for a rather long lunch hour. However, I had been taking pretty short ones during the week, making a point of letting The Old Toddler know about it because I would need the time on Friday. He didn’t really say anything all week, as I seemed to be working diligently and was getting to work on time every morning. It was amazing how much more motivated I could be in my job knowing I would soon be able to quit, maybe even within a few weeks! What was more amazing was my energy level. I was spending most of my early evenings apartment hunting, and then often working late into the night on the computer, checking out stocks, scoping out the various gambling sites, and so on. After that, I was laying in bed either worrying about what else I needed to do to make the next few weeks safer and more profitable, or fantasizing about what I would do when the money started rolling in. There’s a lot to be said for natural adrenaline highs.

Friday came at last. I drank three double cappuccinos during the day to make sure I stayed alert during the night. At five o’clock sharp I bolted out the office door, ran up the stairs and raced to the ‘fridge to grab the first of two sardine sandwiches I had made earlier. I knew I would need energy for the night ahead. I also knew I would be far too impatient to fix anything after the start of the evening’s festivities.

I sat down at the kitchen table and started munching while I turned the box on and flipped the “Acquire” switch. Having ‘previewed’ three days out once before, I was not surprised about how long it took to get the settings right. I was still very impatient. I forced myself to relax and do everything precisely right in order not to screw it up and have to start all over. Finally, there I was in that little screen. I was sitting at my table with the sports pages spread out in front of me, slowly flipping through them to show the various weekend’s results. I carefully noted down every single result I could see, no matter what the sport or level. I had set it to run for seven minutes in order to look at some of the more unusual stories, as well as the composite results of the major sports. Consequently, I had quite a few notations written down by the time the screen finally went blank.

I grabbed my second sandwich and slid in front of the computer. The next few hours were carefully spent placing bets, limiting myself to two or three on each site. With each broker, I made sure I had one losing bet. Is that the polite term for bookies over the internet, like what we call the people who help us gamble on the stock market? Naturally, there wasn’t much money on those losing bets. I also made one with very high odds against the winner, which of course I intended to win. I bet nearly every penny I had. I mean that literally, since I had even emptied the ‘pennies’ jar I had been filling for years, hating to carry small coins around with me, but being too parsimonious to throw them away. Even after the past two weeks, with the machine never having been wrong once, I was extremely worried. If none of my bets came through I would be dead broke and out on the streets in another week. On the other hand, if everything went the way it should, I would, after fees, deliberate losses and so on, net just over nine thousand dollars by the end of the weekend. That would nearly double my total cash assets.

By the time I finished it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. My body felt washed out. Between the caffeine and the nervous exhilaration, however, I was so wired that I decided to go out for a walk. The San Francisco autumn days are generally gorgeous. But the nights can be freezing when it turns windy and foggy. I bundled up pretty well and hit the streets. My neighborhood’s not the best in the world. However, my thoughts were bouncing around so much with all the things currently going on in my present, and perhaps future, that I really didn’t pay much attention to where I was going or what was happening around me.

Consequently, I was really startled when a huge male figure lurched away from a building and got right in front of me. He looked like a Grizzly bear staring down at an exhausted salmon.

“Hey, buddy, y’got a quarter you could spare?”

It was only a panhandler, thank God, but my heart was still racing as I quickly backed away. After all, he was very large and I wasn’t. It was very dark with no one around. And who knew how violent some of these people could get if you didn’t give them money?

“Buddy,” I said with total sincerity, “I haven’t got a penny to my name right now. But, if you’re around here next week, it may be a different story.”

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he said forlornly.

I thought, “Christ, what a depressing thought.” I turned around to get away, looking back over my shoulder the entire time. He made no attempt to follow or stop me. He just stood there, looking totally helpless and hopeless in the gloom that surrounded him.

Sympathy aside, I hurried back to my shabby little apartment as quickly as I could, attracting as little attention as possible. As bad as it was, I thought as I locked the door behind me, it was still Home. It was also a lot safer and more comfortable than where that guy was. The image of that huge, pathetic figure would not go away.