"Oh, yeah. Right. I should be so lucky. Christ, where's my pencil? This place is driving me nuts. I think my mind's going. I've gotta shorten up some here before the close. Hang on."
He yelled at a runner to take his buy slip, then came back to the phone. "Matt, you're really shaking this place up, you know. Guys are starting to back away. And the people upstairs are beginning to wonder. You've gotta think about going off- exchange with some of this. Hit the market-maker banks. We can't keep up with you here. I could try to get the Exchange to waive their position limits, but don't hold your breath."
"No problem, Jerry. My client's got plenty of other accounts. We'll roll the next thousand contracts through a different one."
"Christ, whoever you're working for must have coconuts the size of King Kong. You realize you guys're naked here? You're getting short billions."
"I just handle the orders, Jerry."
"Your numbers scare the piss out of me just looking at them." He sighed. "Listen, Matt, take care. Get back to you tomorrow at the opening. Right now I've gotta find some greenhorn to take a few of these puppies off my hands or I'm gonna get blown out. Jesus, how'd I let myself get this long at sixteen? Forty fucking contracts. And I was sure . . . Hey, gotta run. Think I see some idiot over there signaling a seventeen bid. Kid must be from Mars."
"Good luck."
"Right. Maybe I'll try prayer." He was gone.
I'd known Jerry Brighton since we crossed professional swords once in the late sixties, and I'd never seen the man actually sit down. He gave up law early, and these days he elbowed the mob in the Treasury bond futures pit with the grim determination of a horse addict shoving his way to the two-dollar window. If the bonds were sluggish, he'd roam the floor looking for action. Football, you name it. He'd make up bets. Rumor has it, one slow day he even set up a wager pool taking odds on which floor trader would be the next to go broke, "tap out" in Exchange parlance. I'd guess Jerry's own number was pretty low. A reliable source once told me Jerry'd averaged a million a year for the past five, even while taking a hit year before last for over two million when a certain famous "inside trader" sandbagged him with a phony merger rumor. Maybe it was worth the ulcers. Thing is, I know for a fact he'd have done it for nothing. A born market maker, right down to his rubber-soled Reeboks.
So when Jerry Brighton started complaining that Matsuo