The Bastard began nodding his head again, as if to say, “Move on.”

“Well, whatever,” I said. “The manager was sitting in a small office at the front of the boardroom, and he seemed oblivious to everything. He was yapping away on his phone, talking to his wife, I recall, and saying something about their dog being sick. When he saw me, he held up an index finger, to which I nodded dutifully. Then he kept on talking.

“His name, as it turned out, was George Grunfeld, and two years prior he'd been a social-studies teacher. He was in his mid-to-late forties, and he happened to be the spitting image of Gabe Kaplan, the teacher from Welcome Back, Kotter.”I smiled at OCD. “Remember Welcome Back, Kotter,Greg?”

OCD nodded. “Yeah, with Travolta.” He looked at the Bastard. “You ever watch Welcome Back, Kotter?“

The Bastard flashed OCD a dead smile. “Yeah; up your nose with a rubber hose,” he said tonelessly.

“Ah, there you go!” I said warmly. “That's exactly what Travolta used to say to Mr. Kotter.” I smiled at my new friend, pleased that I was finally able to find some common ground with him. Alas, he refused to smile back. Instead, he stared at me, stone-faced.

I shrugged. “Well, anyway, he looked just like him, bushy everywhere—his hair, eyebrows, mustache, knuckles. It looked like someone had glued a bunch of tumbleweeds to the guy!”

OCD shook his head, amused, while the Bastard stared ominously.

“Anyway, George finally hung up the phone and came over to greet me. ‘Just pick a free desk and start dialing,’ he said after a few seconds of small talk.

“ ‘That's it?’ I said. ‘You're hiring me?’

“ ‘Yeah, why not? It's not like I'll be paying you a salary or anything. That's not a problem, is it?’ I was about to tell him that it wasn't, when one of the salesmen suddenly popped out of his chair and started pacing back and forth. George motioned toward the guy and said, ‘That's Chris Knight; he's our top salesman. He's got a helluva rap. Listen…’

“I nodded and focused my attention on Chris, who was tall and lanky and had a face longer than a thoroughbred's. He was no older than twenty, and he was dressed like he'd just strolled in from a keg party. I remember being appalled at how terrible he sounded. He was mumbling, slurring; I could hardly understand the guy! Then, out of nowhere, he started screaming into his telephone, in short rapid-fire bursts of ludicrous sales hype. ‘Jesus Christ—Bill—I guaranteeit!’ he screamed. ‘I guarantee this stock is going up! You can't lose here—it's impossible! I have information-it's not even public yet—do you hear me? I don't think you do, because I have inside information!’ And then he yanked the phone away from his ear and held it out in front of his own nose and stared at the receiver with contempt. Then, after five seconds of staring, he put the phone back to his ear and started screaming again. I looked at George and said, ‘What the hell was that all about?’ and George nodded his head knowingly and said, ‘He's pretty good, isn't he?’ And I just shook my head in disbelief and said nothing. Meanwhile, Chris was still screaming, ‘Don't you understand? We can't lose here, Bill! I promise you! The stock is going to the moon! No ifs, ands, or buts! You gotta buy it now-right now!’”

I shrugged and said, “During my six months at LF Rothschild, I never heard anything so ridiculous, and I'm not just talking about all the securities laws he was violating but also his complete lack of professionalism. All this screaming and shouting and ridiculous sales hype was so Mickey Mouse-ish that no one with even the slightest bitof financial sophistication would give this guy the time of day.”

The Bastard held up his hand. “Let me get this straight,” he said skeptically. “You're saying you're nota proponent of sales hype?”

I turned the corners of my mouth down and shook my head. “No, I'm not, actually. Selling through hype is a complete waste of time. In military terms, it's like carpet bombing. It's very loud and menacing, but it's only marginally effective. At Stratton, I taught a different style of selling, which was the equivalent of dropping laser-guided smart bombs on high-priority targets.” I shrugged. “Let me take things in order and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.”

The Bastard nodded slowly.

“All right,” I said. “So as awful a salesman as Chris Knight was— or, should I say, as untrained a salesman as he was—it was what came out of his mouth next that truly shocked me. ‘Oh—come on!’ he screamed at his client. ‘The stock's only thirty cents a share. Pick up a thousand shares, that's all I'm asking! It's only a three-hundred-dollar investment; how could you go wrong?’

“With that, I turned to George and said, ‘Did he just say thirty cents a share?’ And George said, ‘Yeah. Why?’

“ ‘Well, it's just that I've never heard of stocks that cheap.I was trained at a Big Board firm—meaning we sold mostly New York Stock Exchange stocks. And even then,the stuff we did on NAS-DAQ was in the fifteen-to-twenty-dollar range.’

“Meanwhile, Chris was busy slamming down his phone in anger. Then he started muttering: ‘That motherfucker hung up on me! What a rat bastard!’ So George looks at me and says, ‘No worries, he'll get the next one. But either way, you should sit next to him for a few days, so he can show you the ropes.’

“Well, I was about to break out into outright laughter, but then George added, ‘He didmake over ten grand last month. How much did you make?’

“I looked at George in disbelief, wondering how a moron like Chris Knight could make ten thousand dollars in a month; then something very odd occurred to me. ‘Wait a second,’ I said to him. ‘How the hell did he make ten thousand dollars working on three-hundred-dollar trades?’ Then I explained to George how a three-hundred-dollar trade at LF Rothschild would yield a commission of between three and six dollars—depending on how aggressive you wanted to get with the client. And sometimes the commissions were even lower than that, I added, especially on tickets of a half million or more.

“So George waved me into his office to offer me a visual explanation. He grabbed a sheet of paper off his desk and said, ‘These are the only stocks you'll be recommending here. There are six of them.’ He handed me the sheet of paper, and I took a moment to study it. ‘KBF Pollution Control?’ I muttered to myself. ‘Arncliffe National?’ I was about to say, ‘I've never heard of any of these stocks,’ when George pointed to a column of numbers and said, ‘These are the bids for the stocks,’ and I saw that they were all under a dollar. I was about to say, ‘These must be real pieces of shit if they're all under a dollar,’ when he pointed to another column of numbers and said, ‘And these are the offers. Everything in between is your commission.’”

I paused for a moment to let my words sink in. Then I smiled and said, “You might find this hard to believe, given my current level of sophistication, but back then I didn't understand the difference between the bid and the offer. I mean, I knew you sold at the bid and bought at the offer, but I'd never really considered what happened to the money in between.

“You see, with big stocks the difference between the two is small, maybe half a percent, and only occasionallydo the brokers get a sliver of it; usually it's glommed up by traders. In fact, at Rothschild, the brokers would go absolutely wild when a block of stock came with a spread in it. They would call their clients and bang them over the head, because they were making double commission.

“But at the Investors’ Center, I couldn't believe my eyes. The spreads were enormous—at least fifty percent or better. I said to George, ‘How could the bid for Arncliffe National be twenty-five cents and the offer be fifty cents? My commission can't reallybe a quarter a share, can it?’ to which he replied, ‘Sure, why not?’