Ticker Tape By Joe Smith

The Women spill out of the frigid tomb of a fish-packing shed all talking at once. From what I can catch of their rapid, clipped Spanish, like the tap of stiletto heels marking out a quick tango on a hardwood floor, they're chaffing the youngest among them about some gringo smitten by her charms.

"Donde está el bubblegum boy hoy?" chirps one of the women as they tromp across the loading dock in their insulated rubber boots.

The peculiar sobriquet, whether it refers to the smitten one's pinkness, his sticky ardor, or his malleability, launches quite a few titters and playful tongue clucks. Then the rungs of the dimpled, non-slip metal steps ring out as the women descend into the parking lot, stepping from the shadows of the corrugated tin building into the sunlight. Flecks of ice clinging to yellow tufts of fur at the top of slug-green boots flash in the sun. By the time the women have settled down on crab pots and wooden crates, removed their lumpy sweaters and pulled lunch out of wrinkled paper bags, the sun has laughed away the last of the ice.

It's one of those rare summer days, without wind or fog, that make even the hoarse, scolding bark of sea lions patrolling the harbor sound almost happy. The river sparkles like a debutante in a ball gown covered with shiny black sequins. It flirts with the bow of a trawler riding low in the water, filled to the scuppers with fish for the women to filet.

"Got a light?"

The voice is gruff, but its owner is all smiles. George, a gardener-turned-day-trader, flourishes a cigar. The cheroot looks like a miniature in his meaty hand, gone a bit pale and flabby since the time we shoveled and raked our way through a couple landscaping jobs together. He stuffs the cigar into his mouth and leans toward the flame of my Zippo. I remember George had a way with flowers, could coax them to grow in cement.

"Durn tootin'," he replies to my lame comment about how it's just another sunny afternoon in paradise. George can gnaw his cigar, grunt, and inhale, all at the same time. It's a neat trick, much harder than most would imagine.

As it turns out, George really is quite elated. According to the government, another quarter-million Americans found themselves unemployed last month, so he treated himself to cracked crab at the fancy seafood restaurant with tinted windows overlooking the breakwater.

"That ought to keep the Feds from hiking up interest rates and giving the market the blues," he explains.

I've never understood how leading economic indicators work. Money itself is mysterious to me, or at least a bit unreal. Like most insubstantial things, it seems to float upwards, to travel an inexorable path from the pockets of peasants to the pocket of the king. The year I spent toiling on Montgomery Street, in the heart of San Francisco's financial district, was apparently wasted.

Of course, I was just a lackey, a proofreader in the financial publications department of an investment banking firm. The brokers were mostly former collegiate football stars, cheery, glad-handing brutes who stretched the seams of their tailored suits and inspired confidence in clients.

And of course, my stint among the skyscrapers where the money's made was back in the olden days, before computers. Ticker tape machines spit out stock quotes on long white ribbons that coiled up in piles on the gray carpeting. The dry, nervous click of the machines filled every office, like the stutter of automatic-weapon fire in a border war. They were slow by modern standards. The number of shares traded in a week would no doubt be considered rather low volume for a single morning in today's electronic market. But there was always enough tape to drape a victorious general waving from an open limousine in a parade crawling down the crepuscular cavern of Montgomery Street.

And there were leisurely lunches. I would flee the gloomy downtown defiles and light out for the slopes of Chinatown. Women lugging canvas shopping bags jockeyed for bok choy at the stalls of vegetable vendors, glassy-eyed carp swam circles in the tanks of fish markets, and men rolled up their shirt sleeves to tackle the intricacies of Mah Jong on tables in Portsmouth Square. There's nothing like a repast of dim sum — har gow with a dab of hot black bean sauce, steamed pork rolls, shiu mai, pot-stickers — on a sunny bench under a poplar to make it seem that heaven does, in fact, have a tenant, and that all is right with the world. As the gleaming statue of Sun Yat-Sen passed silent benedictions upon the belly dancers gyrating in the lee of Saint Mary's squat brick church, I sucked the remains of dim sum from my fingers and sprawled on a patch of grass to watch.

It was the belly dancers that ended my foray into the world of high finance, and the crash that afternoon. I ogled every move, every swivel of every hip. Every gauzy veil fluttered across eyes rimmed in kohl or down a spangled halter.

When I finally returned to work about an hour late and whistling a wild, catchy Arabian melody, the brokers were clustered around a ticker tape machine, much as they probably used to huddle around the quarterback between downs. The office was hushed. Secretaries bent over their desks as though the ceiling were pressing down on them, and the usual muzzy yet somehow consoling smell of multi-martini lunches was missing.

"Stop that whistling!" hissed one of the brokers, tearing his eyes away from the tape to glare at me.

He detached himself from the huddle. I had never seen him tremble before or noticed stains on the lapel of his suit coat. He was a solid, friendly sort. On his desk sat a photo of a pert, blonde wife and two hefty, no-neck boys in soccer outfits. They stood in front of a palatial home, probably heavily mortgaged, probably in Marin. Twins, he proudly announced to me once, as if the boys' identical genes weren't perfectly obvious.

"What are you so happy about? Don't you realize what's happening? I've lost more money in the last hour than you'll ..."

"Than I'll make in the rest of my life?" I asked.

He glared at me, then walked off.

He was right, of course.

Now I see myself in the reflective silver lenses of George's sunglasses. And beyond myself, beyond my reflection, according to some abstruse law of physics, I see the tiny figures of two women sitting on crab pots sharing tamales.

"Yeah," says George, "those Labor Department figures ought to goose the market. It's like giving the old, limp Dow Jones a jolt of Viagra."