WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1997

Darlene pulled me aside at the close today and said, "Marty Shiflett needs a clerk in January. I told him you." Just like that, in the hallway by the coat check, with her coffee.

Marty is a local in the bean pit. A local trades his own money, nobody's orders but his own. Badge SHF. Forty-five, quiet for a bean trader, which means he only yells during trading hours. Darlene has stood near him for ten years and says he's honest, pays on time, and doesn't throw things. On the floor, that's a reference letter.

Clerk means I'd be in the pit area every day, keeping his trades, checking them, tracking his position, standing behind him and being his second pair of eyes. More money than running. Way more to learn. Way more ways to screw up in front of everybody.

I said yes before she finished the sentence. Then I went to the ladies' room and stood there shaking for a minute. There's only one ladies' room near our end of the floor. You get to know it.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1997

Thanksgiving. Eddie came to dinner at my parents'. I'm writing this at midnight with a plate of leftover stuffing on my lap, so you know how it went.

My dad has been a Chicago cop for thirty years. He's met every kind of person there is and he has a face for each of them. When Eddie walked in with a bottle of wine and a pie from a bakery downtown, Dad gave him the face he uses for guys in nice cars who say they don't know why they got pulled over.

Over dinner Dad asked Eddie what he does. Eddie explained trading. Dad listened to the whole thing and then said, "So you bet on beans." Eddie said it's corn, actually. Dad said, "So you bet on corn." My brother Paul choked on his potatoes. My mom kicked Dad under the table, which we all heard.

Later, in the kitchen, Dad said to me, "He's all right. He talks fast." Then he said, "Your mother talked fast too." Then he went and watched the football game. I think that went fine. I think.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1997

The stock market fell 554 points today. They stopped trading in New York for the first time ever, because of the new rules where they shut it down if it falls too far, and then it fell some more and they shut it down for the day.

We'd already closed in the bean pit by then. The grains finish at 1:15. So a bunch of us were standing around with our jackets off, under the TVs, watching the numbers go red, the way you'd watch a fire across the street. One of the old traders said it's the Asian thing, the currencies over there, and another one said it's nothing, buy tomorrow, and a third said everybody shut up.

Eddie called me tonight all wound up, he said it was "beautiful." I don't think it was beautiful. I think some people are going to lose their houses. I didn't say that. I'm learning when not to say things.

FLOOR WORD: local. A trader who trades for himself, his own account, his own money, his own heart attack.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1997

Okay. There's a guy.

His name is Eddie Shepherd. He's twenty-six, he trades in the corn pit, he's from the North Shore, he went to a fancy college back East, and he has the loudest voice on the ag floor, which is saying a lot. He's been buying me coffee in the mornings since August. On Friday after the close he asked me to dinner, and we went to Greektown, and the waiters set the cheese on fire and yelled "Opa!" and he yelled it louder than they did.

He's a local. He trades for himself. Some days he makes more than my dad makes in a month. Some days he loses it. He talks about it like weather.

Vanessa, who runs for the firm next to ours, says don't date a trader, they're all married to the market. Darlene says the same thing, but with more swear words. I said it's just dinner.

It was a good dinner.

THURSDAY, JULY 24, 1997

A trader yelled at me today in front of the whole pit. I brought an order to the wrong broker. Same jacket color, two steps over, and I was moving fast, and I handed it to the wrong guy. The right guy noticed in about three seconds and turned around and let me have it. Words I won't put on the Internet. People on the steps were laughing.

I fixed it, got the order to the right guy, and nobody lost money, which on the floor is the only thing that matters. But I shook the rest of the morning.

At dinner I told my dad. He's been a cop thirty years. He put down his fork and said, "Did you cry?" I said no. He said, "Good. Did you fix it?" I said yes. He said, "Good. Then it's done. Tomorrow you walk past that guy and say good morning like nothing happened." So I will.

Also, it's hot. The floor is air-conditioned but there are thousands of people in it and everybody's running, and I sweat through my jacket every day. I've gone through two pairs of gym shoes since April. The floor is hard on shoes. The floor is hard on everything.

MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1997

The Bulls won the title Friday night, number five. Paul and I watched Game 6 at a bar near my parents' house and when Kerr hit the shot at the end the whole place jumped so hard the TV fell off its shelf. Somebody caught it. Nobody cared.

So this morning the floor was in a great mood, everybody hoarse already, and then the beans opened and it all went out the window. July beans are crazy right now. The old-crop beans are almost gone, the ones from last fall's harvest, and the guys who need them are fighting over what's left until the new crop comes in. The July contract jumps around like it's got something in its shoe. Darlene says she's seen it before. She says it every time.

FLOOR WORD: old crop / new crop. Old crop is what's left of last year's harvest. New crop is what's growing in the field right now. In the summer, they're two different animals.

FRIDAY, MAY 16, 1997

I put up this page! My sister Tricia showed me how over the phone from her dorm, which took two hours and cost my parents a fortune. I wrote the first two entries in a notebook on the train and typed them in tonight.

Today I want to write about Darlene.

Darlene Mayes has been a clerk in the bean pit since 1974. She clerks for a broker who fills orders for one of the big commission houses, and she stands on the second step in a gray jacket with her hair up in a clip and a pencil behind each ear. She has a voice that cuts through the whole pit like a car alarm. There are maybe a handful of women in the bean pit, and when I say handful I mean you could count them on one hand, and she's been there the longest.

She noticed me on my second day because I was the only other woman running orders to her side of the pit. On my third day she said, "You. Come here," and gave me three rules.

1. Never let them see you cry. Cry in the ladies' room. Nobody follows you in there.
2. Get your time stamps right. Everybody else will be wrong. You be right.
3. If somebody grabs you, you grab back harder and then you tell me.

Nobody has grabbed me yet. I've cried in the ladies' room once. My time stamps are perfect.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 1997

Hand signals. Everybody asks.

The pit is too loud to hear anything, so everybody talks with their hands. Palms facing in, toward yourself, means buy. Palms facing out, away from you, means sell. You show how many with your fingers held against your face, at your chin for ones and up at your forehead for tens. The price is your hand held out in front of you. So you can buy ten at a price from forty feet away without saying a word, while six hundred people are screaming.

The phone desks around the edge of the floor talk to the pits the same way. There are clerks who do nothing all day but stand at the desks and flash signals to the brokers in the pit and read the signals coming back. They're called arbs. Their hands go so fast it looks like they're swatting bees.

I practice in the mirror at home. My mom walked in on me last night and asked if I was having a stroke.

SUNDAY, APRIL 13, 1997

First week on the floor. I'm writing this in a notebook on the couch with ice on my feet.

Who I am: Michele Brumfield. Twenty-two. Southwest Side of Chicago, where the planes into Midway go right over the roof. My dad's a cop, my mom works at the parish office, my big brother Paul fixes CTA buses, my little sister Tricia is a freshman downstate. I got my business degree in December, also downstate, and I sent out sixty resumes and got a lot of very nice letters saying no.

A friend of my dad's from the job has a cousin who runs a phone desk for a clearing firm at one of the futures exchanges downtown. One phone call later I'm a runner.

A runner runs. The phone desks around the edge of the floor take orders from customers. They write the order on a ticket, time-stamp it, and hand it to a runner, and the runner gets it to the broker in the pit as fast as humanly possible, and brings the filled order back. All day. From 9:30 till the close at 1:15. My boss is Johnny at the desk, who has a phone on each ear and has said maybe ten words to me, eight of them "Go."

The room is bigger than a football field and it's the loudest place I've ever been, and I grew up across the street from a Little League field and around the corner from a firehouse. Thousands of people screaming numbers at once. Paper everywhere, ankle-deep by the close. Everybody in colored jackets with badges on the front with three letters on them, like license plates.

My jacket is the firm's color, kelly green, and they only had one left, a men's large. It comes down to my knees. I roll up the sleeves twice. I look like a kid wearing her dad's coat to play dress-up, and the first morning a trader with a gray mustache looked at me and said, "Who let the Girl Scout in?"

I'll tell you who. The Southwest Side let the Girl Scout in.

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