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My Mom and Dad
by
John Falconer
My mom was an Atlanta stock broker. She was famous in financial circles for being the fastest trader in town. Considering her background in Appalachia, where her father had abandoned her because he wanted a son, nobody expected her to move so fast after she arrived in Atlanta with a suitcase held together with chicken wire.
Ma did not have much book-learning but she caught on quick. She had been raised by a cunning hunter who never paid a dime in taxes his whole life, and who managed to run a still for over twenty years without the revenuers catching up with him, so Ma was fast on her feet and crafty when he got done with her. He had taken her in after the death of the grisly old woman who had found her freezing and starving, a baby abandoned to die on a mountainside. And he sure raised her right. Ma could shoot a running squirrel's tail off at a hundred yards, and she could outrun any young man in the valley when she was barely ten-years old. She was a real wheeler-dealer with the whiskey too, nailing the best prices down.
Anyway, when Ma got to Atlanta, she knew enough to get her going. She did have a couple of books in her possession when she arrived: a dog-eared copy of Edith Hamilton's book on mythology, dated 1942, and a beat-up old stock guide. She also had in her suitcase her grubstake, $72,000 in cash off the last batches of white lightning--the hunter had died, and she took over the stills.
No, It didn't take Ma long in Atlanta to learn the ups and downs and how-tos of stock-trading; she'd hunt and hunt day and night for some stock about to go up or down, then she'd go long or short accordingly. She had a keen eye for that, and before long she was really loaded. There was only one faster trader in Atlanta, my dad. He had amassed a small fortune shorting gold stocks, then bought a gold company, sold it, then started trading all kinds of securities on a daily basis. Ma didn't really care what kind of company was involved in her trades either, though she did have a liking for liquor and tobacco companies; come to think of it, she told me once to avoid the golds because they do not move fast enough except in scary situations.
My dad heard about Ma from a guy who said she was a "fast" woman. He misunderstood: he tried to chase her down Peachtree during lunch one day but she easily slipped away, and he could see he was no match for her on the street. He tried to hustle her on the phone, but she had her secretary put him off. Vexed, he started trading against her big time, but she outfoxed him, causing him to drop almost $8 million in one week. Frustrated by her beauty and her trading skills, he conceived a plan to out-distance her.
Dad had a detective friend check out Ma to see what she was most fond of; the dick found out just before he got a load of buckshot in his groin: he traced her back to the valley, where he found out Ma loved apples and shiny things. So Dad commissioned a sculptor to create three marvelous apples of solid gold, each bearing a little inscription professing his love for her. Well, he had them delivered one at a time to her just before crucial trades in a stock they both happened to be manipulating at the time. The golden apples really threw Ma's timing off, and she blew all three trades, two long plays and one short play, all highly leveraged, doubling up with borrowed money the last two deals.
It was the talk of Atlanta. Ma dropped over $130 million and was wiped out by margin calls. Dad went over to her office with roses in hand. They were married in Vegas 7 hours later, and I was conceived shortly thereafter.
--The End--
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