Play it Again Sam Pt. 03

So yeah, money. I didn't have it.

So every day, after I had made my ten attempts at cracking Julie's cellphone, I did something I hadn't planned on...going to work.

Don't get me wrong, I hadn't forgotten that my wife was a slag. But I needed something to distract myself.

The first few nights, after I had either been locked out of or given up on Julie's devices, I did something I had never done before...drunk myself into a stupor.

I am not a drinker. My theory was that most people start drinking young to fit in and be "cool." College almost makes heavy drinking a course requirement. By the time we reach adulthood, drinking seems like a prerequisite to have fun.

I hadn't started young. My parents only had the occasional beer. I had never seen them drink more than two in a sitting. They let me satisfy my curiosity with a few sips over the years.

I'm just going to say it- beer tastes like ass. I have serious doubts that very many people had their first beer and loved it. It's an acquired taste. I'd never acquired it.

But now I was looking for a way to escape my painful reality, and nothing kills brain cells and fogs memories like hard alcohol. I found a new appreciation for the joys of liquor.

I bought several bottles of hard liquor and retired to my hotel du jour. Then I would drink myself stupid until I woke up the next morning. One benefit of the time loop...no hangovers!

But an unexpected drawback of this plan put an end to my drinking binge.

I must have drank too fast and passed out. That was my intention, but I didn't plan on waking up still on Friday.

I had my first dream in a month.

...

I am sitting on the couch in our living room. My mother and Nancy Reagan are having a conversation from the armchairs on either side me.

"Well of course of course you can have my meatloaf recipe Nancy. The secret is using crushed potato chips instead of breadcrumbs."

"But won't they get soggy, Rhonda?" asks Mrs. Reagan.

"Yes, they're not for texture so much as flavor. I'm telling you, Ron will love it."

"I hope so. Lately he has seemed so distant. He's taken a part-time job, greeting at the Walmart. I'm afraid it's a bit of a let down after leading the free world. I worry that he may be depressed."

"Well," my mom asks. "Have you tried giving him a blowjob?"

"Of course! That was the first thing I tried. I even took my teeth out."

"Let me tell you about something that Sam's father just adores. It's called a Tijuana Slider-"

My mother is interrupted by a banging sound above our heads.

"Those kids!" says an exasperated Rhonda. "They're up there jumping on the bed again. Sam, could you go up and tell them to settle down?"

"Sure mom," I reply.

I get up and walk to the stairs. I'm having a hard time walking up them. I look down and see my pants are around my ankles. I start to reach down to pull up my pants.

"No, no Samuel," calls Nancy. "Leave them. In fact, pull down those bloomers."

I sigh, "Yes, Mrs. President."

I skin my tighty whiteys down. I see that I'm smooth like a Ken doll. I am not alarmed.

I can't step up with my ankles trapped, so I hop up the stairs. I fall several times, but eventually I reach the top. I mince my way to the bedroom door and open it...

Julie is kneeling on a giant lily pad next to the bed, wearing a naught nurse outfit.

On the bed are five Dr. Peters. They are naked except for stethoscopes around their necks. They are very hairy, with a slight simian cast to their features.

They are jumping up and down on the bed, stethoscopes and penises flopping. Julie is clapping in time as she sings.

"Five little monkeys...jumping on the bed...one fell off...and he got head."

One of the Peters hops off the bed and shoves his cock in Julie's mouth. He grabs the back of her head and fucks her mouth. After a few minutes he pulls out and cums on her face.

He steps away and Julie starts clapping again, hair and face matted in semen.

"FOUR little monkeys...jumping on the bed...one fell off-"

...

"AAAHHHAHAHAHA"

I woke up in a cold sweat and looked at the clock. 12:45pm. I grabbed the last unopened bottle of rum sitting on the bed beside me. I chugged it as fast as I could. I got dizzy and nauseous, but kept drinking.

...

Friday July 15^th, 2016 Day 26

"What is love? Baby don't hurt me....don't hurt me....no more"

"No more drinking."

I vowed to stop getting drunk every day. But if I wasn't going to drink to distract myself, then I needed something else.

So started Operation Instant Millionaire.

I still spent the morning commute entering PIN codes into Julie's phone. But when I arrived in New York, I actually went to work.

I had briefly considered stealing the money. I didn't need to worry about getting caught. I had access to the private account information of the members of my mutual funds. I could drain off enough money to last the day before anyone above me caught on. And if I did get caught, I would only spend a few hours in jail.

But I'm not wired that way. Plus, I had the means to make a quick fortune honestly...day trading.

I didn't do any trading for customers at Broadwell and Marx. My job was purely analytical. But I did have access to all the company's standard market analysis tools, and the ability to execute trades on my personal portfolio.

I didn't have much money in my stock portfolio (at least comparatively). About $20,000. Personally I would have rather used that money to pay down some of my debt. But for a Wall Street denizen to not have any money invested is taboo. It's like a vegetarian butcher.

In fact, even though our personal finances are supposed to be private, the higher ups use their system access to peak. I'd often wondered if my unwillingness to risk my own money in the market was holding me back at Broadwell and Marx. Sometimes, Dwayne Maxwell, one of the VPs, would give me a look like I had PUSSY branded on my forehead. The rest were more subtle, but my biannual reviews were often peppered with thinly veiled hints that I needed to be a more aggressive investor if I wanted to be noticed.

But you may be asking, 'why work on Wall Street if you don't trust your own judgement to invest?'

I do trust my judgement. If I do the research on a company, I have no problem pulling the trigger. But I don't want to spend all my free time working. I can't invest in the companies and products that I scout for our mutual funds. They have a name for that- insider trading.

Our funds have huge buying power, the accumulated wealth of thousands of investors. So when the fund buys a stock, the price moves. Every stock that is bought or sold moves the price point. With a single trade, our B&M Small Captl Growth Fund, for instance, can buy several hundred thousand shares of a company. If you were to have advance knowledge of such a transaction...

So I couldn't trade in stocks that I researched for the firm. All the long hours I put in doing analysis were useless for personal enrichment. I would have to do more market research on my own time.

Or I could do what many of my colleagues did- cheat. While I couldn't trade on my own inside information, I might be able to get away with trading on others info. Say a friend working in another division knows about a big deal coming up with his fund. He passes the info to me so I can use it to make a quick profit. Then I return the favor at some point in the future.

Just as illegal, but harder to prove. This is in part how the wolves of Wall Street make their fortunes. They are careful to leave no trail. No emails. Nothing in writing. All communication either in person or over burner phones. They don't all do it, but most cut corners to some extent.

Even getting caught is not a black mark. You may pay some fines, even do a short stint in federal prison. But if you made a boatload of money for yourself and especially for your investors... Wall Street is quick to forgive.

There was no doubt that my refusal to play the game had held me back in my career. My ability to network and make connections in the financial world was hindered by my lack of back scratching.

Truthfully, I might have given in to the pressure to succeed. Left on my own, I would have skirted the bounds of the law, and fuck ethics.

But Julie was my wife, the woman who I considered the embodiment of personal and professional integrity. I wouldn't have wanted to disappoint her.

I no longer gave a fuck what my wife thought. I would have happily turned to a life of crime, so long as this time loop lasted.

But I didn't need to. I could make money honestly, so that's what I would rather do.

The stock market opened at 9:30, and closed at 4:30.

I spent days watching the market in real time, making note of every change that could make me money with advance knowledge, which was literally everything. The problem was not finding a way to make money. The problem was narrowing down the list to something I could memorize. My notes would disappear with the dawn.

I needed to book my trades in advance, so that I could go to the office in the morning, and then watch my bank accounts balloon over the course of the day. I bought futures, shorted stocks, purchased on margin.

I started to make trades the second day.

After a week I was pulling in about $300,000 at close of business.

After two it was 1.2 million.

I never stopped making small corrections to my formula. I was only limited by my own memory and ability to retain information, which both steadily improved with my time stuck in the loop.

Eventually I was turning my $20,000 into over 7 million dollars. It could have been more, but I would have had to let the entire amount ride until the market closed at 4:30. Instead I set it up so money would start syphoning off into my checking account at 10am. It would progressively grow until I had the full amount with easy access to spend.

Now I had the money to do whatever I wanted.

Right around the time I made my first million, I managed to crack Julie's phone.

...

Friday July 15^th, 2016 Day 44

"What is love? Baby don't hurt me....don't hurt me....no more"

I was making my daily commute, going through the motions of trying to get into Julie's phone. My mind was actually more on refining my stock trades than the phone.

Her passcode was our wedding anniversary. I wasn't sure how to feel about that.

I decided to delay gratification for a bit. I went into work and booked my orders for the day. Then I found a quiet spot in the New York Public Library where I could examine the phone uninterrupted.

As I expected, there was a treasure trove of texts and emails. I spent the rest of the day reading them.

The texts only went back eight months, when we both got new phones. The emails went back over a year. We had free email accounts that had limited storage, so occasionally we would have to erase old correspondence.

The bad news was that the affair with Peters had been going on for several months. I had been sure that what I saw wasn't the first time, but the texts confirmed it. I saw that they had planned their Friday dalliance several days in advance. Julie must have contacted him to cancel on the days that we spent talking about the time loop.

This explained why she was so anxious when I mentioned surprising her with lunch. I wondered if she was stressed at the thought that my time loop fell on a day she planned to cheat on me. She was probably praying that the loop would close before she got caught.

Also, my fears were confirmed that Liz and Emma knew that Julie was cheating on me. They would dish back and forth about her latest meeting with Dr. Dick. They also talked about ways to keep me from finding out. Since I had an hour and a half commute to and from New York, there was very little chance of me catching her so long as she kept her clandestine meetings to the daytime.

The deceit and betrayal made me angry. The lack of respect and humiliation of telling her friends and family that she was putting the horns on me was enraging.

The texts between Julie and Dr. Dick were typical bullshit. Outrageous flirting and innuendo that looked like it was written by two teenagers and not married professionals. They only talked about two things- what they were going to do to each other, and in Dr. Dick's case, making sure his wife didn't find out. Julie never voiced any concern about me catching them.

But there was worse revealed by her texts.

First, while she only shared the details of her illicit sex life with her two besties, there were several comments that made it clear that others knew as well.

From Liz, "Did Susan (Julie's boss) give you any flack for taking a two hour lunch yesterday?"

"Nah, she knows that I always make up any time I miss. And she says that a good lay makes me more productive, LOL."

From Emma, "Mom is going to organize a 5k Cancer walk with her church group. She wants you ask Dr. Peters if he'll give a short speech beforehand."

"Why doesn't she ask him herself? I'll introduce her."

"Why do think dummy? She's not fucking him, ROFL."

My blood was boiling. Her mom and boss both knew. If her boss knew, it was probably common knowledge at the hospital. I didn't see any texts that explicitly talked about anyone else being in the know, but there were subtle hints that she didn't really try to hide what she was doing. Trenton was a big city, she didn't have to worry about small town gossip. But she didn't seem worried that any of our circle of friends and family would out her. To me, that said they knew and were complicit.

But the worst thing revealed by the texts and emails was not her brazen fling with Dr. Dick. No, the worst was that the texts made clear that Peters was not special.

The affair with Peters had only being going on a few months. Julie had been cheating long before that. Before Peters, there was another doctor, a pediatrician. Before the pediatrician was a neighbor who lived two streets over from us. Before the neighbor... well that I didn't know.

The emails went a back year, and she had been cheating on me all that time.

I stared at the phone in my hand for a minute. Then I threw it against the wall of my hotel room. I had been aiming for a spectacular shower of plastic and glass. It just bounced off. I walked over and picked it up. The screen had a small crack. Well, shit.

I spent about 30 seconds working the protective cover off. This time I hurled it as hard as I could at the opposite wall. It dented the sheetrock and the battery popped out, but it still looked mostly intact.

"Fuck!! Why won't you die?!" I screamed, as I jumped up and down on the phone. "Worthless piece of shit! God damned whore!"

Someone started pounding on the wall. "Hey! Keep it down in there! People are trying to sleep!"

"Fuck off!" I yelled.

But I did cut it out.

It was late, so I turned off the lights and laid on top of the bedspread, still fully dressed.

Up until reading her communications, I had still harbored some small hope for my marriage. If the affair with Dr. Dick had been a recent lapse of judgement, and Julie had shown true remorse... I may have been willing to forgive her, or at least table the issue until the time loop ended. Honestly, my entire world outside of the office revolved around her. I could have swallowed some pride if I could get my loving wife back.

Now, did I ever really have her? How could she have been stabbing me in the back for so long, with so little regard for my feelings, my love, or my reputation? Exactly how long had this gone on? Even in the earliest emails that referred to her lovers, it was treated as old hat.

I wanted to know more, and the texts pointed to a way. Several times, Julie and her sister talked about their diaries. Either they would mention that such and such needed to go in the diary, or they were writing in them as they were texting back and forth.

I had no idea that Julie kept a diary. I suppose if I had still trusted her, that wouldn't have bothered me. Diaries are by their nature deeply personal. If I had known she had one, I would have itched to get a peek at it. It's human nature.

But where was it? If it was a digital diary, I wasn't looking forward to resuming my efforts to hack into her laptop. I would do it, but I thought it was more likely that she kept a physical diary. Julie prided herself on her penmanship. She looked for any excuse to send a handwritten letter or card. I was confident that if she kept a diary, it would be traditional paper and ink.

Tomorrow I would look for it.

For the first time since I was a little boy, I cried myself to sleep.

...

Friday July 15^th, 2016 Day 45

"What is love? Baby don't hurt me....don't hurt me....no more"

In the morning I used the time before Julie's alarm went off to search the more unlikely hiding spots in our house. Our McMansion was way too big for two people. Julie said we would need it when we had kids. I thought we would have been better served with a smaller home and less debt. You can guess who won that argument.

I searched the kitchen, looking in every cabinet and pantry. I checked behind the waste bin, and even opened the stove, before calling myself a moron and moving on.

I looked in all the downstairs closets and opened every furniture drawer. I wasn't really expecting to find Julie's diary in the public areas of the house, but I had the time to be thorough.

I left the house to give Julie time to get up and go to work. I could have gone to get breakfast, but I just drove a block over and parked. I hadn't had much appetite since catching my wife in bed with Dr. Dick. I could go days at a time without eating, my body replenished itself every morning.

After I was sure she was gone, I drove back home. I would have to go through the same routine at noon. I decided I better search the bedroom before it smelled like sex.

We had a shared office and two spare bedrooms, but the master bedroom seemed the most likely hiding spot for a diary. My hope was I could find it and be gone before Julie brought home Dr. Dick at midday.

Where do women hide things? I thought the best bet was in her walk-in closet. I say her walk-in closet, because there sure as hell wasn't room for my clothes in it. Our master suite wasn't quite ostentatious enough for 'his' and 'hers' walk-in closets, so Julie had purchased an antique armoire for my hanging clothes.

I checked in all the boxes up on the top shelves, swept clothes aside to see behind them, and pulled the shoes out of their cubbies. Nothing. Her bedside table yielded a couple vibrators I didn't know she had (in addition to several I did know about, so no big whoop), but no diary.

Next I turned my attention to her vanity. It was part of a matched set with my armoire. When I was feeling more cynical I thought that if she hadn't found that set and loved the vanity, my clothes would be in another room entirely. It was a monstrous Victorian thing. I looked in all the drawers and found nothing.

I was about to get up and search elsewhere, when I had a thought. Quality antique furniture was known for having hidden compartments. Julie had bought the furniture through a broker. I had just come home one day and it was there. I wasn't happy about the expense, but my suits were already feeling the crush of Julie's expanding clothing collection. So I didn't make her return everything, on the condition that the armoire was mine. I think Julie's plan was to eventually fill the closet and the armoire.