Chapter 49

January 16, 1979

It was cold that day, but not horribly so for January. It was a Tuesday and Tim was inside the house with his crew working on drywall. It seemed to Tim that his life was settling into a rut. First he’d tear out the walls, fix the wiring, put up new walls, tape them, paint them, and then put on the fixtures. Once all of that was done, the carpet layer would come in and install the flooring. Then it would be on to the next interior.

It wasn’t that simple. There was also the installation of the appliances. Sink, dishwasher, refrigerator, stove, and oven. He couldn’t forget the cabinets. Tim had to admit that he tended to purchase cabinets that were a bit above the regular. He not only wanted appearance; he also wanted durability, functionality, and ease of installation. Getting any two was easy, but the third tended to cost a bit of money.

Today they were painting. One of his crew had brought his work radio and were playing it pretty loud. The two guys who listened to it the most were real headbangers and loved the music loud. There were few rooms where you could work in which you couldn’t hear the music. He was happy listening to the music for the most part.

The station they were listening to was pretty good at playing the music rather than airing commercials or having the disk jockey perform monologues. It did break for five minutes at the top of the hour to recite a little of the headline news. It seemed that even headbangers were kept aware of current events.

Tim wasn’t really paying much attention to the radio until the news came on. Even then, it was just a background noise. It wasn’t until the announcer started talking about Iran that he stopped what he was doing and listened.

“ ... to Egypt claiming health problems and the need for a vacation. The Shah has left Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar in charge of the country...”

Tim tuned out the rest of the announcement which was about the turmoil and tensions that had been building in Iran. He’d heard the important part, namely that the Shah had fled the country. This first announcement didn’t include any suggestion about Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Iran from Paris.

Thinking about the news, Tim finished painting the wall. It wasn’t good to run off with a wall half painted. He didn’t rush the job. One of the reasons that they made so much money flipping houses was that they never brushed over a problem, but fixed it correctly. He was getting paid a good deal of money to fix up the house.

He informed his crew that he was going to be gone for the rest of the day and that they were to continue painting. He made a quick tour of the house trying to see how much they could finish for the day. He figured they’d get the walls done. He could return that evening to start painting the trim.

Grabbing a coat, he headed over to Benny’s house. It was half a block from the house he was restoring. He actually viewed what he was doing as restoring rather than remodeling. Remodeling suggested a few cosmetic changes here and there. He was leaving the house in its original architectural form. The work he was doing was more like restoration, in which he was having to do major structural fixes, rewiring, replacement of windows and doors, and even fixing up the plumbing.

Without knocking, Tim went into the house. Benny wasn’t in his living room. Tim went up to the study and found Benny at his desk reading a book. One look at Benny let Tim know that Benny was lost in his own magical world. He hated to interrupt him like this, but felt that the news was too important.

“Benny.”

When Benny didn’t respond, Tim shook him by the shoulder. Benny looked up from the book irritated at the interruption.

“What?” Benny asked.

“The Shah went on vacation.”

Benny sat up straight. Just to confirm that he heard correctly, he said, “The Shah of Iran went on vacation?”

“Yes. That’s what they said on the radio.”

“That’s very interesting. You know what that means.”

Benny got up and grabbed his heavy coat. It had been cold out earlier with the temperature in mid-thirties.

“You betcha. The price of oil is about to go bat-shit crazy. So what do we need to do make a pot load of money on this?”

“We go see our stock broker, Mr. Robert Kane.”

“He’s not really a stock broker.”

“I know, but he knows more about this stuff than anyone else we know,” Benny said.

“That’s true.”

Remembering the money they had stashed away in the stock market, Benny said, “We’ve still got that money we put in the stock market. Our thousand dollars is now worth about three grand.”

“Will that let us do anything?”

“Three thousand? It should,” Benny answered while pulling on his coat.

It was forty-five minutes later when the two of them walked into the pawn shop. Robert was busy talking with a young man with long scraggly hair and wearing torn up clothes. The guy was nothing but skin and bone.

Robert spotted them and called out, “I’ll be right with you, Benny.”

“Okay,” Benny said.

Robert returned to dealing with the young man. Spreading his hands wide, Robert said, “Look, man. I’m not saying you stole this, but I’m convinced it is stolen. I’m not taking it.”

“C’mon! I need the money.”

“It’s stolen.”

“Man! Look. I’m desperate.”

“Get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

The guy grabbed the necklace and stormed out. He passed Benny and Tim while giving them a snarl.

Tim asked, “What was that about?”

“Damned speed freak. He comes in here with a thousand dollar necklace to pawn. You know it has to be stolen. That guy has no business with a necklace like that.”

“I guess you have to deal with that kind of stuff.”

“Yes.”

Tim looked down at the case. He observed, “There’s a lot of silver jewelry here.”

Robert looked down at the case realizing that he had done something pretty stupid. There was nothing like have a whole bunch of silver with ridiculously low prices on display just before the price of silver went up. The price of silver had already risen to $6.00 an ounce. Considering that a year ago it was around $5.00, that was a move in the right direction. Considering that it represented a 50% increase in price over a two year period after years of being stable at $4.00 an ounce, Robert had become convinced that Benny was right in saying that someone was taking over the market. He was kind of surprised that no one had noticed that yet.

“I’ll be packing it away soon. I’ve got a feeling that the market is going to start going up soon.”

“Well, we’ve got a problem,” Benny said.

“What?”

“The Shah went on vacation.”

“So?”

“The Shah went on vacation.”

“I’m not following you,” Robert said.

Tim said, “The Shah of Iran just fled the country. There’s a revolution going on there. They’re going to stop producing oil and the price of oil is going to go through the roof. There are going to be lines at the gas station. It’s going to get crazy.”

“Don’t do this to me. We’ve got everything tied up in silver.”

“I know,” Benny said. “We didn’t know which was going to go up first, silver or oil.”

“Look, if you’ve got a little extra cash around then I’ll help you invest it. I’m consolidating our investments around silver. I’m not going to change horses mid-stream.”

“We can make money,” Benny said.

“You tell me that oil is going to double. Normally, I would be jumping up and down, except you’ve told me that the price of silver is going to go from six dollars to forty five dollars. That’s going up more than seven times. So, we can drop everything to double our money or we can hold onto what we have and increase out money seven-fold. Which do you want?”

“Seven-fold.”

“Good choice.”

“Still...”

“You’re the mathematician. Tell me how much we could make with oil doubling versus how much we’ll lose if the money has been taken away from silver and silver goes up just three more dollars an ounce,” Robert said.

Benny thought about it. He figured that if they sold a thousand dollars worth of silver at $6.00 an ounce and bought oil with it that they’d have two thousand dollars after selling the oil. If the price of silver went up $3.00, then they’d be buying the silver back at $9.00 an ounce. They’d still make more money, but it wouldn’t be double. If the price of silver doubled, then they wouldn’t have gained anything.

After a moment of thought, Benny said, “You’re not quite right, but you’re right enough. We don’t know when silver is going to take off. If it doubles in the same amount of time that oil doubles, we don’t gain anything.”

Tim said, “Benny! We’ve been waiting for this to happen since the Yom Kipper war broke out.”

“Tim, Robert is right. We could make some money, but we’re taking a risk. What if oil doesn’t go up as quick as the silver? We’ll lose out.”

“I do remember that the Iranian hostage situation is going to come to an end when Reagan gets into office.”

“That’s two years from now.”

Robert asked, “What’s the Iranian hostage situation?”

Tim answered, “That’s when the Iranian rebels take over the US embassy in Iran and hold our people hostage.”

“It’s what got Reagan elected,” Benny added.

Robert was thinking that the primary wasn’t even for another year and they were talking about Reagan being the next president. The idea of Iranians taking an American embassy hostage was ludicrous. After all, there were Marines guarding it. Still, Benny and Tim were so matter of fact about those events that he felt he had to give them the benefit of the doubt. He couldn’t believe that they had rehearsed that conversation, it was just too spontaneous.

Tim said, “I wish we had paid a lot more attention to what was happening in the world during our first time through. It would be so much easier this time through.”

“I know,” Benny said.

“We were just too damned poor to worry about anything other than ourselves.”

That was a good summary of why Benny and Tim, despite being smart, had no clear idea of when significant events happened. At the time, the fall of the Shah was far less important than getting the money to buy the part that would repair the car so that they could get to work to earn money so that they wouldn’t be homeless. Later when the gasoline prices went up, they didn’t care about what month it was, they had to scramble to feed the car enough fuel to get to and from work that day.

To them, the most significant thing about that time, was always the immediate present and the future. The electric bill was due in three days. Payday was in five days. Even a past due bill was just something they had to pay now or in the future. It wasn’t important when it went past due only that it did.

Thinking more like the sixty-five year old man he actually was, Benny said, “Robert, you should really pay attention to what’s happening now if you ever decide to come back. It’s not enough to know the broad sweep of history; you’ve got to remember the details as well.”