Ghosts of Manhattan (11 page)

“Jesus, I hope you didn't.” Jack is loving this story. Nothing gets him energized like this, like a dog being fed a strip steak, eating it down so fast he's barely chewing.

“So I told him I smoke, I drink too much, I do cocaine, I like strippers, love hookers, I think his other daughter is pretty hot, and I'd kinda like to nail her too.”

Silence. We sit looking at William, blinking. Woody snickers, still with his hand over his mouth. I look at William, my face expressionless except my eyebrows are as high as my forehead can pull them, trying to decide if it is possible that he said those words.

“Are you serious?” Jack looks at William with awe. An almost impossible expression for his face.

“No. But I wish I had. The guy was such an ass.”

“What did you really say?”

“I just told him where I'm from, where I went to school, I work hard and career is important, I want kids, and family is most important.”

“Was he buying it?”

“Not really. He said he's concerned about my drinking and my quote unquote nightlife.”

“You're famous in Arizona now?”

“Jen must have told her parents a few things. She's close with her mom. I guess when we argue, she talks to the mom, then the mom talks to the dad.”

“So how did it wrap up?”

“Well, I was getting pissed. I didn't count on the third degree. I would tell him it's under control but he kept pushing, so finally I told him, look, this is just a courtesy. I don't appreciate getting grilled.”

“Jesus. And you're still getting married.”

“At the end he let it go. He said of course they'd support our decision to get married. So then we watched the game in total silence for two hours until Jen and her mom got back.”

“You're off to a beautiful start. I'm sure he'll give a lovely toast at the wedding.”

Appetizers and more drinks arrive. Jack and Woody make trips to the men's room. Coke doesn't inhibit the drinking but it does knock back the appetite. Probably why Jack's whole body isn't fat, just his face.

William asks, “Hey, Nick, what's the deal with that guy Fred Cook who keeps coming around the office to talk with you? Guy looks like a real douche.”

I turn to William. “Watch it, twerp.”

“Doesn't he work in the risk group?”

“Yeah.”

“He's worried about all the crap you guys are slinging around?” Jack asks. Jack is a drunk but he also has a lot more sophistication about the markets than William or Woody.

“I suppose he is a little.”

“He should be. Mortgage market is overheated. Everyone has a story about their dog walker buying a mansion. And the credit
default market is just creating more leverage. Getting so there's more insurance on bonds than actual bonds.”

“That feels true. I'm mainly doing CDS trades instead of the bonds,” says William.

“We're just moving this crap around and around and around. There's no way this paper's as good as where it's priced. If the insurance ever actually gets pulled in, the whole thing is screwed.” Jack actually looks a little distressed.

“Careful, Jack, don't put that in an email,” I say. “We've been warned about that. Verbally warned. Email is like signing, notarizing, and filing a statement with the SEC.”

William seems like he's barely paying attention. “Things always wind up and then unwind, that's just the way it goes.” He speaks like a kid who has never had anything catch up with him in his whole life yet.

Jack seems to recognize that he is not playing his usual role as the reckless one. “That's an awfully long view of the world, four years out of college.” He takes another drink. “Maybe you're right, though.” He seems to want to change the conversation, and so do I.

“That hostess looks good to me,” Jack says looking across the room with intent as though trying to read the lettering on a billboard that is just out of range. I hadn't noticed on the way in, and the three of us turn in unison to see a hostess that is decidedly not hot. She's a bit overweight but not so much that she won't wear skintight pants and a tube top that accentuates her potbelly. Her hair is weirdly punked out, her nose is hooked, and she has layered on eye shadow that is one shade more heinous than interstate blue.

“Jack, what are you talking about?” Woody has genuine concern
in his voice, like a relative at the bedside of a sick and delusional man.

“What do you mean? You would turn that down?”

“Yes, I would turn that down.”

“Come on. She's sexy.”

“She has a big ass and an ugly face.”

“She has nice shoulders. You can see the muscle definition in her traps. Makes me want to rub them.” I've seen this before with Jack. He manages to find a single redeeming feature in an otherwise unattractive woman. It isn't always the shoulders. It could be the chest, legs, or lips. He'll lock on to that feature and want to sleep with the woman. There's some flattery in there for women unaccustomed to it, but when I look at Jack's glare, I know this makes him more greedy than generous.

“You need help, buddy.” Woody shakes his head, unable to generate any feeling of sexual attraction for the hostess.

William is also frowning and looking confused. “Jack, let's get out to a strip club after dinner. We'll go up to Scores. We need to recalibrate your settings.”

“Man, I got busted by my girlfriend a couple nights ago,” says Woody.

“For what?” Clearly it could have been any number of things.

“For going to Scores. She knows I go but she doesn't like it so I usually don't tell her. She thinks I go a couple times a year when I absolutely have to for work. I just tell her I've been out drinking.”

“How'd she bust you?” William sees an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.

“The stripper glitter.”

“Stripper glitter?”

“The what?” Jack and I get this out at the same time. We've been around a while and haven't heard this one.

“You know. The lotion with the sparkles in it that they rub all over themselves. Makes them glitter when they dance around. I got home early enough that night that Beth was still up. I gave her a kiss and when I looked down she was glittering! At the same time she looked up and saw I was glittering. It was all over my face and neck and arms. Jig was up.”

Stripper glitter. Jack and I can add that to our vocabulary. A contribution from the next generation of lap dancees. The glitter lotion must be a new thing. I'm getting old.

“Right. That goddamn stripper glitter. It's hard to get off.” William purses his lips, trying to solve the riddle.

“Nick, you haven't been, you must be dying.” Jack tosses the white bag over the table and it lands on my fork.

“Thanks.” I shove it away in my pant pocket and head for the men's room. I climb the spiral staircase feeling the coke like stones in my pocket. Closing the bathroom door behind me and locking in my solitude gives me a fleeting feeling of comfort and safety, until I pull out the bag and put it on the ledge of the sink. I lean over, hands braced on either side of the sink well the way a person does when he might throw up, and I stare down at the little white bag.

Ten years ago I did blow without thinking much about it. Just isolated moments that did no harm. Of course I knew it wasn't great. You just need to hear yourself snorting to know something isn't right. But I didn't have the knowledge then that it isn't an isolated moment, that there is a cumulative effect, that it can spread like a cancer through the rest of your life. I was innocent of that then. A kid having fun who didn't know better, maybe shouldn't know better. Now I do know better. Doing it now means more.

I try to imagine William and Woody with a few years more on their twenty-six. They could be like Jack. Like me. Something
better or worse. I'm not just on the outside looking in at them. I'm right in the mix. It occurs to me that during their private minutes in the men's room tonight when the sound of their snorting reached their own ears, they may have had the same thoughts, made similar comparisons to me. I'm not just a spectator holding tickets to the circus. I'm a clown who can't leave his dysfunctional circus family because he can't remember who he was before becoming a clown.

I unlock the cellophane bag, dip in my key, lift it to my nostril, and listen to my violent inhale.

You can have anything you want but you better not take it from me.

—G
UNS
N' R
OSES

December 6, 2005

I AGREE TO MEET FREDDIE COOK AT A STARBUCKS A
few blocks from the office. He had called my home again this morning with the hushed and rapid diction of a panicked target in a spy novel. Something serious had happened the night before, he said, and we needed to talk in person right away.

I pull open the door to the Starbucks and see Freddie sitting by himself at a table in the corner drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He's wearing a suit and it seems his mission is to show that a man wearing a suit can look just as unkempt as a man in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He's making a statement to Bear that you can make me wear a suit but you can't make me look good. I don't think it's deliberate, he just doesn't know any better.

I pat him on the shoulder as I walk up to him and sit down. Even the pad in the shoulder of his suit is wrinkled and bent. His body looks soft like raw dough and I feel I could push my finger right through him and see it push out against the skin on the other side of him. He has light-brown hair, ruffled like his suit, and it covers his ears with a couple inches not because it is the
style he chose but because he hasn't had a haircut in a few months. He's probably thirty-five and still speckled with pimples around his jaw and forehead from all the pizza and soda. Not even beer but just soda, like he's still a nervous teenager.

“Pepsi?”

“I hate coffee.”

“Why the hell'd you pick Starbucks?”

“It's a long story. Someone's meeting us later. I need to talk to you first.”

“Okay. Who's meeting us?”

“I'll get to that in a minute. Nick, my analysis is pointing to some very strong conclusions. Very strong. People aren't going to want to see it.”

“Take it easy, Freddie. You're doing good work. People are going to want to understand your perspective.” Freddie takes an apple out of his jacket pocket and rips his teeth into it like a sailor off a ship. He has no manners at all.

“They're not going to want to understand it, because then they're going to have to deal with it. I'm already getting pressure from my boss to put it aside. He's getting less subtle about it. I think he's getting pressure from somewhere farther up.”

“You might just be reading into things. Your job is to analyze the risk of the firm.”

“But they don't want me to analyze the risk. They don't want me coming back and reporting that our current strategy is dangerously irresponsible. Have you talked about any of this to Joe?”

I report directly to Joe Sansone and Joe reports directly to Dale Brown, the president of Bear who runs all of sales and trading. Joe is inept and insincere and should never be put in charge of another human being. He's a classic example of a very good sales guy who was then promoted to a management position for which he is
wholly unequipped. He has the skills and personality to be a pure sales guy and nothing else. “No.”

“Good. I don't think you should say anything to him yet.”

“I wasn't planning to, but Freddie, don't you think you're making too big a deal of this?”

“There's a lot of money at stake, Nick. I'm getting pushback on this report before people have even seen it. They just know what it might say and they don't want to hear it. We're selling mortgage-backed securities that are grossly inflated in value. In my opinion, fraudulently inflated. This will crash and at that point whoever holds a significant position in these securities will get burned. Right now, it's us getting burned. If they get warned on the record about the risk and they don't do anything about it, they can get burned if things go bad. But I'm not going to be silent. I'm not going to say what they want to hear and hang my own ass out there.”

“How bad is it?”

“This isn't like losing a bet and you move on to try to win the next bet. Every bet is linked to a thousand other bets. It's one bet for the whole system. It wouldn't be like a fire that runs out of wood and burns itself out. Nick, this is like a nuclear reactor meltdown and the first small explosion becomes fuel itself for a growing problem that doesn't end but keeps growing and getting worse and that can't be stopped unless you sacrifice everything and shut everything down.”

Freddie looks so nervous and frantic that his story seems less credible. He looks like a mad scientist. But since he's the smartest guy at Bear and one of the few whose salary is not directly linked to trading commissions, it's worth hearing what he has to say. “How are you coming up with this?” I ask.

“I wrote a custom software program that takes into account
our position and the risk of the mortgage securities but also the overall context of the market around us, basically what other companies will do. It's the difference between roulette and poker. If you play roulette and put a million dollars on red, it doesn't change anything around you. They still spin the wheel and it doesn't have anything to do with your bet. But if you play poker and take a card, then bet a million bucks, every player around you reacts. They fold, call, or raise and build a strategy based on your action. A lot of models that look at Bear treat it like roulette, but it's really poker. If we make a big move, it will set off a chain of reactions.”

Freddie looks down at his watch.