Ghosts of Manhattan (3 page)

It occurs to me that “simple” to him means that any corner that can be cut will be cut. “But aren't you stuck in a relationship covered with itches?”

“But they're mine, it's my business. If I'm okay, the relationship is okay. It's not cheating.”

I don't follow the logic but am amused by it, so I let it pass. I've been to a rub and tug too. It's just been about ten years since and I did it twice in my life. I haven't waved it in a few times a week like a turkey sandwich. “Okay, so what's reason number two?”

“Number two is a little more complicated.” Here we go. “You have to switch roles in your head. If my fiancée had an itch and she went to some Asian guy, or gal, therapist who gave her a massage, then fingered her to orgasm to help her relax and feel good, I wouldn't care. I don't feel an ounce of jealousy over that. It just makes her happier and better able to deal with me.”

I find myself smiling while listening to this. I haven't yet decided if it is sheer lunacy or if there is some twisted genius in what this kid is saying. Jerry has leaned back, slowly nodding, while Ron has an “amen, brother” look on his face. Frank looks confused. The silence from all of us lasts long enough that William just continues.

“Anyway, it's not cheating. Because, what is cheating? Cheating is an affair with someone you know, a personal relationship. Not a professional relationship. An anonymous hooker or massage gal is not cheating.”

He says this with the tone of a philosopher, like he's quoting an important passage. The philosophy of William. A one-woman-and-many-hookers man. I turn and get another drink. Not only did Frank not kill the conversation, but we just brought back a red-light district Frankenstein. I'm still pondering William's theory of personal versus professional cheating, or noncheating. I'm struggling to connect the dots. Good for him if he can get some mileage out of professional noncheating and make it work. I can allow that he is on to something in that there are degrees between the two. I don't think I could handle being on the receiving end of my wife having an affair and actually developing another relationship that had more meaning than just scratching an itch.

From this happy thought I begin to suffer from another bout of the syndrome I have recently begun to call “what am I doing in a bar with a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds when I'm thirty-five.” Bourbon always helps amplify my mood, for good or ill. In the last twenty minutes it's been heading down, and fast. This is my career. By day I sell paper from companies whose business I don't fully understand and could never run. By night, this. I've developed no real talents. A few people report to me, but the extent of my management skills is to give them a hard time over cocktails. Every time I think I need to get out and do something else, that thought is followed up with the realization that there is nothing else. What the hell else can I do? This job is all I've done for more than a dozen years and I have no other skill, if you can even call this a skill. At least I'm making some money. At thirty-five is it too late to pull out and switch careers? I think better never than late.

“Guys, I feel like crap. I'm going to pull the rip cord and get home.”

“What!” in chorus. “Come on. A couple more drinks and we'll head over to Scores. We're already on the East Side.” Jerry
attempts the argument of geographic convenience after having dragged us all the way uptown. Home is downtown and farther west, so there isn't any advantage for me. Plus it has gotten hard to expense strip club bills and we'd probably have to come out of pocket. And I really do feel like crap.

“Not tonight, guys. Enjoy the club, I'm out.” I bolt for the door before they can mount another argument.

November 15, 2005

I GET IN A CAB AND REST ONE SIDE OF MY FOREHEAD
against the glass window. It's about twenty minutes from J. G. Melon to home. I watch a few pedestrians that we pass on the sidewalk, then close my eyes and my mind drifts. I remember my first time at Bear Stearns when I interviewed and got the job. It's the kind of memory people can have that feels like yesterday and also another lifetime. The winter of 1992 is my senior year. I drive to Manhattan in my Explorer that has 190,000 miles on it and is worth less than what I pay the garage to park it for three days in the city.

I have two days of interviews set and I'm planning to sleep on the couch of a Cornell friend who's a first year at Bear.

The interviews themselves are a joke. I've never had a job or done much of anything worth interviewing about. I sit with four different traders each day for two days and I don't think they care anything about what I've done before. I was told ahead of time that the main test I need to pass is whether I'm a guy they could sit next to on a long plane ride without wanting to put a bullet in
their head at the end of the flight. I'm at Cornell, so they assume I'm smart enough. I play lacrosse, so they assume I'm a good guy. As long as I don't walk in there like a cocky punk but show I'm humble and willing to pay my dues, it should be fine.

The interviews are breezing by and all about the same. They ask about what classes I'm taking, how the lacrosse team is doing, and some useless stock interview questions like what's the hardest thing I've ever had to do, what's my greatest strength, greatest weakness.

For the last interview of the second day, they take me to an office on a floor I haven't been to before. The office is small and a mess with papers and magazines. The desk and chairs look like cheap discount office furniture and they point me to an uncomfortable-looking chair in front of a desk with nobody behind it, then close the door.

I sit in the chair and the room is so quiet I can hear the second hand of the clock on the wall. I'm happy I'm almost through this process and looking forward to getting back in my Explorer to listen to music on the drive back to school. Ten minutes pass and I'm getting restless but want to look cool, so I pick up a magazine and flip pages. It's
Fortune
or
Forbes
and I'm not reading anything more than the captions under photographs. Twenty more minutes pass and I've flipped through the magazine twice. I could get another but I'm not reading anyway.

Another half hour passes. I've recrossed my legs in every possible way to distribute the soreness. I decide to stand for a bit and look at pictures on the wall. As soon as I'm up, the office door opens and a voice says, “Sit down.”

I turn to see a massive guy in a suit filling the door frame. Someone had pointed him out to me the day before on the trading floor. The guy had been a tight end for Penn State and joined
Bear after one year as a scrub in the NFL for the Redskins about ten years ago. He's six foot seven, two hundred and eighty pounds. I take a seat. He walks past me and he reeks of whiskey.

He drops into the chair, which looks outmatched, and I imagine it to be anxious about how long it can support him. He eyes me in a suspicious way but he looks too stupid to be thinking anything other than whether he's doing a good job of looking suspicious.

“You want to come work for Bear?”

“I do.” This seems like the obvious answer but it also occurs to me I haven't asked myself the question before, nor has anyone else. Maybe he's brighter than I have given him credit for being.

He finds something amusing in my answer and he smiles and leans back in the chair, which responds with an audible panic. “That a fact.”

This doesn't have the tone of a question but I nod anyway.

“I've seen your type before. Plenty of times.” He shifts again, swinging a leg around the side and banging a foot on top of the desk. I've never seen a shoe like this before. It looks like a kayak wrapped in black leather and flopped across the desktop. Stores probably don't bother to carry shoes this size. I think of the giant bottles of wine the size of a child that aren't really available but are in nice restaurants just for show. He seems aware of the effect his circus-like shoe can have on people, imagining their necks underneath it.

“I don't know what you mean.” I hope my voice sounds even. I think it does. I'm still more amused than nervous.

His smile gets a little bigger. He keeps his foot where it is, reaches into a desk drawer, and comes out with a full liter bottle of Jack Daniels and a short rocks glass. He doesn't seem to be paying much attention to me anymore. He pours a little bit and drinks it
down, then repeats this. He pours a third and puts it down on the desk, holding it in place with his sausage fingers.

I think about getting up and leaving, but his eyes come back to me and it seems like he wants to talk again. I wait for him.

“And what if I don't want you to work for Bear?” He seems to be getting crazier by the second.

“Then you'll tell someone I was a bad interview.”

His shoe comes down faster than I thought possible. The leverage brings his body forward and his hand launches the whiskey at me. It hits me flush in the chest and the vapors of alcohol are in my nostrils. I haven't moved an inch out of stunned disbelief, and we're just staring at each other.

“You want to take a shot at me?” I think he wants to hear a yes.

“Maybe I'll wait until you finish the rest of that bottle.”

He pours more whiskey in the glass. I stand to leave before I'm drenched.

“Nick, hang on a second.” He stands with the glass and comes around to me. He looks happy and less crazy than a moment before. He seems even taller standing right next to me. He rests a paw on my shoulder but it doesn't seem threatening anymore.

“We're just having some fun. I like to see how guys do in situations under pressure. You did good. Most guys really crap themselves.”

It occurs to me that half this guy's job description is to be the hired goon hazing new guys and telling inside-the-NFL stories.

He's laughing, so I kind of smile but I'm not really happy and I smell like booze.

“Let's get going. We're going to meet some guys for drinks.” The goon's name is Mark Sauter and he takes me back to the trading floor, where a few guys are standing or sitting on desks in a huddle. Rather than walk to the group, Mark chooses to start a
conversation from the maximum distance. “Dave, we're all set! You guys ready?”

Dave and the group get up and close the distance between us. “Good. Let's go to Lucky Strike.”

We take the elevator down and Dave, one other trader, and I get into a hired Town Car. The other guy is Sam Curry. I had an unremarkable interview with him the day before. He is average-looking in almost every respect except that he is older than the rest. Even adjusting for the years of booze, I'd guess he's about fifty. With age usually comes seniority and respect, but I've learned with traders there's a crossover point where age starts to signal weakness. Sam seems too old still to be doing this. It makes him seem desperate and I think he knows it, which makes him seem weaker and a little sad.

The others are off to some party, and Sam, Dave, and I take the car service to Lucky Strike, a restaurant and bar in SoHo. It's not yet 5 p.m. when we get there. The opening room is small, with a bar on the right side and lounge tables on the left. The restaurant part is in a second room through a passage in the back wall and it's a tiny room too. It feels like the kind of place that is somehow in style and a movie star with a baseball hat pulled low might come in at any time for a drink at the end of the bar.

We keep the bartender company while she fixes our drinks and cuts fruit to prep for the night. There's no question she's an aspiring model. Despite her long hair, perfect cheekbones, six-foot and size-two body, and the fact that I imagine her skipping through ankle-deep water on a beach in a bikini, she looks efficient and at home behind the bar. She gets our drinks almost gruffly, then knives through a batch of limes and lemons like a samurai, all of which makes her even hotter.

Dave and Sam are trying to be funny and flirty, and in the face
of her aloofness they look like homeless children scrapping for a meal. I'm too bashful to say anything stupid in front of any of the three of them.

After enough punishment, Dave tells her to pick her favorite four appetizers and entrées to bring us. It seems like his way of declaring something about that relationship, and then he turns his attention to me.

“You'll love living in New York. It's a pain in the ass if you don't have any money, but if you have some dough, it's the biggest and best playground in the world. You interviewing at other banks?”

“No. Not yet,” I add, to sound a little more sophisticated about the process. I wouldn't be interviewing at any banks at all if a buddy hadn't called me to get down here.

“It comes down to people and culture. You want to be at a place with a good reputation but doesn't take itself too seriously and treats people well. Goldman and Morgan are too uptight. You don't want to surround yourself with a bunch of Harvard MBA jackasses. They were stealing each other's library books back in school and they're still the same douche bags. If they're not trying to outsnob each other, they're stabbing each other in the back. Bear might be a level down in reputation but we're one of the best names on the Street and we have a good time. Plus, at Bear, traders are kings. Most of the money at this firm comes from sales and trading, not banking. And believe me, we make a hell of a lot of money.”

I don't know enough about any of this even to ask a smart question. “I liked everyone I met. I even warmed up a little to that last guy, who dumped bourbon on me.” This is a white lie.

“Ha. You might have to put up with a little of that in the beginning, but it's all fun. It's all worth it too.”

“That's right.” To this point I hadn't thought about a salary
number or getting rich quick. I was just feeling the stress that comes with not having any plan in my last year of college. Stress is always about not having a plan. All I want is something respectable, but I don't know enough to want anything in particular or even to rule out anything in particular. Bear seems to answer all this plus makes me rich.