The Fall of Princes (11 page)

She said, “You never paid me back the thousand dollars you owe me. So I figure it would have cost me at least a hundred dollars a night to stay in a hotel, so I’m considering the loan paid back, since I’ve been here eleven nights.”

It took a lot to shock me in those days, or to hurt my feelings, since I had so few genuine feelings anyway, but I was appalled. I said, “Well, if you were hiring me as a rent boy, I would have thought the going rate was either nothing at all, or a good deal more than ninety dollars a night. Good-bye.”

With a sigh of relief I closed the door behind me, and when I came home that night, drunk at two a.m., she was gone without a trace except for the price tags from the ball gowns, which littered the floor, in an effort, undoubtedly, to fool the customs people in England into thinking that she always traveled with eleven brand-new ball gowns.

That was it. Alexis Tayloe was gone, and I was never to know whether or not the cancer was real, whether, if it was real, she had survived, whether Cyril ever got into Parliament, whether Olympia ever stopped getting a rash every time her mother picked her up.

There was only this: at Christmas, a card arrived, with Cyril and Alexis Tayloe printed on the inside with some vague nonreligious wishes for a happy holiday season, so it must have been the card they sent out to Cyril’s supporters, people they didn’t really know. The stamp on the card had a picture of the Queen of England on it.

At the bottom of the card, there was this note: “I can’t tell you how many ways I would like to hurt you. I can’t express how may ways I would like to cut you to the quick.”

It’s hard to talk about the eighties without using the word “fucking” a lot, since I spent a great deal of my time either in a rage or seeking out someone to have sex with me, or both simultaneously, even though it’s a word I rarely if ever use now.

When I looked at Alexis Tayloe’s printed Christmas card, not even engraved, merely printed, I thought,
So much for fucking hospitality. Fuck you, Alexis. Fuck your breast cancer. Fuck your fucking dresses. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

And then I never thought about her again, except at Christmas when the cards would come in, although never again from Alexis Tayloe.

Luckily, almost nobody sends Christmas cards anymore.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Do’s and Don’ts of Rising and Falling

W
e used to play a game called Misery Poker. The greatest bartender in the world, Shirts, so called because he had been literally known to give the shirt off his back to some hopelessly drunk twenty-four-year-old who had puked all over his Turnbull & Asser shirt, would be the judge, the final arbiter. He presided behind the bar at the rundown place that was closest to The Firm, Callaway’s, and was always waiting with a smile and a Tanqueray at two a.m., which is when we often reluctantly hung up the phone for the night. He’d listened to so many horror stories about selling and trading, about the terrors of the first years, that he could have been one of us.

The game was simple. If your workload was a bigger nightmare than any of your colleagues’, you got to drink for free all night. “I’ve pulled four all-nighters in a row.” “I’m staffed on three deals, and I haven’t seen daylight since Easter.” It was taken for granted that you would lie and embellish, to gain sympathy and get free drinks. Not that we needed anything for free, but drinking without paying felt like a mother’s soothing touch on your sick brow. How we loved it. Our misery. We ate and drank the rigors of our chosen profession, the road to ultimate riches stretching straight ahead of us, littered with land mines of misery. We had T-shirts printed up, emblazoned with The Firm’s logo on the front, and the slogan
WE EAT OUR YOUNG
printed in bold letters on the back. It was the Superbowl of hard jobs, which is why we put up with the shit, because, if you survived, the rewards were tangibly enormous. Our greatest goal was to invoke fear in the hearts of colleagues and clients alike. And we thrived on it.

Except not everybody thrived. Two guys died in the same month in 1984, marking clearly where at least some of the land mines lay. Both deaths were tragic, of course, but each was also irritating, creating a caesura of silence and schadenfreude in the otherwise unblemished culture of success. I mean, somebody dies, for God’s sake, you have to stop betting against oil futures in Dubai for at least a few minutes, by which time the whole canvas of the world’s economy may have changed, leaving you no longer in the picture.

Conti went first. Nobody knew his first name, or, if we had, we had forgotten it. Peter, the obituary in the
Wall Street Journal
said. He was twenty-two, an intern, and a true shark. He had moved a cot into the boiler room so that he didn’t have to commute to work. See, we were all brilliant. We all worked like dogs. The only way to distinguish yourself your first year was to work harder than anybody else, in Conti’s case, to work yourself literally to death.

So, Conti slept in the boiler room, and never saw the light of day. One afternoon, after pulling six all-nighters in a row, his heart blew up while he stood at his desk, on the phone. His heart blew up and killed him dead, at twenty-two.

EMS was called, and he was pronounced dead and wheeled off the floor on a gurney with hardly a pause in the action.

The next day, though, there was a minute of silence to mark his death. Even the Big Guy came down and said a few sympathetic words about what a good candidate he had been, made of the stuff The Firm expected and demanded, the energy, the enthusiasm, the brilliance. It was obvious the Big Guy wouldn’t have known him if he’d run over him in his Bentley, but still, a death is a death, and we waited out the full minute in silence, well, not exactly silence, since the phones didn’t stop ringing for a second, and our fingers were itching in our pants to answer them. So passeth Peter Conti.

After he died, the winner of the nightly game of Misery Poker was always called Conti, probably still is, even though the reason for the name has no doubt long since been lost in the speed and click of the rolling dice.

The second death was even more shocking: Harrison Wheaton Seacroft IV, who we called Helter Skelter because of the aggressiveness of his attack mechanism. A true pit bull. He was a big guy, a rugby player, and nobody’s voice was louder. When Helter Skelter made a deal, everybody knew it instantly by the roar he bellowed across the floor.

We had been sort of friends. I had spent a weekend with his family at their huge pile in Southampton the summer before, a house not bought, just one of those things that was “in the family.” I met his parents, nice people who did things with the kind of elegant simplicity that is only bought with a great deal of very old, very honorable money. His father had a seat on the Exchange.

There were lawns, immaculately groomed, a discreet pool that couldn’t be seen from the house—too vulgar. Servants who unpacked your suitcase for you. Lunch beneath a big tent on the lawn served by women who had been with the family since before I was born, seemingly before time began. Dinner at eight thirty, dressed appropriately in sherbet-colored linens, a light cashmere sweater when the chilly breezes sprang up from the ocean so that candles flickered and danced as they had at this same table in this same gazebo for four generations of Seacrofts. One could feel the genial ghosts of all the Seacrofts sitting at the head of the table, barefoot in pastel linen, a life in which far more is saved than is ever lost.

He believed that credit cards, which had been invented in his lifetime, were the doing of the devil, the scourge of the middle classes. He didn’t believe in debt. He felt that if you couldn’t afford something, you simply didn’t buy it, although the old boy was so rich it was a rule that rarely had to be invoked. They had the largest Manet still in private hands hanging in the library of their summer house. Harrison
was heir to all this, and was rapidly building his own place at the family table.

He had been two years on the trading floor already and, at twenty-eight, was richer than most people dream of being, ever. Their minds just don’t count that high. He was looking at retirement at thirty-two. And he killed himself. He got a phone call, a private phone call, an almost unheard-of occurrence, but one that caused him to leave his station on the floor and take it in his private office, white carpeting, a Richard Prince on the wall. It was all clicking into place for him, and then he got this call, which lasted no more than thirty seconds, and then he wrote a short note and addressed it to his parents.

He came out onto the floor and sought me out and shook my hand, curiously, and then handed me the note and asked me to see that his parents got it, by hand, not by mail. On the bottom left of the envelope, he had written, “kindness of . . .” and then my name, and I took the letter, not knowing what was going on, and I watched as he went back into his office. I saw it all, while nobody else even raised a head to watch as he did what he did.

He took off his shoes and placed them neatly under his desk, picked up a fire extinguisher and slammed it through the plate glass window of his office, killing two people on the street below, and then he jumped out the window, and fell seventeen floors, roaring as though he had just made the biggest trade of his life, which I guess he had, to land on the roof of one of the waiting black cars. The rest of the guys on the floor didn’t even notice his absence until the cops showed up later. Somebody picked up the phone still lying off the hook on his desk, a man in Zurich still screaming as though nothing had interrupted the urgency of the deal that was taking place, and we gently cradled the phone on the receiver. End of deal. End of Helter Skelter Seacroft IV.

This was obviously not supposed to happen. Ours was a life of continual advancement. Failure and weakness were not allowed. It’s one thing to have your heart explode at the age of twenty-two, it’s another thing to jump out the window with $13 million in the bank.

Of course, we all put on dark suits and went to the funeral, looking appropriately stark, the wake and the funerals held necessarily at night, since nobody would be fool enough to think we would leave the trading floor before seven o’clock, but we knew in our hearts that he and Conti were both losers.

After the funeral, at the small reception at the Colony Club, his mother came up to me. Nobody had known who to invite since nobody had known who Helter Skelter’s friends were, even his parents, who claimed that I was the only friend of his they had ever met, my entrée being good lineage in an old Southern family. We noticed that his father had not attended the funeral.

His mother took my elbow, “Come sit with me for a minute,” and we tucked ourselves into a quiet corner and sat on the edge of two gilt chairs, ridiculously fragile, Mrs. Seacroft in a stark and perfect black suit with a single strand of pearls at her throat, her face drained of color, awash with grief and loss. He was their only son, out of five
children.

“His father wouldn’t come. He was outraged, and says he’s washed H Four from his memory forever. He says there is no forgiveness. Mothers are different.”

She paused. She didn’t know where to go next.

“He had the disease. That cancer. He was a homosexual. I can’t even say it. It’s unbearable to think of. He had everything. Girls adored him. I loved him with all my heart, my first child and my only son. How could he do this to me, to us? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I had no idea. I swear I didn’t.”

“That he could bring this shame into our house. That’s what his father will never forgive. He would not, he will not, have a son who was, who was . . . that way.”

“He was a nice man. A lovely guy.”

“He was a liar. He chose to destroy us, not even by jumping out the window, but by living that lifestyle, by lying to us about who he was, because he knew we would never ever accept it. If he hadn’t jumped, he would have been without family, he would have died with nobody to hold his hand, to give him the slightest comfort.”

“It wasn’t his fault. I would have held his hand.”

Suddenly vehement, she flashed her icy eyes at me. “Of course it was his fault. Do you think we did anything to . . . to . . . make him that way?”

“God made him that way.”

“And God punished him. His father won’t allow him to be buried in the family plot, where we have all been buried for four generations. His name is never to be spoken again. We’ve thrown out every picture of him. We’ve burned the clothes hanging in his closet. We could catch it from his clothes. I had two children born dead. I wish he had been one of them. I recovered from those deaths, I went on, because that is what you do. This, this . . . I will never get over it. I am just as infected as he was.” Her voice rose to a pitch of anger I could not have imagined in her. “He ate off of our china. He slept in my sheets. I will burn every one of them.” And she started crying, wracked with sobs. I put my hand on her shoulder, she shrugged it off violently. She pulled herself together and said calmly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have taken it to the grave. But there was nobody else.

“He was my boy. My only son. And he was a liar, and a deviant, a disgrace. I will never be happy again. Could you leave me now? There are hands to shake. Appearances will be kept up. The grieving mother, bravely taking in the death of her beloved son. A lie, all of it, but it must be done. Good-bye. You’re welcome to visit us at any time.” The words were spoken without the slightest conviction.

I walked home. Helter Skelter a queer. He jumped because he had just been given a death sentence, and because he couldn’t let the world know how he had gotten ill. And I thought of all those nights in all those clubs, the dark bathrooms where men and women mingled high on drugs, grabbing for whatever skin there was, fucking any orifice that was offered. My face flushed with shame. What if? What
if I was going to get the same phone call one day soon? I still insisted to myself that I was not a homosexual, but there was no denying I had done the things Harrison had done.

God help me, in those bathrooms, in the balcony at Studio, I had fucked men and I had enjoyed it. I was infected, and suddenly the streets were filled with men who were infected, too, just like me. We were all dying. All walking through the night, in dark clubs and alleys, high on coke and meth and Quaaludes and smack and flesh. Highest of all on flesh. And for that we would die. For the sweetness, the loveliness of touch, the feel of skin against your own, we were all to die.

We couldn’t stop and we couldn’t go back.

Harrison IV. HIV. A martyr to love. Riding the express train to being banker-splat on the top of a car that would have taken him home and into the night where he could not, would not live lying about the sex between his legs and in his heart.

Dying for love, that kindest of emotions. Pause for a minute and weep on 24th and 7th, surrounded by brooding, handsome boys in leather jackets, in muscle shirts, all those young men, all around. Me.

Maybe I had missed the bullet, but I didn’t think so. I didn’t deserve it. I would wake in the morning with the same hungers, and the party, although it was over and had turned lethal, the party would never stop and I would play until it killed me.

Dying. Dying for love. God help us.

The wages of skin is death.

In the morning, I felt as though my mood of last night was foolish. I felt invincible, despite the half gallon of vodka I had drunk when I had gotten home. The liquor had washed me clean. I
was
invincible and nothing would kill me, certainly not a few drunken moments in the dark at Steve Rubell’s House of Sin.