“I’m Sam.”
“I’m Crunch.”
“I’m Grove. And I pee in the shower.” In this manner Charlie Kelemen convened the first session of Shower Pissers Anonymous.
He had a gift. Successful and irreverent, Charlie made his friends laugh. There were times when his wit doubled us over. The abdominal spasms hurt until we came up for air. We howled at Charlie, at ourselves, and at the affectations of a society that glorified money, beauty, and youth. Ironically, the world seemed lighter around our fat friend who filled rooms with his outrageous remarks as much as his porcine waistline.
Charlie’s joy was infectious. We laughed with him, no matter how coarse his wit. Impervious to his blimp of a head and whale of a gut, he made us dismiss our own flaws. It felt good not to worry about what we ate or whether we had said the right thing. It felt good to join Charlie’s embrace of the two most satisfying words in the English language: “Fuck it.”
After the shark attack, I could no more say “Fuck it” than compete in the Tour de France. There were too many questions. How did Charlie’s arms and hands get cut in so many places? What about the cart tied to his leg? Who would do such a thing? It made no sense. Charlie had no enemies.
And Sam. What about Sam? I worried about her all weekend. She never returned any of my phone calls.
Message one: “Sam, I’m crushed. Please call me.” No response.
Message three: “I want to help.” No response.
Message six: “I’m starting to worry.” No response.
Even under the circumstances, it was not like her to avoid me. We were too close, friends since college. She had been Sam Wells then. We met at one
of those Harvard-Wellesley mixers that invariably married two ingredients: loud, pounding music and “fit-shaced” coeds buzzed on precoital cocktails. Sam and I never dated, but we stayed close all four years. It had probably helped that Sam and my girlfriend were roommates and best friends.
Hell, I had lived with Charlie and Sam for six of the last eighteen months. Un, Deux, and Trois, their three dachshunds named for the restaurant on West Forty-fourth Street, treated me like family. I walked the dogs far more than Manny, and he was the family’s driver and all-purpose runner. All of a sudden, it felt like I was cold-calling my best friend’s widow.
Late Sunday night NBC reported that Boston police had closed the New England Aquarium indefinitely. It was a crime scene. The anchor added, “Police will be contacting all guests, who numbered about five hundred people.”
“To pick sharks out of a lineup?” I asked darkly and without humor, knowing that the real culprit had two legs.
Who the hell did Charlie piss off? How long will it take the police to reach me? What am I missing?
By 11:30 P.M. Sunday I was still agitated by Friday’s events. But it was time to sleep. The markets closed for dead presidents but not for Charlie Kelemen. My alarm would sound at 5:30 A.M., the opening bell for another week at the office. From previous experience, I knew my professional life offered plenty of hiding places from grief.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sachs, Kidder, and Carnegie (SKC) is a boutique investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Our headquarters are located in New York City at 610 Fifth Avenue. Inside, the ceiling-high windows overlook a skating rink to the west and Saks Fifth Avenue to the east. We have offices in London, Paris, Singapore, and Hong Kong. There is talk about opening a branch in Rio.
SKC was born in 1991. We are a young organization. But the company name creates images of greatness from America’s financial past. The allusion is by design. Percy Phillips, the founder and CEO, wove the surnames of economic legends into a corporate identity. In the process he also ignored the facts. Samuel Sachs and Henry Kidder were never business partners. They competed against each other in the late 1800s. Andrew Carnegie made more money in railroads, coal, and steel than he ever made selling bonds in Europe. No matter. The coined name rings of Wall Street’s triumph.
Competitors say, “SKC is nimble and ferocious, a force to fear.” I regard my firm as the ultimate meritocracy. We produce. Or we pack up and go elsewhere. Nobody coasts and survives at SKC. Our corporate culture prizes aggressiveness and rewards those who go for it. Damn the consequences.
Sometimes I wonder how SKC ever became my professional home. It
differs vastly from the genteel place where I grew up. Change tilled suspicion in South Carolina. And ancestry, rather than performance, conferred opportunity. My dad once quipped, “Charleston is a city distinguished by three hundred years of history uninterrupted by progress.” He was right back then. People tell me things are different now, but it is impossible for me to comment. I have not been back to Charleston for some time.
Eight years ago I graduated from Harvard Business School and started as a broker in the Private Client Services division of SKC, “PCS” for short. I manage $2 billion for sixty-five families today, a business that easily nets me seven figures every year. It is an amount I never fathomed while chasing fiddler crabs and scratching mosquito bites as a kid.
It is also axiom number three in action: Wall Street firms pay ridiculous money to top producers.
I love the feverish energy of PCS. At any given moment we scream into our phones. Or we scream at each other, jabbering and gesticulating with two or three people on hold. Almost everybody chews hangnails or fidgets with Hacky Sacks, our nervous tics sweeping through low-rise cubicles like bacterial plagues on the march. The commotion, the consequence of financial greed and highs from coffee, Cokes, and candy bars, can be downright scary to the untrained eye. But to me it is a shot of pure adrenaline.
There’s nothing like Wall Street’s constant flow of ideas, some good, some bad, and some so toxic they must originate in Chernobyl. Clients pay me to be vigilant. My guys know all the dirt: the public doughnut company that spent as much time cooking the books as it spent frying the batter; the CEO who threw a party with ice sculptures that pissed vodka; and the analysts who publicly extolled companies while privately bashing the same piece-of-shit stocks. My guys hire me to watch their backs. Sure, they grumble about the fees. But I keep their money safe, and they know it.
There’s no telling what’s out there.
PCS has been especially important on a personal level. During the past eighteen months, the daily regime of sensory overload monopolized all my waking moments. I dissected thousands of investment pitches, wrangled with other advisers trying to poach my clients, and steered great fortunes through the mud and muck of money management. The action, Wall Street’s spider-web of greed and conflict, obscured my wretched memories from that black night in New Haven.
SKC gave me the capacity to cope. This world of ambition, the overlay of lunacy, administered a potent painkiller over the last eighteen months. When my best friend died last Friday, I knew just what to do. I was a veteran patient in the care of PCS.
At 7:15 A.M. on Monday I hurried through the “boardroom,” our tongue-in-cheek nickname for the open-plan workstations. I passed Scully, the world’s loudest stock jockey, and turned right near Bagwell, who wore a different pair of suspenders every day. I continued straight at Casper, ghoulishly white and known for clipping his nails compulsively. Even at that hour Casper’s semirhythmic
plinks
were already reverberating across the room and sabotaging the appetites of those eating breakfast at their desks.
Frank Kurtz, our boss, barreled out of his office and caught me in the aisles. “Grove,” he said in a voice already charged from coffee and a cigar, “I want to bounce an idea off you.”
“Sure, Frank. What’s up?” Like every other adviser on the floor, I distrusted Frank, regarded him as another overhead line item from the layers of management. Behind his back, we all called him the “Monthly Nut.”
“Percy intends to re-brand our division,” Frank said. “Goldman, Morgan, Merrill, they all called themselves PCS at one time. The name’s a commodity.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking this conversation could wait until after my first cup of coffee.
“McKinsey recommended we call ourselves Global Wealth Management. Tell me what you think. Gut reaction. What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
“Bathhouses.”
“Huh?” he asked. With the skinny legs of a ballerina and the bull torso of a weight lifter, Frank teetered slightly. “Where’d that come from?”
“Acronyms, Frank. GWM is the acronym for Global Wealth Management. Tell the knucklehead from McKinsey to read
The Village Voice.
GWM is how gay white males in search of love identify themselves in classified ads.”
“Shit,” he muttered, and let me go. “I need to call Marketing.”
Axiom number two in action: As long as we generate revenues, our
bosses tolerate our quirks and leave us the hell alone. Top producers can say almost anything and get away with it.
En route to my desk, it was impossible to avoid Patty Gershon. She had short black hair, Ferrari-red lipstick, and an angular but pleasing nose. Patty was an outstanding adviser, a cagey student of the capital markets, but way too aggressive for my taste. She “jammed product,” our vernacular for selling hard and saying anything to turn a buck.
Patty also doubled as a powerful magnet for every woman in the office with something on her mind. She sat at the epicenter of “Estrogen Alley,” my term of endearment for the cluster of women working in her vicinity. Their cubicles were loud and raucous, no topic taboo. Male endowment, feminine hygiene, and the havoc that childbirth wreaks on women—way too much information flowed within earshot of my desk.
“Hey, O’Rourke,” she called, the only person who ever addressed me by my last name. Patty was wearing a sharp Giorgio Armani suit. At forty-three she still flaunted her body, a successful joint venture between her personal trainer and a skilled plastic surgeon.
“Lady Goldfish,” I replied in kind. Goldfish eat their young, and Patty was predatory. She won all her battles, the inevitable ax fights that erupted over wealthy prospects, through a fearsome combination of guile, decibels, and threatening comments about prejudice in the workplace. Fortunately, she never quite grasped the hidden meaning of her nickname. Patty thought it was a character from
Finding Nemo
.
“What do you call a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound philanthropist?” she asked.
I blinked, never expecting Charlie’s clip to become source material for Wall Street’s dark humor. But every topic was fair game, no matter how unkind or distasteful the material.
“Bait,” she answered. “What do you call a friend that gets eaten by three sharks?” This time she stared at me intensely, in order to build anticipation.
“I give up.”
“Chum.”
I walked. Patty was clueless about my friendship with Charlie. She had no idea about my suffering. Advisers hid clients from colleagues. For all the esprit de corps at SKC, we worked in silos. We never knew when someone would leave the firm and become a competitor.
“Wait,” she insisted. “I’ve got more. What do you feed a shark with indigestion?” I knew better than to respond. When Patty spoke, she ran all her words together without breathing. Every sentence became one long, extended word. Her syllables grew spontaneously like cancerous cells that kept splitting and splitting. It was impossible to interrupt politely. I waved good-bye over my shoulder and closed fast on the last few feet to my desk. “Don’t you want to know?” she called after me.
Some other time.
Annie and Chloe were manning our phones. Both my assistants looked downcast, their expressions troubled. Charlie had been their friend, too. He sent flowers on their birthdays and chocolates whenever the spirit moved. He constantly asked Chloe, a single mom, about her daughter. And he teased Annie, two years out of college, about her relative youth. All three of us were still in shock.
Annie ended her conversation abruptly, “Gotta go,” and bear-hugged me before I could sit. She was slender and tall at five-nine. I felt the sweet weight of her head on my shoulders, the ticklish brush of golden blond hair, and the fullness of her breasts against my chest—simple affection without the complication of romance. In that moment it felt good to work with her, to call Annie “my friend.”
Perhaps I savored Annie’s touch a little too long. A hush gathered over Estrogen Alley. With Patty and her gang gawking, Annie and I broke gently. “I can’t talk about it just yet.”
“Me either,” she agreed in a voice that lacked the usual spark. Annie returned to the phone, rubbing me on the back as she moved away. Chloe continued with her conversation, her eyes dark pools of blue melancholy.
My first inclination was to wake up Ray Ranieri. I’d probably start the call with something pleasant, something snappy and to the point, something like, “Fuck you, numb nuts.” It would go downhill from there. “Radio” Ray—“Radio” being shorthand for “Radioactive” and a reference to the nuclear waste he sold—was a bond trader on the high-yield desk. Last Thursday he had dumped crappy bonds at a crappy price on me, and it still pissed me off. This morning seemed like a good time to continue our argument. Deep inside I knew the real reason. The ensuing squabble would put Charlie Kelemen out of my mind for a while.
Fights erupted every day over trades. And in our world of unbridled
conflict, bond traders equated courtesy with naïveté. For prophylactic reasons it helped to come out swinging, to start all conversations with “Fuck you.” Otherwise, the traders would smell easy prey and price bonds too high. Not on my watch. Not with my clients.
