For the Love of Money (16 page)

CHAPTER
30

Sacred Creatures

¤

K
atie and I started couples counseling. The counselor was a diminutive, academic-looking woman with cropped gray hair and big glasses. As soon as we sat down in front of her, Katie started crying. When the counselor asked if she knew why she was upset, Katie said no. For the entire session, tears that she could not explain poured down her cheeks. We went a few times, but we hadn't gotten very far. We were still living together in our sepulcher of an apartment, a crypt for the living death of our relationship.

I knew I needed to make amends with my mother. I flew out to Seattle to help her sell a condo she'd purchased and reorganize her finances. I offered to find an attorney for her to seek recourse for the divorce. I collected all the documents and then started calling divorce lawyers in Seattle. Some wouldn't speak to me after hearing who my father's attorney was. I finally connected with one of the top divorce attorneys in Seattle who spoke in rapid, clipped bursts. He asked why it'd taken me so long to look into this. I told him I'd only recently discovered how much help my mom needed.

“That's unfortunate,” he said. “Over three years have passed, making it very unlikely we could get a judge to overturn.”

Mom didn't seem surprised. It was as if she'd accepted that my father would always beat her. But I could hear in her voice that she was grateful someone had taken her side.

When I returned home, I knew things with Katie had to end. During a counseling session I told Katie it was over. She begged me to give it a few months, and the counselor suggested I do the same, but I couldn't. I knew I didn't love her. She moved out one weekend when I was away. When I returned home, the apartment was half empty. I walked through the cavernous space, my footsteps echoing off the twenty-foot-high ceilings, and thought about the brand-name life I finally had but no longer wanted. I had six months remaining on the year's rent I paid in advance, but I decided to move into a tiny apartment in Alphabet City that fit me better.

After that, I felt better about the direction of my life. But something nagged at me. There was still something that my father had taught me—something big—that continued to impact how I treated women.

It started when I was twelve. I found a tattered porn magazine in the bottom drawer of my dad's bedside table. I took the magazine and hid it under the couch in the living room. When the house was asleep, I crept out of bed and retrieved it. Wide-eyed, I read the erotic stories and masturbated for the first time. It was, to that point, the greatest moment of my life.

My dad unknowingly provided me with a steady supply of smutty magazines and books, and I was perpetually sneaking them from his drawers. In high school, I started to buy porn magazines myself from shady-looking liquor stores. The cashier would put them in a brown shame bag, and I'd slide the bag into the back waist of my jeans before walking out. I looked at porn for five years before I even had sex. By the time I lost my virginity, almost everything I knew about sex came from porn.

In college, I no longer had to endure the shame of buying magazines from a person, or even buying anything at all.
Columbia had broadband Internet access. Always a reader, I preferred stories to pictures or videos. There were millions of stories online, available for free.

As an adult, looking at or reading porn became a regular part of my life. When I found myself alone at home, I'd open the computer or turn on one of the soft-core flicks on Cinemax. The amount I watched or read ebbed and flowed—sometimes daily, sometimes once a week, depending largely on whether I had a girlfriend or not. I didn't become obsessed; porn didn't take over my life. Instead, it was one of those enjoyable life habits that I always looked forward to, like morning coffee.

At the same time, I knew it wasn't innocuous. I knew because I was ashamed. I never spoke about it. I would make sure the doors were double-locked, the shades drawn. I deleted the history on my computers and was nervous whenever anyone picked up my cable remote control in case they might click the Recently Viewed button. After getting sober, I'd cut out everything in my life that I was ashamed about, except for expensive haircuts and pornography.

The fact was that I needed it. Sometimes I would try to masturbate without pornography. And it would happen, the process would happen. But it wouldn't be the same. It would take longer, and be less charged. It lacked the rush. The excitement. The drug.

Around that time, I came across an article about how a large percentage of porn actresses were sexually abused as kids. That hit me in the gut. I knew from experience that how you were treated as a child impacted your behavior as an adult.

It made sense to me that girls who'd been sexually abused were more likely to go into a sexual profession. They had learned at an early age that their bodies were for the use of men—that the only places they would get real attention was on their backs or their knees. I had learned from my dad that money would make me safe and important, and had made
my way to a Wall Street trading desk. They had learned from their dads, or their uncles or neighbors or family friends, that sex made them valuable, worthy of attention, and made their way to dark street corners, stripper poles, or video cameras that could stream to the Internet.

I talked to some guys about the article, and they said they thought porn or stripping was a good trade: a woman can put herself through college working far less than she would as a waitress. But I questioned the fairness of that trade.

Despite what I was learning, I continued to use porn. I figured the videos had already been made; I was just watching them. The porn industry was going to exist whether or not I participated in it.

But soon I realized that my logic was flawed. I was part of the demand. Maybe my viewing one Cinemax film was the tipping point that caused the production of another. Maybe my viewership was responsible for the humiliation of that woman, naked on her knees in front of twenty people on set, and millions of eyes through the Internet.

But it wasn't just about porn actresses—it was about what the proliferation of porn meant for all women. I was amazed, as I looked into the statistics, at the sheer amount of sexual violence in our culture. Almost half of all women are raped or face attempted rape; 38 percent of girls are sexually molested. Porn is an integral part of a misogynist culture that makes it difficult and dangerous to be a woman in America.

I understood this reality because I had begun to notice how porn changed the way I looked at women. There's a scarcity of women on trading floors, and the few who are there are often in assistant roles. Because of this scarcity and subordination, there's an oft-used term—“trading-floor hot”—which means that a woman you ordinarily wouldn't look twice at in regular life seems attractive at work. Not attractive in that you'd want to marry them, but attractive in that you'd like to fuck them.
A woman walking down a trading row might turn around to see half of the traders she passed leaning back in their chairs ogling her. The more porn I looked at, the more overpowering my trading floor fantasies became.

Porn wasn't just teaching me how to treat some women; it was teaching me how to treat
all
women. That's when I realized that porn wasn't about sex—it was about power. Porn was teaching me that women were there to be used by me, whenever I wanted. I had thought porn was about sex and arousal, but now I saw it was about denigration.

So I quit. A few months after Katie and I broke up I disconnected Cinemax and pledged not to read another story or look at another picture. At first it was hard. I'd come home from work and just want the release I knew porn would give me. But I didn't open the computer. Days turned into weeks, and after a while the urges began to subside.

One night, I went out to dinner with a managing director and a high-profile client to a churrascaria—a Brazilian all-you-can-eat meat buffet—on Fifty-Fourth and Eighth Avenue. The MD and the client were old friends, and they rapidly got red-faced drunk. About an hour in, the waitress swung by to ask if they'd like another round—two Glenlivets. As she walked away, they both stared hard at her ass. The client turned to me and said, “I'd like to bend her over the table, give her some meat.” The managing director roared.

“What's wrong, Sam?” said the client, noticing I wasn't laughing. I forced a smile, and said “Nothing.” The managing director ordered another round.

In the cab home, I was furious. I should have spoken up, but I hadn't.

CHAPTER
31

Gatsby, Interrupted

¤

A
few months after I started on the distressed desk at Bank of America, the market fell off a cliff. This was great for me. I'd been bearish and very vocal about it. I'd constructed a portfolio of complex trades that would, I thought, profit in a market collapse. As the market began to plummet, my reputation skyrocketed. I was invited into meetings way above my pay grade, with Marshall, the head of distressed, and even the head of the investment bank. When my facility with derivatives became apparent, the head of the investment bank asked me to meet with the heads of all the business lines, to assess their derivatives risk. I was a young trader, but all of a sudden I was meeting one-on-one with the head of equities, the head of mortgages, the head of treasuries.

That was the apex of my career at Bank of America.

It turned out that I had overlooked an important variable when I'd constructed my portfolio—the difference between how bonds and derivatives perform in a funding crisis. I owned a lot of bonds and had shorted derivatives against them. I'd thought the spread between them would compress; instead, the bonds started to plummet, while the derivatives stayed put. I lost $5 million the first week, $5 million the sec
ond week, and then $10 million the third week. Soon there were rumors I'd be fired.

Marshall was losing money, too. He'd seen the crash coming and put on a massive short position. But his bosses disagreed with his call and forced him to exit the trade. A week later the market plummeted. Without his short position as a hedge, the desk he ran started losing money. Marshall was blamed for the losses.

On Wall Street your reputation can change by the day. That's how it was for both Marshall and me. One week we were on top of the world. The next week we were on the verge of getting fired.

I loved Marshall more than ever. I'd heard that he'd stood up for me in a management meeting where my losses were being discussed, even though his own job was in jeopardy.

One day, when yet another market drop left both our portfolios bloody, I typed a Bloomberg message—the instant messaging system traders use to communicate with each other—to Marshall:

The train is heading for the cliff

His response came almost immediately.

And the doors are double-locked

I chuckled and then wrote back.

And it's on fire

In the midst of misery, we shared a laugh. While Marshall's laugh was hearty, mine was grudging. Sitting at my desk watching my portfolio bleed, I felt like I couldn't breathe. Like I was drowning.

That's when Sean Mallory, the head of trading at Pateras, called me. I told Marshall immediately, and he said I couldn't have dreamt up a more perfect job. Pateras offered me a million dollars, and I accepted. A week later I resigned from Bank of America. Marshall walked with me over to Pateras. I hugged him and thanked him for all that he'd done for my career. Then I walked in and signed my contract.

A few weeks later, Marshall was fired. An article was written about it in the
New York Post
.

Six months later, I rented two houses on Fire Island and invited Mom, my siblings, and two close friends out for a family vacation.

Fire Island is just an hour train ride and a twenty-minute ferry outside New York, but it's a different world. The island is only a half mile wide, and there are no cars because there are no roads. Wood-planked paths run between houses and up to the sandy beach, and to get somewhere you bike or walk. There are a couple restaurants; mostly you cook for yourself. It's sort of like camping, but in nice houses.

Because it's just an hour outside of New York, it's expensive. But I could afford it. With that year's bonus, I had officially become a millionaire. But unlike my other bonuses, this year I knew that there was nothing I really wanted to buy. Instead, I thought of other ways my money might be useful. I donated a thousand dollars to a congresswoman. I gave $40,000 to charity.

The two houses I rented were cozy, rustic, and stood next to each other, fifty feet from the roaring waves. The first night, we cooked a steak dinner together. When we all sat down at the patio tables, I felt the awesome power of the internal work I'd done. The changes I'd made in my life had begotten changes in my family. Both Ben and my younger brother Daniel were sober, and all my siblings were in counseling with Linda. Mom had almost not come because she was scared, but
I had called and told her I loved her and wanted her there. My siblings had done the same. We all now made efforts to honor her role as the mother of our family. I looked at the excited faces of my brothers, my sister, and my friends, and the fearful, tentative face of my mom, who wasn't used to being included, and I felt how much I was loved and how much I loved in return. I opened my mouth to speak, but I was so overwhelmed that I could barely get any words out. I mumbled something about letting the food get cold and then reached for the steak.

• • •

That night I walked alone on the beach. I was feeling my dad's absence. We hadn't spoken in two years, ever since I'd told him to fuck off. I missed him every day, but I was also very angry. Memories of things he'd done swooped through my head like battle hawks. My mind was polluted with them, thousands of instances where Dad had not been what I wanted him to be. So much of my life had been a reaction to my father. I was sick of living in the past, tired of being angry.

Linda had been encouraging me to do a shame ceremony, a Native American practice in which people dug holes in the earth, screamed their rage and shame into those holes, and then covered them, praying for the earth to keep their poisonous emotions.

To me, it just sounded corny. But when I returned from my walk on the beach, I was warming to the idea. I knew I needed to do something to get Dad out of my head.

The kitchen was dark. Daniel was standing by the counter, holding a thick peanut-butter sandwich. Not even an hour had passed since dinner. He looked embarrassed.

Daniel weighed over four hundred pounds. Of all the kids in my family, Daniel had taken the most abuse. He wasn't successful in school like Ben and me, and his failures had infu
riated my father. When Daniel was still in elementary school, he'd shown Dad a poor report card in the car. Still driving, Dad clubbed Daniel in the stomach with his fist, and called him an idiot. Dad's rage had been too much for Daniel's tiny body. Now his body had swollen to a size that could accommodate the burden he'd been given to carry.

I understood what Daniel was doing, because I had done something similar myself. That's what my bulimia had been about. I was hungry, not for food, but for love. In college when I'd go to
JJ
's Place and gorge, I'd feel disgusting afterward, like I didn't deserve all that food, didn't deserve all that love. So I'd eject it from my body.

My brothers and sister had all dealt with our pain differently, but it came from the same place. If you are treated as worthless enough times, you start to believe you deserve it. Then you create an external reality that reflects that.

When I saw that peanut-butter sandwich, I decided, corny or not, we were doing this shame ceremony. I walked over to Daniel and said, “You don't need to hide that from me. I'm your brother. And we are both going to let go of our shame.”

On our last morning on Fire Island, my brothers, sister, and I woke before dawn and biked to a secluded beach. We sat in a circle. I explained the process.

We each began to dig a hole in the sand with our hands. There was a sense of embarrassment, but as we reached the tight-packed lower layer of sand, we had to really work, and the embarrassment faded. When our holes were finished, we leaned over and began to whisper into the holes everything we'd ever been ashamed of.

I poured everything into that hole—all the humiliations and embarrassments of my life.

When I finished, I looked up. Julia was crying. Daniel looked like he could talk into his hole forever. Then I heard a deep guttural groan emanate from Ben—it looked as if he
were vomiting every humiliation, every failure into that hole. Then he, too, started crying.

They were crying. But I wasn't crying. I'd done enough crying. For me, this ceremony was about saying good-bye. For too long, I had been my father's son. Now my life was about different things—sobriety, healing, love. I was ready to let go of my anger, my sense of injustice.

I thought about the things I was grateful for from Dad—life, shelter, food, college. Dad had done the best he could, and in so many ways I was lucky. I was done being a victim. I would no longer allow how I'd been treated as a boy to control who I was as a man. I was finally ready to take accountability for my life.

Good-bye, Dad
. And for the first time since I could remember, I wished him well. I hoped that he was happy and that we would one day talk again.

The last line of
The Great Gatsby
is, “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” Well, Jay Gatsby
was
borne ceaselessly into the past. But I had faced my past. Now I was ready to transcend it. For the first time, I looked at the world not through my father's eyes, but through my own.