For the Love of Money (8 page)

CHAPTER
13

Spiritual Counselor

¤

L
inda was around fifty, with a gangly California look. She was six feet tall and had long blond hair. When we walked into her office, she enveloped Sloane in a hug. Then she looked at me, and I knew she wanted to hug me, too. I turned away and sat down on the white couch. Sloane sat next to me. Linda sat in a soft armchair facing us.

“So,” she said, putting her hands on her knees, “first I want to thank you for coming, Sam. That took courage.”

I told her I had a few questions. “Where did you get your PhD?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I don't have a PhD,” Linda said. “Or a masters. I completed a three-year program in psychosynthesis, and I have a Certificate of Ordainment from the Association for the Integration of the Whole Person,” she said.

I almost laughed out loud.
Um, the Association of what?
She hadn't even gone through an accredited program.

“Well,” I said, shooting Sloane a look, “then how is it that you are a therapist?”

Sloane glared at me.

Linda smiled.

“I am not a therapist. I am a spiritual counselor. I'm a
Cherokee by descent, and my teachings are based in Native American philosophy and traditions.”

I'm pretty sure insurance is not going to cover this.

“My practice runs on word of mouth,” continued Linda. “People find me when they need me. I help make them whole again.”

I didn't understand what she meant by making people whole, and I didn't really care about Native American philosophy. I was about to say something to this effect, when I remembered the chill in the air between Sloane and me at breakfast that morning. We hadn't had sex for weeks. We'd fought the night before because she wanted to watch
Felicity
and I wanted to watch
Law &
Order
. We were dropping into longer and longer silences.

I saw Linda watching me.

“Do you have any more questions, Sam?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I'm good. We can start.”

“Good. Sam, since it's your first time, why don't you begin? You can talk about whatever is going on with you.”

“Just talk about anything?” I asked.

“Yes,” Linda said. “I'd like to learn a little about where you are.”

I laughed, exasperated.

“Um, okay,” I said. “Sam in a few words. I don't have many friends. I'm at couples therapy with my girlfriend, with whom I fight all the time. Mostly, I'm alone. Other than that, things are great.”

When she didn't respond and just kept looking at me with a warm smile, I realized I'd been waiting for a rebuke. She nodded, as if to encourage me. To fill the silence, I started talking again.

I talked about the fights Sloane and I were getting into, how insecure I was when we accompanied her parents for cocktails at their friends' mansions, me wearing my only nice sweater, which had a hole in it. I talked about my family, how
my twin brother hadn't spoken to me for four years, and the recent revelation of my father's long-term affair.

“How did you feel when you learned of the affair?” Linda asked.

Growing up in
LA
you learn what earthquakes feel like. Mostly, they're not like they are in movies—walls don't crumble, massive fissures don't appear in the ground. Instead, you feel a powerful but distant rumbling. A deep vibration that is not violent in itself but in what it reveals—which is that solid ground, the very foundation upon which we build our lives, is not so solid after all. Earthquakes aren't scary because the ground shakes a lot; they're scary because the ground shakes at all. Learning about my dad's affair felt like an earthquake—distant, but powerful.

Linda motioned for me to continue. While I talked, I kept my eyes down. Sometimes I'd lift them to find Linda looking at me, her eyes kind. She'd nod encouragingly. She'd chuckle when I said something funny.

I talked and talked and talked. Words poured out unprompted, like they'd been bottled and shaken. We had two hours scheduled, and I'd been sure we wouldn't be able to fill all that time. When I glanced at the clock, I saw that an hour and a half had passed. I realized with horror how long I'd been talking, and clamped my mouth shut.

Linda smiled.

“I'm so glad you felt safe enough to share that with us, Sam. I'm sure Sloane is as well.” I looked at Sloane, who smiled at me. I was mortified.

“Now, there is something Sloane would like to discuss,” Linda said. “Okay if we change subjects?”

I was exhausted. I nodded.

“Would you feel comfortable,” Linda asked me, “sharing a little about what the issues around sex have been like for you and Sloane?”

Um, no.

“Well, here's an example,” I said. “When I came to
LA
over Christmas, Sloane picked me up at the airport. When we got to her house, no one was home. We went upstairs to her room. We hadn't seen each other in three weeks. And I wanted to have sex. I mean, it had been a long time!”

Linda nodded.

“We start kissing, but after a minute Sloane pulls away and gets out of bed and starts organizing her drawers. I'm like,
What the fuck?
in my mind. If there is any time, now should be it, but she doesn't want to. It sucked.”

I'd worked myself into a huff. I glared at Sloane.

Linda said that sounded really hard for me.

Then Linda turned to Sloane. “What did it feel like to hear Sam say that?” Sloane looked like she was going to cry.

“It's true,” Sloane said. “I feel so terrible about it. I want to have sex. I want to want to have sex. But sometimes I can't. Sometimes I just shut down.” She turned to look directly at me. “I'm really sorry that it's so hard for you. It's hard for me, too. I feel like something is wrong with me.”

I must have looked incredulous, because she sort of pulled back. But I wasn't angry; I was shocked. I'd assumed she didn't like sex sort of how I don't like Brussels sprouts. I hadn't imagined that she was upset about it, too. For a moment I understood what a bully I'd been.

Linda asked Sloane if she wanted to share with me some of the things that were going on with her. Sloane nodded and she pulled her knees up to her chest with her feet under her. She looked like a little girl. She said she was working through some stuff with her dad. While she was working on this stuff, she said, being sexual felt uncomfortable.

“Do you understand, Sam?” asked Linda.

“Not really,” I said.

“Let me explain a few things,” Linda said. “Sloane's father
has some trouble seeing how his actions impact his children. Sloane is dealing with some boundary violations that have had a significant impact on her.”

My body was tense. I knew I'd done some boundary violating of my own.

“I'm not her dad,” I said.

“That's true, Sam. And it's Sloane's responsibility to not put her feelings toward him on you. Sometimes she struggles with that. Like everything, it's a process. But there
are
certain similarities between you and her father. That is one of the reasons you two are together. Sometimes, if we have a wound inside us that we need to heal, we seek out situations or partners with whom we can re-create that historical dynamic. That's one of the reasons Sloane was attracted to you, and the same likely holds true for you.”

Parents, parents, parents
.
I'm an adult, and this is bullshit.

I checked my watch—only fifteen minutes to go.

CHAPTER
14

Like Father, Like Son

¤

S
ix months later, Sloane left to study abroad in Florence. I was glad. I'd had my eyes on two girls whose glances had lingered on mine in the library, and by the time Sloane called from Florence two weeks into the semester, I'd slept with both of them. Sloane was in tears—she said she'd made a mistake going to Italy. She asked if I would come visit her. I smiled as I felt the power shift to my side. I coolly told her time apart would be good for us.

This was perfect. When Sloane came back, we'd get back together. In the meantime, my focus would be on getting a high-caliber summer internship, so I could start building toward a life like Jack Taylor's.

In the spring, companies descend on Columbia's campus, recruiting for summer internships. There were several types of internships available—consulting, investment banking—but I'd known I wanted to work on a trading floor since I'd read
Liar's Poker
by Michael Lewis the year before. As he unveiled life on a trading floor—the card games during the workday, huge platters of onion cheeseburgers arriving at 10:00 a.m., the freedom to scream into your phone and slam it dramatically into the cradle—I thought,
P
eople actually get paid for this?
They did. A lot. I was sold.

I'd applied to the trading department at every investment bank, but my sub-3.0 GPA made me an unlikely candidate. In the end I only got interviews at
CSFB
and Goldman Sachs. For Goldman, the GPA was ultimately a deal breaker. But
CSFB
was impressed with my entrepreneurial experience, and they invited me to the final vetting process known as Super Day.

That morning I took the subway from Columbia to ­
CSFB
's downtown headquarters for five back-to-back interviews. I was given a sticker with my name and college printed on it and led to the waiting area, where my fellow interviewees from schools like Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago huddled nervously around the silver coffee dispensers and fresh fruit. Every few minutes the pretty young women of the human resources department came in, scanned the name-tagged students, and led the next interviewee away.

My first four interviews were mixed: some of the traders were impressed by my work experience, others by my stint as a Division I wrestler; all of them were concerned about my GPA. My final interviewer, a director named Taylor Madsen, was a former football star at Yale. As he walked in, I noted the caramel tan of a two-round-a-week golfer. From the nonchalance with which he held his finger up, cutting me off midsentence to take a call from his wife, I knew that
this
was the guy I needed to impress.

When he got off the phone, he scanned my resume. My stomach dropped. In addition to abysmal grades, my resume was littered with half-truths and obfuscations. I'd left out the fact I'd been suspended from Columbia and fired from
ON24
.

Taylor Madsen looked up from my resume and smiled.

“This work experience is amazing,” he said. “And your timing is incredible. You left San Francisco a month before the dot-com boom ended!”

I nodded, terrified. My resume: a house of cards.

“Your grades suck,” he continued, “but you're a wrestler so I know you're driven.”

He paused.

“I like you,” he said. “I'm going to get you this job.”

I hadn't said a word. I started to thank him. He held his finger up, freezing me midsentence again, put his phone to his ear, and walked out of the room.

Years later I'd think back to that moment—how despite my poor grades and the lies on my resume, I'd gotten one of the most competitive internships in the world without speaking a word. It was as if the universe knew that I needed to go to Wall Street, needed to glimpse, like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, what was really behind the curtain.

The next few months were spectacular. With a summer internship in my back pocket, I spent most of my time at bars, chasing girls, drinking, and occasionally dabbling in drugs.

I started to dream about Sloane. She'd walk toward me, a glint in her eye, a pouty smile on her lips. She'd wrap her arms around my neck and kiss me softly. If I half woke up, I'd try to go back to sleep to get back in the dream. She was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about at night. I thought about her when I was with other women.

I knew the minute her plane was scheduled to land, but I didn't call her. I was unwilling to sacrifice the hand I'd gained.
Better to let her call me
,
I thought. She did. We agreed to meet for lunch.

Both of us were reserved, cautious, but soon conversation rippled between us. I told her excitedly about my internship, which started in two weeks. She told me she'd missed me. I paid the bill, and as we left the restaurant I casually asked her if she wanted to spend the evening together. I saw the relief flood her, and I pulled her to me and kissed her.

Later she came home with me, to the same place where
I'd slept with a girl named Cassandra the night before. That night, before Sloane and I had sex, I put on a condom because I'd been having unprotected sex with other women. It was the first time we'd used a condom since Sloane went on birth control. I saw her notice, and I thought she was going to say something, but she didn't.

Over the next few weeks I saw a lot of Sloane but continued to see the other women as well. I could tell by how Sloane avoided asking me about evenings I spent away from her that she knew.

CHAPTER
15

Brand-Name Life

¤

I
n June 2002, at the age of twenty-two, I stepped out of an elevator onto the
CSFB
trading floor on the first day of my summer internship.

The room was the size of an airplane hangar. Glass-walled offices fenced the perimeter. Rows and rows of trading desks stretched across the room. On the walls hung a hundred glowing flat-screen
TV
s. Each trader sat in front of six high-tech computer monitors and a phone turret with enough dials, knobs, and buttons to make it seem like a cockpit. My eyes fastened on a trader in a light-blue button-down. He was talking rapidly into the microphone tip of a headset. He looked like he was running the command center of a spaceship.

“That's Greco,” said the
HR
woman who'd come up behind me, pointing at the trader I was staring at. “He trades ­telecom—Verizon, AT&T—on the corporate bond desk.” Trading floors are laid out like school cafeterias—instead of each table belonging to a clique, each belonged to a certain market.

“You'll be on corporates for a month,” said the
HR
woman, holding a clipboard, wearing pearls and a gray pantsuit. “Then you'll rotate to mortgages. It'll be between you and two other interns; only one of you will be offered a full-time job. Good luck.”

Getting that offer was the whole point of my summer. I was approaching the elbow between college and the real world, where an Ivy League education was most concretely valuable, where securing a full-time position at a prestigious firm meant entrance into the highest echelon of American capitalism. The first step toward becoming one of the business leaders you read about in the paper.

When markets were up, banks hired every one of their interns. But now that the Internet bubble had burst, and the stock market's value had declined by half, turning an internship into a full-time job had grown difficult. I was terrified about not securing a position at a blue-chip firm and disappearing into the anonymity of regular life.

I watched as the
HR
woman walked back to her office, passing rows of men glued to their computer screens. One trader strolled down the aisle casually swinging a golf club. Some were on the phone and I could hear the hum of conversation like in a restaurant. The atmosphere was focused, professional—nothing like the shouting and waving of the trading floors on
TV
.

I realized I was gawking. I didn't have any idea what to do, or where to stand. My face flushed. I saw Anna, a junior trader who'd interviewed me. She looked up, a phone pressed to her ear. I waved. She smiled. Then her eyes flicked back to her screens.

I walked over and stood behind her chair. I figured she'd sense my presence and get off the phone and I could ask her what I should be doing. I didn't realize at the time that standard rules of propriety don't apply on a Wall Street trading floor. In the weeks ahead I'd become accustomed to standing behind a trader for fifteen, twenty minutes before they'd even acknowledge me.

After a minute I thought maybe she hadn't seen me so I stepped closer. She didn't even look up; she just speared
an index finger into the air, indicating that I should wait. I felt conspicuous, embarrassed. I stood there for ten minutes before Anna hung up the phone. “Grab a folding chair from that closet,” she said.

My job was to learn how a trading floor worked by watching and asking questions. But the last thing in the world a trader wanted was some college kid peppering her with questions, so in reality my job was to fade into the background, like furniture. I spent the morning listening to Anna and scribbling notes to appear busy. By early afternoon, unaccustomed to adult workdays, I was struggling to keep my eyes open when a trader across the aisle stood up holding a World War II infantry helmet. “It's time,” he said.

Everyone laughed and reached for their wallets. “That's Jared Caldwell,” Anna said. “He trades energy. He's a stud.” The next few minutes consisted of traders flicking their gold and silver credit cards into Jared's helmet. When all the cards had been collected, Jared picked a card, read out the name, and then tossed the card back to the person it belonged to. Then again and again and again, while traders ribbed one another, chortling when their own names were called. When just two cards were left, everyone knew whose they were. Jared picked one out and put it facedown on the desk. Then he grabbed the last card.

“Today,” Jared said, “coffee is on . . . Hinton!” The group exploded, laughing and yelling. “Where's the intern?” Jared yelled. I hustled over. He shook my hand, gave me Hinton's credit card, and told me to go to Dunkin' Donuts and get coffee for the whole desk. I walked toward the elevators with a huge smile across my face. This was fun!

That night I went out with the other interns. A willowy French girl from Georgetown laughed loudly when I told the group how I'd stood behind a trader for twenty minutes without being acknowledged. She kept glancing at me, and
when she went to the bar for a drink, I followed. Her name was Melanie, and soon we were chatting, just the two of us. Two managing directors showed up; they both leered at Melanie as they talked.

Two hours later, I was drunk. When Melanie said she was leaving, I said I was, too, and soon we were pressed against a building making out. I asked Melanie to come home with me, to the Alphabet City apartment I was subletting with another finance guy. She said no, that she had to wake up early.

Reluctantly, I stumbled home alone. I packed some pot into a glass pipe I kept in the drawer next to my bed, smoked, and went to sleep.

I was on the trading floor by five thirty the next morning. I asked Jared, the trader with the credit card helmet, if I could sit with him. “Sure,” he said. “Just plug in this headset, and you can listen to all my calls. Write down any questions, and I'll answer them at the end of the day.”

I spent the rest of the morning listening to Jared's calls, safely blending into the background. In the afternoon, Jared spent twenty minutes answering my questions, mostly about what certain words meant in the foreign language of trader-­speak.

“Anything else?” he asked after answering my last question.

“Yeah,” I said. “Who is that?” I pointed to the biggest office on the floor, where a tall good-looking blond man in his thirties sat reclined in his chair, his feet propped on the desk. I'd seen him walking the floor earlier. People had stood to shake his hand.

“That's Jack DiMaio,” Jared said. “He's thirty-five and the boss of the whole floor.” Jared told me how Jack had organized a walkout when the traders thought they were being underpaid; to entice them to return, management had given all the traders three-year multi-million-dollar bonus guaran
tees. Jack was guaranteed $15 million per year and named head of fixed income.

I looked at Jack, reclined in his office, and bristled with envy. I imagined myself in his position, my feet propped on the desk. The boss of the whole floor.

The next day I was sitting with Jared again when Jack ­DiMaio called him. I looked to Jared to see if he wanted privacy, but he motioned for me to listen. After a few minutes of talking about the market, the conversation turned casual. Jared, a car aficionado, said he admired Jack's new Porsche. “Well,” said Jack, “then as a part of this year's bonus, it's yours.”

I almost fainted. I'd dreamt of being rich since I was a kid. But I'd never imagined a world where people gave each other $70,000 cars in a casual phone call.

Before that summer, the most successful guy I knew was Sloane's father. At
CSFB
, I saw a thousand Jack Taylors, men who had gone to brand-name schools and gotten jobs in brand-name firms and wore brand-name clothes in their brand-name lives. They lived in places like Darien and Greenwich, took Caribbean vacations, and belonged to country clubs. The most important thing in my life was getting what they had.

I spent the next few weeks working feverishly. I was the first one on the desk in the morning, arriving at 5:00 a.m. At night there were dinners and drinks with traders and executives, and how well you performed in those situations was as critical as your performance on the desk. Getting a full-time job offer was not based on how smart you were. It was a question of whether the traders liked you.

They wanted to know if I was cool. Did I play a sport in college? Which one? There is a hierarchy of athletics on Wall Street: Lacrosse at the top, crew at the bottom. Wrestling was right in the middle—not as cool as soccer or basketball, but tough enough to impress.

They also wanted to know how social you were. Time after time veterans told me that Wall Street works hard, but they play harder. You had to prove that you could handle yourself in a bar.

To the traders, as an intern, I was an afterthought. To me, they were the most important people in the world. I can rattle off the names of those
CSFB
corporate bond traders like I can the seventh-grade cheerleaders from junior high. They were the gatekeepers of my future.

I went out every night. I rarely called Sloane, and when she called me I often didn't answer. One night, I hooked up with two girls in the same night. The first was a Duke sorority girl I'd met on Super Day, and when she left my apartment I was still drunk and still looking to party. So I called an engineering major at Columbia whom I'd hooked up with often while Sloane was in Italy and invited her over. By the time she arrived I was nearly blacked out. We started to have sex. I pushed her to do things she didn't like. She got pissed, stormed home. I passed out.