The Buy Side (14 page)

Randy holds his fist in front of me, as though he wants to play a game of one potato, two potato. I hold out my hand and he drops a bag of cocaine into my palm. A warm breeze flutters across the rooftop. I’m six cocktails deep and everything is wonderfully gauzy. I follow him to the bathroom and we enter separate stalls. I hold the tiny bag for a moment; a lot has changed since the last time I was holding cocaine, primarily my bank account and social status. The white stuff doesn’t look so menacing this time. There are no alarming thoughts about Len Bias. It makes sense now. It’s part of the culture. I might as well see what all the fuss is about. It’s not really a big deal. I should just try it once. I dig my pinky deep into the bag and pull out a hefty amount and jam it up my nose and snort as hard as I can.

The high is immediate: a rush of energy like someone pushed a reset button. Gone is the gauze from the alcohol, and in its place every one of my senses is heightened. I feel invincible. When we return to the roof, I can’t stop smiling. I take in the whole scene with a glance. There’s a guy twenty feet away from me trying to hit on the girl at the bar. He’s going to fail. Three girls are sitting at a table across the roof; they’re looking at me and talking about me. They like me. As the cocktail waitress hands me my tequila, I look into her eyes and her whole backstory unfolds. She is from the Midwest, wants to model, but has low self-esteem. “Where you from?” I ask. “Ohio,” she says, as though she’s embarrassed by it. I’m Michael Jordan in the fourth
quarter. I can’t miss. And all I want to do is fuck someone. I can have any girl I want, and I’d be doing them a favor. I never want this feeling to end.

“You should come over to our place next week,” Randy says.

“Yeah, dude, its fuckin’ tendy,” James adds.

“Tendy,” I say, laughing. It must mean something good.

ONE BROKEN
leg, 2 prescriptions of Vicodin, 4 planes hijacked, 7 escorts called, 10 percent loss in the market, 12 nights of cocaine, 16 weeks of mono, 19 terrorists, 24 one-night stands, 30 cartons of cigarettes, 75 new sales traders, 100 miles to the summer house, 150 business dinners, 250 nights out, $300 million in capital, 365 days later …

I CAN
smell the tequila I drank last night. It oozes from my pores. I’m still wearing my blue Prada suit from yesterday. It looks like I’ve just pulled it out of a gym bag. I have ten clean ones just like it hanging in my closet, but I woke up late again. I wonder what my personal shoppers at Barneys would think if they saw me right now. I reek of cigarettes too. It feels like my teeth are wearing little wool sweaters.

The trading desk is surrounded by glass. I work in a fish bowl. I’m in the middle of a newly renovated office on Park Avenue. New everything. Thank god Krishen isn’t in today, or anybody else for that matter. My elbows are on my desk. I slowly raise my head and check the clock. As the opening bell rings every muscle in my body clenches. I sit upright and try to focus on the eight computer screens in front of me. There are twenty-five orders on my desk, each from five to ten million dollars and involving some sort of investment decision. My head throbs.

If I can just make it to lunch, I tell myself. A cheeseburger with a fried egg will help. I try to see how many minutes I can go without looking at the clock—sixteen is the record for the day. I can’t keep my eyes open. I just need to make it to the closing bell.

2:55 p.m.… 3:17 p.m.… 3:58 p.m.…

I count down the final minute like a Canadian in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

I’m free.

Forty-five minutes later: There’s an ounce of cocaine piled in the microwave. An additional few thousand dollars’ worth of blow sits on a single plate in the kitchen. The place is littered with Grey Goose bottles, ice, cups, and straws for snorting. We call this East Side apartment the White House for obvious reasons, but it’s more like a Wall Street crack house. Randy and James live here. I’m not sure what they do when their parents come to town. Everything is provided and paid for, compliments of the sell side. I never did tell Randy and James that the first time I tried cocaine was a year ago when I was with them at the Thompson Hotel. I guess I was embarrassed. I only come about once a month, but they treat me like a regular. They like to please all of their clients. Tonight they were kind enough to order in: Chinese and Mexican escorts.

I watch as two American Express black cards fly through the air across the kitchen. They land right on top of the blow. James uses the cards to chop the cocaine as twelve guys roll up their shirtsleeves. One of the hookers, Adelina, a large-breasted firecracker, drags a finger across my chest. Two traders who work for a hedge fund in Connecticut—and raced here by car service—grab the Asian twins and head to the bedroom. Dr. Fish, a three-hundred-pound sales trader who grew up in the Florida Keys, lays claim to Adelina and escorts her to the other back bedroom.

As I watch Adelina disappear behind the wall of Fish’s girth, a guy approaches me and introduces himself as Gus. He’s in his late twenties, with short dark hair. He wears a blue dress shirt that’s open at the collar. He lives in New Jersey. He hands me a straw. All the other faces in the apartment are familiar; it’s like a gang meeting with one inductee. I’m not sure who invited him. “So you’re
the
Turney Duff,” Gus says to me. I smile and pass the plate of cocaine. An internal warning light begins to flash.

“It’s Gus, right?” I ask.

“Yeah, but everyone calls me Turbo,” he says. “ ’Cuz of how I snort the ’
caine
.”

He’s smiling way too much for someone who hasn’t snorted their first line of the night yet. The nickname’s bad enough, but then he has to explain it? This guy is trying too hard. Strike one, I say to myself. “It’s a pleasure to meet someone from the Healthcare Mafia,” he says.

I roll my eyes. I want to turn my back. I wish he’d just leave, but he’s holding the plate.

“That’s really more of an urban legend than anything else,” I say. Except it’s not a legend. A trader at Fidelity in Boston named Tom Bruderman first coined the name. One day Bruderman—who owns a permanent place in Wall Street lore for an outsize bachelor party that included several rounds of dwarf tossing—was making a large buy of a biotech stock. Amgen, I think. “Don’t tell the Healthcare Mafia,” he told the broker. He was talking about a select group of hedge funds, including me at Argus. Though we wore the moniker with pride, it might have been more accurate to compare us to the team in
Ocean’s Eleven
. While huge firms like Fidelity have a bureaucratic process to make investment decisions, hedge funds are much quicker. As head trader, as soon as I get the info, I can pull the trigger on a trade. Plus, we run in a pack, sharing information. So if we knew that Bruderman
was buying, say, seven million shares of Amgen, we could front run his trade, buying the stock ahead of Fidelity. The Fidelity trade would push the price of the stock up, and we’d reap the profits. Front running is illegal, but extremely hard to prove. Still, the nimbleness and information sharing among “Mafia members” is something I use to my advantage.

But I’m not going to get into a conversation with Gus about it. Whether I belong to a mafia or play the role of Danny Ocean, we have a code of silence,
omerta
. I grab back the plate of cocaine and inhale a rope-size line. I snap my head back and wipe my nose. Gus is still talking.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” he says.

“What’d you hear?”

“That if we ever met, we’d end up dead in a Vegas hotel room together,” he laughs.

I laugh too. I picture a sleazy motel off the strip with two chalk outlines of guys holding BlackBerries and rolled-up dollar bills.

I always thought moans sounded the same in every language, but Adelina’s are Spanish-accented. Even in the kitchen, it’s clear how well things are going in the back bedroom. Fifteen minutes later, the guys from Connecticut emerge and shortly thereafter so does Dr. Fish. The three guys bump fists with three other guys, who head back to the bedroom—like tag-team wrestling. Fish and company gladly divulge the most intimate details of their conquests: nipple shapes and colors, bushes or lack thereof, positions. In no time we can hear the moans again. They sound exactly the same as before. After the second round of guys, the girls have reached their limit. Now they’re in the kitchen with the twelve of us: six of whom have fucked them and six of whom haven’t. The guys who had sex try not to act awkward. I guess they feel
like they’re standing in a police lineup, but nude—and the guys who didn’t don’t know exactly what to say.

“You girls can stay here and party,” Randy says. The girls politely decline.

By eight p.m. the last of the guys are putting on their coats. They have wives, girlfriends, and children to go home to. I try not to judge, but I tell myself that when I’m married and have kids I won’t carry on like I do now. I’m left standing with Gus, Randy, and James. I’ve started to do a lot of business with Randy. We might pay his firm a million dollars this year. I do business with James also, but not nearly as much. I don’t know Gus at all, but I know his kind. The four of us head out for the night.

The Wetbar in the W Hotel is easy. James and Randy are regulars, and we’re afforded full access. Several female bartenders in tight black shirts and skirts work the long bar that runs along the Lexington Avenue side of the lounge. The place is dark and sexy. Candlelight is the primary form of illumination. Hotel guests camp out on the back wall, but the Street owns the middle, and that’s where the action is—if you want to call girls looking for a husband “action.” The four of us sit in the corner booth. Before we left the apartment, we each took a spoonful of blow and dumped it into our cocaine doggy bags. When Desirre, our waitress, takes our order, Gus insists on paying. He puts his credit card on the table. Desirre, an attractive girl with dark hair and eyes, knows Randy and James well and asks if they want their usual. I order Patrón Silver on the rocks with three limes. “That sounds good,” Gus says, and orders one too.

No, it doesn’t, I think to myself. I don’t love the taste of tequila; I love what it
does
to me.

We sip our fifteen-dollar drinks and take turns going into the
bathroom to snort key bumps of cocaine. After a few big nights, sometimes it takes a couple of minutes to insert my apartment key into the lock because of the crusted powder on it. The bathroom is not the most conducive for illegal activity. Its unsuitability gives me an idea. I’m going to start keeping copious notes of bathrooms in New York. I’ll call it a Zippets guide for snorting. The best bathrooms (five Zips) have a single lock, with no attendant. A mirror inside with a sink for cleaning up is preferred. It also helps when the bathroom is off of a hallway, away from the crowds. The Wetbar’s bathroom garners only two Zips. There’s no attendant, but there are four stalls, and it’s a stressful walk from the stall over to the sink and mirror to check your nose. Randy and James are friendly with the general manager, who told them there’s a hidden camera in the bathroom. To snort blow, you have to use the fourth stall and face sideways. When I hear that, I downgrade the bathroom to one Zip. Hidden cameras? In the bathroom? Sounds ridiculous, but ten minutes later I’m in the fourth stall, standing sideways, snorting away.