The Buy Side (16 page)

“You still don’t have a girlfriend?” she asks as she takes my hand and leads me to the couch. “I don’t get it.”

“I’m having too much fun,” I say as I pat down my hair.

“Me too,” she says. Barbara was listed under “mature” on the website where I found her six months ago. Her photo was sexy: blond hair, really large breasts. But in person, she wears the truth of her age in her eyes. A bird’s nest of wrinkles sits on either side of them, and they have the tattered expression of a hard life filled with disappointment.

“I gave my number out tonight and took one,” I say.

“There you go,” she smiles. “Nice work.” I like Barbara and I think she likes me. But like most everyone else in my life now she’s a person whose sincerity I sometimes question. One of the first times we were together she told me I reminded her of Johnny Depp. I laughed because I look nothing like him. She told me she’d once spent several nights with the star, and he was very much the gentleman. I liked the story, and didn’t care much if it was true or not. I dump the rest of the coke on the coffee table and she fixes me vodka on the rocks.

She asks if I want to take this party to bed, but I get the feeling she only says it because she feels obligated. She can tell that I’ve partied too much. No thanks, I say. Instead, we stay on her couch and chat. I ask her how her business is going and she shrugs as if to say that some
nights are better than others. “If only I’d invested some of my money,” she says, “then I’d be set.” The statement makes me wonder. I want to tell her that it’s a bear market and nobody’s making money. “Then I wouldn’t have to do this every night,” she says. “I could pick my clients and only hang out with guys like you.” Her comment makes me smile, but I now realize how similar we are.

I’m tired and feel dirty. Barbara asks if I’d like to take a shower with her. The hot water pelts my body. We take turns washing each other, and laugh as we do. It’s the best twenty minutes I’ve had all day.

I’m dressed now, my hair still wet. I hug her at the doorway and try to hand her some money, but she refuses. “Please, just take it,” I say. She begins to push me out into the hallway but not before I drop a couple of hundred-dollar bills on her table next to the door.

On the street, I look at my phone: it’s 5:42 a.m. I need to go home and change my suit.

AN HOUR
later, I’m at my desk next to Rich and Melinda. They both work on the trading desk with me. We hired Rich right after we launched. He was my Citigroup sales trader when I worked at Galleon. He executed my million-dollar Sepracor trade. When Gary called him up to tell him he couldn’t cover Argus anymore, he must have chuckled. He was on his second interview with us. Rich is the skinniest ex–Division I hockey player ever, and has unruly black hair that sits on his head like abstract art. With his white pearly smile and his ’fro, all the girls love him. Melinda, who was Krishen’s assistant at Galleon, is a dark-haired beauty who’s part Hawaiian or Filipino or something. Melinda deserves her seat. She’s the first in the office and the last to leave, and she’s fully aware that she doesn’t know everything yet, which makes her very wise. I enjoy coming to work: we laugh a lot and work hard, everyone is smart, and we function as a team.

Gus calls right after the opening bell. I knew he would. I give him
an order: buy 15,000 shares of SPY. I don’t have any interest in buying the stock, but it’s so liquid that I can either sell it immediately or wait five minutes and see if I can make a little money. Both Melinda and Rich cast questioning glances my way. It’s like they know I’m up to something. “He has great execution,” I say, pinching my shoulders up. I want to take my words back. “Great execution” is code for “he has a big expense account.” It’s not like I can do
anything
I want, though. Krishen needs to approve any account I open, but when he asks me why I opened this one, I’ll just make something up.

Gus calls back with the report. This time Rich intercepts the call. “Who the hell is this tool Gus?” he asks me. He sounds like he’s joking. “I mean, seriously, man, who names their kid Gus?” Biting my lip, I’m thankful he didn’t share his nickname: Turbo. It hurts to even think about last night. My guard goes up. Neither Rich nor Melinda knows about my drug use. I wouldn’t know Gus’s name if he hadn’t supplied me with the pile of blow. On Wall Street, a bag of cocaine is like an after-hours name tag, but much more memorable.

“He’s not a squirrel, I promise.” A squirrel is someone to whom you give an order only to find that they keep coming back for more. Sometimes they’re from a regional bank in the Midwest or some boutique outfit close by. Feed them once and they start calling you every day. And then it’s a few times a day. Next thing you know the squirrel is driving you nuts. We now pay five cents a share on every trade, so the squirrel has two cheeks full of nickels and starts coming to your door looking for more. The problem is, I have a feeling that Gus is as squirrelly as a guy can get.

By the afternoon I need toothpicks to keep my eyes open. Fucking brutal. The only good news is, Gus hasn’t called in a couple of hours. I’ll never do what I did last night again, I tell myself. This is the time of day that sucks most. The two hours left until the closing bell are an
eternity, and there’s nothing to keep the feelings at bay. And now the worst of those feelings take control. I begin to hear a primal drumbeat inside my head.
You fraud
, it says. In the space of twelve hours, I go from king shit to just shithead.
I’m not making this firm money. They could train a chimpanzee to do what I do. Melinda and Rich will both find out I’m a coke fiend. Every time I sniffle they look my way. Krishen is about to fire me. I’m a buy side squirrel and I’m only thirty-two
. One ugly and negative thought after the other spills out of me like gray matter from a shotgun blast to the head. Then, right when I’m about to drown in my negative internal talk, right when I’m at my most vulnerable, the phone rings and I pick it up.

“Come on over to the White House after work,” Randy says.

“No,” I say. I quickly hang up the phone. I don’t want to go back for at least a month.

I love Sunday nights. As a trader, there isn’t much to do. Sure, I could be studying some charts or reading
Barron’s
, but who wants to do that? I’d much rather be sitting on the couch with Jason and Ethan watching
Sex and the City
. My cell phone buzzes. I programmed Gus’s number into my phone, but I did it under “Turbo.” It makes me smirk every time I see it flashing. I click Ignore. Then my phone buzzes again. “Turbo can’t take a hint,” I say. But when I look at the caller ID, I see it’s a number I don’t know. I press the Talk button.

“Hellooooo,” I say in my best Barry White.

“It’s Lily,” says the voice.

Lily?
I repeat her name in my head a few times. But I have no idea who she is. It’s not that unusual for an unknown female voice to be calling me—I’m social. I play it cool, ask her what’s going on. When she says she’s at a friend’s house and just got done watching
Sex and the
City
, I grab the remote and mute the closing credits. Soon we both run out of things to say and an awkward silence ensues. “So, you’re really good at the towel dance?” she asks. How does she know about that? “We should get together so I can show you in person,” I say.

“Okay,” she says sweetly. “I’m busy until Labor Day, but how about after that?”

I take Lily’s number and agree to give her a call. After I hang up, I ask Jason and Ethan if either of them knows a Lily. They both shake their heads. It’s not until later that night when it comes to me.
Lily!
The bartender at Wetbar with the Jennifer Aniston hair.

In September 2002, my roommates and I decide to move. Much of Manhattan—the Upper West Side high-rises in particular—is like an upscale Soviet Union. People live in apartments that all look alike, they awake at the same time, eat the same granola, dress in the same corporate uniforms, and line up for the crosstown bus or take the stairs down to the subway. The sameness can drive you crazy. We all agree: it’s time for a change.

Right now there’s only Ethan, Jason, and me living here. We knocked down a wall to open up the living room. Ethan is my cousin. He’s an actor a couple years out of college. He’d be perfect for an afterschool special playing the morally responsible friend. I need to corrupt him a little bit. He
looks
like my cousin, Duff nose and all. Then there’s Jason. He looks like a chubby Ben Affleck. The kid could make you laugh at a funeral. He’s a media buyer; he purchases airtime on television for his clients. All my other roommates have moved out.

Now, it’s not like I can’t afford an apartment on my own. I can. My salary is up to two hundred grand a year at Argus. And that’s not including my bonus. In 2001, I got six hundred grand. We didn’t make any money, but Krishen rewarded me for taking the risk of leaving Galleon.
What would be the fun in living alone?
The thought of being
unaccompanied, hungover, in a fancy one-bedroom apartment is depressing. I want to live with my friends until I fall in love, get married, and start a family. When I was a kid all I wanted to do was become an adult. Now as an adult, all I want to do is remain a kid. Anyway, I always told my friends that if I made it I was taking them along with me. It’s time for me to back up my words.

Only one question remains: Where? Once, when I was headed to a restaurant downtown in Tribeca, I saw a converted factory building with a black wrought-iron staircase and porch across the front. At the time, I thought: I’d love to live in a place like that. But the idea of moving to Tribeca might have actually formed on a date that everyone remembers.

On September 11, 2001, Argus Partners had been up and running for only a couple of months and we were in our temporary space on Sixth Avenue in Midtown. Along with several other senior people, I was in a meeting that morning when an administrative assistant came into the room to tell us a prop plane had hit one of the twin towers. When the second jet hit, Krishen asked everyone to evacuate the office. We gathered on the sidewalk outside of our building. Looking down Sixth Avenue, I could see the smoke billowing from the upper floors of the north tower, which, by then, stood alone. I remember turning away to light a cigarette. When I turned back, the top of the tower was gone. In that moment, the building had begun to collapse into itself. I spent much of that day with Jason, Ethan, and some other friends in the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. We smoked cigarettes and scanned a sky that was far too blue for more jets. Later that evening, we all went to a local bar. For once I didn’t want to go. But I didn’t want to be alone.

Three weeks later, I threw a party for the Twin Tower Fund, a charity that raised money for children who were left orphaned by the
September 11 attacks. I’d called every contact I had on Wall Street. The party was held at a club in Tribeca called Shine, and raised more than twenty-five grand for the charity. Wall Street still talks about that night. More than a thousand people danced until four in the morning just blocks from the still smoldering site of Ground Zero. Though I’d always thought of Tribeca, with its cobblestone streets and converted factories and warehouses, as a magical place, after 9/11 the idea of living there brought out in me an almost patriotic fervor.

It’s Jason and I who go looking for apartments. One of the last we see is in the Sugar Warehouse building, a redbrick ten-story structure on a cobblestone block called Laight Street. When the structure was built, before the Civil War, it was one of the tallest buildings in Manhattan and part of the city’s skyline. Now the building consists of duplex and triplex apartments. The doorman tells us that the apartment we’re looking at is the only rental in the building—the rest are tenant-owned.

The door to 5A swings open to reveal huge floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the Hudson River. An orange sun sets over New Jersey and its rays form a shimmering path that cuts the river in two. A cruise ship slides by. The view is stunning. The living room is sunken and spacious; the shiny wood floors glisten at our feet. There’s a full dining room and a kitchen filled with top-of-the-line stainless-steel appliances. A huge master bedroom is on the second floor. Here, with even bigger windows than in the living room, the view is even more amazing. The master bath has beautiful southwestern tiles and a monster steam shower. Across the hall is another bedroom with its own bathroom. The third floor is perfect for a pool table (if we stick Ethan’s bed in the corner) and has a sliding glass door that opens up to a 1,500-square-foot roof deck. Jason and I stand on the deck. We can see up and down the Hudson River from the George Washington
Bridge to the Statue of Liberty. Like the iconic
New Yorker
cartoon, the rest of the country lies beyond the river. I light a cigarette and the white smoke curls and dances away with the breeze.

“I’ll take it,” I tell the broker.

“But I haven’t told you what the rent is,” he says.

I don’t care. I have to live here. “How much?” I ask.