The Buy Side (3 page)

My journalism adviser from Ohio University had called me six months after graduation. He told me if I want to work in New York, I have to be in New York. In the month of December I’d sent over thirty blind résumés and cover letters to newspapers, magazines, and
public relations firms. Getting zero responses, I decided to knock on doors. The U-Haul is ready to go. My mother gives me a hug that makes me feel like I’m going off to war. My father reaches out his cold hand to give me a handshake. His technique is perfect, firm and solid, while he looks directly into my eyes, exactly how he taught me.

“Good luck,” he says. If there was ever an opportunity to hug my father for the first time, it’s now. I’m sure he hugged me as a child, but I don’t remember. He should hug
me
, I think. I release from his handshake to break the awkward moment. We’re off.

It’s still snowing. Ten hours later we’re done moving my stuff into the apartment on Eighty-Fifth and Columbus. There’ll be three of us living here. A friend of a friend of Jayme’s named John, who is a banking analyst and works eighty hours a week, is getting the large bedroom. Jayme has dibs on the smaller bedroom. And I’m going to sleep on a couch in the room that connects the small bedroom with the living room. My rent is four hundred dollars a month. The wood floors and white walls look nice—it’s just small. This is going to work, I think. Tomorrow I’ll get a job.

I can’t even get past the front lobby. Apparently
Sports Illustrated
doesn’t appreciate unannounced guests. The security guard squints his eyes and leans in closer when I tell him I want to go up and introduce myself. “No, I don’t have an appointment,” I admit. “I just want to drop off my résumé and see if I can talk to someone.”

“Mail it,” the guy says.

When I get home I decide to make some phone calls. I figure if I’m going to call a public relations firm I should ask to speak with the president. No one calls me back, ever. After weeks of this activity, I find myself in a headhunter’s office. I’ve heard the word “temp” used several times while sitting next to her desk. It’s depressing. The office is old. The walls are dirty and the carpets are stained. Four women,
each with a smoker’s hack, sit at their desks hidden behind stacks and stacks of paper. Darlene, who has high hair and wears a purple pants suit, tells me to follow her. She’s the one I booked the appointment with from the ad in the newspaper. She leads me to a small empty desk with a typewriter.

“Here,” she says with a flick of a piece of paper. “You have one minute to type.”

I look at the page; it’s a few paragraphs about some guy named Bobby who wants to buy a new car. When I spoke to Darlene on the phone she didn’t mention anything about a typing test. I roll a blank piece of paper into the typewriter. I neatly place the story about Bobby on what resembles a music stand. Darlene stares at her watch.

“Go!” she shouts.

I took a typing class my freshman year in high school, and as a journalism major I typed in college, but I was never fast. And I’m rusty. I begin slowly. I figure it’s better to not make any mistakes than to try to rush. I finish the first sentence and give it a once-over to make sure there are no mistakes.
Fuck
. I put a space between
dealer
and
ship
.

“Time,” Darlene says behind my back.

“Are you serious?” I say. It was the fastest minute in all of my twenty-four years. She takes one look at my one sentence and tells me I failed. I glance up at her with puppy-dog eyes, the same expression that usually works on my mom.

“Sorry,” she says without a single drop of compassion. “Can’t help ya.”

She doesn’t even walk me to the elevator, but instead slinks back to her desk and sits behind her stacks. I grab my coat and leave.

I’m sitting in the apartment alone. Jayme and our other roommate, John, are at work. I stopped by the Gap on my way home and got an application. At least they were friendly there. I decide to file it away in
my closet. I don’t want my roommates seeing it, and I don’t want to work at the Gap. But I need a job. I pick up the phone to call my mom for some comforting, and she suggests I call her brother for guidance. I’ve only seen Uncle Tucker twice in ten years, both times at my sisters’ weddings. All I know is, he moved to San Francisco with his second wife. He still works in finance. He shaved his mustache and traded in the Corvette for a navy blue Mercedes 560 SL that he calls the Boesky Benz. He named the car after his biggest client, Ivan Boesky, who was at least partly the inspiration for
Wall Street
’s Gordon Gekko. Because of Uncle Tucker, the Wall Street world has always seemed magical to me. But the idea of working there has never even entered my mind. He must know successful, influential people, even in the world of journalism. I jot down his number and say goodbye.

Tucker answers the phone on the first ring. “Trading,” he says. I tell him it’s his nephew Turney and he’s surprised but happy to hear from me. He waits for me to speak. I haven’t planned what I’m going to say. My throat is dry and my brain feels empty. I try to get my words out, and somewhere in between all of my
um
s,
ah
s, and dead silence, I manage to tell him I need help finding a job.

“Gotcha,” he says.

I try to elaborate, but I keep repeating myself.

“Call you back in ten,” he says before I’m able to tell him what kind of a job I’m looking for. I set the phone down and sit on the couch also known as my bed. Twenty minutes later the phone rings. “You have ten interviews this week,” he says.

“For what?” I ask.

“Just tell them you want to get into sales,” he says.

When Jayme gets home from his paralegal job I tell him about the lead from my uncle. As we sit on the couch eating a pizza, Jayme tells me about Dave, his college friend from BC whom I remember from
my visits there. “Dude, he got a call to interview at Goldman Sachs,” Jayme says, and his words hang in the air while he waits for my response. But I have no idea what Goldman Sachs is. It sounds like a fancy department store.

“Is he gonna work there?” I ask.

“Nah,” Jayme says, wagging his head. “Blew it off. He’s movin’ to Prague to try to play professional basketball.” Good for him, I think. Better than selling ladies’ perfume.

A few days later I’m wearing my Filene’s Basement suit and standing in front of Three World Financial Center. Behind me, the Twin Towers soar to the sky. It’s 8:45 a.m., and a stream of suits file past. I muster my courage and push through the door. The guard at the front desk calls my contact and directs me to take the elevator to the eighth floor. There, the receptionist smiles and shows me to a windowed room filled with sleek modern furniture and tables strewn with
Wall Street Journal
s and financial magazines. I decline her offer of something to drink and sit on the edge of one of the stainless steel and leather chairs. Five minutes later, a man in his early forties, short but fit, with a receding but still black hairline, walks into the waiting room. He wears dark suit pants and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His tie is loose around his collar, like he’s been at work for hours.

“Mike Breheny,” he says pumping my hand.

Apparently already super caffeinated, he begins to talk a mile a minute. He has a New York or Jersey accent, which along with a quick delivery makes him a little hard to understand. I think he’s telling me something about the history of Lehman Brothers, and then he asks me what I’m interested in doing.

“Sales,” I say. “I want to get into sales.”

I’m sure my uncle must have left something out. But it seems enough of an answer for Mike. He nods and takes me out to a big,
open room lined with long desks on which sit computer screens and telephones. On the trading floor, there are maybe a hundred mostly young men, all of them talking, either on the phone or to one another. The energy they emit is kinetic. My heart, already beating quickly, begins to thump in my chest. Mike leads me down one of the aisles and seats me between two young traders.

“Get a sense of what we do here,” he says, patting me on the back. Although I’ve only known Mike for a few minutes, I don’t want him to leave. But one of the traders allays my fear with a friendly smile.

“Where’d you go to school?” The young, sharply dressed trader has the phone receiver cradled in the crook of his neck as he looks at me. “Ohio,” I answer as he punches the lit-up button on the phone and barks something about needing a look in Bristol Myers. “When didya graduate?” I feel like I’m intruding, but somehow he’s able to carry on both conversations simultaneously and seemingly with equal interest. All of a sudden, he bolts straight up from his chair. “Bristol’s opening at fourteen and a half on two fifty,” he yells over to another coworker some twenty feet away. I have no idea what just happened, but I love it.

Once the opening bell rings, it’s controlled chaos. Everyone is screaming, punching tickers into the keyboard. A trader in his chair rolls down the aisle and ducks to avoid a phone cord that stretches twenty feet. Crumpled balls of paper are shot into wastebaskets. Everyone commands attention: Some stand and some sit. Some have phones on one ear and then both while shouting across the room to their coworkers. The frenzy of movement seems as well choreographed as a fight scene in
West Side Story
.

A few minutes later, the young trader plugs in a phone for me and tells me to listen in to his conversations. “When I hit the light, you hit yours,” he says. One right after the other, he calls clients, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and other traders. I understand none
of it. It’s like he’s talking in code and at light speed. But in the midst of this litany, one call has a slightly different tone than the rest. The guy talking on the other end is saying something about plane tickets and hotel reservations in Vegas. A plan for a bachelor party is apparently in the works. Midway through the conversation, the young trader realizes I’m still monitoring his line. He holds his hand over the receiver. “Um, you don’t need to listen to this one,” he says. As he talks with his friend I look around. I see a pool of people I want to be with. I’m swept up by the energy, intensity, and utter grandness of it all. I want in.

I’m pulled from my thoughts by Mike. He walks me over to meet the big boss, a fellow named Donald Crooks, who glad-hands me and asks a quick battery of questions: What school did I go to? Did I play football? What he doesn’t ask is anything that might indicate if I’m right for the job. In fact, I don’t remember, in any of my Wall Street interviews, being asked a question that might qualify me for a job in finance.

My next eight interviews at such firms as Merrill, KBW, Jefferies, Smith Barney, and UBS are more of the same. All feature modern reception rooms and shirtsleeved managers. All have the energy Lehman had. But each interview seems perfunctory. The fast-talking guys Uncle Tucker steered me to take my résumé and tell me to keep in touch.

Then I’m at Morgan Stanley on the thirty-third floor, the trading floor. I’m almost at the point when the manager takes my résumé and tells me to keep in touch when the phone on his desk rings. “There’s someone on thirty-seven who wants to meet you,” he says.

She introduces herself as Stephanie Whittier. She might be forty, but if she is, it’s a nice forty. With raven hair and a figure that fills the dark business suit she wears, she looks a bit like Demi Moore circa
A Few Good Men
. We get on the elevator and go up four floors.
“I love Tucker,” she says. “We go way back.” As she walks me to her office we make the usual small talk. Her desk is clean. She has stacks of folders, but they are in perfect order. She has a few items on her desk—a rubber-band ball the size of a grapefruit, a yellow smiley face stress ball, and some chopsticks. I also notice a photo of her and O. J. Simpson—standing on the trading floor, it appears. Out of exactly nowhere she mentions she missed the previous night’s episode of
Melrose Place
. Conveniently,
Melrose
is a guilty pleasure of mine. I saw the show, so I tell her about Sydney’s ploy to hire a prostitute to seduce Robert and how she videotaped the whole thing and how Michael mailed the videotape to Jane—crazy stuff. Stephanie thumps the desk with her hand.

“No way,” she says.

I nailed it.

Twenty minutes or so later, she tells me she has two stacks of résumés for the job she’s going to fill. “One’s this high,” she says, holding her hand a few feet over her desk. “And the other’s this high,” she says, lowering her hand to a couple of inches. Then she smiles and says: “You’re in the second one.” Twenty-four hours later, she calls and offers me a job.

It’s a few days before my first day on the job and I decide to take a walk instead of going back to my apartment. I happen to have twenty-two dollars in my pocket, a fortune! I start walking west over to Amsterdam Avenue. I think there’s a movie theater on Eighty-Sixth and Broadway. When I’m alone I love to escape. There’s nothing better than spending two hours staring at a screen getting lost in someone else’s world. I prefer a thriller, but I’ll see any movie. When I get to Amsterdam, I see a bar. There, in front of a saloon called the Raccoon
Lodge, is a sign that announces draft beers
$2, ALL DAY
. I pull out my money and do some quick math: eleven beers without tipping, and approximately eight to nine beers with tipping. I allow the magnetic pull of the Raccoon Lodge to gently tug me. I’ve also found that a few beers help me escape and are usually better than a movie. The first beers taste like dirty bathwater, but the third and fourth taste just fine. Just around then, I notice a middle-aged man looking at me from the end of the bar. He has on a brown suit that has had one too many trips to the dry cleaner. It shines like a new penny. He’s also wearing an ugly, pastel-colored tie and sneakers. He’s obviously had a few. He sees me looking at him and I quickly look away. But I’m too late. He picks up his draft and slides it down to the stool next to me. He throws his Marlboro Reds on the bar in front of me.

“Have one,” he says.