The Buy Side (6 page)

Seven of us, Dave and I and five of the seven women with us at the bar, hop in two cabs. I tell the driver the address: Tenth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. I’m sure Dave and Keryn can handle the place I have in mind, but the other girls might be a little horrified. It’s one of my favorite bars; I go there almost every weekend. Our cab drops us off first. Along with Drea, Lauren, and Keryn, I stand outside a wooden door covered with stickers for bike shops, booze, and gangs. There are no lights on the street corner; the only illumination comes from the neon bar sign. We’re on the outskirts of the Meatpacking District. Seventeenth Street is as dark as an alley. We can hear the rumblings of a good time coming from inside the bar. The black
banner emblazoned in red with
RED ROCK WEST
above the windows looks like it may fall down any minute. The girls want to know where I’m taking them.

“You’ll see,” I say.

A few minutes later, Heather, Nora, and Dave hop out of their cab. As I open the door to the bar, lyrics from a Def Leppard song slam us in the face: “Do you like sugar?” the song asks. “One lump or two!” the crowd of bikers, party girls, and cowboys bellows in response.

The place is packed. The medium-size bar is dark, but glows blues and reds from the neon beer signs. Behind the bar are more stickers, license plates, Harley signs, hula hoops, postcards, lanterns, and bras hanging from a huge mirror. Lots of bras. The air is thick with the smell of stale beer. Two female bartenders dressed in skimpy leather tops and jeans stomp around in their black shit-kicking boots. As the speakers blare “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” a girl lies on top of the bar with her shirt pulled up to her neck revealing Victoria’s Secret, a pretty pink push-up, while a bartender pours whiskey into her belly button. The head bartender sees me and waves me over. She plants a kiss on my lips, then hops up on the bar, straddles the patron, and sucks the whiskey out of the girl’s innie. The crowd is delirious. They raise their Buds, PBRs, and Rolling Rocks as suds fly everywhere. The jukebox is blasting. People are singing. The two female bartenders begin making out as the crowd eggs them on. I order eight longneck Buds and turn to hand them back to my group. The girls stand there, mouths wide open, in absolute disbelief. Dave clinks his longneck to mine.

I’M SUMMONED
into Stephanie’s office. I think I’m in trouble. She looks very stiff, like something’s wrong. She tells me to sit down and close the door. I know what I did. I might be fired.

Morgan Stanley recently has had mice problems. We’ve received several emails reminding us not to leave food on our desks at night. My desk-mate Michelle is terrified of mice. So last week when she went to lunch, I snuck under her desk. It was too tight under there, so I had to slide open the black metal door under her desk to crawl into the area where we hide our computers and all of the phone wires. I barely fit. When Michelle returned from lunch, she kicked off her shoes. I knew it. A perfect pink glossy pedicure. I bet she wears sexy outfits and open-toe high heels on the weekends. I took my index finger and thumb and started giving her little mouse bites on her feet. It was the loudest scream I’d ever heard. She jumped up from her desk screaming. Her lunch flew into the air. This must be why Stephanie called me into her office. Everyone had to have heard the scream.

Stephanie looks like she’s shooting arrows from her eyes. She picks up the phone and dials a number. “Hey, John, I just want to confirm what we talked about,” she says.

I don’t like the sound of this. But as she hangs up, her serious expression melts to a big, shiny white grin. “I want you to plan a party,” she says. It takes me a second to realize I’m not in trouble. Meanwhile, Stephanie has begun to go into detail about the morale on the floor, which, she says, is too low. Apparently the department is allocating three grand to boost it.

“I’m in,” I tell her. I know how to throw a great party. I majored in it at college. When I get back to my desk I realize Stephanie must
have been talking with John Straus on the phone. He’s the head of the department, my boss’s boss’s boss, the very top of the food chain. I don’t even think he knows my name. I admire him. He’s like a general, but willing to stand on the front line. He’s a family man with values. His hints of gray hair show his age and make him look distinguished.

I find a bar near Thirty-Seventh Street and Third Avenue. It has a narrow room with a long wooden bar, exposed brick, and a jukebox. There’s really nothing to it, except the huge outdoor space they have in back. After one trip there, two phone calls, and three emails, the entire night is planned. Now all I have to do is to make sure the party is a success. I know both Stephanie and John Straus plan to attend. I don’t want to end up looking like a complete failure in front of two of the most important people in the office. I come up with a plan. On a Sunday I call up my high school friend Chris Arena, who moved to the city before I did. He works for the NBA in their main office in Midtown, and he has a computer program in his office I want to use. He meets me at the side entrance of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral off Fifth Avenue; his office is across the street. As we make our way through his lobby and into his elevator bank, I explain to him what I have in mind: a newsletter. In Chris’s office, I sit in front of his computer looking at the blank screen. I love a blank screen. All I want to do is fill it up.

The whole purpose of my newsletter is to get people excited about the party, but I also want it to be fun to read. The who, what, when, where, why, and how of the party fills the whole first page. I add some cheesy champagne bottles and flying streamers clip art, and also a table of contents—a teaser of what’s inside. I know I can’t provide any of my coworkers with market knowledge or insight that they don’t already know. This has to be straight-up supermarket checkout lit. Water cooler talk. When I realize this, the stories begin to fly out of me. I title the first story “So … You Want to Be a Porn Star?” Eight
hours later—an interval that goes by in the blink of an eye—I finish the last of the blind items. All that’s left is to give the newsletter a name. I write
The Turney Tape
in large, bold font across the top.

I decide to wait until Tuesday to hand it out. I figure my audience should receive it close enough to the party so they won’t forget. That morning I wake up an extra thirty minutes early so I can get to the office and make 250 photocopies of
The Turney Tape
. I need to print it on longer paper so it looks like a real newsletter or miniature newspaper. I get the guy in the mail room to show me how to print it. I decide lunch is the best time to distribute them—I don’t want them to get buried in the morning research and client requests.

At noon, I look at the stack of newsletters and begin to wonder if this is a huge mistake. There’s at least a fifty percent chance I’m coming out of this looking like a joke. What if nobody laughs? When I stand up, my trepidation gets even worse. It would have been hard enough distributing some type of business-related research I’d done. Even that would have left me wide open to snide remarks and criticism. But an office gossip newsletter? What was I thinking?

In front of me stretches the block-long open office. Though most of the brokers and many of the assistants are still working, on the phone or intently studying the computer screens, there’s also the first sign of lunchtime on their desks: paper take-out bags and cafeteria salads and sandwiches. I take a deep breath and begin my march. One by one, I hand out copies of
The Turney Tape
. I stop at every desk. It’s easier to give them to the sales assistants, because I know them all. The brokers seem a little more skeptical. I guess they assume it’s official Morgan Stanley business, information on a new product we’re launching or something. But with each copy I hand out I become a bit more emboldened. I tell myself I don’t care anymore. I’m doing it.

It’s right about this time when I hear the first giggle behind me.
I turn and see an assistant holding the newsletter up, pointing out an article to another person in her group. I watch and confirm that they’re both smiling. Then I hear someone from another group laughing. Another laugh comes from a desk a few steps away. Then a broker comes up and asks me for a copy.

Once I finish with all of the brokers, assistants, and back office and portfolio guys, I start to make my way to the windowed offices, the managing directors. I tiptoe into office after office, smile politely, and leave the newsletter on the desk. When I reach the biggest corner office on the entire floor, I peek in. Thankfully it’s empty. I’m not sure I’d have the courage to hand John Straus a copy if he were there. I drop the newsletter on his desk and dart out of his office.

As I return to my desk, I turn to look back out on the floor and it seems like everyone is reading it and laughing. That afternoon, I receive a steady stream of assistants and brokers congratulating me. More important, almost all are excited about the party.
The Turney Tape
is a hit.

A little later I hear a familiar voice coming from a few groups away. “Where’s Turney?” he says. “Where’s Turney’s desk?” John Straus has his sleeves rolled up, and his red tie sways as he strides toward me. Though he’s still twenty feet or so from me, I can see he’s holding a copy of
The Turney Tape
. I quickly turn back to my computer screen. I know he’s heading for my desk. I grab one of my pens and start to roll it between my hands. I squint at the screen and pretend to be doing a complex math formula in my head. Then I hear his voice directly behind me. “Turney?” he asks. I turn around and say hey. I can feel hundreds of eyes on me, from all directions. “Have you ever considered doing something other than selling stocks and bonds?” he asks. For a moment I’m not sure if it’s a compliment or an insult. I shrug and peer up at him, waiting for my fate. It’s then that his face breaks
into a huge smile. “This is great,” he says. The expression on his face is better than any year-end bonus I’ve ever gotten.

The turnout for the party is huge. A resounding success. At one point, John Straus walks up and puts his arm around me. He gives me a hug. “So, Turney, where did you grow up?” he asks. I can see Stephanie smiling across the crowd from us. In this moment it comes to me. I just made my first power move.

TWO YEARS
later, I’m still a sales assistant for Morgan with my résumé burning in my hands. Some power move. It’s been more than five years since I first sat in the conference room listening to Stephanie and I’m still working as an assistant.

“I can no longer work for my group,” I tell Stephanie. “I have to do something else.” I’ve lost all hope of becoming a trader at Morgan. She pulls me into her office and closes the door. There’s nothing in Stephanie’s office that indicates a life outside of it—no vacation photos or pictures of family or husband. The picture of her and O.J. disappeared after the car chase. She’s spent twenty-five years at Morgan, and for most of that time her whole world has been running the assistants’ program. I look into her eyes and can tell she’s conflicted. In one sense, she can’t imagine why anyone would want to work anywhere else. But there’s another aspect as well. Though I have no evidence to prove this, maybe what I see is a secret longing for an escape herself. She scribbles
something on a piece of paper and hands it to me. For a second, both of our hands hold the paper.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m doing this for you,” she says as she finally lets go. Although I don’t know this for sure, I would bet that she has never done this for anyone. On the paper are the names of contacts on the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch trading floors.

Both interviews go fine. But it’s obvious they aren’t hiring and are just doing a favor for Stephanie. I return to the floor in PCS after my second meeting. I set my file folder filled with my résumés on an empty desk. Stephanie has allowed me to return to floating to free up time to interview, but there’s nowhere for me to float today. Then the phone rings. Only Stephanie and the receptionist know I’m at this desk. It must be a wrong number. I answer it with a hello like I’m at home. “Get your ass over here now,” the female voice on the other end of the phone says. It has to be a wrong number. I’m just about to say something smart, or hang up, when I hear, “Turney, I’m serious, get over here right now,” she says. I realize it’s Keryn.

Keryn left Morgan a year ago to go to a start-up hedge fund called the Galleon Group. I haven’t had much contact with her since. I heard through the grapevine she’s doing really well. Dave Slaine helped her get the job and then went over there himself a few months later. Liz, who worked with all of us at Morgan and then got her big break with Lehman, saw me today at my interview. She called Keryn and told her I was looking for a job. I know nothing about Galleon, and very little about hedge funds. I don’t even know what the job is. I ask her if I can come in tomorrow.

“Fine,” she says. “Be here tomorrow around lunchtime.” She gives me the address and tells me she’ll call me tonight at home to go over everything I need to know for the interview.