Monkey Business (17 page)

Now, understand that it’s not like the banker can run out to Kinkos to get the job done. This is a major production process—colors,
bindings, inserts, acetates—the copy center guys, for all their shortcomings, are the only ones capable of cranking out these
pitch book behemoths. Taking a job like this to Kinkos would be like trying to clean up an offshore oil spill with a dish
sponge.

So at this point, the interaction can take one of two potential paths.

Path#1:
The associate flies into an immediate rage. “You fucking idiot! This has to be done by SEVEN FUCKING
A.M
.! Do you read me? Comprende? My job, this
here job, takes priority! This is the biggest goddamned deal this fucking bank has pitched in the past decade. Do you understand
what that means? Do you have any understanding outside of that miserable little existence that you call a life what I’m telling
you here? Of course you don’t. Who the fuck am I fooling? Look, get this through your thick head—THIS JOB TAKES PRIORITY!
Now goddamn it, get it done by seven
A.M
.!”

This is exactly what the copy center guy wants to hear. This is precisely the kind of respect that a guy making seven bucks
an hour figures he deserves. An apoplectic born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth asshole from Westchester County is telling
the Pride of the Barrio that he’s a fucking idiot. And, moreover, he’s telling him that he’s an idiot while concurrently begging
for his help. The rich honkey banker has just made it clear through his very rage that he’s in a pickle. Nobody gets that
mad about something unless their ass is in a sling.

The world is an unjust place, and the inequities inherent in Wall Street’s money game push the outer limits of that injustice.
The copy center, though, is the one place on Wall Street where the little man has his day. When confronted with a livid banker
demanding service, the copy center guy gets to give the rich pricks their comeuppance. It’s a kangaroo court for assholes,
and the copy center guy is judge, jury, and executioner. The copy center guy can turn to the raging banker and tell him, “So
sorry, but your job doesn’t have priority here. This is my shop, this is my decision. Your job’ll get done when I get to it.”
The banker has no choice. He has no idea how to make copies, especially color copies, and he has no idea how to bind a document.
He has no idea where the dividers
are, the blue sheets, the covers, the acetates, the back covers, or anything else. Unlike word processing, which any half
decent associate could do himself if push came to shove, the associate is unable to do the copy center guy’s job. No way.
The associate is screwed. He’s up shit’s creek without a paddle. The associate has no choice but to surrender to his destiny.
The associate has to suck up his pride and develop a new approach. He must head down path number two.

Path #2:
Money talks. The associate relies on his skills of negotiation and bribery to move the job to the head of the priority list.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds, because the sort of cold cash payments to the copy center guys that would provide incentive
enough for them to push all other jobs aside are only allowed at holiday time. At all other times of the year, the bribery
has to be more subtle and the associate has to be more crafty in the approach. The senior bankers don’t understand this part
of the game. A managing director has no idea how to build a relationship with the copy center guys. The managing director
may be at home in the corporate boardroom talking turkey with eager CEOs with deal fever, but when it comes time to get a
priority rush on some pitch books from Julio in the copy center they’re useless. They have to rely on their lieutenants—the
associates.

The good associate recognizes from day one the value of good copy center relationships. The good associate greases the wheels
of progress, even when there isn’t an imminent need for express service in the copy center. The good associate orders up five
or six pizza pies for dinner every couple of weeks and sends two of the pies up to the copy center. The good associate runs
around
the corner to the deli once a month, picks up a case of beer, and delivers it to the copy center guys. The good associate
stuffs a twenty-dollar bill into the pockets of the key copy center guys at Christmas time and engenders some goodwill, or
he stuffs a fifty into those same pockets and engenders twice as much goodwill. And then, when the need for express copy service
actually arises, the good associate finds his job pushed to the head of the line while the badly mannered bitter associate
spews forth futile vitriol, and gets the job returned three hours after his deadline. One hand washes the other.

The copy center is a factory. It’s full of big industrial-size copy equipment, the kind of heavy machinery that’s not supposed
to be operated by anybody under the influence of NyQuil. The copiers in the copy center are living, breathing creatures capable
of tearing off a thousand copies in the time it takes to light a cigarette, and stapling those copies before the first soothing
fix of nicotine hits the bloodstream. These aren’t copiers where you punch in the number of copies you want and hit a big
green “COPY” button. These are copiers with a command console that looks like something out of a nuclear submarine. They’re
scary, and the only people who know how to make them work are the copy center guys.

Copiers aren’t the only equipment in the copy center. There are also big industrial hole punches, heavy-duty paper cutters,
monster scissors, gigantic stapling machines, and huge, intricate binding machines. The binding machines have a big steel
handle on the side. When you pull the handle, two rows of metal jaws pull the plastic binding apart so that the copy center
guy can slip the pages into the binding. Like birth stirrups for a newborn
book. The copy center’s not the kind of place that you want to be caught naked in. There’s too much opportunity for something
to get caught, twisted, pulled, or cut off.

There are a million variations on the basic black-and-white copy available in the copy center. There are standard copies and
there are color copies. There’s white paper, beige paper, and blue paper. There’s velo binding, staple binding, and spiral
binding. There are horizontal covers and vertical covers, with and without little windows. There are acetates and back covers
that are green or black, with the DLJ logo printed horizontally or vertically. The permutations are limitless. Copies can
be grouped, collated, stapled, or hole-punched. The copies can be delivered to somebody’s office or picked up. A banker can
give the copy center a single sheet of paper and get back a copy of that sheet on laminated bond paper, bound into a booklet
with an expensive-looking green cover with “Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette” embossed in gold letters. It makes that one sheet
of paper look very impressive. That’s what making the pitch books is all about—making mundane information look impressive.

When a job gets delivered to the copy center the associate has to fill out a requisition form. The requisition form includes
spaces for all of the options. It looks like a test form for the SATs. It’s important for the associate to mark the requisition
forms very carefully, because the copy center guys do exactly what the requisition forms request. They aren’t there to think,
they’re there to do. If an associate gets a job back, and is convinced that the copy center has screwed it up, he’ll march
into the copy
center and start yelling. His copies are screwed up and he wants to see some heads roll. The copy center guy behind the counter
will look beneath the counter for the requisition form. Most of the time, he’ll pull it out and, with a big smile on his face,
show the junior banker that the form was marked wrong. That makes the copy center guy feel good. If the copy center guy says
that he can’t find the requisition form, that’s the secret code for “We fucked it up.” The copy center will never openly admit
that they fucked it up, though. They know how to cover their ass.

Troob knew how frustrating the copy center could be. Part of the reason for that was that he did a lot of work for Jack Gatorski,
and Gator loved to get copies made. Troob once told me that he thought Gator had a strange thing for copies. It went way beyond
just being a Paper Banker. He swore that he’d once seen Gator get a big stack of copies back from the copy center that were
still warm, and that Gator had closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and started stroking the warm paper.

Gator was crazy when it came to getting copies made. He especially loved color copies. Charts, graphs, maps, pictures, he
loved all that shit. Whenever I did a pitch for him we’d sit down to run through a draft of the pitch book and I’d be saying
to myself over and over, “Please, God, not too many color copies. Please, Lord, not too many color copies. Just don’t let
him ask for too many color copies; please, please, please.” My supplications were never answered. The good Lord never came
to my
rescue. Gator’s penchant for color copies always overcame whatever practical sensibilities he may have had.

The problem with the color copies was that they gummed up the entire pitch book–making process. With all the state-of-the-art
high-technology equipment that they had up in the copy center, the process of actually assembling the pitch books was barbaric.
The black-and-white copies got made on one machine, and the color copies got made on another, much slower machine. Whichever
copy center guy was putting the books together then had to collate everything by hand. The copy center guy would have fifty
piles, each one a separate copy of the book, spread out all over the room and he’d be pulling copies off the color copier
and sticking them into each of the piles where they were supposed to go. Well, if you’ve only got three or four color pages
in each book then there isn’t all that much room for error, but in one of Gator’s books there were usually more color pages
than black-and-white pages, which meant that no matter how conscientious the copy center guy was, chances were that something
was gonna get screwed up. Layer on top of that the fact that the copy center guy was only making seven dollars an hour so
he didn’t usually give a fuck, and he had twenty other bankers calling him every fifteen minutes to ask him when their more
straightforward black-and-white jobs were gonna be done, and it was a recipe for disaster.

What it all meant was that every time I got a set of pitch books back from the copy center, I had to page through every single
copy by hand to make sure that all the pages were in order, that all the copies had been made on the same kind of paper, and
that some random crap hadn’t
made its way into my pitch book from somebody else’s pitch book. It was like doing piecework for an Eighth Avenue sweatshop.
When I did find the inevitable mistakes, I couldn’t bitch and moan about them to the guy in the copy center who had screwed
things up, because he’d just end up getting pissed off and fucking me over the next time I needed a favor. In fact, I usually
had to take the books back up to the copy center and act like the mistakes were my fault, and beg and plead for the copy center
guys to fix the books so that I could meet the deadline, which was usually within ten hours. The copy center guys hated it
when I brought back jobs that they thought they’d seen the last of, so I usually had to provide them with some extra incentive
to make things right. My big sales tool was lap dances down at Shenanigans. I’d offer to buy the guys a few lap dances each,
and they’d usually take care of me.

There was one time when I got my pitch books back at 4:30 in the morning. The copy center guy who had just finished them up
had taken off for home as soon as he was done and a new copy center guy was on call. Well, as usual, the pitchbooks were all
fucked up. I had to be on a flight for Cincinnati with the books in three and a half hours so I had a little bit of a problem.
To explain the problem to the new guy and go over what he’d have to do to fix it would take hours, and to do it myself was
impossible because I didn’t know how to use the machines. So a fifty-dollar bill emerged from my pocket and two pepperoni
double cheese pizzas helped to cajole my newfound friend in the copy center—Manuel—to help me go through each book, book by
book, and fix them.

Manuel and I went through each book and through
both pizzas. First, each book needed a new page twelve. Fourteen books and each one needed page twelve changed. Then the back
cover needed to be put on each book, then page thirty-four needed to be replaced by a color graph. Page seven had to be removed
and a new page seven had to be inserted. Pages twenty-four and twenty-five were inverted so they had to be switched around,
and page forty-two was behind page forty-three, so that needed to be fixed. All of the books needed to be checked again.

It was 6:30
A.M
. when we got done, or so I thought. When I checked the books some were still fucked up. The monotony of making the same changes
in every book was mind-numbing and Manuel and I were incapable of keeping all the changes straight. So, back we went to the
spiral binder and copy machine to fix the mistakes. Basically, everyone else’s jobs got screwed, but I had forked out fifty
bones and two pizzas. At 7:30 we were done. I had half an hour to get to the airport. I had packed a bag the night before
and left it in the office knowing that something like this would happen. It inevitably did. I ran to a cab with fourteen pitch
books, an overnight bag, my briefcase, a cell phone, and no sleep.

For the past year, I’d been dating this girl Marjorie. Since she lived in Chicago, we had been doing the long-distance thing.
Lately, things between us had started to get more serious. I called her from the cab and left a message on her answering machine
saying hello and “I’m sorry.” I felt bad. The previous weekend she had come to New York to visit me and had ended up sitting
in my apartment the whole time because I had to work. Thank God for 1–800-FLOWERS.

In the cab I checked the books and ten were good, two were slightly messed up, and two were completely fucked up. I took one
of the messed up ones for myself and prayed that after giving one good one to Gator there wouldn’t be more than nine guys
from the company who wanted pitch books. I dumped the two fucked-up pitch books in the garbage at La Guardia.