Monkey Business (25 page)

Once again, we sat in a room and listened to one of the general managers tell us about the business. Like most French people,
he hated us for being American. That was OK with me. To amuse myself, while the other bankers were asking legitimate questions
about the operations I asked him stupid questions like, “If one of the cab drivers spills a cup of coffee into the radio,
will it
stop working?” When the meeting ended, the Goldman and SBC Warburg bankers got into a fight over whether we should spend the
night in Paris and head out for Innsbruck in the morning or whether we should go to Innsbruck that night. The Goldman vice
president wanted to go shopping in Paris and get Hermès scarves. I told everybody that they could do whatever the hell they
wanted but I was going to Innsbruck. I called my voice mail back at the office. I had seven more messages.

Wednesday, 7
P.M
.—We got on the puddle jumper from Paris to Innsbruck, Austria. Another 190 miles. By this point, I’d only had six hours of
sleep in the prior sixty hours. I fell asleep before the stewardess even got to me with the cocktail peanuts.

Wednesday, 11
P.M
.—Innsbruck was a welcome change from France. Then again, a kick in the head would have been a welcome change. Everybody spoke
English. Our cab driver was named Max Van Weezel. GWA, who had been responsible for booking all the travel arrangements, had
booked us into the Innsbruck Holiday Inn. The Goldman bankers weren’t too hip on that. They didn’t think that “Goldman Sachs”
and “Holiday Inn” belonged together. Four Seasons, definitely. Hilton, maybe. Holiday Inn, no way. It didn’t seem to matter
that the rooms were twice as big as they would have been at one of the classy hotels. It didn’t seem to matter that there
was a swimming pool, which the classy hotels never
had. It was still a Holiday Inn and that didn’t cut the mustard with Goldman bankers.

I called my voice mail back at the office. I had four more messages. I accidentally erased three of those before listening
to them.

Thursday, 8
A.M
.—We began our meetings with the operating managers of the Austrian paging operation. The Austrians served us fish for lunch.
I fell asleep during the meeting and drooled on my tie. I learned nothing about the paging operations that day.

Thursday, 6:30
P.M
.—We got on a plane bound for Warsaw, Poland. Another 1,100 miles. We lost another hour in the time change. I had a banking
dream on the plane. I dreamed that one of my managing directors, dressed in a black leather dominatrix outfit, was flagellating
me with a whip made of Twizzlers. I may have been delirious.

Four hours later we landed at the Warsaw International Airport. The airport had no lights, the runway was covered with snow,
and there were wild dogs running alongside the plane as it landed. None of it fazed me. All I wanted was a hot shower and
a warm bed.

Thursday, Midnight
—It was midnight by the time we got to our hotel. I was now 5,000 miles away, and seven time zones removed, from DLJ’s headquarters
back in New York. I was in snowy Warsaw inside the former Eastern Bloc. I actually started to feel as if I’d left it all behind.
I
could disappear into the Polish countryside and become a potato farmer. I was tired and disoriented but felt better than I’d
felt in months because I knew that nobody could touch me. No managing directors. No vice presidents. I was flying solo.

As it turned out the only place I was flying was right into the eye of the storm. I was a pitiful fool to think that I was
beyond the iron clutches of my superiors. There was no escape.

I was standing at the check-in counter when the phone behind the desk rang. The clerk picked it up. Somebody on the other
end was speaking. The clerk appeared puzzled. He looked up.

“Is there a Mr. Rolfe here?”

I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a coincidence. There had to be another Mr. Rolfe. There was no way that I’d come this
far to be tracked down in the lobby of the hotel. I spoke up: “I’m Mr. Rolfe.”

“You have a phone call.” The clerk handed me the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey Johnny, it’s Melba.” Melba was one of my BAs.

“How the fuck did you find me here? I’m standing at the check-in counter.”

“I called GWA in Toronto. They told me where you were staying. I figured that you’d be in your room.”

“Unbelievable. Why are you calling?”

“It’s Bubbles. He’s going nuts. He’s been down here all afternoon screaming at everybody. He needs to talk to you about the
Woodpecker deal. He said that he’s been leaving you voice mails for the last two days and that you haven’t returned any of
them. He said that he left
you one last night telling you that it was urgent, that you needed to call him.”

Uh-oh, I thought. That must have been one of the messages that I’d accidentally erased the night before in Innsbruck. “All
right, look,” I told Melba, “tell him that my plane got delayed and that I just got into Warsaw. I’ll call him in a couple
of minutes.”

My peace was shattered. Not even the tattered remnants of the Iron Curtain could keep my managing directors at bay. There
was to be no peace. I trudged up to my room, head held low, and put in a call to Bubbles. First he ripped me a new bunghole.
Then he proceeded to generate enough demands related to Project Woodpecker to keep me working frantically for the next four
hours. When I was too tired to work any more I called my voice mail back at the office. I had nine new messages. I didn’t
listen to any of them. I didn’t care any more. It was 4
A.M
.

Friday, 5
A.M
.—I woke up an hour after I’d fallen asleep. I was dazed. I stumbled into the bathroom and, in my confused state, mistook
the bidet for a toilet. Why couldn’t the Europeans have just one big porcelain throne in the bathroom like the Americans did?
I didn’t get it. They refused to shower regularly, but wanted to have the cleanest asses in town.

Friday, 12 Noon
—Friday morning was free. It had been scheduled that way to give us time to do some sightseeing around Warsaw. But that was
a pipe dream. I sat in
my hotel room instead and did some cleanup work on Project Woodpecker.

The diligence sessions on the Polish cellular operations began at noon. Poland was GWA’s crown jewel. A big chunk of the expected
offering proceeds had been earmarked to pay for the buildout of the Polish system. We had to pray that the money from the
offering would actually be used to build the system and wouldn’t end up in an anonymous bank account in the Cayman Islands.
It was now Friday afternoon and I’d only had fourteen hours of sleep since the previous Monday morning. The chairs were comfortable
and there was no way to keep my eyes open. I fell into a deep sleep. Diligence be damned.

Friday, 7
P.M
.—GWA had planned a special dinner for us. Some dignitaries from the Canadian embassy showed up. I sat across from the ambassador.
He was a big, fat jolly guy who looked a lot like Santa Claus. He spent most of the dinner drinking plum wine. I didn’t want
him to feel alone so I joined in. Before going to bed I called New York and checked my voice mail. I had six new messages.

Saturday, 12 Noon
—We got on a plane and chased daylight for twelve hours. Warsaw to Frankfurt to London to New York, 5,000 miles. It was 5
P.M
. Saturday—New York time—when we finally landed. I thought about bending over to kiss the ground when I got off the plane
at Kennedy International Airport, but my back was really
killing me from all the hours that I’d spent in plane seats that week, and the ground didn’t look so clean.

Sunday, 9
A.M
.
—I spent three and a half hours responding to the forty voice mails I’d gotten during my previous week’s absence. I did it
from home because I didn’t want anybody to see me in the office and know that I was back in the country. That could spell
trouble. I held a cloth over the phone as I returned each voice mail so that it would sound like I was far away.

Sunday, 8
P.M
.
—The trip wasn’t over yet. We still had to go to Mexico City. Another 1,900 miles. Another five hours. We didn’t get into
our hotel until about 2
A.M
. By the time we finally walked into the lobby, we all looked like such pieces of dung that I swear I saw the lady behind
the front desk grab for the Bat Phone to call security. I wouldn’t have cared. I could have slept anywhere, even in a Mexican
jail.

Monday, 8
A.M
.
—We sat in a room, listening to guys with heavy Mexican accents talk about how great their business was, and looking at metal
boxes with blinking lights on them. I can’t even remember what GWA owned in Mexico City. I think that it was either paging
or cellular or dispatch radio. Maybe it was a grocery store or a whorehouse. It didn’t really matter. I was a robot. I was
a dog. I was dead tired.

Monday, 9
P.M
.—Home for good. Finally. The diligence was finished. I fell asleep in my suit.

I’d spent eight days doing diligence on GWA’s foreign operations. I’d traveled 12,000 miles through seven countries and eight
time zones. I was now the sole fount of DLJ’s institutional knowledge on GWA’s operations. I’d slept through a few diligence
sessions and zoned out through almost all of the others. All I had to show for the eight days’ work was a page and a half
of notes and a headache. DLJ was going to attempt to sell GWA’s equity to their best institutional accounts based on my assertions
that the deal was a good one. I hoped that somebody, somewhere, had their fingers crossed.

“H
e’s a fuckstick. A complete fuckstick.”

Troob and I were sitting in the back of the biannual analyst review session. Andrew Gold, a second-year associate, was giving
his assessment of one of the first-year analysts, Carl Kantor. Doug Franken, the managing director in charge of all staffing
matters for investment banking, didn’t understand what Goldy was trying to say. He asked for some clarification.

“Goldy, what’s a fuckstick? I don’t know what a fuckstick is.”

Goldy clarified. “A fuckstick is a stick that’s only good for one thing and that’s for cramming up somebody’s ass. It’s no
good as a walking stick. It’s no good for stickball. It’s only good for sticking into a butt. It’s the stupidest, most worthless
kind of stick there is. That’s what Kantor is. He’s a fuckstick.”

Franken decided that this one was worth digging into a little deeper. “Give me a little help here, Goldy. What is it that
Kantor did that endeared him to you so deeply?”

“He built a merger model for me that left an entire division out of the final roll-up for the merged entity. We delivered
a goddamned fairness opinion to the committee based on a model with one of the target’s primary divisions missing. It was
a disgrace. I can’t work with somebody like that. We should fire him.”

I looked over at Troob. I knew that we were thinking the same thing. Kantor, the analyst, wasn’t the fuckstick. Goldy was
the fuckstick. It was basic. You didn’t tell a monkey to make a merger model for you and then expect that there wouldn’t be
any mistakes. You had to check the monkey’s work, because monkeys were always liable to leave a few banana peels lying behind.
We knew that Goldy was lazy and that his laziness had finally caught up to him on this one. He just didn’t want to go down
alone. He wanted to take Kantor down with him.

Troob and I had to come to Kantor’s defense. He was a good kid. Overworked, but good. He’d done a lot of work for both me
and Troob. We’d promised him that we’d go to bat for him during the review. Troob spoke up.

“Kantor’s a good man. Goldy’s rap is bullshit. The kid’s here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He’s walked through
walls for me. The wrong walls sometimes, but he’s walked through walls. We’re not training brain surgeons, we’re training
apes. Kantor’s a good ape.”

The room was quiet for a minute. The other associates didn’t know what to do. As associates, nodding our heads in agreement
was an involuntary reflex. We’d been
taught to always concur. Conflict was confusing. Finally, somebody else spoke up.

“Yeah, I think that Kantor’s good. He’s always done good work for me. I like him.”

The tide had turned. The associate gods were now smiling on Kantor. His review would be favorable. He’d get his bonus.

Twice a year all the DLJ associates piled into a conference room. We sat in padded chairs and ate macaroni salad. Managing
Director Franken and the senior associate in charge of analyst staffing sat at the front of the room like two Indian chiefs.
They read the names of the analysts off one by one in alphabetical order. As each name was read, the associates who had worked
with that analyst weighed in with their judgment of the analyst’s worth. Those assessments were used, in turn, to determine
the analysts’ bonuses—bonuses that ranged anywhere from $30,000 for a first-year analyst to $100,000 for a third-year analyst.
We were all sworn to secrecy regarding the review session’s proceedings. We were told that if word ever got out that we had
divulged details of the review session’s proceedings the repercussions would be fast and furious. It was our own little Star
Chamber. We were horse traders, checking out the teeth and gums of the old nags to determine their health before we sent them
packing to the glue factory. For a few short hours we had the power.

There were two problems with these review sessions. The first was that outside of the review sessions we’d been conditioned
to always tow the party line. Independent thought wasn’t valued. We were processors. We
weren’t allowed to have our own opinions; we were only allowed to have our managing directors’ opinions. So, when they locked
us into the room twice a year for these analyst review sessions and asked for our opinions most of us didn’t know what to
do. We usually panicked and fell back onto our instinctive reflex—nodding in agreement.