Monkey Business (28 page)

U
nlike Rolfe’s epiphany, which hit him like a ton of bricks, my realization that banking wasn’t for me crept up on me more
slowly. I’m not even sure when it first began. Maybe the seeds of doubt were planted during a four-day pitching marathon with
only six hours of sleep. Maybe I first started questioning my career choice after one of my colleagues called me a “fat little
fuck” for the fifty-seventh time. Maybe it was the recurring nights at strip clubs that got me thinking. Was I nothing more
than a filthy little animal who had so little time to enjoy the pleasures of life that I had to resort to stuffing a ten-dollar
bill into a neon-yellow G-string for satisfaction? Would I ever have time to have a lasting relationship? Marjorie and I had
gotten engaged and she was planning on moving to New York in a couple months. I loved her and wanted things to work out, but
I was never around. I had no time. While Marjorie
knew I spent a lot of time at work, the entire time we had been dating she had lived in Chicago, so she’d never really experienced
the whole investment banking routine. How much of my lifestyle could she take? Would my only skills after twenty years in
the business be a proficiency at inventing creative excuses for my loved ones to explain my perpetual absence and the ability
to immediately identify the raunchiest strip clubs in every major city worldwide? I wasn’t so sure that I wanted that to be
my legacy.

I don’t think the bare reality of the situation really hit me, though, until I realized that I was actively recruiting other
young suckers to follow in my footsteps. I was like the crackhead who starts dealing to support his habit, and then realizes
one day that he’s selling dime bags of the rock to elementary school kids. Wow. It didn’t make me feel so good.

I got a call one afternoon in early January. MBA recruiting season was in full swing. One of the managing directors in charge
of Harvard recruiting was a-jingling on my phone.

“Hey, Troobie, we need you to go to Harvard and help recruit some new meat. We need you to be part of a panel discussion.
You can fly up to Boston tonight and have a good old time up there. Live large on the firm’s nickel. Tomorrow is an open house
where all the MBAs get to ask questions of all the panel members. Afterwards, there’ll be a reception and you’ll stand at
the DLJ booth handing out annual reports and talking to the students. All the usual suspects will be there: Morgan, Goldman,
Merrill, and Lehman. You have to try and sell the kids on DLJ. You know the drill. Thanks for the help. I’ve already
booked plane tickets and a hotel room for you. This is top priority. You’ve got to do some recruiting. Tell your other deal
teams that you’ll be out of commission for a day.”

Yeah, I knew the drill because I’d been through the drill for the last two years. I was supposed to tell the young, impressionable
MBAs that being an investment banking associate was fun, exciting, and rewarding. I was supposed to tell them that being an
associate was a thrilling job and that only the best of the best ever made it to showtime. I was supposed to pump them up
with all the jive hype that I had been pumped up with just a couple of years before.

I went to Harvard, put on my name tag, and sat at the little DLJ booth. MBAs swamped me. One woman literally ran up to the
booth clutching her résumé and started speaking before I could even introduce myself.

“Mr. Troob, I really want to work at DLJ. Here’s my résumé and my husband’s résumé. We’d love to be able to work together.
We know we’ll work hard and we don’t mind the long hours. We know what banking is all about and we want to work for DLJ. Do
you like it there? Is it as awesome as I’ve heard? Are you doing deals all day?”

I came back with the party line. “Yeah, I like it there. It’s an awesome place to work. And, yes, I’m doing a lot of deals.
I’ll take your résumé and see to it that it gets to the right person. You have the right level of enthusiasm to work for DLJ.
Thanks for showing interest.” It was hard to sound enthusiastic. I was getting tired of all the brow-beatings, the long nights,
and the never-ending day-today grind. I was at the end of my rope.

With my comments and compliments still ringing in her ears, she glowed and floated away. If I allowed this
woman and her husband to come work for DLJ I would effectively be breaking up their marriage. DLJ would kick her eager ass
all over the place. DLJ would chew her up and spit her out, and she’d end up a shell of her former enthusiastic self. Screw
it. Who was I to care? I was there to fill the pipeline. I was there to get some fresh bodies down below me so that it wouldn’t
hurt so badly when I fell. So I smiled and went on.

A guy named Ernie stopped at the booth. I’d worked with Ernie while I was an analyst at Kidder Peabody. He recognized me right
away. “Hey, Pete. I hear DLJ’s the place to be. The money is supposed to be great and the work is interesting. You guys do
great deals—highyield, merchant banking, all the fun stuff. It’s not like Kidder, is it? If I’m going back to the Street I
want to work at DLJ. Can you help me out?”

I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to tell him how much life as an associate really sucked and how unhappy I really was.
I took a deep breath. “Ernie, absolutely. I can help you out. First, the money is great. Think about what we made at Kidder
and multiply it by five or six. Second, it’s not like Kidder. It’s fun. Even the pitches are interesting. The deals are the
best, interesting and challenging. You should work at DLJ. I’ll definitely help you out.”

He thanked me and left. I saw him go to the Goldman, Lehman, and Merrill booths. I sold him down the river. I helped him get
a job at DLJ and he accepted it. I heard that he quit about a year later.

As I boarded the plane on my way back to New York I saw another old friend, Danny, who had become an associate at Merrill
Lynch at the same time I had joined DLJ. He was the guy that I had sat with in the steam room two
years earlier at Harvard. We had sworn to each other that we wouldn’t go back into banking. I yelled his name and he came
over. He told me how his job sucked and how he never had time for anything and how he needed to get out and find a more rewarding
job. We got on the plane and sat next to each other. Two losers. Two guys that all the MBAs thought were big winners sitting
there miserable and just wanting out.

I was everything that I didn’t want to be. I had lost the one thing that I needed most. I had lost my pride. If a senior banker
asked me to spit-shine his shoes for an extra-good review at bonus time, I would hock a loogie and start scrubbing.

When I got off the plane my beeper was beeping. I called into the office to check my voice mail. There was a message: “Peter,
I need you to come into the office and help the analyst run a couple of models, and then I need you to start writing the equity
underwriting committee memo. It has to be done by tomorrow afternoon. The vacation’s over. Back to work.” FUCK. I looked over
at my friend Danny. His beeper had gone off too and he was checking his messages. Some senior Merrill Lynch banker had left
him a voice mail with marching orders that were going to keep him at the office all night. We wallowed in our misery together
for a few minutes, and then both of us had to get back to the office.

Danny and I had each called our firm’s car service from the plane. We both jumped into our cars and told the drivers to get
their asses moving back to Manhattan because we had important banker stuff to do.

Things had changed at DLJ. The place had grown from around 325 bankers when we had first started to over 600
a couple of years after that. I think the mandate was to get to 1,000 bankers by the year 2000. That just meant more people
to boss me around. It seemed like every day more lateral hires were announced—more bankers coming in over the transom from
other investment banks. It was like that old saying about knowing your enemies. At least when there were only 325 bankers
I knew who my enemies were. Six hundred bankers was too many to keep track of, and 1,000 would be out of control.

Life went on and time marched by. I fell into the black hole called work. The next thing I knew, it was time for Marjorie
to leave Chicago and move to the Big Apple. She called me and asked if I would pick her up from the airport. I promised that
I would. She was moving to a new city. She was leaving her family, friends, and career in Chicago. She needed my support.
When she stepped off the plane in La Guardia all she got was a guy named Gupta standing at the baggage carousel holding a
sign that said “TROOB.” I couldn’t make it to the airport because an uptight manager director was busting my hump over some
word processing document. When he angrily said, “Jump,” I politely replied, “How high, sir?” Marjorie went back to our apartment
and cried herself to sleep. I was ruining the best thing in my life.

I thought about quitting, but what else could I do? How could I ever find the time to look for another job? And then it struck
me. I was supposed to take a vacation to Greece in another two weeks. I figured that would give me the time I needed to clear
my head and think. Maybe I could handle this banking stuff if I had a strategy. This vacation would give me the time to develop
a game plan.

Marjorie was going to leave ahead of me with a girlfriend.
They were going to spend some time in Turkey, then Marjorie was going to rendezvous with me in Greece. Wow, was I excited.
I told all my deal teams that I was going on a vacation. One of my managing directors smiled mysteriously.

Two days before I was supposed to leave for Greece the managing director with the mysterious smile decided that I couldn’t
go. He told me, “One of the deal team members has to cover the road show in both Kansas City and Seattle. We need somebody
out there with management. Both me and the VP on the deal are busy. You’ve got to take one on the chin for the team. It happens
to all of us. It’s part of the job.”

Part of the job? FUCK YOU, MAN! There was a pounding in my head that I couldn’t control. I wanted to pull a Wile E. Coyote
on him and drop a big iron anvil on his head.

I was crushed. I asked the VP why he couldn’t go. He told me that he was having trouble with his girlfriend and that he needed
to spend some time with her. He told me, “Don’t worry, it’s happened to me too. Welcome to investment banking.”

I had to call Marjorie in Turkey and tell her that I wouldn’t be meeting her in Greece. She was pissed, really pissed. There
was nothing I could say to make her happy. How many more times could she forgive me? How many more times could I tell her
I was sorry? This wasn’t the dream. I had thought that I would have more time and more fun. What was at the end of the desert
anyway? An oasis? A mirage? Maybe I wasn’t in a desert after all. It seemed more like a never-ending jungle. I
didn’t care anymore. Whatever I was in, I wanted to be airlifted out.

I was upset that I had missed my vacation, and I didn’t like the fact that I’d pissed Marjorie off, but neither of those was
the deciding factor. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t like the person I saw in the reflection. I was disappointed in
myself. I had no dignity. Greece would have been a break in the action but not an end to my misery. I wasn’t the man I wanted
to be. I only had one thought: “Fuck this. No more.”

It was the last straw. There was no more fire in my belly. There was no more spark in my eyes. I had to get out.

I
had to find a new career. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I called a headhunter and I didn’t tell a living soul. Not
even Rolfe. Any leak of information that I was trying to leave the bank and I would either be immediately fired or summarily
castrated. Neither of those options struck me as particularly attractive. In order to find a new job I had to be ultrasecretive
and move like a stealth bomber. I went on interviews in the mornings at 7:00
A.M
. before work. I interviewed on the weekends and did interviews by phone. Months went by and nothing seemed to pique my interest.

Finally, I met a group of guys through a headhunter and coincidentally, through one of the deals that I was working on. They
were value investors of distressed bonds. I liked the guys and they liked me. They had a good setup. They had six people with
north of $400 million dollars in their fund. They were doing research, thinking, and making
decisions about how to invest the money. The concept of actually using my brain intrigued me. They were looking for another
guy to help them invest the money. They made me an offer. I didn’t have to think about it for very long—I accepted.

Now came the hard part. I had to tell DLJ that I was quitting. Whom should I tell? Whom did I really work for? None of the
senior bankers dealt with personnel issues. The head of the whole shooting match, Gary Lang, didn’t know me from Adam, and
even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass that I was quitting. So I called up Rolfe and told him. He was
surprised and he seemed a little pissed off. I couldn’t worry about that, though. I had to figure out who else to tell.

I told Brock LeBlank. He was the vice chairman of the investment banking division. I liked Brock and respected him. He was
a good guy. He had worked hard, caught some breaks, and had moved up the DLJ ranks in short order. He was one of the chosen
ones, and he’d always treated me pretty well. I told him that I was leaving because I didn’t see a fruitful future for me
at DLJ. He smiled. It was a crooked smile, though. There was a glint of evil in his eyes and I wondered momentarily whether
he might throw a stapler at my head.

“Peter, you’re one of our superstars. I mean that. You could really excel here. Anyway, Peter, do you know those large houses
in Greenwich on the water? Bankers own those houses. DLJ gives you the opportunity to have more money than you could ever
dream of, and to have the biggest house in the neighborhood. This hedge fund you’re going to won’t ever give you that opportunity.
The Street is cluttered with hedge funds. The one you’re joining
could fail. And then what do you do? I think that you’re making a big mistake and I think you should reconsider. You have
a bright future here. You’re well regarded and if you stay here you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. DLJ isn’t going
to fail. I’d like you to reconsider. I’d like you to talk to Nussbaum and Weinstein. I’ll set it up.”