Monkey Business (29 page)

What a bunch of phony baloney. I knew that the biggest house in the neighborhood usually belonged to a construction contractor
or the guy who invented the paper clip. He couldn’t fool me. Still, I had to give Brock credit for acting like he was truly
concerned. He also had my hot buttons clown pretty well. The guy knew how to stroke my ego.

I went to see Nussbaum. He was the head of High Yield Banking, the group that I worked for. I told him about the job I had
found. I told him that I wanted more free time, that I wanted a life. He was quiet for a minute, then he spoke.

“Peter, you’ll have plenty of free time later in life. Look, Peter, you have to pay your dues now but later you’ll reap the
benefits. That’s how it is in life, trust me. Anyway, this job you’re thinking about taking, it seems like it sucks. You might
get screwed by the partners. It’s too risky. I think that you’re making a big mistake. We’ll take care of you here. We’ll
do anything that has to be done in order to keep you. Is there anything we can change for you? If there is, then we’ll change
it. We want to keep you.”

They’d take care of me? Sure, just like a wise guy “takes care” of a guy who gets caught with the wise guy’s wife. I figured
that I’d humor Nussbaum. I’d see what I could get out of him. I told him that I didn’t want to work
for Gator anymore, and that, in fact, I didn’t want to work for any of the vice presidents in the group. He said, “Done.”
I knew it was bullshit. He was a good guy. He was trying to be helpful. However, he was a senior guy and he didn’t understand
that there was a mass of investment banking humanity between the two of us and there was no way for him to control it all.
I would continue to get crushed. He could see that I wasn’t coming around, so he decided to send me to Weinstein’s office
to get the final once-over.

Weinstein. The Black Widow. I’d interviewed with him while I was at business school. He was a little pit bull. He stood about
five foot six and was pissed about it. He was going to beat the tar out of me and scare me into staying at DLJ. I walked into
his office and he immediately launched into his tirade.

“Well, well, well. So little Peter thinks that he’s going to a hedge fund to make lots of money. No way. You’re going to fail.
I hope you have a backup plan because you won’t succeed. Your best chance of succeeding is by staying here. You’re naive and
you don’t know what you’re doing. I hear that you want to enjoy your life and have more free time. Well, if that’s what you
want, then you’re a pansy and you may as well go into the advertising business. C’mon, Pete, you know that you’re not ready
to leave. I assume you’re staying. Now tell Brock you are back on the DLJ team.”

The Widow was shaking my confidence. It hadn’t broken yet, but it wasn’t exactly sturdy. I steeled myself. I was leaving.
That was it.

I had just gone through the three-step banking process. These three steps are used in banking whether a banker is
pitching a deal, executing a deal, or attacking a colleague who’s thinking of quitting.
Greed, Fear, and Abandon
. Those are the three steps. First, persuade by talking about money and success. Greed and the pursuit of money is the banker’s
ultimate aphrodisiac. Stroke the ego and tell the clients what they want to hear. Act sincere. If this doesn’t work, move
to the second stage of the process—fear. Scare the shit out of the clients and shake their confidence. Tell them that if they
don’t join the bank in a deal, then they’ll fail and be miserable. If the banker can’t entice the client with money, then
maybe they can use fear to achieve the desired result. Finally, if this doesn’t work the banker will abandon in an unusually
rapid fashion. If there’s no deal, then there’s no need to continue any discussion.

I called up Brock LeBlank the following day. His secretary said he wasn’t in. Maybe he just didn’t want to take my call. I
left him a voice mail. I told him, “Brock, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I’ve thought about my decision and continue
to believe that I’ll be happiest if I take this new job. Thanks for your support. I hope to keep in touch. Good luck.” I never
heard from Brock again.

I called Nussbaum and told him I’d made up my mind. I told him that I was leaving for sure.

“I’ve got to go to a meeting,” he said. “Good luck.”

Finally, I called the Widow. “Hey, Greg, it’s Pete. I’m going to take the job.”

The Widow said, “You’re making a big mistake.”

“I think that things will work out,” I told him.

“They won’t,” he said. “I hope your dad has money.” The Widow had dug his stinger deep into my mind. Fuck him.

The phone rang one last time. It was someone from personnel. “Hey, Peter,” he said. “Say your good-byes to everyone and get
your stuff together. There’s a lot of proprietary information lying around here and we can’t have you around it. Your computer’s
been shut off, your ID card has been deactivated, and I’ve sent boxes down for your files. Good luck. Bye.”

I called Rolfe and told him that I was getting booted. In forty-eight hours I had announced my resignation, spoken to the
head of the bank, and been put through the wringer with the top guys in my department. They had tried to persuade me to stay.
They had tried to scare the bejesus out of me. Then, they abandoned the ship and told me to get the hell out. It was that
quick. I had been hired in a seventy-two-hour time frame and was out the door in forty-eight. On to something new.

“You’re bailing on me,” Rolfe said. “How can you do that?”

“I just can’t take it anymore,” I told him. “There’s gotta be more to life than this crap.”

That was it. I was free. Really, really free. Rolfe was pissed, but I could deal with that. He got pissed a lot and he usually
just needed to kick and scream a little before he came around. He made me suffer a little bit, though, before he forgave me.
He made me feel like I’d abandoned my only brother in the orphanage.

You’re damn right I was pissed. When Troobie first called me and told me he was leaving I was ripshit. My boy was leaving.
Leaving me hanging. We’d clawed our way up the bloody beaches of Iwo Jima together and
now, when I needed him most, he wasn’t going to be there. There’d be no one to watch my back.

Troobie’s decision to leave was more than just me losing my buddy, the guy whom I could always rely on to go down to Shenanigans
with me at 2
A.M
. to grope naked ladies. I mean, I couldn’t go down there
alone
. I’d feel like a frigging pervert, and none of my other boys were as reliable in the search for diversion as Troobie.

Troob’s decision to leave was significant because as long as none of the associates in our class had left we’d been able to
convince ourselves that at least part of the dream was still alive. Regardless of what went on around us, regardless of the
depths of our despair, regardless of the degree to which everything we were doing seemed counter to what we’d hoped for, our
unwillingness to break ranks kept us all sane. We bitched and moaned. We told each other that we were jerkoffs with no lives.
But there was no way that we could all be idiots. And if we weren’t all idiots, and none of us had left, then there had to
be a reason to believe. We couldn’t all be stupid enough to stay locked into a no-win situation.

That all changed when Troobie walked out. The doubts became real. Maybe we were idiots after all. Maybe it really wouldn’t
ever get better. Maybe we were doomed to a life of perpetual pitching, making copies, and endless rounds of word processing.
Maybe there really was something better out there that the rest of us were missing out on. But then maybe Troobie was wrong.
I was confused.

Troob called me every day from his new job. After the first week, he told me that one of the partners at his fund had yelled
at him when he found him in the office at
8:30
P.M
. one night. “You’re not a banker anymore,” the guy told him. “We’re paying you to think, not to stay here all night.”

Troob said that it took him a few weeks to remember how to use his brain. He didn’t make pitch books anymore. He didn’t have
to bribe a bunch of guys at the copy center. He spent all day thinking about companies and whether it made sense to invest
money in them. He was the guy on the other side of the table now, the guy with the money. He was looking for the right answer,
not just the answer that he thought the guy upstairs wanted to hear. He was making decisions, not chugalugging the last remaining
vestiges of his pride. He’d gone from happy to angry. Now he was happy again.

It didn’t take long for me to make the decision that I had to get out, too. Even after the initial excitement of leaving DLJ
had died down for Troobie, he was still jazzed up about his new job. It wasn’t just that he was glad to be gone. He actually
looked forward to going in to work every day. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d felt like that. I wanted to feel
that excitement again. I wanted to walk into work in the morning with a big smile on my face.

I got the names of a bunch of headhunters who specialized in the financial services industry. I put all their names into a
spreadsheet and began to call each one. I took a lot of notes. I met with most of them and learned what each of them specialized
in. I told them why I wanted to quit banking and what I wanted to do. They all told me that I was a smart guy with a good
résumé and finding a new position shouldn’t be difficult. Every once in a while one of them would call me up and tell me
about the latest position they were trying to fill. Most of it was garbage. I got more and more frustrated.

Then, one day in early December, I got a call from Slick. He’d talked to Troob earlier that morning and Troob had mentioned
that he’d heard about a small hedge fund that was looking to add somebody. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Slick was interested
in but he knew that I was looking. He gave me a phone number. Troob, who had abandoned me in mid-battle, was throwing out
a lifeline. If I held on tight enough maybe he could help pull me out.

I dialed the number Slick had given me. A guy answered. I told him that I had heard that his fund was looking to add somebody.
He said, “Come on over and meet us. Tell us why we should hire you.” I did.

The guys I met with had $100 million. They were looking to add another guy. That guy was me. They wanted somebody who could
think, somebody who could help them make money.

They told me that they were worried that I might have been brainwashed by DLJ. They weren’t sure if I still remembered how
to reason. I told them that it might take a couple of weeks but I would remember how to use my mind again. We had a deal.

All that was left to do was quit.

I walked into each of my managing directors’ offices and told them that I was quitting. I told them that I couldn’t take it
anymore, that I didn’t want to be a banker, that I wanted to do something different. They told me that I was a nice guy and
a good associate. They asked me if there was anything they could do to get me to stay. I thought about revenge. I thought
that maybe if
they allowed me to first pour boiling oil over them and then stretch them out on a rack for a couple of weeks I might start
to feel better. Maybe then I’d want to stay.

“No, there’s nothing you can do,” I told them.

Later that day I got a call from Brock LeBlank. “I hear you’re leaving,” he said. “I want you to come up and talk to me.”

I called Troobie at work. I knew that he had talked to Brock when he was leaving. “What’s Brock gonna say?” I asked him.

“He’ll tell you that you’re making a big mistake. He’ll tell you that you’re a superstar and that you can excel at DLJ. He’ll
tell you that all the guys up in Greenwich with big houses are bankers. He’ll tell you that hedge fund managers are a dime
a dozen. He’s not a bad guy, but he doesn’t understand that the place has changed and that there’s a big difference between
being on the top and being on the bottom. Remember: greed, fear, and abandon.”

“OK, I gotta go.”

I walked up to Brock’s office. He was on the phone. He made me sit and wait for ten minutes. Maybe he thought that by making
me feel small I’d want to stay.

Brock started, “So I hear that you want to leave us.”

“Yeah, Brock,” I said, “I got a job with a hedge fund.”

“You’re making a big mistake, John. You’ll never find another job where you get as much responsibility as you’ve got here.
You get to travel all over the world. Heads of the world’s largest corporations will look to you for advice. No other job
is going to give you that. Hedge fund managers are a dime a dozen.”

That’s funny, I thought, I never
feel
very important
when I’m doing my job here. The only thing a leader of industry has ever looked to me for is to pass him a pitch book. I feel
small. I feel like a gnat.

“You know, John,” Brock continued, “ten years from now you could be sitting in this chair.” He motioned to the chair he was
sitting in. “You’re one of our superstars. I mean that. You could excel here at DLJ.”

I started to laugh. Where the hell was he going to be in ten years? How was I going to get his chair? Maybe he’d be supervising
the new addition to his house in Greenwich to ensure that it was bigger than the house next door that the hedge fund manager
had just bought.

When I walked out the doors of the DLJ building for the final time later that week I felt no remorse. It was two years and
nine months after I’d walked through the doors for the very first time as a summer associate. My buddy Troob had been gone
for about six months. DLJ had taken their pound of flesh, but I was off to something new.

The dues we paid took their toll on us. We felt ten years older. Our rite of passage may not have been complete according
to the Investment Banker’s Code, but we had cut it short. Maybe the dues-paying part of any job doesn’t stop until you decide
to take a stand and stop it. Maybe we weren’t up to the task. Either way, we were out. The beginning of something good was
finally stirring inside us again. Maybe there was another dream out there that we could chase. There was hope yet.