Monkey Business (7 page)

“Ahhh, yes.”

“Of course.”

“How interesting!”

“Certainly.”

As events would turn, within twenty minutes the deal had died. Troob had been right. The model he’d built and the transaction
multiples whose computation I’d had to be instructed upon had both indicated that the investment returns to the financial
sponsor were insufficient to warrant their ongoing consideration of the deal. There was a consolation, though. I’d found a
new friend in Troob. He’d saved me from the Widow’s fatal clutches, and for that I owed him my life.

Rolfe and I became fast friends when we worked together on his first foray into the world of I-banking. He owed me one after
that. He was green, really green, but he was smart and he didn’t have an attitude. Those were two big positives. I figured
that if I taught him a few things, he’d be a guy I could rely on. I knew I’d need that.

The summer at DLJ wasn’t all about hard work and subservience. DLJ had a plan, and that plan centered around showing us
just enough
of the good life during our summer sojourn to leave us wanting more. Their plan was a microcosm of what they would try to
do to us once we’d signed on full-time. At that point, they’d pepper us with a parade of high-profile events—black-tie dances,
expensive
dinners, and private parties at the Greenwich estates of our managing directors—in order to convince us that through unwavering
devotion to our jobs we, too, could one day hope to live the good life. During the summer, though, the focus was more on showing
us what a bunch of laid-back, easygoing guys investment bankers were despite their tight-ass reputations.

The summer associate experience at DLJ centered around a calendar of social events: dinners, booze cruises, baseball games,
dance clubs, at least one event each week. We were trained through repetition to understand that our attendance at these social
events was more than just hoped for, it was mandatory. From our first day as summer-DLJers, we were made to understand that
when it came to getting a full-time offer, our attendance at the summer social functions was equal in importance to our on-the-job
performance. Of course, this advice had predictably fallen by the wayside by our third week on the job, at which point the
majority of the summer class was regularly putting in work hours that extended well past midnight.

Our first social event of the summer season fell on Thursday of our first week at DLJ and, as it was still the first week,
was well attended by our summer class. Wexler and Brown, the two full-time associates running the summer program, had decided
to break us in easy on our first night out and had planned dinner for us at a local barbecue dive followed by some dancing
at a Midtown club—Le Bar Bat. In addition to the summer associates, these nights out generally included as many full-time
associates as our mentors were able to round up and, in addition, our four BAs. The BAs’ presence not only ensured
that such a large group of vain, predominantly male bankers wouldn’t be mistaken for a group of West Village fairies but also
provided an opportunity for our summer associate class to initiate our attempts at sexual conquest of the BA pool.

Upon our arrival at the restaurant, and prior to our being seated, the liquor started to flow freely. The liquor barrage was
a result of the efforts of one Rod Ferramo, the associate who had originally interviewed Rolfe down at Wharton. Ferramo was
an old-school vulgarian, born and bred in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was heralded inside DLJ as a young banker known for his
ability to spend egregious amount of money in the pursuit of carnal pleasures. Rumor had it that on a business trip to Mexico
for DLJ, he’d once spent three thousand dollars for two local whores to service him in his hotel room. Given that a moderately
priced south-of-the-border whore was going for less than fifty bucks at the time, Ferramo’s weakness for upper-end pleasures
was evident.

That night, though, it wasn’t Ferramo’s lust for flesh that would dictate our demise but his penchant for drunkenness. Ferramo
immediately began ordering up rounds of shots for everybody, whether they wanted them or not. This presented the class with
something of a dilemma. We wanted to be professional, but enough booze would undoubtedly loosen us up to the point of being
dangerous. There we were with rounds of shots being passed around. It was clear that we were being set up for an evening of
drunken excess. We had to be team players. Our success in investment banking would depend upon our willingness to subjugate
all personal goals to the greater good.

Ferramo ended everyone’s initial hesitation with a loud question: “Why the fuck isn’t everyone drinking?”

We all took our shots of Jaegermeister.

Our first dinner as a group was in true DLJ style—marked by excess. After we’d been seated, the waitress came over to take
the appetizer orders. Ferramo took it upon himself to order for all of us. “We’ll take three of everything, and keep the drinks
coming. I don’t want to see anybody’s glass empty.” We gorged ourselves as wave after wave of food arrived. Before long, not
only were we corralling every passing waitress to bring additional food, but the busboys as well.

By the time we had departed from the restaurant and pointed ourselves in the direction of Le Bar Bat, the aggregate level
of drunkenness in our merry band had increased considerably. Our merriness increased as the hours in Le Bar Bat slipped by
and we continued our rum-fueled binge. Then came the debaucherous display of Rod Ferramo.

One of the BAs, Hope, had been downing shots with increasing rapidity over the course of the evening. The combination of the
shots, the heat, and the level of the music at Le Bar Bat had pushed her beyond her limits. As she stood at the bar waiting
for her next drink to arrive, an uncontrollable urge to vomit overcame her. She ducked her head underneath the bar, and began
spewing forth a fragrant mixture of barbecue chicken and Captain Morgan spiced rum. Ferramo, who at the time of the opening
projectile was on the dance floor immediately adjacent to the bar, witnessed these initial throes of expulsion and interpreted
Hope’s temporary incapacity as an opportunity to initiate an impressive public display of
vulgarity. He quickly positioned himself behind her, whipped out his hogan, and as she continued her litany of expurgation
he straddled her backside, grabbed her hips, and began to grind her from behind in a simulation that would have made a dog
in heat blush.

As we viewed this display from across the dance floor we were thoroughly befuddled. Was this guy really so desperate and so
sexually depraved? What the hell was going on? Some of the people whom we knew in investment banking were good guys. Did the
pressure just cause some of the others to snap? We didn’t know. Maybe it was the sleepless nights. Maybe it was the lack of
a social life. Maybe it was the opportunity to finally not be the one getting shit upon but to be the one doing the shitting.

Either way, we didn’t realize that in the not-too-distant future we, too, would be full-time associates doing things we never
thought we would stoop so low to do. It was uncanny what a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week nonstop-stress career choice
would do to our judgment.

Not all activities on the summer associates’ social calendar lived up to the standard set by our initial outing at Le Bar
Bat. Many of the dinners, baseball games, and nights drinking and dancing were uneventful. Others were, however, notable in
their own right. One of the most anticipated evenings out was a summer associate dinner at the Links Club with Dick Jenrette,
one of the founders of
our firm. Jenrette was a legend on Wall Street. He was chairman of The Equitable, a company that was both DLJ’s corporate
parent and one of the country’s largest insurance companies. Jenrette was famous not only as one of the founders of DLJ but
also for his instrumental role in having brought The Equitable back from the brink of insolvency in the early 1990s. For our
summer associate class a chance to meet the man was a real honor.

Basically, the reason for us to meet Jenrette was summed up by an older associate. He said, “It’s a yearly tradition. The
old man sucks it up for a night and presses the flesh with all the summer idiots. I think they figure that trotting Jenrette
out gets people to sign on full-time when the offers come out in the fall.”

That evening’s dinner at the Links Club, hosted by dear Dick Jenrette, was well done. The Links Club was an all-male institution
whose membership roster was among the most exclusive in New York City. Special permission had been sought, and granted, to
allow for the presence of our one female summer associate classmate, Diane. Even then, Diane’s permission slip only gave her
access to a limited number of the Links Club’s rooms.

The dinner was preceded by a cocktail hour during which gloved waiters made the rounds taking drink orders and delivering
trays of mushroom caps and raw oysters. Jenrette made his own rounds to each of us and, in the most gracious manner possible,
listened intently as we stammered out how honored we were to meet him and how we were so incredibly thankful to have been
given the opportunity to spend our summer at DLJ.

The dinner came and went with no significant occurrences. Seating positions at the table had been apportinned
on a musical-chairs basis, with most of us attempting to arrange our seating positions so as to avoid being too close to Jenrette.
Although the man was unusually friendly, most of us felt that it might be somewhat awkward to have to carry on a conversation
with somebody whose station in life was so far removed from our own that he couldn’t possibly give a shit about what we had
to say. With our business school debts, most of us were worth about fifty dollars. Jenrette was worth hundreds of millions.
We were young. He was old. We just had nothing in common. The fact that we knew he would feign interest in our miserable lives
made the specter of conversation that much more unappealing.

Afterward, during dessert and coffee, the informal conversation that had dominated the dinner was replaced by a question-and-answer
session. We’d been warned to expect this ahead of time, and it had been strongly suggested that we prepare at least one intelligent
question each to ask Jenrette. The usual garbage spilled forth from our mouths as we drew upon our business school skills
to formulate meaningless, inane questions about the future of DLJ. Only one of our classmates distinguished himself during
this session, Mike Stevens.

Stevens was one of the Harvard boys. Although he was attending business school at Harvard, he had spent his undergraduate
days at another Ivy League powerhouse—Penn. Stevens was a big man, he’d played football for Penn as an undergraduate. Between
his size and his classic bowl haircut, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Lurch, the butler from
The Munsters
.

Over the course of the summer, most of us had come to the conclusion that Stevens was a manic-depressive.
When Stevens was on a high nobody could touch him. A common fixture in all the summer associates’ offices were foam footballs
that were gifts from a foam processing company whose initial public offering DLJ had recently underwritten. Stevens could
frequently be seen in any number of offices in the Bullpen clasping one of the foam footballs to his abdomen and rolling around
on the floor, proclaiming all the while that he was going to impart his football knowledge to the masses by offering each
of our BAs free fumble-recovery lessons there on the office floor.

Prior to returning to business school, Stevens had been an investment banking analyst with me at Kidder Peabody. Stevens was
one of the most focused, motivated, intelligent individuals I’d ever met. During our time at Kidder, I’d once seen Stevens
spend an entire weekend balling up enough wastepaper to fill a colleague’s entire cubicle waist-high. The colleague had been
furious upon returning to his office the following Monday morning, but even he had to admire Stevens’s determination.

Stevens’s focus and determination could just as easily manifest themselves through his dark side, however. His temper was
legendary. Stevens regularly held wicked battles over the phone with his fiancée, with the decibel level generally rising
to a point where it was impossible for anybody in the Bullpen to escape exposure to his invective. In addition, we think that
the facilities personnel at DLJ had taken to stocking an inventory of spare telephone handsets following Stevens’s arrival
for the summer, as Stevens had a habit of regularly smashing his handset to pieces against his desktop after receiving phone
calls from DLJ managing directors whose requests he didn’t appreciate.

Stevens’s capacity for work far surpassed that of the rest of us. He was concentrating most of his efforts during the summer
on work for DLJ’s insurance banking effort, an industry with which he had considerable expertise. While the rest of us typically
had our hands full with one or two concurrent projects at any given time, Stevens was doing yeoman’s work by managing up to
three live deals and multiple pitches at the same time. For the seventy-two hours prior to our dinner with Jenrette, in fact,
Stevens had been assembling five pitches at the same time, an incredible feat for anybody, let alone a summer associate. Stevens’s
physical and mental capabilities were being pushed to the limit, as he had done back-to-back all-nighters, but the reigning
powers at DLJ had indicated that the Jenrette dinner was absolutely a mandatory event.

So there was Stevens, with no sleep for the preceding seventy-two hours and with a full meal under his belt, fighting to stay
awake during our after-dinner question-and-answer session. Rolfe and I were seated directly across from him, and had watched
him come close to nodding off several times during dinner. Each time he’d been able to fight off the urge and stay conscious,
but the effort this required was clearly increasing with each occurrence. At times his eyes came within a hair’s breadth of
being closed, so that he looked like a Korean fighter pilot after two quarts of rice wine. When a short lull in the question-and-answer
session arose Stevens elected to fire off a question of his own, more to keep himself awake than for any real desire to hear
the answer.