Monkey Business (9 page)

I turned back to Slick. “What do you mean, nothing matches? He just read us off the page numbers, how could nothing match?”

“I don’t fucking know.”

“Hello? Are you guys there? I don’t have time for this shit.” Bubbles’s voice was getting louder. Heather, our BA, and a couple
of our summer associate classmates had heard the commotion on the speakerphone and had now stuck their heads through my office
door to listen. I took the speakerphone off mute once again.

“Look, Bill, I apologize, but we don’t seem to have all the page numbers down just right. Could you read them off one more
time.”

“Jesus Christ, I don’t have time for this shit. I may be working from an older draft version than you, but don’t worry about
the fucking page numbers. Just listen to what you have to do and then do it. Think, you stupid assholes.” Bill’s voice was
getting louder. He wasn’t a happy man. He began to read through the list of changes again, twice as fast and twice as loud.
I muted the phone and looked at Slick. He looked back at me as Bubbles continued to read.

“This still isn’t making any sense,” Slick said. “Bubbles is working off an old version of the draft. Man, I hate this guy.”
Without thinking, I took the speakerphone off mute and interrupted Bubbles for the final time. “Bill, we need to go through
this without talking about page numbers. They’re confusing us.” The phone went silent. Then the eruption occurred.

“WHAT? WHAT? I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE GODDAMNED PAGE NUMBERS. READ THE FUCKING HEADERS ON THE PAGE…”

The level of abuse coming through the speakerphone, and the volume at which it was occurring, was amazing.

“WHAT ARE YOU GUYS? FUCKING ASSHOLES? YOU THINK I HAVE TIME TO WASTE ON THIS FUCKING SHIT?”

I put the speakerphone on mute and looked at Slick. As Bubbles’s diatribe continued Slick and I started to laugh. There was
Bubbles, 35,000 feet up in the air in an apoplectic rage. He was yelling so loud that not only were the other first-class
passengers undoubtedly privy to
his thoughts but so was everyone in coach class, including those who were locked up in the bathrooms all the way in the back
of the plane. We, meanwhile, were on the ground in New York and there was absolutely nothing that we could do, other than
let his fury run its course.

Eventually, after determining that he had debased us sufficiently, Bubbles gave both us and his fellow passengers a break.
He hung up the phone and Slick and I got to work trying to untangle the wicked web of changes Bubbles had delivered. Seventeen
hours later, I would deliver the books to the offices of D. L. Thompson & Co. for the first public airing of Kinetic II.

By this point in the summer, my exposure to the dysfunctionality that defined the investment bankers’ world should have been
sufficient to allow me to make a reasoned decision to pursue other career paths. If it hadn’t, the visit to D. L. Thompson
& Co. should certainly have driven the point home.

The D. L. Thompson partner who greeted us was straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. He had stuffed his generous ass into
a tight pair of seersucker trousers. On top, he wore a bright red sweater vest that looked as if it had recently been pulled
from the garbage receptacle behind the office tower that was home to D. L. Thompson & Co.’s offices. The D. L. Thompson partner’s
defining feature, however, was a set of sideburns that were half the width of his entire cheekbone and which ran all the way
from his ears down to the corner of his mouth. Stuffed into that mouth was an unlit cigar that had been chewed down to a raggedy,
soggy pulp, and which was leaving tobacco shards all over his teeth,
lips, and sideburns. The guy was a freak, a bad Halloween rendition of an innkeeper out of the
Canterbury Tales
, and we were there to kiss his ass. His name was Chester Goodman III.

Bubbles started out the meeting in his customary style with an effusive show of gratitude for having been granted the meeting.
He then proceeded to launch into a needless round of name-dropping, during which Chester cut him short.

“Billy, what do you have for me today?”

“Oh, we’ve got some good ones today, Chester. If you open your book to page four, the table of contents, you can see what
we’ve got lined up.”

Chester opened to page four, scanned the table of contents, then looked up at Bubbles.

“Billy, how many times have I told you that I don’t want to look at any baking businesses. You know I hate bakeries. You’ve
got four baking companies listed in here. This is a waste of my time.”

“But, Chester, these are really
good
bakeries. I think that you might want to consider these.”

“No bakeries.”

Poof—just like that, four of the twenty companies in our pitch book had gone up in smoke. And Bubbles, the little bastard,
had known ahead of time that this guy with the sideburns didn’t like bakeries. Chester was just beginning.

“Furthermore, Billy, your friends from Bear, Stearns have already been here to show us Colemack Company, Circular Toys, and
Fountain Healthcare. And you can forget about Extruded Synthetics and Condor Can, Inc.
They’re too goddamned expensive. We won’t pay a premium for businesses trading at those kinds of multiples.”

We’d been in the meeting for under two minutes, and Chester Goodman III had already eliminated nine out of our twenty companies
without ever making it past the table of contents. Hours upon hours of work, our beautiful charts, graphs, and plagiarized
prose would never see the light of day.

“Now this one could be interesting. Finale Industries—a consolidation play in the death care industry. I tell you what, the
demographics should really drive this one. Gonna be lots of dead people over the next few years. I wouldn’t mind owning a
piece of the market that sucks their money up before their corpses get dropped down into the dirt.”

Bubbles had been given an opening. One of our ideas had sparked a flicker of interest from Chester. Bubbles seized the opportunity
and proceeded to wheedle, cajole, and beg for Chester’s continued attention. Chester, however, was like a fat pussycat whose
attention was drawn by a passing cockroach. He batted the cockroach a few times, found temporary amusement in its confused
stumblings, and then settled back to continue his slumber. There would be no deal for Bubbles and DLJ that day. There would
be no deal for the young summer associate. Kinetic II’s first foray out of the box had been a resounding failure. It was a
harbinger of what was to come.

As I sat in Chester’s office that day, I should perhaps have looked at things differently. Instead of looking upon Chester
as an aberration in the human gene pool, I should have realized that it was Bubbles and I who were the human detritus. As
I watched Bubbles do everything
but chug down Chester’s cock with the goal of securing a piece of business, I should have been ashamed. I should have immediately
cast off my leather shoes and woolen suit and gone streaking naked from the room in search of redemption. I should have, at
the very least, realized that the Chesters of the world were the ones with the purse strings, and the guys with the purse
strings were the ones in control. I should have thought about the number of nights that I’d been at the office until 3
A.M
. and assessed whether anything was worth that sort of commitment.

I didn’t do any of that, though. And for that oversight, I would pay.

And so it was that the summer dragged on for Rolfe and me. Pitches, deals, dinners, nights on the town, it was one long continuous
bank-a-thon. Lots of learning, little sleep, and a healthy serving of humble pie. Eventually it came to an end. The summer
had been painful, but it was over. We had survived and we were ready to use the summer experience as a springboard to bigger
and better things. Rolfe and I swore we would never go back. We promised ourselves that we would try to get an offer from
DLJ and then use it to find other, more rewarding jobs. Once again, we were believing our own bullshit.

What we didn’t know was that DLJ was beefing up and we were the beef. DLJ needed bodies, lots of bodies, and they needed them
fast. Because of that, just about all the summer associates would get offers. In fact, the only person in the summer associate
class with a serious chance of not receiving the coveted full-time offer was Rolfe. It
wasn’t because he hadn’t worked hard. It was a much more serious offense. During the Summer Associate Golf Outing, Rolfe had
managed to hit the managing director in charge of associate recruiting, Doug Franken, in the leg on the fifth hole. Rolfe
didn’t just bean him in the leg, he had done it at Franken’s own country club and with one of the Titleist golf balls that
Franken had lent to Rolfe. During another summer, Rolfe’s transgressions might have gotten him dinged.

Fortunately for Rolfe, DLJ needed associates.

T
he summer was over and Troob and I felt pretty crappy. We hadn’t exercised that much, we’d worked long hours, and we were
tired. A summer that we had thought was going to be filled with social engagements, weekends in the Hamptons, and dating turned
out to be a summer filled with work. However, we were paid well—about $12,000 for ten weeks of work, the first two weeks of
which we did nothing. They told us that if we came back full-time we would be handsomely rewarded. We were told at the end
of the summer that if we joined full-time we’d receive an advance of $18,000 and receive a signing bonus of another $5,000
that would cover our moving expenses at the end of the school year.

We went back to our second year of business school, me to Wharton and Troob to Harvard. Within two months the recruiting push
for full-time employment came. The DLJ bird catchers came hunting for Troob
first. He was a pigeon, and I could hear him squawking all the way down at Wharton:

Over the summer I had made some good friends like Rolfe, but I was standing on my moral high ground and saying to myself that
I wouldn’t get lured in by the mystique of investment banking and would only take a job that I really liked. Well, my moral
high ground was about as sturdy as a drunk cowboy’s shooting hand. I was weak. I called Rolfe and asked him what he was going
to do and he told me that he was going to hold out. So I said I would hold out also. Then in October some senior DLJ bankers
came up to Boston to take me out to dinner.

Ed Star and Les Newton came to town. I’d worked with both of these guys during the summer. They were up in Boston to seal
the deal, to close the transaction, to lock me in. I was a project to them, just another deal that they needed to close. I
was a steer and these were two cattle ranchers rounding me up. They wanted to brand my ass with a hot iron. Looking back,
I had no chance.

Star was the head of the Merchant Bank, the most orgasmic place to work on Wall Street. In the Merchant Bank even the junior
bankers were allowed to participate in the deals. Just hanging out with Star got me excited. He smelled like money. They didn’t
have to corral me and lead me to slaughter, I was ready and willing to walk into the DLJ slaughterhouse all by myself. I was
as lubed as the women at Peepland, and ready to sign up.

I wanted to be like Star. He was married to a woman who looked like she was a dancer or a model. People said that he had bought
a house in the Hamptons for
around $5 million and an apartment in NYC for the same amount. He said that he played golf all the time, and did deals, in
between holes, that made him rich. He seemed to be having fun. He had the life, or so I thought. What I didn’t realize was
that I would be entering the bank at a level so many rungs below where Star resided that our lives would have about as much
resemblance as Cindy Crawford has to the bearded lady at Coney Island. There were dues to pay, pain to experience, and a long
journey from associate to managing director. He may have been my role model, but I was fooling myself to think that it came
easy.

Les Newton was the golden child. He was young, successful, and rapidly moving up the hierarchy. He had it all. He had investments
in deals, lots of disposable income, and what seemed to be a dream job. He looked rested and relaxed. He’d figured out one
of the investment banker’s greatest secrets—how to stay up all night working and still look fresh the next day. He was made
of rubber, and he was what all MBAs hoped they could be. He had also probably kissed more ass than a toilet seat sees in a
year.

I also wanted to be like Les. Les was a good guy. Les played his cards right, played the game well, and he was rewarded for
it.

They took me to a strip bar and we spent tons of dough, and then we went to a steak place, ate great steaks, and drank expensive
bottles of red wine. We finished the evening off with glasses of port, cheesecake, cigars, and a discussion. They really poured
it on and I was loose as a goose and eating it all up. This was what I had imagined banking was all about. Steaks, wine, cigars,
naked women, and rich guys. Like the Tom Hanks movie
Bachelor Party
, except with guys who were loaded down with dough.

“Pete, we want you to join DLJ. You’re our favorite candidate. We really want you, we really need you. Say yes now and I’ll
make sure you get your signing bonus money in a couple of weeks. I think you’re the type of person who would excel at DLJ
and could move up the ladder quickly. When you get to DLJ we want you to work for us. You’re our guy.”

At Harvard the recruiters weren’t allowed to give “exploding” offers. An exploding offer was an offer that automatically got
rescinded at a certain date if it hadn’t been accepted. The business schools had outlawed the exploding offers because they
wanted all the students to be able to fully assess all their options. This gave the savvy students the ability to shop their
offers around. The really smart students would interview with all the banks, all of whom came onto campus early in the recruiting
season, and build a book of banking offers. They would then use those offers as backup while they tried to get the much more
difficult leveraged buyout shop and hedge fund offers.