The Black & The White (5 page)

Next, I heard some pounding and a loud
shattering crack. I stood up to see what the noise was about. I saw
pieces of the telephone fly across the room. Everyone around this
man seemed indifferent. I stared.

“
Fuck you. You don’t hang up
on me. I hang up on you! Your job can’t get any fucking easier, you
asshole. You have just cost me one hundred ninety thousand dollars
for your stupidity, and I hope your kids get cancer!”

“
That’s harsh,” I whispered
to Andrew.

“
People say the harshest
things when they are mad. Don’t take them seriously,” he
advised.

Soon the phone-smasher came back to
his desk with a new handset. Later, I learn from Andrew that this
trader’s broker’s broker had made a trading mistake. I soon learned
that these were the same brokers that wined, dined and schmoozed
all of us.

Andrew hardly ever met his brokers. “I
never have to, I’m at the top of the food chain,” he explained. “My
job is to trade and make money, not to meet people. If I want to go
out, I just press that line.” Andrew pointed to the phone line on
the turret. “That’s the broker we always use to get tickets to
concerts, games, or whatever it is you want to go to. He’s a
scumbag, though,” he explained. “Don’t push that button too often
or you’ll be called a ‘broker whore,’” he said. “This broker,”
Andrew pointed to another button, “he gets us dinner.”

Broker whores were people who abused
the services offered by brokers’ brokers.

What I did learn from Kim was that I
had to work for what the Wall Street book Liar’s Poker had put it,
the “Big Swinging Dick.” Andrew was just that. As a result, Andrew
was offered many gifts—even Superbowl and World Series tickets—but
he often declined the offers. “Nothing is ever for free,” he
said.

Although Andrew never met with his
clients, my second week working for him he thought that it was
imperative that I be introduced. “You have to have a face-to-face
with these people so they know who they’re talking to on the phone.
Everyone on Wall Street is high maintenance,” he explained. “I’d
like you to come meet Stephen. He’s my biggest client, but don’t
get scared. He’s young. Weird…but nice.”

I was curious to see what Andrew would
be like outside of the office, free of the prying ears and piercing
stares. On the trading floor, there was no such thing as
privacy.

That Thursday, we went to Morrell’s
wine bar near our midtown office, across the street from
Rockefeller Center and Christie’s auction house. The bar was packed
with men in suits as well as a few women.

Before Stephen arrived, Andrew briefed
me on him. Stephen had studied physics at Princeton, graduating at
the top of his class, and dreamed of working at NASA. He never
thought he’d take a job on Wall Street. But he’d started trading US
government bonds at a very prestigious firm and soon rocketed up
the corporate ladder trading government bonds across the globe. By
the age of twenty-seven, he had made his first million and became a
managing director, reporting directly to one of the heads of a
firm. He had lived in Tokyo for a year, where he became the largest
trader of Japanese government bonds then London. There, he became
even more recognized, trading everything from pork bellies to
treasuries. At age thirty, he came back to the United States where
he started a hedge fund, managing a select group of
fifteen.

I had no idea what to expect when I
first met Stephen apart from what Andrew had briefed me on. I had
expected a straight-laced guy, debonair with slick-backed hair,
much like those I had seen roaming around outside of Kim’s
office.

When Stephen arrived at the
restaurant, I thought he looked like an awkward boy with long,
unkempt blond hair he tucked behind his ears. He had a slim figure
and a goofy smile with crooked teeth. He wore a short-sleeved plaid
shirt that was wrinkled and untucked and jeans that were torn at
the thighs and frayed at the heels. His sneakers gave the
appearance he had picked them from the back of an old high school
gym locker. His garb suited his demeanor.

Andrew had ordered each of us a glass
of Brunello, Stephen’s favorite.

As I talked to Stephen, I found myself
missing Dani even more than usual. Stephen was a genius,
charismatic, endearing, like a little boy in a man’s body. Andrew
explained how Stephen had gotten his job on Wall Street. It was a
fateful day when his best friend and fraternity roommate, Anson,
signed him up for an interview at a Wall Street firm as a joke.
Little did Stephen know that he would be offered a job on the spot.
He thought he would do it for a year or two. He thought wrong. It
was now more like eight years.

“
Want to see my phones?”
Stephen asked me fifteen minutes into our meeting. He rummaged
through the well-worn leather Gucci man-purse he wore strapped
diagonally across his chest. He pulled out cell phone after cell
phone and lined them up on the glossy wooden bar
counter.

“
Aha, here’s the last one!”
he exclaimed as he picked off a gum wrapper that was wedged in the
screen of his Blackberry.

“
You have ten phones?! Do
they all work?” I asked.

“
Yes, they all work.” He
then corrected himself after deliberating in his head. “Well, they
did at one point. I lose them and then find them. I have three
phone numbers.”

“
How do people know which
number to call?” I asked.

“
Ha! That’s the trick. If
you confuse them with enough information, a lot of people don’t
want to bother calling, so they just email.” He tapped his
forehead. “Genius right?”

“
How do you rationalize all
of this?” I gestured toward his phones.

“
That’s it. I’m not really
rational. I carry a gas mask in my bag. I’m paranoid.”

“
Well, that’s obvious,” I
said.

Stephen later explained that he had
been severely affected by what transpired during 9/11. He’d lost
seven friends, one of whom was his very close friend and mentor of
sorts, the man who had most helped guide him through the Street.
Eventually, he revealed this man acted as his father
figure.

He pulled out a surgical facemask and
placed it around his head. “It’s funny walking around New York with
this on. I was a proctologist for Halloween. Hysterical right?” He
pulled the mask off and put it on my face.

“
Gross!” I giggled. “Where
has this been?”

Stephen laughed. “You don’t want to
know…You look better without the mask anyway. You only give this to
ugly chicks.” He winked. I smiled.

Andrew seemed happy Stephen and I were
getting along well.

Like a magician, Stephen pulled out
object after object from his bag: a sci-fi book; a worn, white
undershirt; a chaotic array of multivitamins and prescription
pills; various male grooming products; strewn pieces of paper with
indistinguishable formulaic scribbles; a laptop computer; and a
dirty black work sock.

“
Huh? I wonder where this
guy’s friend is,” he said, holding up the sock.

He unzipped the side pockets, and
there was more: bottles of hand sanitizer, two packs of Dentyne, a
travel-size bottle of mouthwash, allergy medication,
antidepressants, the business cards of various doctors and
therapists. He continued to rifle through his bag.

“
Oh, look, my business
card.” He handed it to me. There were pen marks all across the
card.

You are nuts, I wanted to
say.

“
Look. An apple. How did
that get in there?” Stephen handed me the apple.

“
No, thanks, I don’t like
apples.”

“
Hey, we have that in
common!” Stephen said.

That’s the only thing we have in
common, I thought.

“
Did you know that I am
allergic to cats, and I have three cats?” Stephen said.

I wanted to tell him I was allergic to
cats also, but he was quick to continue his soliloquy.

“
Oh, oh! And in here”— he
unzipped the last unopened pocket of his man-purse—”is
cash.”

He opened the bag to expose just how
much he had. He took out a large stack of one-hundred-dollar bills
and, as he was thumbing through them, a small plastic bag of white
powder fell out. “Oops! This is a bad habit,” he said. Kim told me
about bad habits.

It shocked me how he could have been
so blasé about his drug use.

Andrew was focused only on the money.
“Ten thousand in cash, still in the bank wrap. That’s only U.S.
dollars. How much do you have in euros?” he asked.

Stephen looked up. “About the same,”
he said. He looked at me. “You see, I’m paranoid. I should go see
my psychiatrist. I probably should meet her more often than I
do.”

He then pulled out various colored
gambling chips, all from different casinos in Las Vegas.

“
This is a good color.” He
placed a brown chip on my hand. It was a $10,000 chip.

“
You’re crazy, Stephen.
Aren’t you at all afraid to have all of this with you?” I waved my
hands over the things he had laid out on the bar. At the very
least, he should have been concerned about the drug possession.
Curiously, no one at the bar paid much attention. Bar patrons
seemed to be engrossed in their chatter about the
markets.

We all ordered another glass of
Brunello.

It was easy and comfortable being
around Stephen, like he was a guy friend I’d known since grade
school. He flirted with me like we were at the playground. I was
caught off guard when he pulled my ponytail.

“
Ouch! What are you
doing?”

“
I wanted to see if your
hair was softer than mine.” He took my hand and made me stroke his
hair.

“
It’s okay,” I said, unsure
how else to respond.

“
Dude, you can’t just say
‘okay.’ It’s perfect and super soft. My Japanese hair stylist would
be offended. I spend lots of money to get my hair this perfect.” He
jumped up and down. “You see? It’s nice and bouncy.”

We all laughed.

Before we left, Stephen ordered a car
service to take me home. He knew nothing about Queens except that
it wasn’t Manhattan, and therefore he was scared for my safety. I
protested at first but eventually I agreed after looking at Andrew
for affirmation.

“
Just let me do this so I
know you’re home safe. And if you’re living in Queens, Andrew needs
to pay you more.”

“
She’s got to earn it,”
Andrew said.

I smiled when a Mercedes came to drive
me home.

“
I could get used to this,”
I said to Stephen.

“
You should,” he
said.

I gloated in the back seat of the car
on the way home. If New York City was a city of layers, Stephen was
a baklava of his own, layers and layers of phyllo dough, covered in
sweetness.

I called Dani immediately after I got
home.

“
I met this client who was
so much like you, habibi,” I said. Dani had taught me the Arabic
word meaning “my love.”

I described Stephen as fun but
socially awkward, geeky yet funny, intellectually independent and
somewhat paranoid. Dani laughed. He agreed that there were some
similarities.

Dani and I talked for hours until I
fell asleep with the phone still stuck to my ear. It was the first
time we had talked to such great lengths since arriving to New
York. It was nice to reminisce.

Dani and I met in the computer lab at
the student center. He was tutoring a student next to me in C++
programming. I was eavesdropping on their conversation, annoyed at
the student’s ineptitude but impressed by Dani’s patience. I
approached him afterwards. We grew to be best friends from that day
onward.

The next morning, I got in at 7:30 and
found Andrew already at his desk. He had come in early to watch the
unemployment numbers, which signified economic health and would
ultimately affect our profit-and-loss statement, otherwise known as
a P&L.

“
What did you think of
Stephen?” Andrew asked.

“
He seemed nice enough,” I
said.

Andrew seemed unsatisfied with my
reply.

“
He did get me a car service
home, and for someone that rich, I would think he would be
different. I guess he’s like you said, quirky and goofy. I mean,
ten means of communication? Why all that money? Isn’t he scared
he’ll get robbed?”

Andrew explained further that after
9/11 Stephen had become paranoid and feared he couldn’t get out of
New York City if he ever needed to. The money he carried gave him
some sort of assurance he would be able to pay someone enough to
either drive, fly, or sail him out of Manhattan. Years of therapy
have not helped him wean off his paranoia. Andrew later explained
that his paranoia could also be drug related.

“
But then again, a lot of us
are paranoid like that,” he added. Then he reached down under his
desk and pulled out a coil of rope.

“
Rope?”

“
You know, just in case you
and I want to have some fun tonight,” he said with a smile. I was
taken quite suddenly and wondered if his comment was meant to be
sexual. But then he turned serious. “Same paranoia. Just in case I
had to leap out of this building, I would have a rope.” His
paranoia made sense. “Don’t worry, kid, I’ll carry you in my arms
if we get in trouble. These fuckers can take care of themselves.”
He waved his hands to the trading desk.