The Buy Side (21 page)

“On its way,” he says.

When I get back into the restaurant, our end of the table has moved to the bar. Jason sits on a barstool, talking animatedly. Four
Susquehanna traders circle him and seem to be hanging on his every word. Uh oh, I think. This could be trouble. “I trade the Qs,” he’s saying. “The QQQ.” All four guys around him nod like he’s the Delphic oracle. This is hilarious. Traders know what the Qs are their first day of work. It’s an ETF just like the BBH, but it represents the Nasdaq 100 and is primarily made up of technology stocks. Saying you trade the QQQs is like announcing you breathe air.

Jason then notices that a Susquehanna guy’s concentration has begun to wander. He’s looking down the bar at a girl. Jason gently lays his hand on the guy’s shoulder, as if to say: “Pay attention.” The guy gives him an apologetic smile, and Jason continues. “I trade ’em tight,” he tells them. Now even the bartender seems to be listening to Jason. “I like to cross shit,” my roommate says. “Mix it up, keep ’em guessing. That’s my style.” The Susquehanna guys’ heads are now bobbing up and down. Jason chooses his words like an exchange student from Bolivia who learned English from watching MTV—but like a puffed-up actor, he teases his audience with dramatic pauses. “I even trade teenies,” he adds, folding his arms to allow his words to marinate. Though “a teenie” is a price—one-sixteenth of a point—and not something that can actually be traded, the Susquehanna guys say nothing to Jason. Instead, they smile and look at one another with blank stares.

“That’s great,” one finally says. “You know,” another says to Jason in a voice just above a whisper, “I want to get to the buy side someday.” Jason takes a moment to ponder this, and then he forms a phone with his pinky and thumb, lifts it to his ear, and gives it a little shake.

“Call me,” he mouths.

I pull Jason away from the group. I tell them we’re going outside for a cigarette. We barely make it out of the restaurant before we burst into laughter. I trade the Qs? I trade ’em tight? Teenies? Just as I’m thinking about how funny my roommate is and how great this
weekend with him is going to be, a white Lexus pulls up. Sam emerges from the car with a glorious smile, like he just hit the lottery numbers. As he approaches, I see him reaching for his pocket. I don’t want Jason to see me get the handoff. He doesn’t know half of my Wall Street dealings. Sam and I lock eyes for a moment. I send him the “Be cool” signal with my eyes. He picks up on it immediately and moves in to shake my hand. He slaps my palm with a medium-size ziplock bag and what feels like a lot of pills. I close my fist and slide it into my pants pocket. When nobody’s looking I pop two of the pills in my mouth. The courage of my tequila buzz squashes any fear of ingesting a stranger’s drug. Let’s hope for the best.

Jason and I make our way back to the bar, and right next to three girls with tans, short skirts, and big earrings. They look like they’re from Miami. They’re hot. They barely notice us, so Jason takes it upon himself to introduce us as Trevor Licious and Turney Me-On. The girls laugh. It’s right about then that it starts to happen. First I feel a tingle coming from deep inside, which begins to move outward, like an ocean’s current. Now I’m smiling. Everything s-l-o-w-s down and all is okay. It’s better than okay: it’s perfect. This f-e-e-e-l-s nice. Look at the pretty lights shining on the bottles behind the bar. That’s c-o-o-o-l. The tingle is now vibrant and engulfs me. There isn’t a problem in the whole world, but if there were I could solve it. My words slice the room like Hemingway’s; I have the edge of James Dean and the rhythm of Michael Jackson.

My body acts in concert with the beat of the music. Inhaling the scent of the girl’s perfume is like being wrapped in fragrant silk. Everything I touch emits the energy of love. I hit every beat; my timing is perfect. The girls laugh. Our group is getting up from the table. The girls start to gather their things. They head for the exit. I need a cigarette. Back outside, I light up. The valet has pulled the girls’
convertible Bronco around front. I turn around. Jason is inside talking to some guys. I look back at the girls. They wave me over. I look back. Jason, Sam, and a few of the other guys make their way toward me. The girls, now in the Bronco, are waiting for me to make my move. I run to the truck. I jump into the backseat. We take off. The way we head is a dead end, so the girl driving the Bronco makes a tire-squealing U-turn and we fly back past the restaurant. Jason, Sam, and a herd of Susquehanna guys are screaming at us. They chase us for half a block. I reach into my pocket for the bag of ecstasy pills. I count them with a glance. There are seventeen left. I take two more and give one to each of the girls. The night has started.

Now I’m in a hotel room. I guess the girls aren’t from Miami. I start to kiss one while the other two begin to make out. We’re all naked on the bed. More ecstasy. Now we’re in a club. The music is loud. More alcohol. I’m making out with one of the girls again. I think it’s the same one. Back in the jeep, the cool Miami night air blows through my hair as we speed along Collins Avenue. More ecstasy and more alcohol and back in another club.

It’s six a.m. and I realize I’m alone. I’m standing in the middle of a club called Space. The music is obnoxiously loud and the same beat over and over again. I think there are smoke machines on the dance floor. Everyone is walking around like zombies. And then it’s as if someone abruptly flips a switch. My brain zaps. The noise in my head is unbearable. I need to go home. I bump into a couple of guys from the trip. They want to know where the ecstasy is and how I got here. But then they ask the most bizarre question. “Dude, what are you wearing?” I look down and see that I have a woman’s pink Izod shirt on. It hangs right above my belly button like a girl’s half shirt.

I know I’m not the most honorable person in the world, but I try to make good decisions. It was wrong to leave Jason and all the
Susquehanna guys. It was wrong to keep all the drugs to myself. I don’t want to be that guy. It’s not the first time I’ve made poor choices that contradict the person I want to be. Maybe that’s the problem. I want to be someone.

Early the next afternoon, I’m by the pool, stretched out on a chaise lounge. Even with my sunglasses, the bright glare bores right through my eyes into my head. My mouth feels like it’s filled with beach sand. In ones and twos, the Susquehanna guys come over and tell me how much fun they had with me last night. They say nothing about the ecstasy I took from them, of course. Nor do they mention anything about my going MIA. They’re the same as they were on the plane down, or at dinner last night. I’m the client, no matter how bad I behave. Jason lies on the chair next to me, uncharacteristically quiet. Finally, it’s just us two. “What happened to you last night?” he asks. I close my eyes to block out the sun and shake my head.

IT’S THE
early summer of 2003, and my parents are coming to New York and are going to stop by my Tribeca apartment for the first time. When I get home from work on a Friday, I begin to tidy up. For the most part, my roommates and I keep the apartment clean, but there’s always the odd empty beer can or pack of rolling papers lying around. I notice Jason has strategically placed a couple of porn DVDs on the coffee table along with a bong and my bag of weed. That’s funny. He’s getting back at me. One night, when we lived on the Upper West Side, we threw a party. When he was in the shower beforehand, I stuffed a bunch of porn magazines underneath the couch cushion in his bedroom. Once the party got rocking around midnight, I lured Jason and a few girls into his room. When I sat on the couch I acted like something was wrong with the cushion. I pulled it off and six or seven triple-X porn mags came tumbling to the ground at the girls’ feet.

My parents are in town because they’re on a flight out of Kennedy
to Paris tomorrow. My sister Kristin lives there now with her husband and three children, and this past Christmas I bought my mom and dad round-trip tickets on the Concorde so they could visit her. When I handed my mom the envelope with the plane tickets, on Christmas morning in the kitchen of our house in Maine, she gasped with joy. Dad said something like: “What’d you go and do that for?”

I put the pot and DVDs behind the bar and look around one final time to make sure I haven’t missed any more of Jason’s booby traps. Everything in the living room is either new or expensive. With all the artwork on the wall, the Indian daybed, and the modern furniture, it’s like I live in some sort of Spoils of the Buy Side exhibit. I decide to turn on CNBC but mute the television to complete the set.

Just then the buzzer rings. Over the intercom, the doorman tells me my parents are at the front desk. I take the elevator down to meet them. In the lobby, Dad is making small talk with the doorman. Mom is talking to Uncle Tucker, who’ll be joining us for dinner. Tucker is back in New York from San Francisco, working for a new firm and on his third wife. It was nine years ago that I moved into the tiny room in the Upper West Side apartment and called him for a job in anything related to my writing degree. It’s weird how things work out. I walk down the long hallway to the front desk. My mom hugs me, and Dad and Uncle Tucker shake my hand. I lead them back to the elevator. Once we’re all in, I tell my dad to hit number five. I turn to start talking to my mother, but I realize the elevator hasn’t started moving. “Dad, hit five, please,” I say.

“I did,” he says.

I watch as he tries again. He presses his thumb as hard as he can on the number five, but he’s hitting the actual number, not the button to the right of it. I reach over and push the button for him. I wonder
in this moment what would’ve happened to me if I never left Kennebunk. Would I know how to operate an elevator?

My father grew up in Pittsburgh. I know very little about his youth—only what I heard over happy hour at Duff family get-togethers. The stories I do remember involved the usual teenage high jinks—firecrackers in mailboxes and midnight cemetery raids. I know even less about his relationship with his father, although I guess it couldn’t have been great. The whispers I’ve heard about Grandpa’s drinking and his ultimate demise in business lead me to this conclusion. It’s strange. Looking back, the extended Duff family, as many as twenty-five members, spent every summer vacation in a house in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin. We gathered at least once, sometimes twice, a year on Thanksgiving or Easter, at my grandmother’s house in Upper St. Clair, just outside of Pittsburgh. And yet these memories are nearly empty of family stories. Maybe it’s just that I was too young then to be interested in them. More likely, though, it has to do with the way my family keeps secrets, many of which are to this day locked in the Duff family’s attics.

There are secrets on my mother’s side, too. I know my mom’s mother drank martinis out of milkshake glasses and smoked cigarettes in bed, where she stayed most of the time. But I found this out from Uncle Tucker only recently. I wonder if my parents’ reluctance to talk about their childhoods was something they each brought to their relationship or was something that was formed because of it.

They met in high school, and then reunited when they both showed up on the campus of Bucknell University. There were pins, proposals, and a pregnancy before college was over. My father took an extra year to finish up his chemical engineering degree. My mother, then pregnant with my oldest sister, Debbie, lived on campus with him. The births
of my sisters Kristin and Kelly came after graduation. And then, at my grandfather’s urging, I came along—the youngest, and the only boy.

I don’t have any of those clichéd memories of playing catch or going fishing with my father.

Instead, we did yard work together, or at least we did it together for a while. It was not unusual for my father to spend every daylight hour of a weekend working around the house. It was impossible to keep up with him, or to live up to his standards. If I couldn’t stack the firewood in a perfect pile, if I couldn’t paint the garage without streaks, he didn’t want me to stack or paint. I remember I once mowed the lawn without him asking me to. When he saw that my mow lines weren’t perfectly perpendicular, he told me never to mow the lawn again. It didn’t take me long to figure out that if I wanted to get out of doing chores, all I had to do was do them imperfectly. That was fine with me. I wanted to be running around with my friends, playing games or just goofing off.

Dad tolerated my mediocre grades, but he was proud of my athletic achievements. He and my mom showed up for every one of my games or meets. There they never embarrassed me; they stayed on the sidelines with their mouths closed.

But even though we shared a love of sports, we had far more differences, such as our attitudes toward wrestling. In my senior year in high school I was voted an all-star in our conference football league. My parents wanted to come to the awards ceremony, but I told them it was only for the players and coaches. It was a lie. And if you ask me now why I didn’t want them there, the only excuse I can come up with is that I was eighteen and being out with my parents, I guess, still embarrassed me. But at family dinner on the night of the event, I was overcome with guilt, told them the truth, and asked if they’d attend. My father refused to go. I’m not sure whether it was his way of
punishing me for lying to him or his way of saying the heck with me. My mom was upset with him, though, and later came to the ceremony by herself.