The Fall of Princes

W
hen you strike a match, it burns brighter in the first nanosecond than it will ever burn again. That first incandescence. That instantaneous and brilliant flash. The year was 1980, and I was the match, and that was the year I struck into blinding flame.

I was a heat-seeking missile headed straight for your gut. Get out of the way or I would take you down. I swear. I’m not proud of it. In fact, I flush with shame at the memory. But that was then, what then was like. Things are very different now. I’m not that person anymore.

Then, I was the still, hot point of light at the end of the matchstick on which everything and everybody converged. I could be seen clearly from outer space, a hot bright whiteness moving without guilt or pity through the hottest, brightest city in the world, and if you happened to be on a space walk on any given night, you could have had a front-row seat to my public chicaneries and my private excesses. Under the $1,000 duvet, on the $15,000 mattress, in the marble-tiled shower, slipping into a bespoke black cashmere jacket on a snowy winter night, I was unmistakable in my vast illumination.

Thousands of hours in the world’s most expensive gym, with the world’s most skilled trainers, had brought my body to such a state of perfection that the women who rushed to take off their clothes in my bedroom could only gasp at the luck that had put them into my line of sight, that had made them, even for one night, the most beautiful creatures on earth, with their lithe arms and their skin like chamois and their scents, God, their scents, and their golden manes of hair, falling on their shoulders, sweeping my chest. A glance was all it took from me. They could feel the heat, the hunger grew before they even knew my name, and they didn’t care, they didn’t care if I was an ax murderer or the Bishop of Lyons.

BSD. That was the phrase somebody coined to describe us and only us. “Big Swinging Dick”—and it stuck, and we wore that sobriquet like a badge of honor, and we sold our junk bonds and our trash securities, and made a $100,000 every microsecond of every minute, the match flaring into atomic glow, lighting up our faces, our ruddy cheeks or glinting eyes, our megawatts of greed and glory and rapaciousness.

My feet solidly on the ground in shoes from John Lobb in London, my legs mammoth, able to press three hundred pounds, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, the rest going on from there, the powerful hips and haunches connected to a stomach as flat and hard as a frozen lake, yet hot to the touch, and they didn’t care if they got burned or scarred for life, like junkies who can’t stop until all the dope is gone, knowing that there is no more, that the withdrawal will be agony but not caring, yearning only for the sharp prick of the needle of my incandescent self.

I say this without pride or apology. It is a statement of irrefutable fact. I could charm a hatchling out of its egg. I could sell ice cream to Eskimos. Dead Eskimos.

And we worked. We worked our asses off. Before we came into the world, fully armed like Pallas Athene, work had somehow gone out of fashion, the men and women had become sluggish, their expectations limited, the horizon they had once envisioned lined with palaces and gorgeous objects of all kinds had become nothing more than a thin line in a rapidly approaching distance, the place they would end up, neither richer nor wiser, filled only with regret and second-tier liquor and the shreds of the dreams they no longer even remembered, surprised to wake up one day and be shown the door with a tepid handshake and a future on the edge of old age and death that held only pictures of the kids and grandkids, a cruise to some out-of-season destination every three years, and the notion, which they somehow managed to believe, that this was comfort, that this was all the splendor they got for forty years of relentless drudgery and obsequiousness.

And to all of this we said fuck you, we want it all, we want it now, you can drain us of our blood for all we care, but we want impossible things of impossible vintage and provenance. We want salaries equivalent to our ages multiplied by 100,000. We want to live life in a rush of fury and light, to rampage, to pillage our neighborhoods and rape and demolish our best and closest friends, and we were secure in this, knowing that, if we all wanted the same thing, everybody would get equally glorified and decimated. We were magnificent in our generosity, and stingy with our secret selves. We sang the executioner’s song on our way to the office in the hour before dawn, and we spent our days playing high-stakes one-on-one basketball with other people’s money in darkened rooms with no clocks so there was no compass, no marker, save for the hum of money, with other young men just like us, our inner lives obscured by insatiable greed, and we let our increasingly dubious virtues grow tangled and overgrown with layer after layer of objects, things, always things, suits that cost more than our fathers had paid for their first houses, cars of exuberant finesse, and the mountains of speeding tickets we got racing out to the East End of Long Island, where we kept the pools heated year-round.

We slept like babies at night.

And I walked through these crowds of men, all of whom wanted exactly what I wanted, and I beat them down until I was a colossus, and rather than inspire fear and loathing, they adored me, they wanted and sought my company, knowing that I would slam-dunk them off the court every single time, and then, like an abusive father, I would shower them with presents, gold watches, cashmere sweaters, and the gift of my smile, the perfect teeth, wholly created by Dr. Gregg Lituchy of Central Park South.

It was going to end. It had to. The worm would, in fact, devour its own tail, eat its own heart out, but that was of no consequence. Not then. Not at that time. Not to me.

Want to know how I got my job? How it all began? It wouldn’t happen this way today. Today, you’d be hired based on some secret CEO algorithm that takes into account your Best in Show at Wharton, your height and your wing span, the charitable work you did in Guatemala when you were sixteen, your ethnic variety. Or maybe you’re hired these days just because you haven’t committed a major felony yet.

In those days, in the year of my incandescence, to get one of the most coveted jobs on Wall Street, you played poker. Winner take all. Job or no job based solely on your ability to beat the CEO at a hand of cards. That’s not how it begins now. Not by a long shot. But then, one hand of poker is what sealed the deal.

It begins when you’re in graduate school. You are courted, warily, at a distance. You feel them circling, and then they come closer, you can feel them breathing down your neck. You feel gifted, blessed, chosen. Then they strike, second year. You get the call that everybody in your class has been waiting for. The Firm, the legend and the gravitas and the money are on the other end of the line, and they are speaking to you in a polite, reserved tone of voice. So much is unspoken, so much unsaid but known. You are invited to New York to work your guts out for one summer, doing the drudge work, crunching numbers for eighteen hours a day. It is understood you will not be paid. This is never said. You pack your bags.

You are met at the train station by a young woman, snugly filling a sober but chic suit, knowing she will never get far in what was then an almost all male world. She got a 4.0 at the Darden School. Every minute of her life she has been the smartest person in the room and, at twenty-three, she is already facing a dead end, the certain knowledge that, however well she does, there is no future for her except a line in bold type on a résumé. She will never be paid what the boys are paid, but, in the end, she will be fine. She will move to Chase by twenty-five, where her every move will be applauded, the hinges of every door oiled to a whispering forgiveness by that one line in bold type that says she worked at The Firm. However briefly. She will retire with a ton of bucks, and a solid collection of good jewelry, and the husband and the three children and the house in Greenwich.

Now, she meets interns, fresh-faced, totally ignorant, crisp as a newly minted bill. She arranges for a porter, although you insist you don’t need one. There is a way things are done in this world, and that way, even though you are a meaningless blob of nothingness, does not include carrying your own luggage. She leads you to a black town car, the first of hundreds, thousands of such cars you are to come to know, to take as your due. This, at The Firm, is what they call public transportation.

You are taken to an apartment in Murray Hill that you do not know then is the dreariest neighborhood in the whole of New York, dark, drab Murray Hill, and you are led into a large and pristine apartment where you are to spend the summer with three other guys who only yesterday were snapping each other’s butts with wet towels in the locker rooms of the finest schools in the world, but who now stand in cordovan bluchers polished to sanctity, and pinstriped suits, their faces eager with greed and fear. Many are called but few are chosen, and you all know that, know also that most of you will never make it, will work your ass off for free for a single summer and then go back to the books and wait for a phone call that does not ever come. This is where it begins, this sizing up, the eying of the jugular.

Then the real courtship begins. You have never been fawned over. You are now. You are watched, and the watchers are swooning. They love you, with an adoration that is both sensual and pragmatic. You are merely another potential ROI to them, but you feel their love, their lust for what you can do for them. You grow taller, stronger, handsomer. You have your shoes polished every day. You arrive every morning so pressed, so starched, that you could shave with the edge of your shirt collar, and by eleven you are a rumpled wreck, because that only makes them love you more, the dishevelment of relentless labor.

They take you around the harbor on Malcolm Forbes’s boat,
The Highlander,
white-coated waiters bring you icy, sweating Heinekens as the Statue of Liberty serenely observes this year’s crop of immigrants, and you want to get shit-faced but you don’t, and you want to sleep with the trim women but you don’t, out of fear that their inevitable doom and departure will leave you scarred, will infect you with their own failure. One in a hundred of them will make it into The Firm, one in a thousand will make it upstairs, one in a million has the mark of the BSD. Unfair. Maybe. But you didn’t make the rules.

They take you to the theater, center orchestra, on the aisle, to watch ludicrous spectacles for which not one single ticket is available for the next two years. They take you to Yankee Stadium, to Shea, where the heroes of your childhood are so close you can see the stubble on their chins. You see Madonna at the Garden, this girl who has caught the zeitgeist and sucked the world into the profound depth of her vagina, this BSD chick who seems to look into your eyes only and she opens her mouth and electrifies you with her power, as though she would not fade, like Cleopatra, not ever, as though the strike of the match was for her and only her, an infinity.

There are twenty interviews, formal, identical except for the fact that the offices get larger each time you are called to trot out your brilliant résumé. You speak of nothing else but your ambition. They talk about the culture of success, a culture you must not only thrive in, you must become, historical.

The questions get more pointed, more personal with every interview. Do you do drugs? Have you ever cheated on a test? Lied to the IRS? Are you a homosexual? What do you dream about while you sleep? Do you ever have thoughts of suicide? Patently illegal questions, even then, but you answer, and you tell the truth because you know they already know the answers and would spot a lie a mile off.

It’s like being tested for rabies, except that, in this case, they’re only looking for positive results. Only the rabid dogs, the ones who have been starved and beaten with chains, teeth filed to ice picks, killer dogs to be put in the ring to kill other dogs, only these pass the interviews and move on to the next, bigger room.

Do you hate your parents?

Have you ever gotten a girl pregnant? What did you do about it?

How often do you masturbate? Would you consider that excessive?

You feel as though you are standing naked at Dachau, inspected by uniformed Gestapo who are deciding which line you are to join. And everybody smiles through it all. Everybody speaks in a kind, almost loving voice as they invade your every orifice, begin the arduous task of taking over your mind and melding it into what they repeatedly call “the culture” of The Firm.

Forty or forty, they say with a smile. Forty or forty. Excuse me?

That’s when you retire, they reply with that bland smile. When you reach the age of forty, or your portfolio reaches forty million. That’s when you can get away clean and get your life back. What’s left of it.

Bulls make money, they say. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. They tell you these things, and you instantly know in your heart what they mean, and it speaks to your heart and your gut in a way no voice ever has.

They tell you these things, and you believe them. You can reach into your pocket and feel the weight of $40 million, not even a hint of gray at your temples yet, and your life stretching before you, the golden door, the brilliant road, the Ithaca, as Cavafy wrote, to which you have journeyed all these years.

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