The limo drops us in front of Melon’s on Third Avenue at East Seventy-fourth Street. The place feels like it hasn’t changed in a hundred years, including the bartenders. I don’t mean just the type, I mean the actual guys. It’s no frills here. There are no cute, sexy bartenders and waitresses. Here it is old men bartenders who look like they’ve been around alcohol their whole lives. If you order a mojito you get a glare that holds like stone until you realize you need to change your order. These guys don’t know any drink that came into fashion after 1950. For them, it’s old-fashioneds, rusty nails, maybe a grasshopper for the ladies. The place is narrow, with old New York relics hanging on the walls, rickety chairs, and simple tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. There is a long, wooden, old-style bar running the length of the left wall with two bartenders who are such curmudgeons you have to love their style. We make directly for them. The place is usually jammed up but we’re early enough to find room for five to stand huddled at the bar.
Jerry orders two bloody bulls for himself. A Bloody Mary with beef broth mixed in. He always chugs the first and sips the second. He’s made this his thing. He loves playing the part. I get Maker’s Mark on the rocks. I usually start with beer to ease in but today want a quicker start. Ron and William both get vodka sodas, with Ketel One. Has to be with Ketel One or they get into a snit. Frank, of course, gets a bloody bull, but only one. Two would be to step out of his subservience and encroach on Jerry’s thing.
I look over at the jackets of Ron and William, unbuttoned while seated in the limo, now rebuttoned again, but just the top two. Ron and William are both slim with dark hair and small features. They’re sort of normal and nice-looking and both give the appearance that they’re good kids, which makes them seem twice as devious when they aren’t. The main differences between them are in the way they move and in about six inches of height. Ron is about six three and moves slowly like he’s stretching his limbs with each motion. His speech is slow to match. William is five nine and speaks and moves in a blur.
“What is it with these three-button jackets? Can’t you two wear a normal goddamn suit to the office?”
Blank looks back at me from both of them. Clearly they like the suits and had thought they were making a favorable impression.
I’m feeling a little tired and grouchy and go further. “You’re not in Milan. Go to Brooks Brothers and get a normal goddamn suit and save yourselves some money.”
Jerry chuckles. He enjoys humor abuse of anything thin and good-looking. The fat bastard looks like he just stepped out of a JC Penney catalog. Ron and William just look uncomfortable. Because I sign off on their bonuses, they are now in the difficult position of having to come up with a witty retort that shows they aren’t defenseless but that doesn’t piss me off either. Not exactly a fair fight. I feel a rising knot of shame at behaving like a bully, but knock it back down with another sip of bourbon that makes the ice slide against the front of my teeth.
I almost never give these guys a hard time, and they aren’t used to hearing me dig at them with an edge. They laugh softly and uncomfortably and feel around for firm footing to make a stand.
“My fiancée likes the suits,” William offers. “I go to a tailor in Midtown that her dad always used. She drags me in there once in a while to get a few suits and shirts made. The shirts are stupidly expensive.” He shakes his head.
“All for the ladies,” chimes in Jerry. He’s finished his bloody bulls and his first beer. He used to drink hard liquor but would pass out in bars and on sidewalks. Now if he sticks with beer through the night, he at least makes it home. He’s already got the wound-up look of a big drinking night. Jerry’s sobriety is like an unstable chemical compound. Pour in a little liquid and it teeters off to something explosive.
“What’s your excuse?” I look at Ron.
Feeling the pressure is diffused a bit, he shrugs. “Hey, I just want to be stylish.”
“Stylish? That crap will be in the back of your closet in a few years and you’ll be embarrassed you ever wore it. Better to be classic than stylish—it’s the difference between Mick Jagger and Huey Lewis.”
A moment later comes a heavy exhale through Jerry’s nostrils—a sort of half laugh to indicate, Good one.
“Tell me about this fiancée,” I return to William. My shame is back and winning. Need another drink. “When are we going to meet this gal?”
“We’re having you and Julia over on Sunday for the dinner party, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Crap, I had forgotten about that.
“I’m not invited?” Ron tries for mock astonishment but seems partly serious.
“It’s a dinner party with wives. You don’t have a wife, and you can’t bring a hooker. Jen’ll know.”
Ron seems satisfied. It’s not the kind of party he likes, anyway. Me either.
William turns back to me. “She’s great. She’s twenty-four, hot, great body. Likes to go out a lot, doesn’t mind me coming home drunk all the time.”
“That won’t last,” Jerry tosses in. “Trust me.” I think he’s referring just to the last point but could be any of them. Anyway, he’s right.
William nods to show that he’s considered this, then moves on. “Her guy friends from college are sorta lame. They’re like young kids, like they could be my little brothers.”
“Aren’t you twenty-six?”
“Yeah, but there’s something about being just out of college like these guys. They haven’t had enough time to grow up in the real world.” The real world, I think. You mean the limo ride we took to drinks and coke. “The girls seem my age, though. At least my age, maybe older. Weird.”
“She does have a tight little body, but that hasn’t slowed down your rub and tug routine.” Leaving nothing to chance, Ron makes sure the conversation goes to his comfort zone and gives his buddy a shove.
I play along. “You have a massage spot with a happy ending?”
Ron smiles. “Not a spot. The spot. Beautiful little Asian gals, and they’re amazing. They crawl all over you.”
Jerry leans forward, a little more interested. Frank has just been listening in this whole time and has nothing to offer. He seems like the kind of guy who has never had any ego tied up in girls. Everyone has a role. Helps to get comfortable with it. He just wants a nice, normal girl so he can settle that part of his life and not compete with other guys on it. He’ll probably end up the only one of us with a good marriage.
“Where is this place?” barks Jerry. The image of a caramel-colored, ninety-pound Asian girl draped over his pasty enormous form goes through my brain like a flicker of the lights.
“Tribeca. They have a converted loft. A few makeshift rooms and a few gals there. It’s open all day. You can just duck over for lunch.”
“Get me that address tomorrow.”
“Will do.” Ron and William stand a little straighter as though they’ve just been promoted.
Frank cocks his head the way a dog will when you speak to it and it is trying hard to understand your words. “Do you feel like that’s cheating?” This is a courageous question, especially since Jerry already showed interest. Honest, from the heart. Maybe this is how Jerry was too, thirteen years ago. I can’t remember. For a moment, I start to like Frank. On the other hand, it is the sort of wet-blanket question no one wants to hear and is a conversation killer. Bad form.
“I’ve actually thought about that, and the answer is no, for two reasons.” Conversation still alive. William continues his CPR. “The first reason is simple. If I scratch an itch and no one’s the wiser, then no one gets hurt. It’s like the tree falling in the forest. It’s not cheating unless both parties are involved and you complete the transaction.”
It occurs to me that “simple” to him means that any corner that can be cut will be cut. “But aren’t you stuck in a relationship covered with itches?”
“But they’re mine, it’s my business. If I’m okay, the relationship is okay. It’s not cheating.”
/> I don’t follow the logic but am amused by it, so I let it pass. I’ve been to a rub and tug too. It’s just been about ten years since and I did it twice in my life. I haven’t waved it in a few times a week like a turkey sandwich. “Okay, so what’s reason number two?”
“Number two is a little more complicated.” Here we go. “You have to switch roles in your head. If my fiancée had an itch and she went to some Asian guy, or gal, therapist who gave her a massage, then fingered her to orgasm to help her relax and feel good, I wouldn’t care. I don’t feel an ounce of jealousy over that. It just makes her happier and better able to deal with me.”
I find myself smiling while listening to this. I haven’t yet decided if it is sheer lunacy or if there is some twisted genius in what this kid is saying. Jerry has leaned back, slowly nodding, while Ron has an “amen, brother” look on his face. Frank looks confused. The silence from all of us lasts long enough that William just continues.
“Anyway, it’s not cheating. Because, what is cheating? Cheating is an affair with someone you know, a personal relationship. Not a professional relationship. An anonymous hooker or massage gal is not cheating.”
He says this with the tone of a philosopher, like he’s quoting an important passage. The philosophy of William. A one-woman-and-many-hookers man. I turn and get another drink. Not only did Frank not kill the conversation, but we just brought back a red-light district Frankenstein. I’m still pondering William’s theory of personal versus professional cheating, or noncheating. I’m struggling to connect the dots. Good for him if he can get some mileage out of professional noncheating and make it work. I can allow that he is on to something in that there are degrees between the two. I don’t think I could handle being on the receiving end of my wife having an affair and actually developing another relationship that had more meaning than just scratching an itch.
From this happy thought I begin to suffer from another bout of the syndrome I have recently begun to call “what am I doing in a bar with a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds when I’m thirty-five.” Bourbon always helps amplify my mood, for good or ill. In the last twenty minutes it’s been heading down, and fast. This is my career. By day I sell paper from companies whose business I don’t fully understand and could never run. By night, this. I’ve developed no real talents. A few people report to me, but the extent of my management skills is to give them a hard time over cocktails. Every time I think I need to get out and do something else, that thought is followed up with the realization that there is nothing else. What the hell else can I do? This job is all I’ve done for more than a dozen years and I have no other skill, if you can even call this a skill. At least I’m making some money. At thirty-five is it too late to pull out and switch careers? I think better never than late.
“Guys, I feel like crap. I’m going to pull the rip cord and get home.”
“What!” in chorus. “Come on. A couple more drinks and we’ll head over to Scores. We’re already on the East Side.” Jerry attempts the argument of geographic convenience after having dragged us all the way uptown. Home is downtown and farther west, so there isn’t any advantage for me. Plus it has gotten hard to expense strip club bills and we’d probably have to come out of pocket. And I really do feel like crap.
“Not tonight, guys. Enjoy the club, I’m out.” I bolt for the door before they can mount another argument.
3 | ON A PATH
November 15, 2005
I GET IN A CAB AND REST ONE SIDE OF MY FOREHEAD against the glass window. It’s about twenty minutes from J. G. Melon to home. I watch a few pedestrians that we pass on the sidewalk, then close my eyes and my mind drifts. I remember my first time at Bear Stearns when I interviewed and got the job. It’s the kind of memory people can have that feels like yesterday and also another lifetime. The winter of 1992 is my senior year. I drive to Manhattan in my Explorer that has 190,000 miles on it and is worth less than what I pay the garage to park it for three days in the city.
I have two days of interviews set and I’m planning to sleep on the couch of a Cornell friend who’s a first year at Bear.
The interviews themselves are a joke. I’ve never had a job or done much of anything worth interviewing about. I sit with four different traders each day for two days and I don’t think they care anything about what I’ve done before. I was told ahead of time that the main test I need to pass is whether I’m a guy they could sit next to on a long plane ride without wanting to put a bullet in their head at the end of the flight. I’m at Cornell, so they assume I’m smart enough. I play lacrosse, so they assume I’m a good guy. As long as I don’t walk in there like a cocky punk but show I’m humble and willing to pay my dues, it should be fine.
The interviews are breezing by and all about the same. They ask about what classes I’m taking, how the lacrosse team is doing, and some useless stock interview questions like what’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, what’s my greatest strength, greatest weakness.
For the last interview of the second day, they take me to an office on a floor I haven’t been to before. The office is small and a mess with papers and magazines. The desk and chairs look like cheap discount office furniture and they point me to an uncomfortable-looking chair in front of a desk with nobody behind it, then close the door.
I sit in the chair and the room is so quiet I can hear the second hand of the clock on the wall. I’m happy I’m almost through this process and looking forward to getting back in my Explorer to listen to music on the drive back to school. Ten minutes pass and I’m getting restless but want to look cool, so I pick up a magazine and flip pages. It’s Fortune or Forbes and I’m not reading anything more than the captions under photographs. Twenty more minutes pass and I’ve flipped through the magazine twice. I could get another but I’m not reading anyway.
Another half hour passes. I’ve recrossed my legs in every possible way to distribute the soreness. I decide to stand for a bit and look at pictures on the wall. As soon as I’m up, the office door opens and a voice says, “Sit down.”
I turn to see a massive guy in a suit filling the door frame. Someone had pointed him out to me the day before on the trading floor. The guy had been a tight end for Penn State and joined Bear after one year as a scrub in the NFL for the Redskins about ten years ago. He’s six foot seven, two hundred and eighty pounds. I take a seat. He walks past me and he reeks of whiskey.
He drops into the chair, which looks outmatched, and I imagine it to be anxious about how long it can support him. He eyes me in a suspicious way but he looks too stupid to be thinking anything other than whether he’s doing a good job of looking suspicious.
“You want to come work for Bear?”
“I do.” This seems like the obvious answer but it also occurs to me I haven’t asked myself the question before, nor has anyone else. Maybe he’s brighter than I have given him credit for being.
He finds something amusing in my answer and he smiles and leans back in the chair, which responds with an audible panic. “That a fact.”
This doesn’t have the tone of a question but I nod anyway.
“I’ve seen your type before. Plenty of times.” He shifts again, swinging a leg around the side and banging a foot on top of the desk. I’ve never seen a shoe like this before. It looks like a kayak wrapped in black leather and flopped across the desktop. Stores probably don’t bother to carry shoes this size. I think of the giant bottles of wine the size of a child that aren’t really available but are in nice restaurants just for show. He seems aware of the effect his circus-like shoe can have on people, imagining their necks underneath it.
“I don’t know what you mean.” I hope my voice sounds even. I think it does. I’m still more amused than nervous.
His smile gets a little bigger. He keeps his foot where it is, reaches into a desk drawer, and comes out with a full liter bottle of Jack Daniels and a short rocks glass. He doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to me anymore. He pours a little bit and drinks it down, the
n repeats this. He pours a third and puts it down on the desk, holding it in place with his sausage fingers.
I think about getting up and leaving, but his eyes come back to me and it seems like he wants to talk again. I wait for him.
“And what if I don’t want you to work for Bear?” He seems to be getting crazier by the second.
“Then you’ll tell someone I was a bad interview.”
His shoe comes down faster than I thought possible. The leverage brings his body forward and his hand launches the whiskey at me. It hits me flush in the chest and the vapors of alcohol are in my nostrils. I haven’t moved an inch out of stunned disbelief, and we’re just staring at each other.
“You want to take a shot at me?” I think he wants to hear a yes.
“Maybe I’ll wait until you finish the rest of that bottle.”
He pours more whiskey in the glass. I stand to leave before I’m drenched.
“Nick, hang on a second.” He stands with the glass and comes around to me. He looks happy and less crazy than a moment before. He seems even taller standing right next to me. He rests a paw on my shoulder but it doesn’t seem threatening anymore.
“We’re just having some fun. I like to see how guys do in situations under pressure. You did good. Most guys really crap themselves.”
It occurs to me that half this guy’s job description is to be the hired goon hazing new guys and telling inside-the-NFL stories.
He’s laughing, so I kind of smile but I’m not really happy and I smell like booze.
“Let’s get going. We’re going to meet some guys for drinks.” The goon’s name is Mark Sauter and he takes me back to the trading floor, where a few guys are standing or sitting on desks in a huddle. Rather than walk to the group, Mark chooses to start a conversation from the maximum distance. “Dave, we’re all set! You guys ready?”
Ghosts of Manhattan Page 2
