“Oh, and don’t forget this.” He reached into the backseat and brought out my Valextra briefcase.
I had left it at his apartment in Queens the last night before entering the system.
The case contained the last remains of my previous life. My passport, the Breitling watch I had given to myself when I first made managing director, my platinum wedding band, now too loose to wear comfortably. And a half-dozen stacks of fifty-dollar bills, still in the bank wrappers. Enough to keep the wolves away until I could straighten things out with Angie.
“Thanks, Pop,” I said, raising the bag in a nonchalant salute. “See you Friday.”
He pulled away. I took a deep breath and began an inventory of the neighborhood.
Change is the constant of New York City geography. The mark of a true New Yorker is how many evolutionary generations of storefronts on your block you can remember.
The Papaya King was still there, but there was a big hole in the ground on the far corner where the fruit market had been. I looked up Amsterdam. The weird little store that sold perpetual motion machines and maps of the universe was gone, but somehow P&G’s, the local dive bar, had survived. Over the park loomed the Apple Bank, looking more like a prison than any of the institutions I had visited. And just beyond it, looking like some Austrian wedding cake on growth hormones, stood the Ansonia Hotel. Home.
I bought the apartment in 1999—the year of the euro. My group of traders had cleared over $200 million on the conversion and I took home my first ten-million-dollar bonus. I got used to that quickly. I loved everything about that apartment—the neighborhood, the history of the place, the architecture, the way it was a condo but still run like a residential hotel, the commute (twelve minutes to the office on the express train across the street), and the tax benefits.
Angie hated it. We met a few years after I moved in.
“But why? I just don’t get the Upper West Side. Isn’t it all gay?”
“Not really.” No more than the Village or Gramercy Park or most of the rest of Manhattan below Ninety-sixth Street.
“But there’s nothing up there. What is there to do?”
“There’s the Beacon Theatre,” where I’d been to see the Allman Brothers every March. And RatDog. And Phil Lesh and Friends. And the Dylan–Patti Smith show.
Angie raised one eyebrow. I wished I could do that back.
“All right,” I tried. “Lincoln Center.” I didn’t go there as often, but I had found it rarely failed to impress.
“Oh, please.” Angie managed to squeeze five syllables out of those two words. “And there’s nowhere to eat.”
“We just went to Cafe Luxembourg a month ago. It was your choice.”
“That was years ago. I remember because Brooke Shields was at the next table and I thought she looked really young for being so old.”
“That’s because it was Liv Tyler—who is almost your age. And we weren’t dating years ago.”
“Really? You were so mean that night. You wouldn’t let me order champers.”
“I didn’t let you order champagne because you were already sliding out of your chair from the martinis at the Monkey Bar.”
Angie picked out our apartment downtown. I was too besotted to care. I would have bought her a planet just to hear her laugh.
I never sold the apartment uptown. After the move, I sublet it. But a few years later, when the tenants moved out, my mind was on other problems. The place had been empty ever since.
Room 811 was a one-bedroom—with alcove—in the southeast turret. It got tons of sunlight. And it was the only prime-numbered apartment on the floor. Some traders believe in luck, some in value, and some attach magical importance to various mathematical progressions. If a trader made money, I didn’t care if he read chicken entrails at Santeria gatherings. I wasn’t superstitious. Patterns of numbers revealed themselves to me without my bidding. I didn’t do it; I couldn’t help it.
The lock opened too smoothly. Someone had been in recently. Probably my father, airing the rooms for me. He would have driven in from Queens and taken care of it, never mentioning it or expecting thanks.
The apartment was smaller than I remembered and still palatial. I was used to sharing an eight-by-twelve space with bars in place of a fourth wall and nothing beyond a toothbrush to call my own. This space—where I could walk more than five paces in any direction without running into a wall—was all mine.
The three tall living room windows looked down on Broadway. New York—or my little slice of it, at least—was laid out below me. Not at some distance where all the human beings on the street were reduced to ants, but immediate, as though I could become just another man on the street, going about his business, never having been to prison. Never having had my fifteen minutes of infamy.
I turned back to the room and began an inventory.
The furnishings were all mine, but nothing felt right. It was like walking through a diorama of someplace I had once lived.
Dust covered everything. I would need to have the place cleaned. Then I realized I couldn’t afford to think that way anymore. I would need to buy a vacuum. A broom. A mop. I had no idea where to shop for those things, but that’s one of the things I love about New York. You can always find anything you might ever want at any time of day. And have it delivered.
Three large cardboard boxes blocked the entrance to the bedroom. I opened the first, and recognized the faint scent of Bolt of Lightning. Angie. The box held linens, blankets, pillows, all still wrapped in Bloomingdale’s bags. The sheets were Ralph Lauren—600-thread count—and all in various shades of lavender. Angie was incapable of giving a present that wasn’t something she would rather have bought for herself. I would have bet she got herself a set as well.
The second box was full of clothes—suits, shirts, socks, etc.—all custom-fitted for a different man. A man two years younger. A man with the concave shoulders and nascent paunch of a desk-bound Wall Street executive. I doubted that I would ever fit that model again.
The last box touched me. It was my music. Hundreds of CDs—jazz, rock, funk, fusion, and a smattering of classical all mixed together in a plastic soup. It would take hours—days—to sort through and arrange my collection, but the fact that Angie had even thought to save it all for me was enough to generate a single shaft of hope.
She’d called four days after the party at the Met.
“Hey, cher. Are you busy?”
It was the middle of the trading day.
“Not at all,” I said, all thoughts of the euro’s two-cent plummet driven immediately from my mind. “Where are you? I thought you were working this week.”
She had flown to the British Virgin Islands on Sunday.
“We’re done. Paolo finished shooting this morning. Everyone is going home.”
“That’s great. Can I pick you up at the airport?”
“Well,” she said, with a sly smile in her voice, “I have this huge room with a private pool outside where I can lie out all day with nothing on but my sunglasses.”
“I see.” Crashing disappointment met full-color mental images of her basking while she was talking to me. At that moment I wouldn’t have known a British pound from a Thai baht.
“And it’s all paid for through Friday and I was thinking it would be a shame to just up and leave!”
The magazine had booked Richard Branson’s Necker Island resort for five days for the shoot. The annual swimsuit issue.
“Everyone else is leaving?”
“Almost. I’ll be all alone on this whole island with no one to rub lotion on my back. There’s this one little spot I just can’t reach.”
I was on a flight three hours later.
The dust and the memories were starting to get to me. It was hard to breathe. I needed to get out. I went for a beer.
I grew up living over a neighborhood bar. My father owned what he affectionately referred to as a “gin joint” in College Point. It was the kind of place that can be a gold mine or an albatross, depending on how much time and energy the boss puts into keeping an eye on things. We had a six-room railroad flat on the third floor, and my father’s commute, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, was up and down those stairs. I did my homework most nights, sitting on a barstool, sipping my Coke or ginger ale and listening to the locals tell each other tall tales. To me, that joint was just another room in our home.
The P&G wasn’t exactly like that, but it may have been a close second. I hadn’t been there since moving downtown.
The afternoon crowd hadn’t changed. Vinny the Gambler nodded from his corner by the window, his Racing Form folded and cushioning his forearm, his short snifter of Rémy and his pack of Camels on the bar within reach. The two Johns, Ma and Pa, a respectable gay couple who had been holding up the far end of the bar for three or four decades, gave a polite “Hello” and went back to their crossword. There was a new bartender, Rollie, but otherwise the place was just the same. The bucolic, medieval-themed mural that covered the wall over the single bathroom in back was still there, permanently nicotine-stained to an old master’s sepia finish. A third television had been added, but as all three showed the same horse race, it didn’t affect the overall decor. The jukebox had not been updated—a mixed blessing, as it held, in my opinion, way too much mid-career Neil Diamond. I put a foot on the rail and sipped my Bud Light.
There was a copy of the Post—every New Yorker’s guilty pleasure—lying on the bar. When I first started working on Wall Street, the head foreign exchange trader had a framed copy over his desk of the Post’s then most famous front page. “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” The editors had worked hard to maintain that level of journalism.
The headline I was now looking at read “He Sleeps with the Fishes.” There was a picture of a bloated corpse—facedown and therefore not in such bad taste as to cause lawsuits—wearing a torn and faded life jacket. Without the picture, the story would have been nothing more than a follow-up buried on page 12. A few weeks earlier, a junior trader from a Wall Street firm had fallen overboard in a storm on the Long Island Sound. His body had just been discovered thirty miles away by a pair of sport fishermen out for striped bass. I followed the story to page 3. There was a picture of a dismasted yacht, broken and leaning at an impossible angle, high on the rocks in a bay near Greenwich. The captain of the yacht had no comment. The guy’s employer had no comment. His parents had no comment. Even his roommate had no comment. The Coast Guard had ruled it accidental and had no further comment. Still, the paper managed to instill the story with intrigue, cover-up, and the hint of scandal.
Two men walked in, arguing agreeably about something about the Grateful Dead. I eavesdropped until I found a way to insinuate myself into the conversation. I mentioned that I, too, had been to some of their shows. Immediate acceptance.
“So, you gonna buy me a drink or what?”
I looked around. The saddest-faced little man in the world stood at my side. Despite his age—somewhere well past Medicare eligibility—he looked like he was made out of rubber, like you could stretch him in any direction and when you let go he would zap back into the same compact form.
“How are you, Roger? Long time.”
He was a late-afternoon regular. When the cocktail hour crowd began to arrive, he tended to take his glass of brandy and retire to one of the back booths. I had joined him there many a night before I met Angie.
We had met on the corner of Seventy-second Street. I was running late and just wanted to get to the subway. Blocking the sidewalk was a clown. A happy clown. With a big, cockeyed smile, like the letter J. He was trying to raise a wheeled trunk up over the curb. The trunk was as big as he was. It wasn’t going too well.
“Give me a hand here, willya?”
I acted as though he must be speaking to someone else.
“Come on, big fella, don’t be a hump. It’s gonna hurt you to do a good deed?”
I stopped. I was in a hurry, but he was right. Besides, it would make a good story for the guys on the desk. I helped a clown.
Together we wrestled the trunk up onto the sidewalk.
“You’re all right. Hey, I seen you. Over to the bar. Am I right or what?”
Was he one of the sad-eyed regulars who could be found propping up the bar at P&G’s any hour of the day or night?
“I’ve never seen any clowns in there,” I said.
He laughed. “Sure you have. The joint is full of ’em.” He reached into a pocket. “Here, take my card. You never know, you might need a clown someday.”
“JACQUES-EMO and WANDA the WANDAFUL—From Birthday Parties to Corporate Retreats—We’ll make you smile.”
“What does Wanda do?”
“It’s my act,” he said. “She’s just there for color, know what I mean? I do some magic and she keeps the rubes from watching too closely.”
I pocketed the card. “Nice to meet you, Jacques. I’ve got to run.”
“It’s Roger. Jacques is the name of the clown.”
“I’ll remember,” I said.
I ordered us a round.
“So how ya been?” He did a little hop that got his butt up onto the barstool.
It could have been a loaded question—my picture had been plastered all over the news two years earlier—but maybe I was being paranoid. I didn’t want to talk about where I had been the day before or the two years prior. But I trusted Roger. We’d been friends—bar friends. We didn’t vacation together or even send cards at Christmas, but we had spent hours together talking about everything and nothing once upon a time.
“I’ve been away, Roger,” I said, hoping he would hear my reluctance.
“I ain’t talkin’ about that,” he said. “You moved downtown, what? Five years ago? Six? And you never once come uptown to see your old friend? You should be ashamed.”
Something else to be ashamed of. Pile it on.
“I got married. Had a kid. Things got a little crazy with work for a while.”
He was shaking his head. “I coulda read all that in the paper. I’m asking, how you been?”
I had no prospects of a career. Few friends. An ex-wife, who I may still have loved, but maybe not, and maybe I didn’t really know what that meant anyway. And a son. Sick and a thousand miles away and being cared for by the alcoholic ex. It was all rather complicated.
“I’ve been better.”
“I hear ya.”
“And worse,” I said.
“Ain’t it always the way.”
And something went click and I felt like I was home. The wolves were still outside, there was a hurricane brewing, and madmen ruled the world. But for the moment, a cold beer in a comfortable bar was pure bliss.
—
FRIDAY MORNING I MET with my parole officer. He had bad hair plugs and breath that stank of cigarettes and coffee. The man who would have absolute control over my life for the next three years didn’t bother to hide his boredom. He rattled off all the restrictions I would have to live with—including no travel outside the five boroughs without his written permission and don’t expect it anytime soon—then he gave me a list of ten employers who would hire ex-cons. I ran my eyes down the page. Terrific, I could become a bicycle messenger or a dishwasher. He saved his inspirational speech for last.
“Listen up.” For the first time, he made eye contact. They were not kind eyes. “I wish you the best of luck and I hope you make it. Nobody wants to go back, but it happens. It happens often. I’ve got a good record with my clients and I’d like to keep it that way. But have no doubt—you screw up, you start missing meetings, you get caught hanging with the wrong people—I will file a request for an arrest warrant and ne
ver give it a second thought. Are we clear on that?”
For a moment, I felt the walls closing in and thought I smelled the stench of prison. “Understood,” I managed to say.
Still, the interview marked my first official act as a free man. No one was coming to take me back today. I headed home. When I walked through the door of the Ansonia, a smiling man in uniform held it open for me. A second greeted me by name and held the elevator. I had gone from a prison to a palace, and I could luxuriate in the differences.
There was a broken spring in the seat of my leather easy chair, so that I had to shift my butt over sideways, but it was the best seat in the house. Looking out on the city, I had not a touch of the claustrophobia that had been haunting me since my release. The weather had turned again. It was stunningly hot, a late-September surprise, and the women on Broadway had responded with shorter skirts and skimpier tops. I considered investing in a pair of binoculars.
I pulled out my cell phone—my lifeline to this new world of freedom—and started picking up the pieces. My first call was to my father—to check in, give him the number, and assure him I would see him that night.
Then I made a flurry of calls to old colleagues. Though I was barred by court order from contacting anyone from my old firm, there were plenty of other acquaintances to be renewed. Networking, my parole officer had assured me, was the key to finding some kind of employment.
Some people would not take my call. I respected that. Others took it and shined me on. Cowards. But a few sounded genuinely glad to hear from me, wished me luck, and promised to keep an ear open for anything that might fit.
I was going to be a tough fit. Anything but advisory or consulting work in the securities industry was out of the question. I was also specifically prohibited from any position where I would be handling money—a basic requirement for just about any job on Wall Street.
I was avoiding making the one call that mattered.
—
A LESSON LEARNED EARLY in my trading career was “Always do the hard thing first.” Once you get whatever it is out of the way, the rest feels easy and your brain functions better without the distraction. I was having a difficult time applying that discipline to my life.
Black Fridays Page 3
