by Sam Polk
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Contents
¤
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
1. Unconscious Inheritance
2. The Cheerleader
3. Camp Fox
4. Numbcake
5. Chicken-All-Together
6. Fifteen Pounds
7. There’s a Bomb in My Stomach
8. The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo
9. The Burglary
10. ON24
11. Fight Club
12. Sex in the City
13. Spiritual Counselor
14. Like Father, Like Son
15. Brand-Name Life
16. The Fulcrum
17. Remnants of an Accident
18. The Easy Confidence of Millionaires
19. Nurturing Love
20. Protector of the Stupid
21. The Least Cool Thing to Order at a Bar
22. The Ice Melteth
23. The Ephemeral Prison
24. Charleston
25. The Land of Ambition and Success
26. A Castle on a Cloud
27. A Handwritten Note
28. The Navy SEALs of Bond Trading
29. The Anniversary Presents
30. Sacred Creatures
31. Gatsby, Interrupted
32. The Mad Max Scenario
33. Fear, Love, and a Billion Dollars
34. Peter Luger’s
35. Hear It in the Deep
36. The Bright Light of the Afternoon
Epilogue: Good-bye to All That
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To my wife and daughter
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Author’s Note
¤
The events in this book are real. I’ve changed most names and altered some details to honor people’s privacy.
Prologue
¤
The e-mail from Sean popped up in my in-box.
Come to my office.
I felt a jolt of adrenaline. It wasn’t fear, exactly. It was just that so much could happen in a late-January conversation with your boss. On Wall Street, everything important—bonuses, promotions, firings—happens in January.
I leaned back in my chair and looked down the row to Sean’s glass-walled office. He sat at his desk, typing on the keyboard. I could usually sense his mood from the set of his jaw, the hunch of his shoulders. Today I couldn’t tell. Sean was the head of trading at Pateras Capital, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. It was rumored that in bad years he made $20 million.
I was one of five senior traders at Pateras. Each of us was responsible for a particular market. I traded bonds of companies in or near bankruptcy. The “distressed” market. The term distressed captured how I was feeling about my entire life.
When Sean offered me a million dollars to leave Bank of America and come to Pateras, I’d felt like I won the lottery. Pateras was one of the most prestigious hedge funds on Wall Street. I couldn’t have dreamt up a more perfect job. But in the two years since I’d arrived, I’d started to see things—about Wall Street, about myself—that I hadn’t seen before. Now I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be here anymore.
I typed out a reply to Sean. Be there in two minutes. I wanted him to think I was busy, and I also wanted to collect myself. I had some internal tension when it came to Sean.
In my first few months at Pateras I’d seen firsthand what an amazing trader Sean was. His market knowledge was encyclopedic; his instincts were fighter-pilot sharp. I started to fantasize about becoming his protégé.
But our relationship hadn’t developed as I’d hoped. While Sean treated me with respect, he never focused special attention on me. He saved that for another senior trader, Derek Mabry. Derek wore expensive suits, dated models, and spent weekends in the Hamptons. Sean preferred him. When I’d see Derek sprawled on the chair in Sean’s glass-walled office, embers of jealousy smoldered inside me.
I worried my big mouth had gotten me in trouble. A few times I’d been on the phone with my identical twin brother, discussing the pros and cons of leaving Wall Street, when I suddenly realized how loudly I’d been talking, and how quiet the trading floor was. I worried Sean had overheard me, that my loose lips had jeopardized my bonus. Why pay someone millions of dollars if their heart isn’t in it anymore?
Sean looked up as I pulled the door open.
“How’s the market?” he asked.
“Stable,” I said. “Not much going on.”
For the past year and a half, the market had fluctuated like a pitching boat. We were still climbing out of the Great Recession. But that day the market was quiet, as if it were taking a collective, exhausted breath.
Sean nodded. The stress of the past few years had taken its toll. He’d always been thin, but he was starting to resemble a cadaver. His head seemed enormous atop his emaciated body. You could see the shape of his skull.
“Let me get right to it,” he said.
I held my breath.
“What are you expecting this year for a bonus? Give me the number,” he asked.
I exhaled. We were having The Bonus Talk. I was safe, not fired. Under Sean’s gaze, I searched for a response. But the answer seemed hazy, far away.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it. It’s impossible to overstate how often Wall Street traders think about their bonuses. Those thoughts drive every trade, meeting, client dinner, and ball game. The carrot at the end of the stick.
One of the reasons you think so much about it is because you don’t have much control over it. It’s a great paradox on Wall Street, where you supposedly “eat what you kill,” that your bonus is entirely at your boss’s discretion. The more trading profits you make, the bigger your bonus will likely be. But there are other variables—how profitable the firm is, seniority, what competitors are paying. You just don’t know.
It was especially true for me that year. I’d had the best trading year of my life. I’d been positioned perfectly for a market collapse. When the crash came, I’d closed out trades for huge profits, and then bought a ton of deeply distressed bonds for cents on the dollar, just as the market bottomed out. Those bonds screamed higher, and by the end of the year, I’d earned several hundred million dollars for Pateras. The year before I’d made less than half of this year’s take for Pateras, and my bonus had been $1.3 million. Sean said that the longer I was at Pateras, the higher my percentage payout would be. Given how much I was up this year, a higher-percentage payout would mean a massive amount of money. NBA all-star money.
I was thirty years old. I’d been an English major. I’d managed to keep my past a secret.
I gazed back at Sean. He was about to tell me I’d make more that year than my mom, a nurse-practitioner midwife, had earned in her entire life.
“So tell me,” said Sean. “What’s the number?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Your bonus this year,” he said, “will be three point six million.”
As I ran the numbers in my head, a hollow feeling crept into my stomach.
“So you all are paying me less of a percentage than last year?” I asked.
“I think they should have paid you more,” Sean said. “But you know how Peter is.” Peter Conroy, co–managing partner of Pateras, controlled the purse strings and seemed to think everyone should just be grateful to be there.
My happiness disappeared under a flash flood of anger.
“You said my percentage payout would go up,” I said.
“I know,” Sean said. “You need to be patient. Just look at Derek—it took him a few years, but now he’s making real money.” The flash flood lurched up like a wave about to break. Derek was making real money this year? More than me.
“This is bullshit,” I said. My hands were shaking.
That night I lay in bed next to my girlfriend, Kirsten, listening to the creaks and groans of the old brownstone in Brooklyn Heights where I rented a floor. Thoughts raced through my head like motorcycles.
The image of Derek bragging about his windfall to his popped-collar Hamptons buddies made me nauseous. But what really hurt was that Sean hadn’t stood up for me. He could have convinced Peter to increase my bonus, or even shaved a few million off his own for me.
But he didn’t.
My face was tight with anger. But I could feel tears lying in wait, ready to stream down my cheeks.
I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I knew my shifting would eventually wake Kirsten, so I sat gently up in bed, my left side suddenly cold without her next to me. I stuck my feet into my slippers and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. I took it to the living room and sat down in the big gray chair where I usually did my reading. But instead of pulling out the worn copy of The Great Gatsby I was rereading, I just sat and thought about my life.
Yesterday I’d been planning to leave Wall Street; today I was devastated because my enormous bonus wasn’t bigger.
What was wrong with me? How had I become like this?
CHAPTER 1
Unconscious Inheritance
¤
I grew up in the suburbs around Los Angeles, in a three-bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac. There was a yard out front and rolling hills out back. From the outside, our house looked pretty normal. We’d moved to Los Angeles so Dad could become a screenwriter. He enrolled in film school; Mom supported the family on her nurse-practitioner salary.
They were constantly stressed about money, but Dad was always talking about how one day he’d score big. His face lit up when he talked about that future windfall, how in a single instant all our worries would disappear. I reveled in his fantasy. When a neighbor asked me that year what I wanted to be when I grew up, I smiled and answered, “Rich.” Dad beamed.
I shared a bedroom with my identical twin brother. Ben and I had been through everything together—birth, potty training, first day of school. We shared clothes, a dresser, a Nintendo. Sometimes we used each other’s toothbrushes. But when we were eight, I begged for a dog, and Ben seemed indifferent. So when my mom brought OJ home from a shelter and Dad, after arguing against it, finally allowed him to stay, OJ was mine.
“This dog is your responsibility,” said Dad. “Not mine.”
OJ was a fat little golden retriever, a Chicken McNugget with legs. His tail never stopped wagging, and his bark was warm. I petted him incessantly, took him for three or four walks a day. I’d snap on OJ’s red leash and get yanked proudly up and down our cul-de-sac.
At the end of our street sat an open lot, dusty and speckled with crabgrass. At the back of the lot a line of trees opened to a dirt path that led to the hills. The steep path wound through a thicket to a rocky clearing that looked like a moonscape, and ended in a cliff that overlooked our block. OJ and I spent hours up there.
I tried to train OJ.
“Sit,” I said, standing facing him. He looked up and wagged his tail.
“Sit,” I said again and pushed his bottom down. He licked my face. As soon as I let go, he was up again, rolling his head side to side and rubbing up against me. He seemed to be laughing, so I laughed. After awhile I gave up and threw the tennis ball I’d brought.
“Fetch,” I said, and he scrambled off across the craggy rocks. I was careful not to throw the ball too near the cliff.
We went up there every day. After we finished playing, I’d get as close to the edge as I could. OJ would sit with his head in my lap. We’d watch the cars coming home, the lights blinking on and off, and I’d thrill in bearing secret witness to people’s lives.
“Good dog,” I’d say. “You are such a good dog.”
I liked being out of the house, because things had recently become tense at home. Mom and Dad had started retreating into hushed conversations.
Mom had undergone a battery of tests for what she thought was a urinary tract infection. One day the hospital called with the results. They told her she had chlamydia.
“It must be a mistake,” Mom said. She was married. The nurse suggested she might speak to her husband about that. Mom was incensed. Dad, too, was appalled at that nurse but said Mom should take the medication just to be safe. He’d get tested as a precaution. A week later he told Mom that his results had come back clean. They wrote it off as a mix-up.
A few months later, Mom became pregnant with my younger brother, Daniel. Her pregnancy was a problem for my dad. Mom worked full-time, while Dad stayed home, smoked weed, and worked on a screenplay. She told him he would need to find an income-generating job.
But Dad had big aspirations for that screenplay, and was furious at Mom for getting in the way of his dreams. He started singing the Rolling Stones lyrics “I’ll never be your beast of burden” when Mom was around, and muttering “cunt” when she’d storm away.
Dad found a job selling kitchen cabinets. After Daniel was born, Mom returned to working full-time, so they hired a Guatemalan woman to care for the baby. She cleaned up some during the day, but by the time Dad and Mom got home from work, the house was a mess. And on the weekends, when the housekeeper-nanny was away, the house looked like a bomb had gone off. Clothes, toys, old newspapers, and empty bowls of cereal were strewn about. The carpet in front of the TV was threadbare and covered with stains, because Ben and I ate most of our meals there.
Dad started working most weekends, and on those days Mom would retreat to her room for an afternoon nap. When I’d shake her awake for dinner, next to her would be an empty bowl with a spoon stuck in the hardened residue of vanilla ice cream. When our cat, Mimi, birthed a litter of kittens in Ben’s and my bedroom closet, we asked Mom if we could keep them, and she absently said yes. Soon the kittens contracted some sort of illness, so when you’d pick something off the floor you’d sometimes find a dead kitten underneath. Plus I’d failed to properly crate train OJ, because I had no idea how to do that, and he wouldn’t stop relieving himself inside the house.
“Don’t let him do that again,” growled Dad, angry after stepping in a pile of shit next to his bed.
“But I don’t know how to get him to stop,” I said.
“You need to shove his nose in his crap, and hold him there,” Dad said.
One day, Ben and I were lying on the couch watching TV when Dad walked through the front door. He took a sweeping look around the slovenly living room. His brow furrowed and his head started to shake. It was like watching a kettle boil. My body tightened in anticipation.
“Banzai!” he suddenly screamed, the bizarre cry he used when the house had gotten too disgusting for even him to tolerate. Ben and I leapt to our feet like we�
��d been shocked with electricity, and began furiously cleaning. I felt the way a fish must feel, one moment swimming serenely, the next yanked into the air by a hook through its face. Dad stood there, fuming. I made sure to stay out of his reach.
I was relieved when he went into the bathroom, leaving the door to the hall open behind him. I could hear the splash of his stream. The toilet flushed and the door to his bedroom opened.
“GODDAMN IT!” he screamed.
When Dad kicked him in the ribs, OJ yelped, that sound that seems to come from the very soul of a dog. I broke for the bedroom.
“Dad, don’t hurt him!” I yelled.
I rushed toward the room and just as I got there OJ exploded out of it and past me. I stood there facing my father.
“Clean up the goddamned shit, Sam,” he snarled.
He towered above me, rage rippling off him like heat off sunbaked asphalt. My hands were shaking.
“You don’t have to hurt him like that, Dad,” I said.
“Next time it’ll be you,” he said. I knew he meant it.
I turned heel and ran for the paper towels. I mopped up the soupy puddle, averting my face. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
I found OJ in the backyard.
“It’s okay, boy,” I said, petting him until my heart stopped pounding.
A few days later, when I got home from school, I saw the single turd sitting innocently in the center of the living room carpet, as if OJ had left me a present.
“Goddamn it!” I yelled.
I rushed to the backyard in a fury and found OJ lying in the sun. He shrunk back from me. I grabbed his collar and yanked him toward the house, pulling him by the neck.
“Bad dog!” I shouted.
I stood over the shit. OJ was scrambling backwards. It felt like his collar might come off over his head, so I grabbed the folds of skin around his neck. I felt my fingernails dig into his flesh. I pushed his nose into the mess. His scrambling took on a new level of intensity. I could hear his nails scratching at the carpet.
