For the Love of Money

by Sam Polk

  She asked if I was willing to go to an AA meeting. I told her I’d go.

  She asked me to commit to doing the following things daily: shower, work out, eat healthy, and write in a journal. “These will help you start feeling good about yourself,” she said. She also asked that I go back to work.

  “There’s one more thing,” she said before we got off the phone. “I’d like you to start working on a letter of apology to Sloane. You need to make amends.”

  A letter will get her to come back, I heard.

  I’d been using pot, alcohol, NyQuil, or Valium to fall asleep for years; that night, despite the fact that I hadn’t slept a wink the night before, I tossed and turned for hours. I’d only just fallen asleep when my alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. I staggered out of bed. There was a gym in the basement of CSFB, and when I stood in front of the mirror in the locker room I grabbed handfuls of fat on my stomach and silently screamed at myself. I made it just ten minutes on the StairMaster before I was gasping for air and had to stop.

  I took the elevator to the trading floor. Jared called me over and started asking where I’d been the day before. I felt like if I spoke I’d burst into tears, so I put my finger up and went into the bathroom. When I came out, I ignored Jared, found an empty desk. I tried to read economic reports to appear busy, but it was as if I were reading Arabic. It felt like the day had been extended from ten hours to forty million. Every hour, I walked to the bathroom, went into a stall, sat on the toilet, put my head in my hands, and allowed myself five minutes of peace.

  On my walk home, I staggered down the street like a refugee, stopping to lean against buildings for support. Once I bent at the waist, thinking I was going to throw up. I poured sweat.

  When I got home, I started to work on the letter to Sloane. I described in detail how much pain I was in without her. I begged her to come back.

  That night I called Linda and read it to her.

  “You are going to need to rewrite this,” she said.

  I needed to take out any mention of Sloane’s part in the situation, Linda said, as well as any requests for her to come back. “Look for your part,” she suggested.

  Fuck this, I thought. That’s not going to help me get her back. But I also knew the letter as I had written it wasn’t going to, either. I’d seen Sloane’s face on that street corner when she told me to go to work. She wasn’t kidding.

  After work the next day, I sat down to work again on the letter. I took out the begging, the blaming. I spent hours on it, taking responsibility, each sentence a struggle. When the letter was done, I knew Linda couldn’t have any problem with it.

  She didn’t. She congratulated me on writing it. Then she told me to put it in a drawer. There might be a time I could send that letter to Sloane, but not now. Sloane had made it clear she needed space. Part of my amends would be honoring that.

  Rage swelled inside me as I thought about all the time I’d wasted on the letter. Then the rage burst like a dam, and I put my head in my hands and cried. Sloane wasn’t coming back.

  When I ran out of tears, Linda told me to read the letter again, and this time to remember it was about me.

  As I read out loud, I thought back to the steel in Sloane’s face, and I understood how that had been forged. She was standing up for herself against a guy who said he loved her but treated her like garbage.

  The next day at work I rotated from the corporate desk to the mortgage desk. Instead of trying to ingratiate myself with my new team, every hour I’d go down the elevator, walk to the park across the street, and smoke cigarettes and think about Sloane. When I came back to the trading floor, I scrubbed my hands and face with soap and rinsed my mouth out to erase the scent.

  When I got home, I sat on the couch and dialed Ben’s number. After the fifth ring, I was about to hang up. He picked up. “What do you want?” he said.

  “I need help,” I said, and burst into tears. I told him about Sloane. I told him I hadn’t used drugs or alcohol since the breakup. I told him I’d barely eaten. I told him I was in ­trouble.

  I took a breath. “Will you come down and stay with me?” I asked. It was a crazy request.

  Ben paused. I heard in that pause an acknowledgment of five years’ separation. Of all the things I’d messed up in my life, my relationship with my twin brother was by far the most painful. His silence meant that it’d been hard for him, too.

  During the five years we hadn’t spoken, I’d heard stories about Ben. He’d gotten in eleven fights his freshman year at Cornell. Some were legendary. One night, a starter on the Cornell hockey team, a bear of a man who would go on to play in the NHL, arrived at a party and picked a fight with Ben. It looked, I was told later, like David versus Goliath. People thought my brother would finally get what was coming to him. But it didn’t go down that way. A group of men had to pull my brother off the hockey player’s prone body after girls started screaming, “He’s going to kill him.”

  After Ben graduated, he’d gone to Korea and Vietnam to teach English and drink. Now he was in upstate New York, working as a counselor at Paul Newman’s camp for terminally ill kids.

  “I’ll take the train,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Easy Confidence of Millionaires

  ¤

  When Ben arrived at my apartment, he sat next to me on the couch. With him next to me it was like my burden had been split in two. At the same time, what had happened five years before sat heavily between us. I knew it wasn’t the time to discuss that, but there was something else I needed to bring up with Ben.

  “There’s something I have to ask you,” I said. My heart hammered in my chest. Ben looked up at me.

  “I need you to not drink while you are here.”

  I was terrified Ben would tell me to fuck off, and leave. But Linda had said that this “boundary” was of the utmost importance.

  Ben looked at me for a long moment, then nodded.

  When I rolled out of bed at 4:30 a.m. the next morning, I left Ben snoring on the couch and headed to the bank’s gym, where I climbed on the StairMaster. Two rows ahead of me on the bikes were Brady Dougan, the head of the investment bank, and Matt Ruppel, the thirty-year-old head of mortgage trading, a former collegiate wrestling champ. Their bodies were tight and sinewy. They had the easy confidence of millionaires. While I pumped up and down on the StairMaster, I watched them talk and allowed myself the fantasy that one day I might be in their position.

  That night I was the last one on the desk. I was packing my bag when Zach Stephens, the head of mortgage sales, walked by. He asked where I was headed.

  “The intern event down the street,” I responded. I’d planned to show my face for a few minutes and then slip out quietly so I could get back home.

  “Me, too,” Zach said. “We’ll walk together.”

  A week ago I would have paid money to spend time alone with Zach, but now I would have paid not to. But he was a managing director; I couldn’t say no.

  Zach was tall and muscular with a long, rapid stride. I hustled to keep up. Fortunately, he was a comfortable talker, and I only had to supply a few questions about his start on Wall Street to keep him talking for most of the ten-block walk. Near the end, he suddenly accelerated into a higher gear and was ten feet ahead of me before I noticed. He passed a woman in a black dress and turned to stare at her, his head cocked diagonally so he could get the best view.

  When I finally caught up to him, he said, “I had to get a good look at those tits.”

  I thought that’s just how guys talked about women. But that day, for the first time, I heard the hostility in Zach’s words. I remembered earlier that day when Zach’s wife had called. He’d told his assistant to put her on hold and kept her there a full five minutes before he picked up.

  Three days later, Saturday, I sat at an outdoor café with Ben in the early afternoon. He’d gone o
ut the night before and gotten drunk. I’d heard him puking in the bathroom. We hadn’t spoken about it. But his drinking lay between us like a gauntlet.

  “So, what . . . are you never going to drink again?” Ben said.

  “I can’t think about it like that,” I said. “I’m not even sure I’m going to make it till next week.”

  I paused.

  “But I want to,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Remember how successful you and I were growing up? Spelling bees, Mock Trial, editor of the newspaper. Since we started drinking, I’ve been arrested, suspended from Columbia, and fired from a great job. And you?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  In college Ben had been arrested twice. One time, he walked into the frat house of a guy who’d harassed his girlfriend, strode into the guy’s bedroom, and slugged him in the face. To make ends meet during college, Ben had supported himself by writing papers for other students. He’d charge $20 per page and guarantee an A grade no matter what subject. But his own grades had been abysmal.

  Ben nodded, as if satisfied with my answer. But I knew I’d held something back.

  “It’s more than that, though,” I said, my throat full. “Here’s the truth. I cheated on Sloane. Multiple times. I lied to her about it.”

  “It’s college,” Ben said. “Everyone does.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “And it’s not just that. It’s like I spend all this time trying to be this cool guy. But deep down, I don’t like who I am. I want to be proud of myself. And I’m not.”

  Ben looked searchingly at me. We’d spent our whole lives pretending things were okay. Now we sat in the silence brought on by my admission that they were not.

  A week later, my dad came to New York for a business trip. I hadn’t talked to him since Sloane dumped me. I was afraid he wouldn’t understand why I’d stopped drinking and smoking pot.

  He called and asked if I would have dinner with him. I asked him not to drink while he was with me. He agreed.

  When I walked up to the restaurant, he was sitting at a table on the sidewalk. There was a fresh Manhattan to the left of his water glass.

  “Hey buddy,” he said. “So good to see you.”

  He pulled me into a hug. I squirmed out and sat across from him.

  “What a beautiful day,” he said with contrived innocence.

  “Dad . . .” I forced out. I was raw, fragile. I’d barely made it through the past two weeks. His disregard for my request felt like a punch in the stomach. It was always like this—my words went in his ears and disappeared, never to be thought about again.

  “Dad,” I started again. “What the hell?”

  “Oh,” he said, looking at his drink. “It’s just one.”

  Then, seeing my contorted face, he picked it up, drained the glass, and put it down. Problem solved, his look said.

  I pushed my chair back with a sharp grating peal and stood up. He looked up in surprise. I looked down at him with a mixture of fury and helplessness. I stood on the edge of collapse. For the first time in my life, I thought, I deserve better. Right now I needed to be around people who treated me gently. Dad had never been gentle.

  I turned and walked away. I heard him shout after me, but I kept walking.

  The last month of my CSFB internship was the longest month of my life. At work, I fantasized about the refuge of my couch. My performance on the mortgage sales desk was abysmal. I tried to seem interested and attentive, but my mind always drifted to Sloane. I’d sneak out three or four times a day to smoke cigarettes in the park.

  While my performance was weak, there were small victories. I didn’t miss another day of work. I worked out every single morning, ate salads instead of burgers. I talked to Linda or went to a meeting almost every day. Amidst the devastation of my life, I collected these small achievements. They felt important, somehow—the first green shoots after a nuclear winter. I was, for once, more focused on taking care of myself than on fitting in or impressing people.

  But it was more than that. Over the past few years, every story I’d told about myself—Sam the wrestler, Sam the Columbia student, Sam the Internet entrepreneur—had been smashed. Now, stripped of the one person I loved, my Wall Street story falling apart, I began to understand that those narratives didn’t define me. In a sense, during those weeks after Sloane dumped me, I met myself for the first time.

  Every afternoon, I’d swing by the corporate desk to visit Jared Caldwell and the other corporate traders, to make sure they remembered me. I wanted so badly to be a part of that team.

  Two weeks after Ben went back to Paul Newman’s camp in upstate New York, he called me and told me he hadn’t drank since he left. He said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he was going to see if he could make it a month.

  I saw Sloane one more time that summer. It was one of those breezy August days in Manhattan where you hear the tinkling hum of people eating and drinking outside and no matter how you are feeling you have to stop and thank whatever it is you believe in for the privilege of living in this majestic, bustling city. I came out of the subway in shirtsleeves. The wind dried the sweat on my back.

  I didn’t have any plans, but I didn’t want to go straight home. Sloane’s building was two blocks out of my way. I wasn’t aiming to see her. I just wanted to be close, to stand outside her building and envision what she might be doing inside.

  As I turned the corner, I saw her standing in the same place she’d stood the morning she told me to go to work. She was waiting for a cab, wearing the same black dress. I realized my presence might scare her, so I put my head down and continued walking. I was across the street and almost past her when I heard her call my name.

  I looked up. She waved.

  “Hi,” I said, and continued on.

  “Come over here,” she called.

  I stood a few feet from her, determined to give her all the space she needed. She reached across and hugged me. I held her gently for the most fleeting of moments. I didn’t grasp as she pulled away.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “How are you?” she asked.

  I paused a second. “I’m okay, actually,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’ve been better,” she said.

  Instead of feeling happy or wondering if she might be open to getting back with me, I just felt sad. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  We both stood there a moment.

  “Well, I better be on my way,” I said.

  “Good-bye,” she said. I nodded and turned away.

  As I walked away I felt the heartbreak reemerge, but it was no longer as jagged. It’d somehow been softened by the knowledge that I’d handled myself like a man. A different kind of man than the one I had previously been, or even wanted to be.

  On the last day of my internship I stood in an empty conference room, practicing the speech I’d prepared for Nasser, the head of corporate trading. I’d only spoken to him once that summer, to introduce myself. He was too high up to spend time with an intern. But I’d e-mailed him to ask if he’d grant me five minutes on my last day. It was a Hail Mary. He said yes.

  I walked to his glass-walled office. He sat at his desk, staring at his trading screens. When I knocked, he held his finger in the air. I stood there, my palms sweaty and my stomach in knots.

  He kept me waiting forty-five minutes. Finally, Jared walked up and asked what was going on. When I told him, he walked into Nasser’s office, tapped him on the shoulder, and pointed to me. Nasser waved me in.

  “Good luck, brother,” said Jared as he walked out.

  Nasser stood. I faced him across the desk.

  “Nasser,” I began, “first, I want to thank you for the opportunity—”

  He held his hand up, cutting me off
.

  “Thank you, Sam. Thank you for your hard work. Whether you receive a full-time offer will not be my decision. The other traders will vote. I’ve been busy and obviously haven’t gotten to spend much time with you, so it would be unfair of me to cast a deciding vote. Again, thank you for your work. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get to a meeting.”

  I stood aside and watched the opportunity of a lifetime walk slowly away from me.

  CHAPTER 19

  Nurturing Love

  ¤

  After my CSFB internship ended, I returned to Columbia for my final semester. A full five years had passed since I’d first arrived in New York as a Columbia freshman; it seemed bizarre that though so much had changed, I was still in the exact same place. I moved into a tiny dorm room with a loft bed and a desk underneath. To get onto the bed I had to step on the desk, brace my foot against the opposite wall, and launch myself up. The waking hours when I wasn’t at the library I spent in my room fantasizing about being a trader on Wall Street, or reading Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, a book Linda suggested, about how childhood trauma manifests in adulthood.

  A couple of weeks into the semester I got a call from CSFB saying I would not be offered a full-time position. I wasn’t surprised, but I was devastated. I would graduate from Columbia in four months with a degree in English and no job. Approaching the end of college felt like sailing toward the edge of the world. Columbia was my badge of worth. I was afraid that after graduation, I’d disappear into the abyss of normalcy.

  I started applying to other investment banks. Getting a job would be next to impossible. It was 2002. The Internet bubble had burst, WorldCom and Enron had imploded, and the economy was reeling. Wall Street wasn’t hiring.

  I called Taylor Madsen, the CSFB director who’d interviewed me at Super Day. He’d been assigned to me as a mentor and had remained supportive even after my performance began to decline.