by Sam Polk
“Do you know anyone who can help me?” I asked.
“I don’t, Sam. I’m sorry.”
Even though I hadn’t gotten a full-time offer, I could tell he was still pulling for me. I took a last shot.
“What about Marshall Masters?” I asked.
Marshall Masters was a Wall Street legend. For years he’d been the biggest corporate bond trader in the market, known for making risky bets that always seemed to pay off. At Merrill Lynch, he’d been the youngest managing director in firm history. He’d run Merrill’s trading desk for years and then gone to UBS, a second-tier trading shop, and led them to the number one ranking as the top corporate bond trading firm on The Street.
That summer, when I was at CSFB, headlines announced that Marshall Masters had left UBS for Bank of America in Charlotte. It was rumored that when Bank of America, then a third-tier trading shop, had asked the fifteen largest money managers in the market what head trader could take them to number one, all fifteen said Marshall Masters. Bank of America paid him a fortune.
Taylor thought for a moment. I knew Marshall and Taylor had started on Wall Street together, ten years earlier, and that they remained friends.
“You’d have to move to Charlotte,” he said.
“I’ll do anything,” I said.
Taylor said he’d talk to Marshall, and he gave me Marshall’s phone number.
I called Marshall Masters the next day, but he didn’t pick up. I was desperate for a job, so I called back the next day and left a message. He didn’t call me back. I decided I was going to keep calling, every day, until I talked to him.
The last semester of my college career was looking bleak—no job, no Sloane. I signed up for a senior seminar class called Upward Mobility Stories in American Literature. There were only ten people in a seminar, and when I walked through the door, I saw Sloane seated at the table. I blushed and tried not to look at her.
When I told Linda that Sloane was in my seminar, she said it would be a good opportunity to practice.
“Practice what?” I asked.
“Nurturing love,” she said.
I was getting used to how Linda talked, but that sounded corny even for her.
“Um, what?” I asked. She laughed.
She said that truly loving someone meant you care about what’s best for them as much as yourself.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “you didn’t receive that kind of love growing up. So you are going to have to learn on your own.”
I gave Sloane space. I smiled at her when I came into class but otherwise left her alone. She ignored me.
One day I returned to my room to find the light on my answering machine blinking. It was Marshall Masters. I’d called him every day for three weeks straight. I took a deep breath and dialed the number I now knew by heart.
“Hi Sam,” he said when he picked up. “Thank you for being persistent. Taylor Madsen has never recommended someone, so I’m excited to meet you. I am going to have you come in and meet some people. We’ll go from there. You’ll have to go through the standard interview process, but I’m going to let HR know I’m interested.”
I hung up the phone, hopeful for the first time in months.
Ben and I had started talking on the phone a couple of times a week. Our conversations were stilted and terse at first but soon turned fluid. Ben understood what it was like to be me more than anyone in the world. Having shared a womb, nothing was off-limits between us. I told Ben about the embarrassing gaffes I’d made that day, how insecure I felt in social situations, how much I missed Sloane.
When Ben’s tenure at Paul Newman’s camp ended, he moved to Manhattan. He rented a tiny room that fit only a bed and a bookcase, and started looking for jobs on Craigslist.
One day, visiting him at his apartment, I looked him in the eye and apologized about hooking up with Emma Ramsdale. “I’m sorry for how much I hurt you,” I said.
He looked at me a second. “I need to tell you something,” he said. During the years we weren’t talking, he’d exacted revenge by sleeping with my ex-girlfriend from high school, Claire.
I was livid. Not only because he’d fucked my ex-girlfriend, but because he’d let me feel guilty all these years, even though he had done the same thing. I stormed out of his apartment.
But as I strode indignantly down the sidewalk, it occurred to me how silly this all was. It all seemed a lifetime ago. We had both been in so much pain. I called Ben and told him I forgave him, and I hoped he forgave me. He said he did.
One day after class I was walking down the hall when Sloane caught up with me. She asked if I wanted to walk her to the library. My heart started thudding in my chest. I said yes and walked silently next to her. I tried to act how I’d acted that day I ran into her on the street. I was quiet and courteous. When we got to the library, she said bye and went inside. I smiled the whole walk home.
The next class nothing happened. The class after that she asked me to walk her to the library again. Soon it became a regular thing. I looked forward to that walk all week.
One day at the end of our walk Sloane said, “You should come see my new apartment.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
She looked flustered and walked away.
I told Linda. She said she wasn’t surprised that my new energy was attracting Sloane.
“She must be curious,” Linda said, “about how much you’ve changed. Maybe it’s time you sent her that letter.”
I did. Sloane didn’t reach out for a week. Then one day I got a text from her asking if I was free to stop by her apartment. I hit the doors of the library at a dead run.
Sloane and I sat on the couch. I felt sparks between us, but I was determined to keep my energy and certainly my hands to myself. All of a sudden she slid over on the couch, leaned in, and kissed me on the lips. I kissed her back, softly. Then she pulled away. I wanted to pull her into my arms, but I didn’t. I just sat there. Then I left.
I didn’t hear from her for a week. A thousand times I wanted to call her, but I didn’t. I’d lie in my tiny, raised bed at night and think about that kiss. Sometimes I’d laugh out loud.
The next time I was at Sloane’s, we started kissing and ended up on her bed, fully clothed. My leg was between hers, and she started grinding against it, until she had an orgasm. But I hadn’t had an orgasm, and I felt like my body was going to explode. The old panicky need for her to attend to me surfaced (It’s only fair, my mind said). But another part of me remembered what I’d learned—focus on giving to her, rather than getting for you—so I just lay back. After a while, Sloane said, “Are you okay? Is it okay if we don’t . . .” I smiled and said it was fine. I was just happy to be there.
I think that was the last test. Something was different about me in a way that you just can’t fake. Later, when we talked about it, Sloane said that being with me that night felt safe in a way that it never had before.
Two months later, I received another rejection from an investment bank. There had been more than a dozen. Only Bank of America in Charlotte was left. I’d made it to the second round of interviews but hadn’t heard back. I sat dejected in the soft armchair in Sloane’s studio apartment.
We were back together, though it still felt probationary. She looked up from her book and saw my glum face. She came over and sat on the arm of the chair.
“Sam,” she said, “you don’t see what I see. You are smart and charismatic. Someone will see that. They’ll be lucky to have you.”
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
A few days later Sloane and I were sitting in her apartment when my cell phone rang. I knew it was Bank of America.
I picked up the phone and the voice said, “I am so happy to tell you that you have been accepted into the Bank of America analyst class of 2003.” I leapt off the floor and pumped my fist in the
air. Sloane started jumping up and down, too, both of us silent as the HR woman chattered on about start dates and starting salaries. We kept silently jumping until I hung up the phone. Then we both screamed, “Yes!”
CHAPTER 20
Protector of the Stupid
¤
In December 2002, at the age of twenty-three, I graduated from Columbia. The Bank of America job didn’t start for six months, and I had to move out of the dorms and find a place to live. Sloane asked if I wanted to move in with her until she graduated in the summer.
The next six months were some of the happiest of my life. I had a dream job lined up and was with my dream girl. I moved into Sloane’s studio apartment on 106th and Amsterdam and got a job waiting tables at Deluxe, an “upscale diner” on Broadway at 113th Street. Sloane went to school, I worked, and at night we’d roll her TV over and watch Lakers games in bed. I read the Wall Street Journal every day, and my fellow waiters would tease me, saying they’d known plenty of actors who waited tables between gigs, but never a banker. As I read about hedge fund managers or bank CEOs, I’d fantasize about someday being important enough to be in the paper myself. Sloane started talking about moving with me to Charlotte.
I spent a lot of time with Ben, who was having a harder first year of sobriety than me. He was deeply depressed; some days he could barely get out of bed. He cried often. I could hardly fathom that the guy sobbing on my shoulder was the same one who’d pulverized guys in college.
We often talked about how worried we were for our younger siblings, Daniel and Julia. They were still living with Mom and Dad; things had gotten much worse. After the split, when Daniel and Julia stayed with Mom, they had to fend for themselves. When they stayed with Dad, they had to deal with his rages and those of his girlfriend, Sara, a deeply sarcastic, easily infuriated woman. It was especially hard for Julia, the only girl in the family. That year she’d walked into a room and overheard my dad on the phone say he’d “fucked her brains out.” Julia didn’t know if he was talking about Sara or someone else. She’d called me, sobbing.
The effects of their fractured home life were becoming apparent. That year, at the age of sixteen, Daniel dropped out of high school. He smoked weed every day, and his weight was ballooning. Julia was also overweight. She hung out with a tough crew, got in fights, and started wearing her hair in cornrows.
After Sloane graduated in May, we flew down to Charlotte together to look at apartments. From the moment she stepped off the plane, I could tell she felt out of place. She loved fashion and culture, an LA-and-New York kind of girl. Charlotte was SimCity with fried pickles. We stayed in a motel that looked much better on the Internet than in person. One night, we were startled awake at 3:00 a.m. by a man pounding on our door, shouting. It was just a drunk who’d forgotten his room number, but when I saw Sloane’s face, I knew she wasn’t moving to Charlotte.
Her dad found her a job at William Morris, a major Hollywood talent agency, and she moved back to LA. I was crushed. She said she wanted to stay together, but I’d be working nonstop, even on weekends. She’d be in LA, starting a new life.
If she’d invited me to go with her to LA, I would have. It would have almost killed me to give up my job at Bank of America, but I would have done it. But she didn’t. She said we’d give long distance a try. I was heartbroken.
Before I moved to Charlotte, there was a monthlong training program at the Millennium Hotel in Manhattan. By the time I moved into the hotel, I’d been sober for a full year. I had the minibar emptied when I arrived, so there would be no temptation.
It turned out that there were over a hundred recent college graduates in the training program; Bank of America was building out their investment bank, and this was the largest analyst class on The Street. Perhaps, I noted wryly, getting a job offer hadn’t been quite the accomplishment I thought.
Every day I ran three miles on the treadmill in the hotel gym before the economics, accounting, and bond math classes held in the vast conference rooms. I was an English major, and though I’d taken two finance/accounting classes senior year, most of the material was new to me.
I was intent on building relationships that would help my career. Every analyst wore a sticker with his or her name and college on it. When I saw two tall guys with MIT stickers, I decided to sit with them.
David and Grant were smart as hell and had easy smiles, but those smiles belied mean streaks, which emerged in sarcastic comments about our classmates. Sometimes, I laughed along with them; Wall Street analyst classes are peppered with suck-ups who sit at the front of the class and ask guest lecturers questions like, “Can you share with us how it is that you became so successful?” On The Street they are known as “ass-clowns,” and they became easy targets for David and Grant’s ridicule. But David and Grant also cast judgment when people answered math questions incorrectly. They’d look at each other and one of them would whisper, “Berkeley,” or “state school,” and they’d guffaw under their breath.
At first it was funny, but then it started to grate on me. I hated their smug assurance that they were the smartest guys in the room. Where did that leave me? They were both math majors; I was an English major, and though I was sure neither of them had read The Brothers Karamazov, here it didn’t seem to matter. I had tons of questions about what we were learning, but I was too embarrassed to ask. I began to get angry at their snide comments, and finally I said something.
“Guys, take it easy,” I said, after they laughed at a woman who asked the exact question I was thinking.
“Whatever,” said Grant.
“There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” I said.
“Yes, there is,” said David.
When I became direct—“You have no right to talk down to people like that”—they turned on me.
“What, are you afraid that you’re like them?” David asked.
“You are smart, aren’t you, Sam?” Grant asked.
“Maybe he’s not,” said David.
Grant snickered. “Is Columbia a state school?” he asked, and they both exploded into laughter.
I stared straight ahead, livid.
They held a whispered conversation and then both leaned back in their chairs.
“POTS,” Grant said. “That’s what we’re going to start calling you, Sam. POTS.”
I tried to stop myself, but I couldn’t. Hating myself for needing to know, I asked, “What does POTS stand for?”
“Protector of the stupid,” said Grant, and they both roared.
That night I called Linda, furious.
“Why are you so angry?” she asked.
“Because . . . these guys . . . they pick on everyone. I mean, who do they think they are? They are so smug and self-satisfied . . .”
“Yes, Sam, they sound like idiots. But there are a lot of idiots out there. Why are you so upset?” Linda asked. Linda always seemed to think my anger came from somewhere else. Sometimes it just is what it is.
Then I understood. David and Grant’s harsh criticism reminded me of my father.
I told her how Dad would stage these kitchen-table debates between Ben and me. At stake was Dad’s approval. One of my most painful memories is losing a debate with Ben about the legality of flag burning. We were seven.
“This is not about those morons; it’s about you,” Linda said. “This is about a belief system that your worth comes from how smart you are. You need to stop competing with everyone. These guys are not your problem. Just move seats.”
So I did.
A few nights later I was in my hotel room flipping through TV channels when I came upon Good Will Hunting, one of my all-time favorite movies. My favorite scene happens in a Harvard bar. Ben Affleck’s roughneck character is hitting on Minnie Driver, a Harvard undergrad, and lies about being a student at Harvard. A pompous Harvard grad student hears this, realizes Affleck is lying, and st
arts quizzing him on intellectual subjects. Just as Affleck grows embarrassed, his best friend, Matt Damon, also a roughneck but secretly a code breaker–level genius, steps in and not only answers the grad student’s questions, but embarrasses him with his clearly superior knowledge. Matt Damon ends up with Minnie Driver’s phone number. I wanted to stand up and clap every time I saw that scene.
I often felt like Affleck: not smart enough. I couldn’t find the right words when I needed them; arguments that sounded good in my head were jumbled when they came out of my mouth. My biggest fantasy was that someday I’d be like Matt Damon, able to win every argument. It was one of the reasons I read so many thick books—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Joyce.
I’d always wanted to be the smartest guy in the room. But no matter what I accomplished, Ben always beat me. I wasn’t even the smartest guy in the womb. After Good Will Hunting ended I turned the TV off. I suddenly understood that my need to be the smartest guy in the room wasn’t a sign of strength, but of a sense of inferiority.
The last two weeks of training were devoted to accounting. I worked out every morning. In the evenings, when other analysts went out, I stayed in the hotel room and studied and talked to Ben on the phone. He was still struggling. As I listened to him cry I’d think about how maybe the toughest guys in the world are often the ones in the most pain.
On the last day of training we received the results of the accounting final we’d taken the previous day. “This is the one that counts,” the HR women had said. “This is the one your bosses will see.”
They walked around handing out papers. When the head of the HR department got to me, she smiled and handed me my test. “Wow, Sam, number two in the class,” she said. “I didn’t know you were that sharp.”
I was still smiling when David walked up to me. “Man, I did not do well on that test,” he said. “Ah, it doesn’t matter anyways. I’ve already been assigned to a desk. They’re creating a new position for me: structured credit trader, really complex, model-based stuff. Derivatives. Cutting-edge finance.”
