by Sam Polk
And why had I gone so over-the-top with my presents? Is it enough? I’d wondered. I had to make sure the presents were enough. Had to make sure that the presents would impress her.
I stopped walking. Is it enough? What I’d really been asking was, Am I enough? And the answer? No. I am not enough. My core belief. That’s what the presents were about. That’s why I’d hid myself from Katie. That’s why I always needed more money, a bigger job, a better-looking girl on my arm. I was compensating, because at heart I didn’t believe I was enough.
I thought about our apartment. It was enormous. We had needed to buy a second living room set, because just one couch looked too small in the massive space. Now we had two sitting areas. Why would two people need two separate sitting areas?
I stood on Fifth Avenue, across from Rockefeller Plaza, and felt something emerge from beneath the confines of my mind. From beneath the ego and the arrogance. It looked around at the pretty frivolity of my life, and it said, I want more. And I knew it was talking about something completely different than the more I had tried to buy, to earn.
I walked all the way home from the Palace in Midtown to my Bond Street apartment in the Village. By the time I arrived, I’d reached a decision. The apartment seemed cavernous as I sat on the couch and called Linda.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
I told her about Katie and the presents. “I want a different kind of life,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “You found your heart.” Years later she told me she’d been waiting a long time for that call, for me to start owning who I was becoming.
That night, I lay next to Katie in our big bed. She had come home, we had made up, and she had fallen asleep an hour ago. But I was a thousand miles from sleep.
I was thinking about what happened eight years earlier, when I’d gone over the top with Sloane’s presents on Valentine’s day—two dozen roses, Broadway tickets, fresh lobster. I’d thought I’d done that because I was so in love. But now I saw that the presents for Sloane were exactly the same as the presents for Katie. What I’d thought was love was just using someone to make me feel important.
I would never have called myself a misogynist, but that night, lying in bed, I saw that I’d mistreated women my whole life. In some way, I was doing the same thing to Katie that Dad had done to Mom. I was staying with her even though I didn’t love her. I was wasting her time, because I didn’t have the backbone to tell her the truth.
Just like Dad.
I called my mom that weekend, just to say hi. As I listened to her talk, my heart filled with sadness. Not just about what her life was like now—she was old, lonely, and overweight from years of stuffing down her pain with secret bowls of vanilla ice cream—but about what her life had been.
She had been abused her whole life. Her alcoholic father and crazy-eyed mother had waged emotional warfare on her and her sisters, and Mom, as the oldest, bore the brunt of it.
She ran away from home at seventeen and fell in love, but her fiancé hung himself in the trailer they shared. After that she lost any hope for a different life and went back to what she knew. She married my dad, who hit her in the beginning, then commenced an even more insidious attack, enlisting her children as enemy soldiers.
I had become one of those enemy soldiers. I’d watched Dad fling poisonous darts at my mom since I was a kid. Soon I was hurling my own darts at my mother. My brothers and sister all followed. Mom was a scapegoat in the family she’d been born into, and a scapegoat in the one she built herself.
All the good memories came rushing back. How she taught me to swim in a hotel pool by promising me a banana split if I reached the other side. The times she, Ben, and I danced in the gardens on the Navajo reservation we’d lived on when I was four, praying for rain. How, at Six Flags Magic Mountain, she’d leave us in line for one roller coaster to save our place in the next line. The time I pointed with five-year-old fingers to the mountain range in the distance and told her I was going to walk there, and she smiled and walked with me until I tired.
It wasn’t that I forgot the damaging things she had done. But in that moment I forgave her. I knew that she’d loved me as best she could.
Then I thought about how I’d mistreated Sloane and Katie. I saw that a whole lifetime of watching my father treat my mother with disdain had taught me to view all women with disdain. I became aware of all of the wonderful women who had come into my life. Elyn Walker, who’d shown me how to get sober. Sloane Taylor, who’d brought me into counseling and shown me that even cool people get help. And, of course, Linda. They were real-life refutations to the story my father put in my head.
The dam broke. Seeing the destruction my dad had caused my mom, I started to face the damage I’d caused the women in my life. I decided to begin repairs.
CHAPTER 30
Sacred Creatures
¤
Katie and I started couples counseling. The counselor was a diminutive, academic-looking woman with cropped gray hair and big glasses. As soon as we sat down in front of her, Katie started crying. When the counselor asked if she knew why she was upset, Katie said no. For the entire session, tears that she could not explain poured down her cheeks. We went a few times, but we hadn’t gotten very far. We were still living together in our sepulcher of an apartment, a crypt for the living death of our relationship.
I knew I needed to make amends with my mother. I flew out to Seattle to help her sell a condo she’d purchased and reorganize her finances. I offered to find an attorney for her to seek recourse for the divorce. I collected all the documents and then started calling divorce lawyers in Seattle. Some wouldn’t speak to me after hearing who my father’s attorney was. I finally connected with one of the top divorce attorneys in Seattle who spoke in rapid, clipped bursts. He asked why it’d taken me so long to look into this. I told him I’d only recently discovered how much help my mom needed.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “Over three years have passed, making it very unlikely we could get a judge to overturn.”
Mom didn’t seem surprised. It was as if she’d accepted that my father would always beat her. But I could hear in her voice that she was grateful someone had taken her side.
When I returned home, I knew things with Katie had to end. During a counseling session I told Katie it was over. She begged me to give it a few months, and the counselor suggested I do the same, but I couldn’t. I knew I didn’t love her. She moved out one weekend when I was away. When I returned home, the apartment was half empty. I walked through the cavernous space, my footsteps echoing off the twenty-foot-high ceilings, and thought about the brand-name life I finally had but no longer wanted. I had six months remaining on the year’s rent I paid in advance, but I decided to move into a tiny apartment in Alphabet City that fit me better.
After that, I felt better about the direction of my life. But something nagged at me. There was still something that my father had taught me—something big—that continued to impact how I treated women.
It started when I was twelve. I found a tattered porn magazine in the bottom drawer of my dad’s bedside table. I took the magazine and hid it under the couch in the living room. When the house was asleep, I crept out of bed and retrieved it. Wide-eyed, I read the erotic stories and masturbated for the first time. It was, to that point, the greatest moment of my life.
My dad unknowingly provided me with a steady supply of smutty magazines and books, and I was perpetually sneaking them from his drawers. In high school, I started to buy porn magazines myself from shady-looking liquor stores. The cashier would put them in a brown shame bag, and I’d slide the bag into the back waist of my jeans before walking out. I looked at porn for five years before I even had sex. By the time I lost my virginity, almost everything I knew about sex came from porn.
In college, I no longer had to endure the shame of buying magazines from a person, or even buying
anything at all. Columbia had broadband Internet access. Always a reader, I preferred stories to pictures or videos. There were millions of stories online, available for free.
As an adult, looking at or reading porn became a regular part of my life. When I found myself alone at home, I’d open the computer or turn on one of the soft-core flicks on Cinemax. The amount I watched or read ebbed and flowed—sometimes daily, sometimes once a week, depending largely on whether I had a girlfriend or not. I didn’t become obsessed; porn didn’t take over my life. Instead, it was one of those enjoyable life habits that I always looked forward to, like morning coffee.
At the same time, I knew it wasn’t innocuous. I knew because I was ashamed. I never spoke about it. I would make sure the doors were double-locked, the shades drawn. I deleted the history on my computers and was nervous whenever anyone picked up my cable remote control in case they might click the Recently Viewed button. After getting sober, I’d cut out everything in my life that I was ashamed about, except for expensive haircuts and pornography.
The fact was that I needed it. Sometimes I would try to masturbate without pornography. And it would happen, the process would happen. But it wouldn’t be the same. It would take longer, and be less charged. It lacked the rush. The excitement. The drug.
Around that time, I came across an article about how a large percentage of porn actresses were sexually abused as kids. That hit me in the gut. I knew from experience that how you were treated as a child impacted your behavior as an adult.
It made sense to me that girls who’d been sexually abused were more likely to go into a sexual profession. They had learned at an early age that their bodies were for the use of men—that the only places they would get real attention was on their backs or their knees. I had learned from my dad that money would make me safe and important, and had made my way to a Wall Street trading desk. They had learned from their dads, or their uncles or neighbors or family friends, that sex made them valuable, worthy of attention, and made their way to dark street corners, stripper poles, or video cameras that could stream to the Internet.
I talked to some guys about the article, and they said they thought porn or stripping was a good trade: a woman can put herself through college working far less than she would as a waitress. But I questioned the fairness of that trade.
Despite what I was learning, I continued to use porn. I figured the videos had already been made; I was just watching them. The porn industry was going to exist whether or not I participated in it.
But soon I realized that my logic was flawed. I was part of the demand. Maybe my viewing one Cinemax film was the tipping point that caused the production of another. Maybe my viewership was responsible for the humiliation of that woman, naked on her knees in front of twenty people on set, and millions of eyes through the Internet.
But it wasn’t just about porn actresses—it was about what the proliferation of porn meant for all women. I was amazed, as I looked into the statistics, at the sheer amount of sexual violence in our culture. Almost half of all women are raped or face attempted rape; 38 percent of girls are sexually molested. Porn is an integral part of a misogynist culture that makes it difficult and dangerous to be a woman in America.
I understood this reality because I had begun to notice how porn changed the way I looked at women. There’s a scarcity of women on trading floors, and the few who are there are often in assistant roles. Because of this scarcity and subordination, there’s an oft-used term—“trading-floor hot”—which means that a woman you ordinarily wouldn’t look twice at in regular life seems attractive at work. Not attractive in that you’d want to marry them, but attractive in that you’d like to fuck them. A woman walking down a trading row might turn around to see half of the traders she passed leaning back in their chairs ogling her. The more porn I looked at, the more overpowering my trading floor fantasies became.
Porn wasn’t just teaching me how to treat some women; it was teaching me how to treat all women. That’s when I realized that porn wasn’t about sex—it was about power. Porn was teaching me that women were there to be used by me, whenever I wanted. I had thought porn was about sex and arousal, but now I saw it was about denigration.
So I quit. A few months after Katie and I broke up I disconnected Cinemax and pledged not to read another story or look at another picture. At first it was hard. I’d come home from work and just want the release I knew porn would give me. But I didn’t open the computer. Days turned into weeks, and after a while the urges began to subside.
One night, I went out to dinner with a managing director and a high-profile client to a churrascaria—a Brazilian all-you-can-eat meat buffet—on Fifty-Fourth and Eighth Avenue. The MD and the client were old friends, and they rapidly got red-faced drunk. About an hour in, the waitress swung by to ask if they’d like another round—two Glenlivets. As she walked away, they both stared hard at her ass. The client turned to me and said, “I’d like to bend her over the table, give her some meat.” The managing director roared.
“What’s wrong, Sam?” said the client, noticing I wasn’t laughing. I forced a smile, and said “Nothing.” The managing director ordered another round.
In the cab home, I was furious. I should have spoken up, but I hadn’t.
CHAPTER 31
Gatsby, Interrupted
¤
A few months after I started on the distressed desk at Bank of America, the market fell off a cliff. This was great for me. I’d been bearish and very vocal about it. I’d constructed a portfolio of complex trades that would, I thought, profit in a market collapse. As the market began to plummet, my reputation skyrocketed. I was invited into meetings way above my pay grade, with Marshall, the head of distressed, and even the head of the investment bank. When my facility with derivatives became apparent, the head of the investment bank asked me to meet with the heads of all the business lines, to assess their derivatives risk. I was a young trader, but all of a sudden I was meeting one-on-one with the head of equities, the head of mortgages, the head of treasuries.
That was the apex of my career at Bank of America.
It turned out that I had overlooked an important variable when I’d constructed my portfolio—the difference between how bonds and derivatives perform in a funding crisis. I owned a lot of bonds and had shorted derivatives against them. I’d thought the spread between them would compress; instead, the bonds started to plummet, while the derivatives stayed put. I lost $5 million the first week, $5 million the second week, and then $10 million the third week. Soon there were rumors I’d be fired.
Marshall was losing money, too. He’d seen the crash coming and put on a massive short position. But his bosses disagreed with his call and forced him to exit the trade. A week later the market plummeted. Without his short position as a hedge, the desk he ran started losing money. Marshall was blamed for the losses.
On Wall Street your reputation can change by the day. That’s how it was for both Marshall and me. One week we were on top of the world. The next week we were on the verge of getting fired.
I loved Marshall more than ever. I’d heard that he’d stood up for me in a management meeting where my losses were being discussed, even though his own job was in jeopardy.
One day, when yet another market drop left both our portfolios bloody, I typed a Bloomberg message—the instant messaging system traders use to communicate with each other—to Marshall:
The train is heading for the cliff
His response came almost immediately.
And the doors are double-locked
I chuckled and then wrote back.
And it’s on fire
In the midst of misery, we shared a laugh. While Marshall’s laugh was hearty, mine was grudging. Sitting at my desk watching my portfolio bleed, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Like I was drowning.
That’s when Sean Mallory, the head of trading at Pateras, calle
d me. I told Marshall immediately, and he said I couldn’t have dreamt up a more perfect job. Pateras offered me a million dollars, and I accepted. A week later I resigned from Bank of America. Marshall walked with me over to Pateras. I hugged him and thanked him for all that he’d done for my career. Then I walked in and signed my contract.
A few weeks later, Marshall was fired. An article was written about it in the New York Post.
Six months later, I rented two houses on Fire Island and invited Mom, my siblings, and two close friends out for a family vacation.
Fire Island is just an hour train ride and a twenty-minute ferry outside New York, but it’s a different world. The island is only a half mile wide, and there are no cars because there are no roads. Wood-planked paths run between houses and up to the sandy beach, and to get somewhere you bike or walk. There are a couple restaurants; mostly you cook for yourself. It’s sort of like camping, but in nice houses.
Because it’s just an hour outside of New York, it’s expensive. But I could afford it. With that year’s bonus, I had officially become a millionaire. But unlike my other bonuses, this year I knew that there was nothing I really wanted to buy. Instead, I thought of other ways my money might be useful. I donated a thousand dollars to a congresswoman. I gave $40,000 to charity.
The two houses I rented were cozy, rustic, and stood next to each other, fifty feet from the roaring waves. The first night, we cooked a steak dinner together. When we all sat down at the patio tables, I felt the awesome power of the internal work I’d done. The changes I’d made in my life had begotten changes in my family. Both Ben and my younger brother Daniel were sober, and all my siblings were in counseling with Linda. Mom had almost not come because she was scared, but I had called and told her I loved her and wanted her there. My siblings had done the same. We all now made efforts to honor her role as the mother of our family. I looked at the excited faces of my brothers, my sister, and my friends, and the fearful, tentative face of my mom, who wasn’t used to being included, and I felt how much I was loved and how much I loved in return. I opened my mouth to speak, but I was so overwhelmed that I could barely get any words out. I mumbled something about letting the food get cold and then reached for the steak.
