by John Rolfe
Rod started to laugh. “What do you mean by that?”
“I’m a masochist. Not an S&M kind of masochist, although I’m willing to learn. I mean I like to work hard. I want to work a lot of hours. The way I see it, that’s about the quickest way to learn, and that’s what I want to do— learn this business. I don’t know much about it right now but I think I’d be good at it. I’ve done a lot of other shit, just never anything like this. I’ll be honest with you guys, I’m not gonna waste anybody’s time here by trying to weave a tapestry of bullshit, I’m just going to tell it like it is….”
Against the odds, the approach worked. I was sitting at home that night when the phone rang.
“Hello, can I speak with John Rolfe?”
“You’ve got him.”
“Hi, John, it’s Rod Ferramo from DLJ. Good news. You’ve made it through to the second round of interviews. We’re going to be holding them over at the Four Seasons tomorrow morning. We’ve got you slotted in for a nine A.M. session. Good luck.”
Holy shit. I’d actually cleared the first hurdle. Un-fucking-believable.
The second-round interviews wouldn’t be so easy.
For the second round I interviewed with a senior vice president named Jack Gatorski, who I’d soon learn was nicknamed Gator. His sidekick was a vice president, Mack Reeling.
Gator sat down and threw the first punch. “Why don’t you start things out by telling me why you want to go into investment banking.”
I launched into my speech, the one about being a masochist and being ignorant of what bankers did but wanting to learn. This time, though, it fell on deaf ears. There were no chuckles, no smiles, no conspiratorial nods of understanding. I’d hit my iceberg and was too far from shore for anybody to hear my calls for help.
That evening, I sat at home once again holding on to only the slimmest sliver of hope. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, I continued to maintain faith that by some act of God I’d somehow manage to garner an offer to be a summer associate with DLJ. The phone rang. “Hi, John? It’s Mack Reeling from DLJ. I’m sorry, but we’re not going to be able to make you an offer for the summer associate class. You just didn’t end up having the support you needed from the people you interviewed with.”
And so it would be. All was blackness and death.
I’d be the only first-year Wharton MBA student who hadn’t been able to land a summer job. Years later the legend would have perpetuated itself, they’d remember me as the Loser of the Class. I began to resign myself to my destiny.
Little did I know, however, that much more powerful forces were at work. The forces of sex and desire. Yves DesChamps, the managing director who had conducted my first-round interview the previous day, had an unstoppable libido. That libido was busy working overtime in my favor.
Flash back twelve hours.
Following the previous day’s first round of interviewing, the entire DLJ recruiting team had made their way down to a local Philadelphia brew pub, the Dock Street Brewery, to moderate their boredom through overindulgence. Now as it turned out, a close friend and classmate of mine, Veronica, also happened to be spending her Friday evening at the Dock Street Brewery with a couple of our other Wharton compadres. As Veronica was sitting at the bar enjoying a drink, our good friend Yves DesChamps took a seat next to her. Yves’s appearance next to Veronica was no coincidence. In the presence of any shapely blonde he became a slave to his carnal desires and was driven by an uncontrollable force to attempt to effect an eventual union of the flesh. One flick of her hair later, Veronica’s blond locks had found their way into Yves’s tumbler of overpriced scotch, thereby providing an ideal opening for conversation.
Soon thereafter, following an opening volley of light banter between the two, it dawned on Veronica that Yves was not only with DLJ but was in town for the weekend interviewing at Wharton for summer associate candidates. And it wasn’t long after that before Veronica did a further bit of digging to discover that Yves had actually been the one to lead the first-round interview with me. At this point Veronica, well aware of the distinct possibility that DLJ represented my last shot at a summer job in investment banking, began hatching a most devious plan of assistance. Her devices: feminine wiles, an overpaid banker with a weakness for women, and a set of bosoms that horny old dog couldn’t keep his eyes off of.
It wasn’t long before Yves was feeding Veronica drinks, buying her dinner, and pumping quarters into the side of the pool table to keep her occupied. Once she had him fully enraptured, Veronica launched her subtle plan of attack.
Veronica blithely turned the conversation toward the events of the day, namely Yves’s recruiting activities. This turn of conversation led, most naturally, to further discussions of her association with me and her intimate knowledge of me as a person. Her breasts hypnotically swaying against the pool table’s felt surface, Veronica began to paint a vivid picture for Yves. It was a picture of me as God’s greatest gift to DLJ, the savior of the banking world. She detailed for Yves how I was the smartest, hardest-working, most capable person she’d ever met. Moreover, she assured him, I already had numerous job offers on the table, and if DLJ wasn’t prepared to act quickly to make me an offer there was a high probability that they’d lose me. That was the clincher. There was no way that DLJ could pass up on a potential candidate who was wildly attractive to a bunch of other banks. If the other guys liked me that much I must be good. Really good.
Veronica’s carefully crafted dialogue, coupled with just the right number of touches, caresses, and beguiling glances, was more powerful than the most potent magic spell. Whether Yves truly took to heart all the lies that Veronica had crafted about me, or whether he saw through them but believed that by becoming my proponent he would be given the golden key to Veronica’s chastity belt, I’ll never know. All that mattered was that less than twenty-four hours after I’d received the telephone call from Mack Reeling informing me that I wasn’t going to be given a summer job offer from DLJ, he gave me a call back.
“Hi, John, it’s Mack Reeling from DLJ calling back. Do you have a minute?”
“For you, Mack, anything.”
“I’ve got some good news. It seems that when word got higher up in the organization that you hadn’t been made a summer offer somebody went to bat for you. They’ve decided to increase the size of the summer associate class by one. That extra spot’s for you if you want it.”
I knew immediately that I was going to accept the job, but I also knew that I had to be coy to save face. “Let me think about it. When do you guys need to know whether I want to accept the offer or not?”
“We’d appreciate it if you could let us know within a week.”
I was in. In a time frame of under seventy-two hours I’d been interviewed, dinged, resurrected, offered a position, and made a decision based on next to no information to accept a job that would dictate the better part of the next three years of my life.
The fox was in the henhouse.
Summer
Boot Camp
For the right amount of money, you’re willing to eat Alpo.
—Reggie Jackson
Our summer at DLJ began with a whimper in late May. On day one of orientation, a week after spring semester classes had ended at our respective business schools, we sat around an Early American antique oak table in a conference room deep within the confines of DLJ’s Manhattan citadel. It was the first time I had ever met Rolfe. I remember that Rolfe was sweating a lot. He looked pretty nervous. There were nine of us all told; eight men and one woman—three from Harvard, three from Columbia, and three from Wharton.
Our orientation was brief, lasting only about two hours. A contingency of full-time associates, as well as a handful of more senior bankers, came through to greet us. They made sure that we understood just what it meant to have been selected to be a member of DLJ’s summer associate class. We were the best of the best, the elite of Wall Street’s financial mavens. And we weren’t going to be pussyfooti
ng around that summer, oh no. We were going to be treated like real, full-time associates. We were going to have to hit the ground running because we were going to do deals. Some other banks might spend the entire summer wining and dining their summer associates to sucker them into signing on full-time after the summer was over, but not DLJ. By the end of the summer we would know, they assured us, what it was like to be a full-time associate at DLJ. If we really worked our asses off, and were lucky enough to get one of the coveted full-time offers in the fall, we’d be in a position to make an informed decision as to whether we wanted to sign on full-time because we’d know exactly what we had to look forward to. Of course, we all understood what was implied but unspoken—that anybody who eventually received an offer for full-time employment and didn’t accept it would be a fool. It would be something akin to the parish priest in Sioux City, Iowa, being chosen to become the Pope and turning it down. It just didn’t happen.
The desire to garner a full-time offer would be the motivating force behind nearly every aspect of our behavior that summer. There was nothing that any of us wanted more than a phone call in the fall offering us a full-time position at DLJ following graduation. The all-night work sessions, the subsuming of any semblance of pride, the absolute devotion to the job—all would arise as a result of that single-minded desire.
We all knew how the summer job was supposed to be played. It was a game of survival. There were nine summer associates, and six would probably get offers. We all knew that we had to work for vocal managing directors who would go to bat for us when offer time came around. If we could kiss a lot of rump and get those managing directors on our side then we’d be shoe-ins for full-time offers. We’d loathe ourselves for being sniveling little ass-kissing summer bankers, but if we wanted to get the full-time offer, then we had to play the game.
So, our summer was full of carrying pitch books, running models, faking smiles, late nights, and self-degrading ass kissing. We were the butt boys and indentured servants for a generation of senior bankers. We had to bust our humps and avoid all conflict or rebellion. If we rebelled, the managing directors would go off and find a more willing servant and we’d end up with no full-time offer. All bets would be off. We’d be fucked.
With an offer for full-time employment, on the other hand, we could expect peace of mind, leverage over other potential employers, and the option to coast through the entire second year of business school with a great, big “FUCK YOU” tattooed on our foreheads. The problem was that our desire was no secret, and every banker in the joint was prepared to fully exploit it. The best of them would dangle that golden carrot out in front as they cracked the whip behind, exhorting us to push just a little harder.
The race for full-time offers would throw a perverse internal dynamic into the midst of the summer class as well. As members of a summer associate class, we were supposed to be there to support each other. We were all in it together, after all. But at the end of every day, none of us knew exactly how many full-time offers would be made that coming fall. If only six full-time positions were going to be set aside for the nine members of our summer associate class, then why the hell would we want to help each other out in a bind? Some other associate’s offer could well be the one that we didn’t get.
Taken to an extreme there was, in fact, some level of motivation to sabotage each other’s work in order to further our individual selfish motivations. So as we sat around the table at orientation that morning, eyeing each other warily, just the slightest hint of distrust hung in the air.
All the critical information was conveyed to us during that two-hour orientation: the account number for the limousine service that handled the DLJ account, the procedures for expensing our nightly dinners to the firm, the rules governing when we could and couldn’t fly first class when traveling on business. By the end of the orientation the secrets regarding how to live the good life at the firm’s expense had been laid bare. We were on our way to becoming real investment bankers.
The Bullpen
Following our breakfast meeting we were led to our new offices. The summer associate offices were in an internal area of the bank known only as the Bullpen. Every summer for as long as anybody could remember the Bullpen had been occupied by the summer associate class. Every August, when the summer associate class departed, the incoming full-time first-year associate class took up residence there. The second-year associates, who had spent the previous year together in the Bullpen, were shuffled and scattered into other offices all over the firm. And so it was that the Bullpen perpetually housed the lowest common denominator among the entire pool of associates and, ignoring the analysts, the lowest common denominator among the entire cadre of DLJ bankers. Naturally, the greener the banker the harder he worked, which meant that the Bullpen hummed around the clock 365 days a year.
The Bullpen was a fortress. Like the hold of a slave ship, it was in the middle of the building tucked away in an area where visitors to the DLJ offices would never see it. It housed eleven offices, five singles and six doubles, which surrounded a sizable common area. The carpeting was dingy, the walls filthy. Somebody at one point had tried to add a personal touch with the addition of a couple of plants to the central common area, but these had long ago lost most of their leaves and stood there like decaying carcasses. Whoever it was should have known better. There were no windows in the Bullpen, and the fluorescent lights were in no way conducive to the healthy development of any living creature, plant or animal.
Each associate, in his or her windowless office, had a standard-issue steel desk, filing cabinet, and adjustable chair. The desks and filing cabinets looked like they’d been carted off a NATO base. The chairs were slightly more up-to-date, a necessity given that we’d be spending the majority of both our waking and sleeping hours in them over the coming months. All this furniture sat on a worn carpet. The walls were scuffed with numerous heel marks, and the fluorescent lights hummed constantly like a set of high-voltage electric wires. By the time we moved in, most vestiges of the previous tenants’ existence had been removed, but within weeks each office would look once again just as it always had—a tangled mass of pitch books, financial filings, and research reports. No personal effects. No pictures of loved ones. DLJ was our family now, and there could be no competing loyalties.
The Bullpen stood in stark contrast to the majority of the DLJ office space. DLJ prided itself on its collection of Early American art, historical documents, and antiques—all of which graced the halls, waiting areas, and managing directors’ offices. Not the Bullpen, though. The Bullpen was all about business, which was befitting for a place where most of the real work got done. The Bullpen’s residents took a perverse pride in their squalor, and the Bullpen itself served as a grim dose of reality for those whose imaginations had carried them too far down the path of believing that their chosen profession was actually a glamorous one.
While the Bullpen’s general atmosphere was in large part set by the wretched physical conditions therein, of equal importance in determining the ambience was the general stress level of its young bankers. The combination of the demands that were placed on them and their eagerness not to fuck up produced an atmosphere second only in intensity to that of a Duke-UNC basketball game. At any given moment, staccato expletives could be heard erupting from multiple Bullpen offices: “fucko,” “shit,” “asshole,” “dick,” “douchebag.” Generally, these were in response to phone calls from DLJ senior bankers who were making unreasonable and sometimes unnecessary demands on already-overtaxed associates. The level of animosity toward many senior bankers that generally permeated the Bullpen had caused these senior bankers to develop a healthy respect for its real estate, and only the bravest of them ever dared to penetrate its dark recesses. Even those senior bankers whose offices were in the Bullpen’s environs tended toward communications with its populace only by telephone. Concerns over their personal safety outweighed whatever desire they may have had to experience the Bullpen firsthand.
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On our first day as summer associates, though, we didn’t know any of this. We were eager, we were ignorant, and we had stars in our eyes. Moreover, upon our initial entry into the Bullpen, its squalid nature was temporarily displaced from our mind’s eye by the presence of four young women as supple as any four we’d ever seen assembled at the same place and time. At first blush, they all appeared to be products of a gene pool from the Valley of the Dolls. As one of our classmates, Enrico de la Hernandez Franca—a Peruvian by birth—would later put it: “Jewels, each of them in their own way. It’s imperative that I have a taste.”
They were our banking assistants, “BAs” for short, and they were there to help and guide us. They answered phones, did graphics work, prepared documents, made travel arrangements, and did database work. At that moment, the four who were assigned to the Bullpen knew far more in aggregate about banking than did our summer associate class. They were equal parts smart, beautiful, and tolerant, but as we stood and ogled that day it was their beauty that was foremost in our minds.
The four introduced themselves to us: Heather, Hillary, Hope, and Tiffany. A second-year associate would later inform us of a long-standing DLJ tradition whereby at least one member of the summer associate class would be encouraged to put the wood to at least one of the BAs over the course of the summer. There were eight volunteers ready to step forward that day, and had the one female member of our class had any lesbian tendencies whatsoever, our voice would have been unanimous.
We congregated around the center of the Bullpen, making small talk and wondering when we were going to start doing deals. Never mind that most of us had no idea what doing a deal entailed. We knew that we were there to do deals, that we weren’t doing them presently, and that we had better start doing them because we only had ten weeks to prove ourselves.
Two full-time associates, Reid Wexler (or “Wex”) and Mark Brown, had been assigned to run the summer associate program. Their tasks were to ensure that we all had good summer experiences and to shepherd us through the political maze that was DLJ. They would be responsible for fielding calls from senior bankers in search of vigorous workhorses, and parceling out those requests in some sort of equitable fashion to the summer class. For the duration of the summer, their offices would be in the Bullpen with ours. They’d be there to share in our triumphs and commiserate with our defeats.
