by John Rolfe
That day, they gave us some sage advice: “Don’t worry, the work will come. Don’t ever wish for more, because that nightmare will inevitably come true. If it’s seven P.M. and you don’t have anything to do, then leave. Go the fuck home.” Of course, none of us would listen to their wise words. We’d look around, see our classmates working, and convince ourselves that we, too, needed to be there doing something. None of us planned on losing out on that full-time offer by virtue of not working hard enough.
For one of us, a deal would come quickly. After several hours of aimless lounging in the Bullpen, Wex’s phone rang. Thirty seconds later we heard him shout from his office.
“OK, who wants a deal?”
Well, of course, we all did but decorum dictated that nobody appear to be too eager. There were a couple of moments of silence.
“I said, which one of you slick bastards wants a deal? Perentazzi, you out there? You have some high-yield experience, don’t you? Get in here so that I can get you up to speed. I need you to be on a plane to Cleveland within the next two hours. You’ve got to start drafting for a high-yield deal.”
Drafting? High yield? It all sounded so exciting. Our classmate Perentazzi, now known as “Slick,” was getting on a plane on our first day on the job, and if he’d been listening as closely as we had that morning during orientation he was going to know how to fly first class. That was living, man, really living. We could see it, Slick had been staffed on a deal within the first couple of hours; it couldn’t be much longer before the rest of us got staffed. Hell, by the end of the first week we’d all be doing deals just like old-timers. We could hardly wait.
Eagerness and Fear
Rolfe and I knew that desire alone, unfortunately, didn’t get anybody staffed on deals. So we had to wait…and wait…and wait. It wasn’t until four days later, on Thursday afternoon, that I’d finally get the call I’d been waiting for. As for Rolfe, he had to wait another entire week before the call came through. That bothered him. He began to worry that he was an untouchable.
I saw Troob and the others all getting staffed those first couple of weeks, and I couldn’t figure out why nobody wanted to work with me. I didn’t understand how random the whole staffing process was. For those first two weeks I sat in my office alternately staring at my watch and playing games of Minesweeper on the computer. I was a Minesweeping machine, but I wasn’t learning a thing about banking. With each passing day, as my summer classmates gradually got staffed on deals and I didn’t, my paranoia increased. I saw the summer passing before my eyes with nothing to show for it. When I finally got staffed, though, my demeanor would quickly change from concern that I’d never get a chance to prove myself to realization that I was incapable of proving anything. If ignorance was bliss, my beatific aura should have rivaled that of a magic bus full of Moonies. Unfortunately, ignorance in this case felt more like sure professional suicide.
The call, when it came, was from Wex.
“Rolfe, I’ve got a deal for you. One of the financial sponsors we do work for is contemplating a buyout of a medical supply company. They may want us to provide some high-yield financing for the transaction. We’re gonna need a model, comps, the whole nine yards. I’ve got some information in my office here that should get you up to speed. Why don’t you come grab it and take a look at it.”
This was great. A junk bond financing for a hostile takeover, I couldn’t have asked for anything better for my first deal. I made my way into Wex’s office, where he gestured to a five-hundred-page stack of documents; the company’s public financial filings, financial filings of competitors, research reports on the company, and research reports on the industry. I took it back into my office and began to plow through it, line by line. I knew nothing about the medical supply industry and had so much to learn…or so I thought.
Wex hadn’t been so kind as to brief me on one of the key precepts for the investment banking associate, “Thou shalt hand over all documents and be exonerated.” Just because I was being given five hundred pages of documents in absolutely no way implied that I was supposed to read five hundred pages’ worth of documents. Wex had merely supplied me with five hundred pages of documents so that nobody would accuse him of not having given me all the relevant material. He was covering his ass and it was up to me to determine what really mattered and what didn’t. I’d made my way through about a hundred pages of the stack when Wex called back two hours later.
“Rolfe, you done looking through that shit yet?”
“No, Wex, I’ve only gotten through about a quarter of it.”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that. We need a leveraged buyout model by late this afternoon. We’ve got a meeting with Greg Weinstein at six o’clock. They don’t call him the Widow for nothing, man. You better get it together. This guy eats summer associates for breakfast.”
I started to panic. Who was this guy they were calling the Widow? I’d built financial spreadsheets before in business school, but I’d spent days, not hours, on them. I thought briefly about buying a van, dropping a tab of acid, and heading out for Santa Cruz. “Wex, I don’t know if I can get it done that quick. You’ve got to remember that this is my first time trying this.”
“All right, Rolfe, look here. You summer guys aren’t supposed to work together, especially since you have to get up the learning curve, but in this case I’m gonna make an exception because we’ve got some time pressure. I’ll get Troob. He’s an ex-analyst. He’ll know how to build a model. In the meantime, you just focus on figuring out some simple transaction multiples ahead of time.”
Relief flooded over me. I didn’t have to build the model. I’d been able to forestall inevitable failure. I sat back in my chair and breathed a sigh of relief. Now I could spend the next few hours working out the transaction multiples. Problem was, it slowly dawned on me, I didn’t know what a transaction multiple was. Fuck. There wasn’t going to be any easy way out of this one, I’d have to suck it up and confess my ignorance. I called Wex back.
“Wex, it’s Rolfe. There’s a little bit of a problem here. I’m not sure that I know what a transaction multiple is. Can you give me some help?” This was it—utter, abject humiliation. “I’m sorry, man, I feel like an idiot.”
Wex was silent momentarily, then he spoke. “Oh, Christ, what rock did they pull you out from under? I don’t have time for this shit. Call Troob and ask him to explain it to you, all right? Don’t forget, we have to meet on this at six tonight so you’d better get it together and figure this out.”
I called Troob and told him that he needed to explain to me what it was that I needed to do. There was silence on the other end of the phone. This was a new one for him. He was also trying to secure a full-time offer, so why should he save my ass? He came to my office and shook his head. He’d never seen a nincompoop of my magnitude. Perhaps, in his mind, I was testing him, or more likely he worried that in some perverse way I could turn my idiocy against him like a weapon. Ignorance, after all, could be the most dangerous weapon of all.
Troob knew the investment banking lingo. He tutored me like a third grader with flash cards, imparting his knowledge. I had learned about finance theory in business school, but Troob stripped all the crap away and let me in on the stuff that really mattered. “This is what you need to do. This is how you do it,” he instructed.
“Don’t be scared of the Widow,” Troob said as he schooled me. “I was told that he’s a little asshole with a big attitude, but I interviewed with him and he’s not that bad. I’ll build you a good model. You just keep your mouth shut. Everything’ll be OK. This deal’s never gonna get off the ground, anyway. You can take a quick look at the numbers and see that.”
My meeting at six that evening was a big success. I followed Troob’s advice. I sat quietly and nodded intelligently every time the Widow spoke. I threw in a few random comments, ones that I hoped wouldn’t further betray my lack of investment banking knowledge.
“Ahhh, yes.”
“
Of course.”
“How interesting!”
“Certainly.”
As events would turn, within twenty minutes the deal had died. Troob had been right. The model he’d built and the transaction multiples whose computation I’d had to be instructed upon had both indicated that the investment returns to the financial sponsor were insufficient to warrant their ongoing consideration of the deal. There was a consolation, though. I’d found a new friend in Troob. He’d saved me from the Widow’s fatal clutches, and for that I owed him my life.
Rolfe and I became fast friends when we worked together on his first foray into the world of I-banking. He owed me one after that. He was green, really green, but he was smart and he didn’t have an attitude. Those were two big positives. I figured that if I taught him a few things, he’d be a guy I could rely on. I knew I’d need that.
The Social Scene: First Night Out
The summer at DLJ wasn’t all about hard work and subservience. DLJ had a plan, and that plan centered around showing us just enough of the good life during our summer sojourn to leave us wanting more. Their plan was a microcosm of what they would try to do to us once we’d signed on full-time. At that point, they’d pepper us with a parade of high-profile events—black-tie dances, expensive dinners, and private parties at the Greenwich estates of our managing directors—in order to convince us that through unwavering devotion to our jobs we, too, could one day hope to live the good life. During the summer, though, the focus was more on showing us what a bunch of laid-back, easygoing guys investment bankers were despite their tight-ass reputations.
The summer associate experience at DLJ centered around a calendar of social events: dinners, booze cruises, baseball games, dance clubs, at least one event each week. We were trained through repetition to understand that our attendance at these social events was more than just hoped for, it was mandatory. From our first day as summer-DLJers, we were made to understand that when it came to getting a full-time offer, our attendance at the summer social functions was equal in importance to our on-the-job performance. Of course, this advice had predictably fallen by the wayside by our third week on the job, at which point the majority of the summer class was regularly putting in work hours that extended well past midnight.
Our first social event of the summer season fell on Thursday of our first week at DLJ and, as it was still the first week, was well attended by our summer class. Wexler and Brown, the two full-time associates running the summer program, had decided to break us in easy on our first night out and had planned dinner for us at a local barbecue dive followed by some dancing at a Midtown club—Le Bar Bat. In addition to the summer associates, these nights out generally included as many full-time associates as our mentors were able to round up and, in addition, our four BAs. The BAs’ presence not only ensured that such a large group of vain, predominantly male bankers wouldn’t be mistaken for a group of West Village fairies but also provided an opportunity for our summer associate class to initiate our attempts at sexual conquest of the BA pool.
Upon our arrival at the restaurant, and prior to our being seated, the liquor started to flow freely. The liquor barrage was a result of the efforts of one Rod Ferramo, the associate who had originally interviewed Rolfe down at Wharton. Ferramo was an old-school vulgarian, born and bred in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was heralded inside DLJ as a young banker known for his ability to spend egregious amount of money in the pursuit of carnal pleasures. Rumor had it that on a business trip to Mexico for DLJ, he’d once spent three thousand dollars for two local whores to service him in his hotel room. Given that a moderately priced south-of-the-border whore was going for less than fifty bucks at the time, Ferramo’s weakness for upper-end pleasures was evident.
That night, though, it wasn’t Ferramo’s lust for flesh that would dictate our demise but his penchant for drunkenness. Ferramo immediately began ordering up rounds of shots for everybody, whether they wanted them or not. This presented the class with something of a dilemma. We wanted to be professional, but enough booze would undoubtedly loosen us up to the point of being dangerous. There we were with rounds of shots being passed around. It was clear that we were being set up for an evening of drunken excess. We had to be team players. Our success in investment banking would depend upon our willingness to subjugate all personal goals to the greater good.
Ferramo ended everyone’s initial hesitation with a loud question: “Why the fuck isn’t everyone drinking?”
We all took our shots of Jaegermeister.
Our first dinner as a group was in true DLJ style—marked by excess. After we’d been seated, the waitress came over to take the appetizer orders. Ferramo took it upon himself to order for all of us. “We’ll take three of everything, and keep the drinks coming. I don’t want to see anybody’s glass empty.” We gorged ourselves as wave after wave of food arrived. Before long, not only were we corralling every passing waitress to bring additional food, but the busboys as well.
By the time we had departed from the restaurant and pointed ourselves in the direction of Le Bar Bat, the aggregate level of drunkenness in our merry band had increased considerably. Our merriness increased as the hours in Le Bar Bat slipped by and we continued our rum-fueled binge. Then came the debaucherous display of Rod Ferramo.
One of the BAs, Hope, had been downing shots with increasing rapidity over the course of the evening. The combination of the shots, the heat, and the level of the music at Le Bar Bat had pushed her beyond her limits. As she stood at the bar waiting for her next drink to arrive, an uncontrollable urge to vomit overcame her. She ducked her head underneath the bar, and began spewing forth a fragrant mixture of barbecue chicken and Captain Morgan spiced rum. Ferramo, who at the time of the opening projectile was on the dance floor immediately adjacent to the bar, witnessed these initial throes of expulsion and interpreted Hope’s temporary incapacity as an opportunity to initiate an impressive public display of vulgarity. He quickly positioned himself behind her, whipped out his hogan, and as she continued her litany of expurgation he straddled her backside, grabbed her hips, and began to grind her from behind in a simulation that would have made a dog in heat blush.
As we viewed this display from across the dance floor we were thoroughly befuddled. Was this guy really so desperate and so sexually depraved? What the hell was going on? Some of the people whom we knew in investment banking were good guys. Did the pressure just cause some of the others to snap? We didn’t know. Maybe it was the sleepless nights. Maybe it was the lack of a social life. Maybe it was the opportunity to finally not be the one getting shit upon but to be the one doing the shitting.
Either way, we didn’t realize that in the not-too-distant future we, too, would be full-time associates doing things we never thought we would stoop so low to do. It was uncanny what a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week nonstop-stress career choice would do to our judgment.
The Social Scene II:
Dinner with the Chairman
Not all activities on the summer associates’ social calendar lived up to the standard set by our initial outing at Le Bar Bat. Many of the dinners, baseball games, and nights drinking and dancing were uneventful. Others were, however, notable in their own right. One of the most anticipated evenings out was a summer associate dinner at the Links Club with Dick Jenrette, one of the founders of our firm. Jenrette was a legend on Wall Street. He was chairman of The Equitable, a company that was both DLJ’s corporate parent and one of the country’s largest insurance companies. Jenrette was famous not only as one of the founders of DLJ but also for his instrumental role in having brought The Equitable back from the brink of insolvency in the early 1990s. For our summer associate class a chance to meet the man was a real honor.
Basically, the reason for us to meet Jenrette was summed up by an older associate. He said, “It’s a yearly tradition. The old man sucks it up for a night and presses the flesh with all the summer idiots. I think they figure that trotting Jenrette out gets people to sign on full-tim
e when the offers come out in the fall.”
That evening’s dinner at the Links Club, hosted by dear Dick Jenrette, was well done. The Links Club was an all-male institution whose membership roster was among the most exclusive in New York City. Special permission had been sought, and granted, to allow for the presence of our one female summer associate classmate, Diane. Even then, Diane’s permission slip only gave her access to a limited number of the Links Club’s rooms.
The dinner was preceded by a cocktail hour during which gloved waiters made the rounds taking drink orders and delivering trays of mushroom caps and raw oysters. Jenrette made his own rounds to each of us and, in the most gracious manner possible, listened intently as we stammered out how honored we were to meet him and how we were so incredibly thankful to have been given the opportunity to spend our summer at DLJ.
The dinner came and went with no significant occurrences. Seating positions at the table had been apportinned on a musical-chairs basis, with most of us attempting to arrange our seating positions so as to avoid being too close to Jenrette. Although the man was unusually friendly, most of us felt that it might be somewhat awkward to have to carry on a conversation with somebody whose station in life was so far removed from our own that he couldn’t possibly give a shit about what we had to say. With our business school debts, most of us were worth about fifty dollars. Jenrette was worth hundreds of millions. We were young. He was old. We just had nothing in common. The fact that we knew he would feign interest in our miserable lives made the specter of conversation that much more unappealing.
