by John Rolfe
“I don’t fucking know.”
“Hello? Are you guys there? I don’t have time for this shit.” Bubbles’s voice was getting louder. Heather, our BA, and a couple of our summer associate classmates had heard the commotion on the speakerphone and had now stuck their heads through my office door to listen. I took the speakerphone off mute once again.
“Look, Bill, I apologize, but we don’t seem to have all the page numbers down just right. Could you read them off one more time.”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t have time for this shit. I may be working from an older draft version than you, but don’t worry about the fucking page numbers. Just listen to what you have to do and then do it. Think, you stupid assholes.” Bill’s voice was getting louder. He wasn’t a happy man. He began to read through the list of changes again, twice as fast and twice as loud. I muted the phone and looked at Slick. He looked back at me as Bubbles continued to read.
“This still isn’t making any sense,” Slick said. “Bubbles is working off an old version of the draft. Man, I hate this guy.” Without thinking, I took the speakerphone off mute and interrupted Bubbles for the final time. “Bill, we need to go through this without talking about page numbers. They’re confusing us.” The phone went silent. Then the eruption occurred.
“WHAT? WHAT? I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE GODDAMNED PAGE NUMBERS. READ THE FUCKING HEADERS ON THE PAGE…”
The level of abuse coming through the speakerphone, and the volume at which it was occurring, was amazing.
“WHAT ARE YOU GUYS? FUCKING ASSHOLES? YOU THINK I HAVE TIME TO WASTE ON THIS FUCKING SHIT?”
I put the speakerphone on mute and looked at Slick. As Bubbles’s diatribe continued Slick and I started to laugh. There was Bubbles, 35,000 feet up in the air in an apoplectic rage. He was yelling so loud that not only were the other first-class passengers undoubtedly privy to his thoughts but so was everyone in coach class, including those who were locked up in the bathrooms all the way in the back of the plane. We, meanwhile, were on the ground in New York and there was absolutely nothing that we could do, other than let his fury run its course.
Eventually, after determining that he had debased us sufficiently, Bubbles gave both us and his fellow passengers a break. He hung up the phone and Slick and I got to work trying to untangle the wicked web of changes Bubbles had delivered. Seventeen hours later, I would deliver the books to the offices of D. L. Thompson & Co. for the first public airing of Kinetic II.
By this point in the summer, my exposure to the dysfunctionality that defined the investment bankers’ world should have been sufficient to allow me to make a reasoned decision to pursue other career paths. If it hadn’t, the visit to D. L. Thompson & Co. should certainly have driven the point home.
The D. L. Thompson partner who greeted us was straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. He had stuffed his generous ass into a tight pair of seersucker trousers. On top, he wore a bright red sweater vest that looked as if it had recently been pulled from the garbage receptacle behind the office tower that was home to D. L. Thompson & Co.’s offices. The D. L. Thompson partner’s defining feature, however, was a set of sideburns that were half the width of his entire cheekbone and which ran all the way from his ears down to the corner of his mouth. Stuffed into that mouth was an unlit cigar that had been chewed down to a raggedy, soggy pulp, and which was leaving tobacco shards all over his teeth, lips, and sideburns. The guy was a freak, a bad Halloween rendition of an innkeeper out of the Canterbury Tales, and we were there to kiss his ass. His name was Chester Goodman III.
Bubbles started out the meeting in his customary style with an effusive show of gratitude for having been granted the meeting. He then proceeded to launch into a needless round of name-dropping, during which Chester cut him short.
“Billy, what do you have for me today?”
“Oh, we’ve got some good ones today, Chester. If you open your book to page four, the table of contents, you can see what we’ve got lined up.”
Chester opened to page four, scanned the table of contents, then looked up at Bubbles.
“Billy, how many times have I told you that I don’t want to look at any baking businesses. You know I hate bakeries. You’ve got four baking companies listed in here. This is a waste of my time.”
“But, Chester, these are really good bakeries. I think that you might want to consider these.”
“No bakeries.”
Poof—just like that, four of the twenty companies in our pitch book had gone up in smoke. And Bubbles, the little bastard, had known ahead of time that this guy with the sideburns didn’t like bakeries. Chester was just beginning.
“Furthermore, Billy, your friends from Bear, Stearns have already been here to show us Colemack Company, Circular Toys, and Fountain Healthcare. And you can forget about Extruded Synthetics and Condor Can, Inc. They’re too goddamned expensive. We won’t pay a premium for businesses trading at those kinds of multiples.”
We’d been in the meeting for under two minutes, and Chester Goodman III had already eliminated nine out of our twenty companies without ever making it past the table of contents. Hours upon hours of work, our beautiful charts, graphs, and plagiarized prose would never see the light of day.
“Now this one could be interesting. Finale Industries—a consolidation play in the death care industry. I tell you what, the demographics should really drive this one. Gonna be lots of dead people over the next few years. I wouldn’t mind owning a piece of the market that sucks their money up before their corpses get dropped down into the dirt.”
Bubbles had been given an opening. One of our ideas had sparked a flicker of interest from Chester. Bubbles seized the opportunity and proceeded to wheedle, cajole, and beg for Chester’s continued attention. Chester, however, was like a fat pussycat whose attention was drawn by a passing cockroach. He batted the cockroach a few times, found temporary amusement in its confused stumblings, and then settled back to continue his slumber. There would be no deal for Bubbles and DLJ that day. There would be no deal for the young summer associate. Kinetic II’s first foray out of the box had been a resounding failure. It was a harbinger of what was to come.
As I sat in Chester’s office that day, I should perhaps have looked at things differently. Instead of looking upon Chester as an aberration in the human gene pool, I should have realized that it was Bubbles and I who were the human detritus. As I watched Bubbles do everything but chug down Chester’s cock with the goal of securing a piece of business, I should have been ashamed. I should have immediately cast off my leather shoes and woolen suit and gone streaking naked from the room in search of redemption. I should have, at the very least, realized that the Chesters of the world were the ones with the purse strings, and the guys with the purse strings were the ones in control. I should have thought about the number of nights that I’d been at the office until 3 A.M. and assessed whether anything was worth that sort of commitment.
I didn’t do any of that, though. And for that oversight, I would pay.
And so it was that the summer dragged on for Rolfe and me. Pitches, deals, dinners, nights on the town, it was one long continuous bank-a-thon. Lots of learning, little sleep, and a healthy serving of humble pie. Eventually it came to an end. The summer had been painful, but it was over. We had survived and we were ready to use the summer experience as a springboard to bigger and better things. Rolfe and I swore we would never go back. We promised ourselves that we would try to get an offer from DLJ and then use it to find other, more rewarding jobs. Once again, we were believing our own bullshit.
What we didn’t know was that DLJ was beefing up and we were the beef. DLJ needed bodies, lots of bodies, and they needed them fast. Because of that, just about all the summer associates would get offers. In fact, the only person in the summer associate class with a serious chance of not receiving the coveted full-time offer was Rolfe. It wasn’t because he hadn’t worked hard. It was a much more serious offense. During the Summer Associate Golf Outin
g, Rolfe had managed to hit the managing director in charge of associate recruiting, Doug Franken, in the leg on the fifth hole. Rolfe didn’t just bean him in the leg, he had done it at Franken’s own country club and with one of the Titleist golf balls that Franken had lent to Rolfe. During another summer, Rolfe’s transgressions might have gotten him dinged.
Fortunately for Rolfe, DLJ needed associates.
The Courtship
I don’t believe we’ve ever met. I’m Mr. Right.
—“Four Tested Opening Lines,”
advertisement, Playboy, 1969
The summer was over and Troob and I felt pretty crappy. We hadn’t exercised that much, we’d worked long hours, and we were tired. A summer that we had thought was going to be filled with social engagements, weekends in the Hamptons, and dating turned out to be a summer filled with work. However, we were paid well—about $12,000 for ten weeks of work, the first two weeks of which we did nothing. They told us that if we came back full-time we would be handsomely rewarded. We were told at the end of the summer that if we joined full-time we’d receive an advance of $18,000 and receive a signing bonus of another $5,000 that would cover our moving expenses at the end of the school year.
We went back to our second year of business school, me to Wharton and Troob to Harvard. Within two months the recruiting push for full-time employment came. The DLJ bird catchers came hunting for Troob first. He was a pigeon, and I could hear him squawking all the way down at Wharton:
Over the summer I had made some good friends like Rolfe, but I was standing on my moral high ground and saying to myself that I wouldn’t get lured in by the mystique of investment banking and would only take a job that I really liked. Well, my moral high ground was about as sturdy as a drunk cowboy’s shooting hand. I was weak. I called Rolfe and asked him what he was going to do and he told me that he was going to hold out. So I said I would hold out also. Then in October some senior DLJ bankers came up to Boston to take me out to dinner.
Ed Star and Les Newton came to town. I’d worked with both of these guys during the summer. They were up in Boston to seal the deal, to close the transaction, to lock me in. I was a project to them, just another deal that they needed to close. I was a steer and these were two cattle ranchers rounding me up. They wanted to brand my ass with a hot iron. Looking back, I had no chance.
Star was the head of the Merchant Bank, the most orgasmic place to work on Wall Street. In the Merchant Bank even the junior bankers were allowed to participate in the deals. Just hanging out with Star got me excited. He smelled like money. They didn’t have to corral me and lead me to slaughter, I was ready and willing to walk into the DLJ slaughterhouse all by myself. I was as lubed as the women at Peepland, and ready to sign up.
I wanted to be like Star. He was married to a woman who looked like she was a dancer or a model. People said that he had bought a house in the Hamptons for around $5 million and an apartment in NYC for the same amount. He said that he played golf all the time, and did deals, in between holes, that made him rich. He seemed to be having fun. He had the life, or so I thought. What I didn’t realize was that I would be entering the bank at a level so many rungs below where Star resided that our lives would have about as much resemblance as Cindy Crawford has to the bearded lady at Coney Island. There were dues to pay, pain to experience, and a long journey from associate to managing director. He may have been my role model, but I was fooling myself to think that it came easy.
Les Newton was the golden child. He was young, successful, and rapidly moving up the hierarchy. He had it all. He had investments in deals, lots of disposable income, and what seemed to be a dream job. He looked rested and relaxed. He’d figured out one of the investment banker’s greatest secrets—how to stay up all night working and still look fresh the next day. He was made of rubber, and he was what all MBAs hoped they could be. He had also probably kissed more ass than a toilet seat sees in a year.
I also wanted to be like Les. Les was a good guy. Les played his cards right, played the game well, and he was rewarded for it.
They took me to a strip bar and we spent tons of dough, and then we went to a steak place, ate great steaks, and drank expensive bottles of red wine. We finished the evening off with glasses of port, cheesecake, cigars, and a discussion. They really poured it on and I was loose as a goose and eating it all up. This was what I had imagined banking was all about. Steaks, wine, cigars, naked women, and rich guys. Like the Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party, except with guys who were loaded down with dough.
“Pete, we want you to join DLJ. You’re our favorite candidate. We really want you, we really need you. Say yes now and I’ll make sure you get your signing bonus money in a couple of weeks. I think you’re the type of person who would excel at DLJ and could move up the ladder quickly. When you get to DLJ we want you to work for us. You’re our guy.”
At Harvard the recruiters weren’t allowed to give “exploding” offers. An exploding offer was an offer that automatically got rescinded at a certain date if it hadn’t been accepted. The business schools had outlawed the exploding offers because they wanted all the students to be able to fully assess all their options. This gave the savvy students the ability to shop their offers around. The really smart students would interview with all the banks, all of whom came onto campus early in the recruiting season, and build a book of banking offers. They would then use those offers as backup while they tried to get the much more difficult leveraged buyout shop and hedge fund offers.
The investment banking recruiting machine was not naive to this strategy, though. So the investment banks would not give official offers at all but would wait until the candidate gave them the assurance that he would say yes if offered a job. This was the pinnacle of the mating dance. The proverbial cat-and-mouse game. On the one hand, the banks wanted to give exploding offers so that the business school students wouldn’t use the offers to find better jobs. On the other hand, the school wouldn’t permit exploding offers. Well, the business schools were no match for the investment banking recruiting machines.
Les said, “We’re not giving you an offer, but if we did offer you a job—remember we are saying if—would you accept it within three weeks? If you can’t accept it by the end of October, then we can’t offer you a job.”
“So,” Star chimed in, “we’d like you to climb aboard. So will you? We’re not giving you an offer, but if we did you would have to get back to us by the end of October, because if we didn’t have an indication that you would accept the offer, which we’re not officially making, then we’d have to look for other people and extend them offers instead. So, if you can give us a strong indication that you want to work for DLJ and that you would accept an offer if one was given to you, then we could probably extend you an offer.”
I’m still not sure what a “strong indication” should have been. Should I have jumped up on the table and screamed, “Yes, I want to work at DLJ!” Maybe if I had run outside and peed the letters “DLJ” in the snow, this would have given them a strong indication. The game was ridiculous and I played right into it.
“You have the right stuff,” Star went on. “You’re our kind of guy. You’re the man. You’ll work in Merchant Banking, and do deals, and get levered and make money. We’ll protect you.”
That saying—“We’ll protect you”—is akin to a nineteen-year-old horny high schooler sitting in the backseat of his dad’s car with his eighteen-year-old date and saying, “Trust me.” Somebody’s about to get screwed.
I was so high by this point. These guys had pumped me so full of hot air that I was almost floating away. My head must have been the size of a pumpkin. Right then and there I accepted. I had promised to talk to Rolfe before I accepted, but I couldn’t wait. I sold my soul.
Well, maybe I really didn’t accept anything because they had never officially offered me anything. I went back to my apartment and called Rolfe to tell him what I’d done, but on my answering machine there was Rolfe.
“Hey, Troob, the guys brought me out and I think that this banking thing will be a good move so I went ahead and accepted their offer.”
I spoke to Rolfe and we assured each other that we had made the right decision. Explanations like “This is a great stepping-stone and the hours won’t really be that bad because we’ll be more senior” pervaded our conversation. We had a favorite explanation: “We’ll only work for the good people. They’ll protect us.”
Within a week, I’d received all of the checks that I was now entitled to and had also received a bottle of Dom Perignon with a note attached: “Welcome to the DLJ family.” I thought that this showed class.
A couple of weeks later they flew me to New York to say hello to other bankers and just revel in the bliss of being part of the DLJ team. They sent me plane tickets and had a car pick me up at the airport. I stayed at the Four Seasons and was told to order as much room service as I wanted. The DLJ Hoover machine was sucking me in like a piece of dust on a carpet. I liked the plane flights, the cars, the nice hotels, the feeling of being rich, the lifestyle. I was a junior banker and no one could stop me. God help me.
However, from November through June I didn’t hear from Ed Star, Les Newton, or any of my so-called comrades-in-arms again. At this point, I called Rolfe and found out that he’d had the same experience. This was our first indication that we were just cogs in the Big Machine. Star and Newton had come to Boston and had done what they were contracted by the firm to do. Make me accept a job that they never really offered to me. They had closed the transaction and moved on. Other bankers closed on the Rolfe transaction. We were two excited and eager suckers.
The first contact we had with DLJ after officially accepting our non-official offers came in June when an administrative assistant called to tell us that we had to take a drug test before starting work. Well, this scuttled a whole load of fun plans we’d had for the summer, but we were willing to do whatever it took to be able to be part of the elite DLJ club.
