Monkey Business

by John Rolfe

  When a job gets delivered to the copy center the associate has to fill out a requisition form. The requisition form includes spaces for all of the options. It looks like a test form for the SATs. It’s important for the associate to mark the requisition forms very carefully, because the copy center guys do exactly what the requisition forms request. They aren’t there to think, they’re there to do. If an associate gets a job back, and is convinced that the copy center has screwed it up, he’ll march into the copy center and start yelling. His copies are screwed up and he wants to see some heads roll. The copy center guy behind the counter will look beneath the counter for the requisition form. Most of the time, he’ll pull it out and, with a big smile on his face, show the junior banker that the form was marked wrong. That makes the copy center guy feel good. If the copy center guy says that he can’t find the requisition form, that’s the secret code for “We fucked it up.” The copy center will never openly admit that they fucked it up, though. They know how to cover their ass.

  Troob knew how frustrating the copy center could be. Part of the reason for that was that he did a lot of work for Jack Gatorski, and Gator loved to get copies made. Troob once told me that he thought Gator had a strange thing for copies. It went way beyond just being a Paper Banker. He swore that he’d once seen Gator get a big stack of copies back from the copy center that were still warm, and that Gator had closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and started stroking the warm paper.

  Gator was crazy when it came to getting copies made. He especially loved color copies. Charts, graphs, maps, pictures, he loved all that shit. Whenever I did a pitch for him we’d sit down to run through a draft of the pitch book and I’d be saying to myself over and over, “Please, God, not too many color copies. Please, Lord, not too many color copies. Just don’t let him ask for too many color copies; please, please, please.” My supplications were never answered. The good Lord never came to my rescue. Gator’s penchant for color copies always overcame whatever practical sensibilities he may have had.

  The problem with the color copies was that they gummed up the entire pitch book–making process. With all the state-of-the-art high-technology equipment that they had up in the copy center, the process of actually assembling the pitch books was barbaric. The black-and-white copies got made on one machine, and the color copies got made on another, much slower machine. Whichever copy center guy was putting the books together then had to collate everything by hand. The copy center guy would have fifty piles, each one a separate copy of the book, spread out all over the room and he’d be pulling copies off the color copier and sticking them into each of the piles where they were supposed to go. Well, if you’ve only got three or four color pages in each book then there isn’t all that much room for error, but in one of Gator’s books there were usually more color pages than black-and-white pages, which meant that no matter how conscientious the copy center guy was, chances were that something was gonna get screwed up. Layer on top of that the fact that the copy center guy was only making seven dollars an hour so he didn’t usually give a fuck, and he had twenty other bankers calling him every fifteen minutes to ask him when their more straightforward black-and-white jobs were gonna be done, and it was a recipe for disaster.

  What it all meant was that every time I got a set of pitch books back from the copy center, I had to page through every single copy by hand to make sure that all the pages were in order, that all the copies had been made on the same kind of paper, and that some random crap hadn’t made its way into my pitch book from somebody else’s pitch book. It was like doing piecework for an Eighth Avenue sweatshop. When I did find the inevitable mistakes, I couldn’t bitch and moan about them to the guy in the copy center who had screwed things up, because he’d just end up getting pissed off and fucking me over the next time I needed a favor. In fact, I usually had to take the books back up to the copy center and act like the mistakes were my fault, and beg and plead for the copy center guys to fix the books so that I could meet the deadline, which was usually within ten hours. The copy center guys hated it when I brought back jobs that they thought they’d seen the last of, so I usually had to provide them with some extra incentive to make things right. My big sales tool was lap dances down at Shenanigans. I’d offer to buy the guys a few lap dances each, and they’d usually take care of me.

  There was one time when I got my pitch books back at 4:30 in the morning. The copy center guy who had just finished them up had taken off for home as soon as he was done and a new copy center guy was on call. Well, as usual, the pitchbooks were all fucked up. I had to be on a flight for Cincinnati with the books in three and a half hours so I had a little bit of a problem. To explain the problem to the new guy and go over what he’d have to do to fix it would take hours, and to do it myself was impossible because I didn’t know how to use the machines. So a fifty-dollar bill emerged from my pocket and two pepperoni double cheese pizzas helped to cajole my newfound friend in the copy center—Manuel—to help me go through each book, book by book, and fix them.

  Manuel and I went through each book and through both pizzas. First, each book needed a new page twelve. Fourteen books and each one needed page twelve changed. Then the back cover needed to be put on each book, then page thirty-four needed to be replaced by a color graph. Page seven had to be removed and a new page seven had to be inserted. Pages twenty-four and twenty-five were inverted so they had to be switched around, and page forty-two was behind page forty-three, so that needed to be fixed. All of the books needed to be checked again.

  It was 6:30 A.M. when we got done, or so I thought. When I checked the books some were still fucked up. The monotony of making the same changes in every book was mind-numbing and Manuel and I were incapable of keeping all the changes straight. So, back we went to the spiral binder and copy machine to fix the mistakes. Basically, everyone else’s jobs got screwed, but I had forked out fifty bones and two pizzas. At 7:30 we were done. I had half an hour to get to the airport. I had packed a bag the night before and left it in the office knowing that something like this would happen. It inevitably did. I ran to a cab with fourteen pitch books, an overnight bag, my briefcase, a cell phone, and no sleep.

  For the past year, I’d been dating this girl Marjorie. Since she lived in Chicago, we had been doing the long-distance thing. Lately, things between us had started to get more serious. I called her from the cab and left a message on her answering machine saying hello and “I’m sorry.” I felt bad. The previous weekend she had come to New York to visit me and had ended up sitting in my apartment the whole time because I had to work. Thank God for 1–800-FLOWERS.

  In the cab I checked the books and ten were good, two were slightly messed up, and two were completely fucked up. I took one of the messed up ones for myself and prayed that after giving one good one to Gator there wouldn’t be more than nine guys from the company who wanted pitch books. I dumped the two fucked-up pitch books in the garbage at La Guardia.

  I made it to the gate at the airport just as they were about to stop letting people onto the plane. I made my way to my seat, and there was Gator reading the Wall Street Journal and looking fresh as a spring daisy. He glanced up at me and said, “It’s a good goddamned thing you made it, because if you hadn’t there would’ve been hell to pay. You look like shit. You’re an embarrassment.”

  Gator and I had gone through a lot over the previous year. I had a grudging respect for him. I can remember him being a good guy—at times—but this time he was an asshole. Maybe the pressure to perform pushed him to be a fuckhead. Whatever the case, I almost yanked him up, pulled his trousers down, and shoved that whole bag full of pitch books straight up his ass.

  There wasn’t a lot of love lost between Troob and Gator after this incident. I think that in another life they might have been friends. They might have enjoyed each other’s company. They weren’t in another life, though. They were in a life that involved color copies. For the time being that made them enemies.

  The Hol
iday Party

  Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

  —Mae West

  The first weeks and months that Troob and I spent at DLJ as full-time associates were painful. The constant pitching, the endless valuation shenanigans, the long nights spent kissing the asses of the coterie of word processing pixies, and the gifts to the copy center Barrio. These exercises in futility clearly weren’t the activities that a young investment banker’s wet dreams were made of. We continued to hold out hope, though. Hope that we’d turn into deal doers and rainmakers. Hope that we’d have a compensation review session where the head of our department would bestow upon us a zillion-dollar bonus. Hope that John Chalsty, DLJ’s CEO, would call us into his office and tell us, “You’re my guys. I need you. I’m gonna build the business around you.” Selective perception was still operating at full tilt, and for the most part we were still seeing and hearing mainly those things that helped fuel the dream.

  Deals came and went. Different companies, different needs, different industries, and different deal teams. The only real constant in our daily lives was that we walked into the office every morning knowing that our day was going to be completely different than the day before had been. We learned to expect the unexpected, and became accustomed to operating as if absolutely everything we worked on was critical to the future welfare of the free world. We were learning how to operate in a pressure cooker without getting basted.

  Although each day was different there was a broad sort of daily routine that we all followed. Being a junior banker meant being a night person. That, in turn, meant that none of the associates usually rolled into the office before about 9 A.M. Inevitably, when we did roll in, there would be something that needed checking. Mornings were checking time. Maybe it was something that we’d left to get turned through word processing on our way out the door the night before. Maybe one of the analysts had built a new financial model and left a copy on our desks. Whatever it was, we’d spend the morning going through it line by line to make sure we weren’t going to get our heads chewed off as a result of somebody else’s screwup.

  The checking routine usually lasted until around lunchtime. Now, at most jobs lunch divides the day into two. There’s “before lunch” and there’s “after lunch.” Once the majority of corporate America has made it through lunch, it’s a downhill ride. Investment banking doesn’t work like that. An investment banking associate has four parts to his day: “before lunch,” “after lunch,” “after dinner,” and “after midnight.”

  Lunchtime at DLJ meant that the day was just getting started. We usually ate lunch at our desks. That was the low-risk way to keep our heads down. Sometimes, if we were feeling adventurous, we’d round up a crew of our comrades and head down to the cafeteria. Eating in the cafeteria was a dangerous game, though. The big risk was that Doug Franken, the managing director in charge of staffing, would see us there and interpret our presence as a sign of sloth. It was a game of Russian roulette whenever Franken caught us down in the cafeteria. We knew that one of us would end up having to take a bullet for the team, we just never knew which one of us it would be.

  The “after lunch” part of the day was usually taken up with meetings. Meetings with clients. Meetings with potential clients. Meetings with deal teams. Meetings with lawyers and accountants. If we couldn’t meet in person, we’d do it by conference call. We had deal team meetings before the client meetings to figure out what we were going to talk about at the client meetings. We had deal team meetings after the client meetings to talk about what we’d just gotten done talking about. As associates, we grew to hate meetings because meetings were the places where little ideas capable of generating huge amounts of work were spawned. The words “I’ve got an idea…” were anathema to us. When we heard them, our hearts dropped into our loafers.

  There were some managing directors who didn’t confine their idea generation only to meetings. Some of them preferred to perpetrate evil through the voice mail system. The Widow used to use the voice mail system to avoid human contact altogether. He would sit in his lair and create voice mails full of new ideas, and then send them to my mail box without ever actually calling me. Many an afternoon I sat at my desk and saw the message light go on without the phone ever ringing. Whenever that happened, I knew that it was one of the Widow’s insidious mail bombs.

  It was tough to get any real work done while the senior bankers were still around. That’s why so many days included “after dinner” and “after midnight.” The managing directors usually took off by dinnertime, which meant that the phones would finally stop ringing and that we’d be able to get cranking on the latest fire drill. Before we did, though, we had a nightly routine whereby Troob, Slick, and I would corral three of our other comrades-in-arms for a tête-à-tête. These three other regulars were Isaac “Big Man” Johnson, who worked in the high-yield group and who had once walked straight into a wall as a result of sleep deprivation; Mike “Wings” Roganstahl, who always dressed to the nines and thought he worked in the merchant banking group but in reality was a generalist peon like the rest of us; and our friend Deepak “Tubby” Verrna from the M&A group whose fat gut and tiny ass usually made his suit pants look like an opera diva’s muumuu. Each night we would commandeer a conference room, order dinner, and spend at least a half hour crapping all over everybody who’d crapped on us earlier that day.

  Dinner was full of insults and profanity. Nobody was called by their real name. Everybody was “pricko,” “fuck-face,” or “jackass.” We reveled in insulting each other’s dignity. The free-for-all at dinner was the glue that held us all together. On a nightly basis, it gave us the opportunity to try to convince each other that the dream was still alive, while we collectively came to the dawning realization that we were investment banking automatons marching in lockstep to the same inevitable fate. Dinner was our group therapy.

  Dinner wasn’t just five nights a week. We were usually there on weekends, too. Every night at dinner there was one thing we could rely on—Slick’s dinner order. Slick ordered the same thing every night: penne bolognese, tira misu, and two small bottles of San Pelegrino sparkling water. The rest of us would mix it up a little, but not Slick. He never deviated. In our first year at DLJ, Slick was probably on the road a total of fifty days. There were probably a total of another twenty days that fell on weekends when he was out of the office at dinnertime. That means that we sat in a conference room watching Slick down penne bolognese, tira misu, and two little bottles of San Pelegrino sparkling water 290 times in that first year. That’s a lot of bolognese. Troob and I think that penne bolognese was Slick’s emotional anchor. No matter what happened during the day, Slick always knew that the penne bolognese would be waiting for him at night. It was like a girlfriend, only better, because the penne bolognese was always on time, didn’t get mad at him for being at work all night, and didn’t yell at him when he had to cancel a vacation.

  “After dinner” was creation time. God may have created first and rested later, but an investment banking associate rests first—at dinner—and creates later; 8 P.M. to midnight was prime time. We drafted pitch books, built models, updated comps, and wrote memos. Computers cranked, pencils flew, and steam came out of our ears. It was the one time of the day when we felt like we were actually moving ahead and weren’t either treading water or slowly sinking. If we were lucky, if the fire drill wasn’t so urgent that something had to be created for the following morning, we’d be able to head home by midnight. Often, though, that wasn’t possible.

  If the fire drill was real, then the day rolled into the “after midnight” segment. After midnight the associate became a conductor. The creation of the raw material was complete, but the transformation of that raw material into something presentable was only beginning. After midnight the associate stepped up to the riser, raised a baton, and brought the orchestra to life. Word processing, copy center, and the young analyst monkey boys each played their part in the symphony. Som
e movements played fast and furious, others slow and serene, but the music rarely stopped. If it did, the associate would slip into an adjustable chair and close his eyes for a few moments of bliss until the music began again. The after-midnight segment could end at 2 A.M., 5 A.M., or it could end at 8 A.M. All we could hope for was that it would end at least a few hours before the routine was all set to begin again the next morning. Spending two, or even three days straight on the Ferris wheel with no sleep wasn’t easy.

  So with all this crap, all this garbage that we were piling through, what was the bottom line? A lot of anguish, never saying no, and about 100 hours a week spent in the trenches. There are only 168 hours in a week, and working 100 of them meant that we had to work every day, seven days a week. Taking corporate car rides home, showering in the mornings, and searching for our lost identities before we went to bed at night enveloped 20 hours of our week. Making a lame attempt at a social life engulfed 15 hours of the week. So that left 33 hours of our week for sleeping. That meant an average of four and a half hours a night. So with this little sleep, there are two obvious questions: (1) Were we productive? and (2) Weren’t we constantly tired?

  The answers to these questions are simple. We shouldn’t have been productive, but we were, and yes—we were always tired. Investment banks are savvy. DLJ was no exception. It knew how to squeeze every drop of productivity out of our little bodies. The investment banks keep the climate perfect for an around-the-clock working environment. Within DLJ the lighting and air-conditioning systems were like a Las Vegas casino. The lights were bright and fluorescent. The air was kept cold, crisp, and dry. It always felt like the middle of the day, even at five in the morning. When we finally left our investment banking casino and stepped into the outside world we came crashing down. But while we were inside the walls we were as productive as little beavers building a dam. We scurried around like lab rats in a cage and were full of nervous energy. Like casino gamblers, we had a lot to give and expectations of much in return.