Monkey Business

by John Rolfe

  Uh-oh, I thought. That must have been one of the messages that I’d accidentally erased the night before in Innsbruck. “All right, look,” I told Melba, “tell him that my plane got delayed and that I just got into Warsaw. I’ll call him in a couple of minutes.”

  My peace was shattered. Not even the tattered remnants of the Iron Curtain could keep my managing directors at bay. There was to be no peace. I trudged up to my room, head held low, and put in a call to Bubbles. First he ripped me a new bunghole. Then he proceeded to generate enough demands related to Project Woodpecker to keep me working frantically for the next four hours. When I was too tired to work any more I called my voice mail back at the office. I had nine new messages. I didn’t listen to any of them. I didn’t care any more. It was 4 A.M.

  Friday, 5 A.M.—I woke up an hour after I’d fallen asleep. I was dazed. I stumbled into the bathroom and, in my confused state, mistook the bidet for a toilet. Why couldn’t the Europeans have just one big porcelain throne in the bathroom like the Americans did? I didn’t get it. They refused to shower regularly, but wanted to have the cleanest asses in town.

  Friday, 12 Noon—Friday morning was free. It had been scheduled that way to give us time to do some sightseeing around Warsaw. But that was a pipe dream. I sat in my hotel room instead and did some cleanup work on Project Woodpecker.

  The diligence sessions on the Polish cellular operations began at noon. Poland was GWA’s crown jewel. A big chunk of the expected offering proceeds had been earmarked to pay for the buildout of the Polish system. We had to pray that the money from the offering would actually be used to build the system and wouldn’t end up in an anonymous bank account in the Cayman Islands. It was now Friday afternoon and I’d only had fourteen hours of sleep since the previous Monday morning. The chairs were comfortable and there was no way to keep my eyes open. I fell into a deep sleep. Diligence be damned.

  Friday, 7 P.M.—GWA had planned a special dinner for us. Some dignitaries from the Canadian embassy showed up. I sat across from the ambassador. He was a big, fat jolly guy who looked a lot like Santa Claus. He spent most of the dinner drinking plum wine. I didn’t want him to feel alone so I joined in. Before going to bed I called New York and checked my voice mail. I had six new messages.

  Saturday, 12 Noon—We got on a plane and chased daylight for twelve hours. Warsaw to Frankfurt to London to New York, 5,000 miles. It was 5 P.M. Saturday—New York time—when we finally landed. I thought about bending over to kiss the ground when I got off the plane at Kennedy International Airport, but my back was really killing me from all the hours that I’d spent in plane seats that week, and the ground didn’t look so clean.

  Sunday, 9 A.M.—I spent three and a half hours responding to the forty voice mails I’d gotten during my previous week’s absence. I did it from home because I didn’t want anybody to see me in the office and know that I was back in the country. That could spell trouble. I held a cloth over the phone as I returned each voice mail so that it would sound like I was far away.

  Sunday, 8 P.M.—The trip wasn’t over yet. We still had to go to Mexico City. Another 1,900 miles. Another five hours. We didn’t get into our hotel until about 2 A.M. By the time we finally walked into the lobby, we all looked like such pieces of dung that I swear I saw the lady behind the front desk grab for the Bat Phone to call security. I wouldn’t have cared. I could have slept anywhere, even in a Mexican jail.

  Monday, 8 A.M.—We sat in a room, listening to guys with heavy Mexican accents talk about how great their business was, and looking at metal boxes with blinking lights on them. I can’t even remember what GWA owned in Mexico City. I think that it was either paging or cellular or dispatch radio. Maybe it was a grocery store or a whorehouse. It didn’t really matter. I was a robot. I was a dog. I was dead tired.

  Monday, 9 P.M.—Home for good. Finally. The diligence was finished. I fell asleep in my suit.

  I’d spent eight days doing diligence on GWA’s foreign operations. I’d traveled 12,000 miles through seven countries and eight time zones. I was now the sole fount of DLJ’s institutional knowledge on GWA’s operations. I’d slept through a few diligence sessions and zoned out through almost all of the others. All I had to show for the eight days’ work was a page and a half of notes and a headache. DLJ was going to attempt to sell GWA’s equity to their best institutional accounts based on my assertions that the deal was a good one. I hoped that somebody, somewhere, had their fingers crossed.

  Bonuses, Reviews,

  and Compensation

  Me want cookie!

  —Cookie Monster

  “He’s a fuckstick. A complete fuckstick.”

  Troob and I were sitting in the back of the biannual analyst review session. Andrew Gold, a second-year associate, was giving his assessment of one of the first-year analysts, Carl Kantor. Doug Franken, the managing director in charge of all staffing matters for investment banking, didn’t understand what Goldy was trying to say. He asked for some clarification.

  “Goldy, what’s a fuckstick? I don’t know what a fuckstick is.”

  Goldy clarified. “A fuckstick is a stick that’s only good for one thing and that’s for cramming up somebody’s ass. It’s no good as a walking stick. It’s no good for stickball. It’s only good for sticking into a butt. It’s the stupidest, most worthless kind of stick there is. That’s what Kantor is. He’s a fuckstick.”

  Franken decided that this one was worth digging into a little deeper. “Give me a little help here, Goldy. What is it that Kantor did that endeared him to you so deeply?”

  “He built a merger model for me that left an entire division out of the final roll-up for the merged entity. We delivered a goddamned fairness opinion to the committee based on a model with one of the target’s primary divisions missing. It was a disgrace. I can’t work with somebody like that. We should fire him.”

  I looked over at Troob. I knew that we were thinking the same thing. Kantor, the analyst, wasn’t the fuckstick. Goldy was the fuckstick. It was basic. You didn’t tell a monkey to make a merger model for you and then expect that there wouldn’t be any mistakes. You had to check the monkey’s work, because monkeys were always liable to leave a few banana peels lying behind. We knew that Goldy was lazy and that his laziness had finally caught up to him on this one. He just didn’t want to go down alone. He wanted to take Kantor down with him.

  Troob and I had to come to Kantor’s defense. He was a good kid. Overworked, but good. He’d done a lot of work for both me and Troob. We’d promised him that we’d go to bat for him during the review. Troob spoke up.

  “Kantor’s a good man. Goldy’s rap is bullshit. The kid’s here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He’s walked through walls for me. The wrong walls sometimes, but he’s walked through walls. We’re not training brain surgeons, we’re training apes. Kantor’s a good ape.”

  The room was quiet for a minute. The other associates didn’t know what to do. As associates, nodding our heads in agreement was an involuntary reflex. We’d been taught to always concur. Conflict was confusing. Finally, somebody else spoke up.

  “Yeah, I think that Kantor’s good. He’s always done good work for me. I like him.”

  The tide had turned. The associate gods were now smiling on Kantor. His review would be favorable. He’d get his bonus.

  Twice a year all the DLJ associates piled into a conference room. We sat in padded chairs and ate macaroni salad. Managing Director Franken and the senior associate in charge of analyst staffing sat at the front of the room like two Indian chiefs. They read the names of the analysts off one by one in alphabetical order. As each name was read, the associates who had worked with that analyst weighed in with their judgment of the analyst’s worth. Those assessments were used, in turn, to determine the analysts’ bonuses—bonuses that ranged anywhere from $30,000 for a first-year analyst to $100,000 for a third-year analyst. We were all sworn to secrecy regarding the review session’s proceedings. We were told that if w
ord ever got out that we had divulged details of the review session’s proceedings the repercussions would be fast and furious. It was our own little Star Chamber. We were horse traders, checking out the teeth and gums of the old nags to determine their health before we sent them packing to the glue factory. For a few short hours we had the power.

  There were two problems with these review sessions. The first was that outside of the review sessions we’d been conditioned to always tow the party line. Independent thought wasn’t valued. We were processors. We weren’t allowed to have our own opinions; we were only allowed to have our managing directors’ opinions. So, when they locked us into the room twice a year for these analyst review sessions and asked for our opinions most of us didn’t know what to do. We usually panicked and fell back onto our instinctive reflex—nodding in agreement.

  In practice, what this meant was that there was generally complete unanimity on every analyst’s review. If the first associate to speak gave a glowing review, then all the other reviews that followed would glow like kryptonite. If the first associate to speak trashed the analyst, forget about it. Resurrection was unlikely, and the offending analyst could end up with $30,000 less than his more fortunate counterparts. The tide, once it began to ebb or flow, was difficult to stem. The associates at the review session all wanted to be on the same helicopter out of Ho Chi Minh City, whether it was headed deeper into the jungle or back to the DMZ. That’s how we’d been trained.

  The other problem with the analyst review sessions was that they inevitably degenerated into outlets for the months of frustration that we ourselves had suffered at the hands of our vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and managing directors. They’d spanked, whipped, and bludgeoned us and we had to pass those beatings along to help clear our anger. If our right of passage was going to be difficult, we were surely going to make the analysts’ right of passage that much more miserable. The biannual review sessions were the only opportunity that we had to inflict that abuse in front of an audience. Beating the dog was a much more satisfying exercise with people watching. Our mothers would not have been proud.

  As we sat in these reviews, there was an unspoken concern in the back of all of our minds. We all recognized that the reviews were bullshit. We knew that the reviews didn’t do a good of job rewarding the analysts who deserved to be rewarded and canning the ones who didn’t. We knew that an analyst’s reviews depended on what kind of a day the associates who had worked with that analyst were having. We also knew that if Franken, the senior banker taking notes on each analyst, had an itch on his ass when a good comment was being made about one of the analysts, then that analyst could be shit out of luck because Franken wouldn’t write it down. We also knew that a roomful of vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and managing directors were reviewing us the same way that we were reviewing the analysts. We knew that the process wasn’t any more equitable for us than it was for the analysts. We knew that for us the stakes were higher because the bonuses that were on the line were that much bigger. There was that much more to worry about.

  At DLJ, the culmination of reviews came in early February each year with the announcement of bonuses. DLJ was late in the process. Bankers at Goldman and Morgan got their bonus numbers in late December. Most of the other investment banks gave out their numbers in January. Not DLJ. DLJ waited to see what kind of bonuses the other banks were giving out, and then they figured out how much they’d have to pay to keep the golden rats from jumping. The upshot was that there was a six-week period every year between late December and early February during which we began hearing stirrings through the grapevine about what the other banks were paying out. As the six weeks passed, we worked ourselves into an increasing state of agitation. Work slowed to a crawl. Bonuses were all we thought, talked, and cared about. We could have been diagnosed with a terminal case of rancid halitosis and it wouldn’t have mattered. We’d spent twelve months busting our humps and kissing the ass of the institution with the expectation that we’d be well compensated. If our counterparts at the other banks ended up making more than us, we figured that we might as well be kissing ass there. After all, at the end of the day it wasn’t like a DLJ ass was any tastier than a Morgan Stanley ass.

  Every associate who knew an associate at another investment bank became a potential source of intelligence. Rumor ran rampant. We would all get on the phone and begin calling people whom we hadn’t spoken to since business school.

  “Hey, man, it’s Johnny Rolfe calling. Do you guys have your nums yet?”

  “Yeah, we got them.”

  “What’s the range?”

  “Eighty thousand on the low end, $110,000 on the high end.”

  “Shit, that’s not bad.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “I heard that Goldman was $90,000 to $130,000. They’re the best so far. Bankers Trust came in $70,000 to $100,000. Cheap bastards.”

  That was the extent of the conversation. No formalities. No “Hi, how have things been since business school?” The nature of the call was clear, the need for information was accepted. The ritual was embraced by associates at every bank. We were on a mission.

  As soon as one of us got a new data point, it was instantaneously disseminated among our classmates. It was like magic, we could smell the money. We approached the information-gathering task on comparable company bonuses with more zeal than any of us had ever mustered for a deal. This was our bank account that we were talking about. There could be no secrets. We knew that if the investment banking department had an unusually profitable year the bonuses might go up modestly, and if the year really sucked they might drop a bit. In general, though, the size of our bonuses was much less affected by the bank’s profitability than it was for the more senior bankers. What really mattered was how well we were paid in relation to our peers at other banks.

  DLJ had always had a reputation for paying top dollar. For a second-year associate that could mean an incremental $30,000 in the bonus over what associates at the other banks were getting. The only other bank that consistently had payouts equal to DLJ was Goldman, so the first numbers that we always tried to get were the Goldman numbers. Those set the hurdle for us. Some banks like PaineWebber ended up at the bottom of the payout scale every year. Troob and I were never able to figure out what the associates at those places used as their yardstick. As far as we were concerned, if our payout from DLJ wasn’t one of the top three on the Street, then we might as well be working for Dairy Queen. We didn’t have any other way to measure our success. It wasn’t the money. We needed the bragging rights.

  After six weeks of obsessive focus on what we were going to get paid, it was inevitable that when we actually got the number it would be a letdown. Regardless of what the bonus number was, if fireworks didn’t go off with a brass band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” in the background it would seem like our obsession had been misplaced. We’d spent close to two months puffing up like peacocks to convince ourselves that we actually deserved a cash bonus that, a year and a half out of business school, would take our total compensation for the year close to $200,000. By the time judgment day rolled around we were damned sure that if we only ended with total comp for the year of $180,000, we were getting raped. We weren’t about to take that shit lying down.

  Jim Firestone, the head of my group, called me on the phone.

  “John, why don’t you come down to my office for a couple of minutes. We need to talk about your bonus.”

  I walked down the hall toward Firestone’s office. What awaited me? Would it be fame and fortune? Humiliation and ruin? I’d soon find out.

  As I entered Firestone’s office he motioned me toward the sofa. So be it. Firestone handed me a piece of paper. It was a memo addressed to me from Steven Tolls and Brock LeBlank, the chairman and vice chairman of the Banking Group. At the top, it said “Annual bonus and compensation.”

  Firestone began to speak. “John, we’ve been extraordinarily pleased with your performanc
e this year. The firm has also had a great year. Your bonus reflects all of that….”

  I didn’t hear a single word he was saying. I began to scan the memo, frantically looking for numbers. They were not hard to find; they were in the first paragraph.

  We are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded a cash bonus of $125,000…you also received $19,000 in special incentives for your role in lead-managed IPOs…together with your salary…your total compensation…is $209,000.

  There it was. That was it. The anticipation was over. The number was pretty good, as good as Goldman’s numbers. I’d just made over ten times as much money as I’d made in my last year of full-time work in advertising before going to business school. The more successful managing directors whom I was working for would, in turn, make ten times as much as I had. That was a steep income curve. That was what awaited me if I could just tough it out. I couldn’t be happy just yet, though. I didn’t know what my classmates had made. Even though I’d just made $209,000, there was a possibility that my classmates had all made $215,000. If that was the case, then I was either a guinea pig, an idiot, or chopped liver.

  Firestone, meanwhile, was still droning on in the background. He was reading excerpts from some of the written reviews that the vice presidents and managing directors whom I’d worked with had submitted. He was a thorough guy and wanted me to hear the whole story.

  “…John’s a real team player, a valuable asset to the Communications and Entertainment group.”

  “…he shows great maturity. He can always be relied on to get the job done.”