by John Rolfe
“…I really enjoy working with John. The clients all speak highly of him.”
“…John shows great promise as a banker. He has the potential to be a real star.”
I wasn’t listening. All the excerpts that Firestone was reading to me were generic. I began to suspect that the vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and managing directors each had a drawer full of Xerox copies of their associate review sheets, fully prepared except for the “name” slot. They each probably had three different sheets; “Good,” “Average,” and “Crap,” which they affixed names to each year when reviews came due.
Firestone was just finishing up.
“John, you’re at the top of your class this year and your bonus reflects that. You’re almost in a league of your own. It’s very important that you don’t discuss your compensation with any of your classmates. That information is nobody’s business but yours and we expect it to stay that way.”
I stood up to go. I was thinking about what Firestone had just said, the part about not discussing my compensation with any of my classmates. I’d been expecting something like that. I’d been warned by others. Their rationale was transparent. That information was power and if none of us told each other how we’d been compensated, then they could tell each of us whatever they wanted to and we’d all be happy clams. They could pay each of us the same amount and then tell each of us that we were at the top of the class. Our egos would remain intact and there’d be no dissension. We were too smart for that, though. We had a plan.
My classmates and I had devised a plan to circumvent the call for secrecy. We all felt a little gun-shy about telling each other what our actual bonus numbers were, so we had come up with a system beforehand that would protect our anonymity while still giving us the strategic advantage of full disclosure. We’d all agreed to meet in a conference room, write our bonus numbers down on a piece of paper, and throw them into a hat. One of us would then take all the pieces of paper, write down the numbers from highest to lowest, and distribute copies of the list to everybody. That way, we’d all know where we really panned out in the hierarchy among our classmates. If anybody thought that they’d gotten fucked, they could bitch and moan about it to the higher powers. They could make their dissatisfaction known. The balance of power would shift from them to us. We’d hold the cards.
I got back to my office and called Slick.
“Hey, Slick, it’s Rolfe. I got my nums, how about you?”
“Yeah, I got ‘em. When are we meeting?”
“That’s what I’m calling to find out. Round up the troops. Let’s get this over with.”
“OK.”
Ten minutes later, Slick called me back. “Rolfe, you’re not gonna believe this.”
“What?”
“Everybody’s bailing on us. Nobody wants to do it anymore.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s being straight with me. They’ve all got bullshit excuses.”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Each of us had been told that we were at the top of the class. We all had a pretty good idea that we were being given a line of crap, but nobody really wanted to find out that they weren’t, in fact, the best. Investment banking had a way of attracting arrogant fuckers like us, and that was our Achilles’ heel. The big boys knew that. They knew us better than we knew ourselves. We were screwed.
“Slick, what was your total comp number, man? Did it have a two in front of it?”
“Yeah, it did.”
“Did they tell you that you were at the top of the class?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
“You don’t figure that we’re really the best, do you?”
“No way. They must have told everybody the same thing. I’m gonna call Wings. He’s still in for figuring out where we stand. I’ll find out what he got.”
I called Wings. His number had a two in front of it also. They’d told him that he was at the top of the class. There was a pattern. It was no coincidence. They’d played us like a shopworn fiddle. We were hopeless amateurs. My phone rang. It was Gator.
“Rolfe, I’ve got a high-yield pitch that needs doing. I’m gonna need to see a draft by tomorrow morning because the pitch is on Thursday. Why don’t you come up to my office so that we can talk about exactly what we’re gonna need for this thing.”
Fuck. That meant that an all-nighter lay ahead. Reality hit me like an acute case of Montezuma’s revenge. The evanescent joy of my big payday exhaled its final gasp and was no more. I’d worked for a year, obsessed for six weeks, and enjoyed the fruits of my labors for ten minutes. Now it was back into the dark underbelly of my investment banking existence. I remembered that I was nothing but unwanted garbage. I took a deep breath and headed for Gator’s office.
The Epiphany
The good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to dress up for it.
—Truman Capote
The dream. Was it worth it? Was big money by thirty the goal, or would we rather enjoy our lives? Could you have both and still be an investment banking associate? You can be rich at thirty, forty, or fifty, but you can’t recapture your youth. You can’t buy time and you can’t buy happiness. Time marches on. The DLJ annual report said “Have fun.” We weren’t.
During our first few months at DLJ the dream was still alive and well in our minds. We didn’t take notice of the sorry state of our lives. We didn’t realize that we no longer had a life at work and a life outside of work. All had become one. At some point, though, as the numbing months of toil rolled on, our views began to change. For Troob, the change was gradual—a nagging periodic sense that he was missing something, that something wasn’t right. Troob was still in his relationship with Marjorie, his beauty from Chicago. Things had been rocky for them at times, but I could tell that he wanted to make it work. He had taken it to the next level, and was now professing his undying love for her. He was worried because he had seen Slick and other colleagues break off their impending engagements due to the pressures of the job. His life was deteriorating and it bothered him. He was a guy who used to work out every day. He had once been lean and mean. Now, when he put a swimsuit on, he looked like a big pink piece of Spam in a can. His negative feelings, only occasional at first, began recurring with increasing frequency until the dull buzz couldn’t be ignored any longer.
Things were different for me. The feeling was more than a nagging sense; it was an epiphany. It was a thunderbolt from the blue.
I am a man. Like other men, I have needs. I need women to tell me that they like me, I crave the company of women. I desire their pleasures.
When my classmates and I began our journey through the web of DLJ, most of us had significant others. We were all fresh out of business school. We had all landed sought-after positions as investment bankers with the mighty DLJ. We all had high opinions of ourselves. We had taken a giant first step toward establishing ourselves as players in the financial fast lane. For most of us, an indispensable square on that quilt of plenty was our significant other. As our first year wore on, however, the devotion to the job that was required of us began to wear on many of these heavenly matches. One after another, my classmates got dumped, thrown out, and had engagements broken off by mates who concluded that a healthy paycheck wasn’t nearly enough compensation for a partner who was never there.
Not me. I didn’t have a girlfriend to begin with so there was nobody there to dump me. I had become quite accustomed to pleasuring myself, and while my classmates searched for enough free time to make it to the gym to work out, I had no need for such common pursuits. Due to my natural ardor, and my need to satisfy that ardor through self-gratification, I was now sporting some of the strongest forearms in the banking division. Popeye had nothing on me.
It wasn’t long after my banking career began that an irrepressible urge for self-gratification at the workplace first hit me. I haven’t seen many published statistics on this sort of cont
emptible behavior, but I think that most people have enough self-control to resist whatever urges may traverse their loins. Unfortunately, while most people can waylay their needs for several hours and, upon returning home, achieve momentary nirvana, the task isn’t so easy for a lecherous young banker. If the urge to indulge hits at 4 P.M., chances are that there are another good ten hours of work ahead before you’re going to be able to take care of business.
At least that was how I justified it to myself the first time I slunk into the DLJ men’s room in search of pleasure.
The problem with breaking a taboo is that, once you’ve broken it, there’s no turning back. My forays into the men’s room became more and more frequent, my lust for life more unquenchable. I was a super sperm dynamo and nobody was going to stop me.
One thing led to another. I became emboldened. One night, in the wee hours of the A.M., the urge settled in as I sat at my desk. I was so tired. I didn’t want to move. Just one lone act of passion couldn’t hurt.
I poked my head out into the corridor. It was 3 A.M., there was nobody around. I can do it just this once, I convinced myself, then never again. It’s not like it’s going to take me long to close the deal. What are the chances of getting caught? Who’s even around to catch me? I didn’t care if I was going to go blind and get hairy palms. I was out of control.
And so the action for satisfaction began. I didn’t get caught. It didn’t take long. And when the dirty deed was finished, I sat back to bask in the momentary glow of a job well done. I craved a cigarette, but had none. It was during this moment of reflection that I had my epiphany.
In my pre-performance haste to ensure that none of my colleagues were still around, I’d forgotten about the thousands of potential spectators who lay directly across the street. My life was DLJ. Only the DLJ people mattered. Others were irrelevant.
One entire wall of my office was glass. It looked out onto two adjacent office buildings. At 3 A.M. most of the offices in my building were dark. Any offices that were still lit up at 3 A.M. demanded the attention of anybody who happened to be looking out a window in one of the adjacent buildings. To break it down, I was spanking off on a Broadway stage and everybody in the two adjacent buildings was my audience. Did any of my neighbors watch my performance? Was it worthy of a Tony? I don’t know. If they did, their image of investment bankers must have been permanently disfigured. It was 3 A.M., I was sitting at my office desk, and I’d just finished spanking. I was worthless and weak. There was no longer any life outside the office. That was my epiphany, and it was the beginning of the end of my life as an investment banker.
My public stroke-a-thon in the office might not, by itself, have been enough to turn my career tide against investment banking. I might have surveyed my sorry display but concluded that my perversities were mine alone and would persist regardless of the career venue in which I was placed. Fortunately, I was able to look around at DLJ and see the remains of age-old bankers who had probably once been like me. I could see the guys who’d been bankers for twenty years, had never been married, and were as perverted as Pee-Wee Herman in a raincoat. Banking was their life, and banking had been their death. I could see these people, and take hope that maybe it was banking that had made them the way they were. If it was banking, I reasoned, escape might provide me with an opportunity for redemption.
The textbook example of one of these filthy career bankers was Kirk Flynn, aka Captain Kirk. He was a senior vice president. He was a pervert. He was a teacher. He was a friend. Most of all, though, he was my eye-opener—the guy who made me realize what I didn’t want to become.
Everybody, everywhere has a friend or relative who they keep quiet about. Usually, it’s because that person says and does things that are so incredibly egregious, outrageous, and patently unacceptable that their behavior is inevitably going to end up serving as a source of total embarrassment. What most people fail to admit, even to themselves, however, is that they enjoy that person’s company. The next time that the drunk guy at the party calls the pompous bastard’s wife a fat pig, open your eyes. The signs of public outcry that follow generally mask twinkling eyes and barely concealed signs of genuine mirth. After all, chances are good that the pompous bastard’s wife is indeed fat, and chances are even better that if she wasn’t a bitch the drunk guy wouldn’t have called her out on it. It’s just that nobody else has the nuts to say it.
Captain Kirk was the drunk guy at the party. He was like my perverted uncle who has to stay out back in the woodshed during Thanksgiving dinner. He was a good guy to go out on a weekend bender with, but his real intrinsic value lay in his filthy, lecherous mind.
The Captain was a senior vice president in the Consumer Technology Group. We worked on more than a few deals together.
I had heard rumblings regarding Captain Kirk’s reputation while I was still a summer guy at DLJ. Kirk was a lifelong DLJer. After twenty years with the firm, he was a member of the Old Guard. He’d been a senior vice president for as long as anyone could remember. He had a few clients of his own, but not enough to get him the bump to the next level. He had long ago stopped fretting about the fact that he was never going to get promoted to managing director, though. He didn’t care anymore.
Captain Kirk was forty-seven, long since divorced, and he was as horny as a bullfrog.
Often, when people met the Captain, they’d wonder why he wasn’t married. Occasionally, the brave ones would ask him outright. He never minced words.
“Why the fuck would I want to be married?”
“Don’t you ever want to have kids?” they’d usually follow up.
“Kids? My sister’s got three kids. She lives an hour away from me. I can visit the kids anytime I want. Meanwhile, I can keep on fucking the twenty-five-year-olds.”
There was no question that Kirk loved the ladies. Demonstrating that love was a Captain Kirk specialty. Many of the women, whether they were social or professional acquaintances, were treated to the lip-smacking Captain Kirk kiss upon introduction.
The Captain knew that he wasn’t supposed to be smooching his female colleagues. As long as they would tolerate it, though, he’d keep it up.
Captain Kirk’s sexual peccadilloes weren’t limited to occasional indiscretions with the female employees. The fire in his loins burned far too bright for that. When it came to the lust in his heart, the Captain was like a bull in a china shop.
Captain Kirk’s lack of technical knowledge was mythical. This was a man who worked in the Consumer Technology Group, yet he had to write step-by-step directions on the plastic casing of his computer monitor so that he wouldn’t forget how to activate his automated stock quotation system. The Internet was a foreign concept to Kirk. He didn’t know what it was, he didn’t know what it was capable of, and he would have gone on in perpetual blissful oblivion if it hadn’t been for an offhand comment I made to him in the hallway one afternoon.
The Captain and I were walking to a conference room to meet with the management of SharpSound, a manufacturer of high-end audio speakers. I was giving the Captain a primer on the Internet.
“Kirk, did you know that with DLJ’s new high-speed Internet connection I can download full-motion porno videos off the Internet while I’m sitting at my desk? It doesn’t cost a penny.”
Free porno! That was enough to grab his attention.
“What’re you talking about, John?”
“It’s like this, Kirk. If I get bored, I click my mouse a few times, and before you know it I’m watching first-class porn.”
We had reached the conference room, and Sharp-Sound management was waiting. I could see that the Captain had many questions to ask me, but they’d have to wait.
We were halfway through our pitch with SharpSound and I could see that the Captain was having a difficult time focusing on the business at hand. He was still thinking about those dirty videos. Fortunately, he knew Sharp-Sound management well. They were a longtime client of his, and they were well versed in the particulars of h
is fetishes. So it really came as no huge surprise when, during a momentary lapse in the conversation, Kirk suddenly blurted it out.
“John knows how to get free porno on the Internet!”
Nobody said anything. We all looked around at each other. I smiled.
“Kirk’s just learned of the power of the Internet. He’s looking forward to exploring its offerings,” I offered up to everybody.
Everyone laughed.
Captain Kirk beamed at me. I was his protégé, and my client management skills were coming along fabulously.
Following our meeting, the Captain and I headed back toward my office.
“John, you’ve got to show me some of that porno. I won’t believe it till I’ve seen it.”
We hunkered down in my office in front of the computer monitor. I began to introduce the Captain to the wonders of free porno, Internet-style. I pulled up a long list of potential fantasy sites and directed Kirk to take his pick. His first selection was a dandy: “Asian Babe Extravaganza.” We accessed the site, and within seconds we were staring at leggy Asian women giving us private beaver screenings. The Captain couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Oh my God. This is incredible. Can I do this on my computer? Can you show me how to do this?”
“Absolutely, Kirk, we all have access now. Technology’s a beautiful thing. This is going to change the complexion of the next generation.”
A voice spoke up behind us: “What are you guys looking at?”
I turned, and there was Diane, one of my associate classmates. She was Asian, she was female, and I wasn’t sure that she’d appreciate the gynecological specimen so prominently displayed on my monitor. I made a lame effort to stand up and conceal our evil goings-ons, but it was too late. The beaver had been witnessed.
“Well, well, well, Diane. Look’s like we’re caught in the act!” the Captain proclaimed. “Boys will be boys, you know.”
