by John Rolfe
Diane looked at me. Diane looked at the Captain. It wasn’t a battle worth fighting. She sighed, turned, and left.
I thought about the whole thing later. It was pretty damned funny. Looking at porno on the computer with the Captain was a decent job perk. I thought about it a little bit more later that night, though, and I started to worry. It wasn’t that I felt guilty. As far as I was concerned, the PC Nazis and their sexual harassment allegations were mostly a crock of shit cooked up by overzealous trial lawyers to generate free business for themselves. What I worried about was becoming like Captain Kirk. I thought that the Captain was funny because he was still so damned horny at the age of 47 and he didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought. That didn’t mean that I wanted to be like him. Forty-seven and never having been married because investment banking had consumed my life. Forty-seven and still spanking the monkey in my office at 3 A.M. That was scary. What was I becoming? I began to think that maybe it wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t living the dream. I wasn’t having any fun. Maybe there was more to life than whatever the hell I was running after.
The Last Straw
He’s turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he’s miserable and depressed.
—David Frost
Unlike Rolfe’s epiphany, which hit him like a ton of bricks, my realization that banking wasn’t for me crept up on me more slowly. I’m not even sure when it first began. Maybe the seeds of doubt were planted during a four-day pitching marathon with only six hours of sleep. Maybe I first started questioning my career choice after one of my colleagues called me a “fat little fuck” for the fifty-seventh time. Maybe it was the recurring nights at strip clubs that got me thinking. Was I nothing more than a filthy little animal who had so little time to enjoy the pleasures of life that I had to resort to stuffing a ten-dollar bill into a neon-yellow G-string for satisfaction? Would I ever have time to have a lasting relationship? Marjorie and I had gotten engaged and she was planning on moving to New York in a couple months. I loved her and wanted things to work out, but I was never around. I had no time. While Marjorie knew I spent a lot of time at work, the entire time we had been dating she had lived in Chicago, so she’d never really experienced the whole investment banking routine. How much of my lifestyle could she take? Would my only skills after twenty years in the business be a proficiency at inventing creative excuses for my loved ones to explain my perpetual absence and the ability to immediately identify the raunchiest strip clubs in every major city worldwide? I wasn’t so sure that I wanted that to be my legacy.
I don’t think the bare reality of the situation really hit me, though, until I realized that I was actively recruiting other young suckers to follow in my footsteps. I was like the crackhead who starts dealing to support his habit, and then realizes one day that he’s selling dime bags of the rock to elementary school kids. Wow. It didn’t make me feel so good.
I got a call one afternoon in early January. MBA recruiting season was in full swing. One of the managing directors in charge of Harvard recruiting was a-jingling on my phone.
“Hey, Troobie, we need you to go to Harvard and help recruit some new meat. We need you to be part of a panel discussion. You can fly up to Boston tonight and have a good old time up there. Live large on the firm’s nickel. Tomorrow is an open house where all the MBAs get to ask questions of all the panel members. Afterwards, there’ll be a reception and you’ll stand at the DLJ booth handing out annual reports and talking to the students. All the usual suspects will be there: Morgan, Goldman, Merrill, and Lehman. You have to try and sell the kids on DLJ. You know the drill. Thanks for the help. I’ve already booked plane tickets and a hotel room for you. This is top priority. You’ve got to do some recruiting. Tell your other deal teams that you’ll be out of commission for a day.”
Yeah, I knew the drill because I’d been through the drill for the last two years. I was supposed to tell the young, impressionable MBAs that being an investment banking associate was fun, exciting, and rewarding. I was supposed to tell them that being an associate was a thrilling job and that only the best of the best ever made it to showtime. I was supposed to pump them up with all the jive hype that I had been pumped up with just a couple of years before.
I went to Harvard, put on my name tag, and sat at the little DLJ booth. MBAs swamped me. One woman literally ran up to the booth clutching her résumé and started speaking before I could even introduce myself.
“Mr. Troob, I really want to work at DLJ. Here’s my résumé and my husband’s résumé. We’d love to be able to work together. We know we’ll work hard and we don’t mind the long hours. We know what banking is all about and we want to work for DLJ. Do you like it there? Is it as awesome as I’ve heard? Are you doing deals all day?”
I came back with the party line. “Yeah, I like it there. It’s an awesome place to work. And, yes, I’m doing a lot of deals. I’ll take your résumé and see to it that it gets to the right person. You have the right level of enthusiasm to work for DLJ. Thanks for showing interest.” It was hard to sound enthusiastic. I was getting tired of all the brow-beatings, the long nights, and the never-ending day-today grind. I was at the end of my rope.
With my comments and compliments still ringing in her ears, she glowed and floated away. If I allowed this woman and her husband to come work for DLJ I would effectively be breaking up their marriage. DLJ would kick her eager ass all over the place. DLJ would chew her up and spit her out, and she’d end up a shell of her former enthusiastic self. Screw it. Who was I to care? I was there to fill the pipeline. I was there to get some fresh bodies down below me so that it wouldn’t hurt so badly when I fell. So I smiled and went on.
A guy named Ernie stopped at the booth. I’d worked with Ernie while I was an analyst at Kidder Peabody. He recognized me right away. “Hey, Pete. I hear DLJ’s the place to be. The money is supposed to be great and the work is interesting. You guys do great deals—highyield, merchant banking, all the fun stuff. It’s not like Kidder, is it? If I’m going back to the Street I want to work at DLJ. Can you help me out?”
I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to tell him how much life as an associate really sucked and how unhappy I really was. I took a deep breath. “Ernie, absolutely. I can help you out. First, the money is great. Think about what we made at Kidder and multiply it by five or six. Second, it’s not like Kidder. It’s fun. Even the pitches are interesting. The deals are the best, interesting and challenging. You should work at DLJ. I’ll definitely help you out.”
He thanked me and left. I saw him go to the Goldman, Lehman, and Merrill booths. I sold him down the river. I helped him get a job at DLJ and he accepted it. I heard that he quit about a year later.
As I boarded the plane on my way back to New York I saw another old friend, Danny, who had become an associate at Merrill Lynch at the same time I had joined DLJ. He was the guy that I had sat with in the steam room two years earlier at Harvard. We had sworn to each other that we wouldn’t go back into banking. I yelled his name and he came over. He told me how his job sucked and how he never had time for anything and how he needed to get out and find a more rewarding job. We got on the plane and sat next to each other. Two losers. Two guys that all the MBAs thought were big winners sitting there miserable and just wanting out.
I was everything that I didn’t want to be. I had lost the one thing that I needed most. I had lost my pride. If a senior banker asked me to spit-shine his shoes for an extra-good review at bonus time, I would hock a loogie and start scrubbing.
When I got off the plane my beeper was beeping. I called into the office to check my voice mail. There was a message: “Peter, I need you to come into the office and help the analyst run a couple of models, and then I need you to start writing the equity underwriting committee memo. It has to be done by tomorrow afternoon. The vacation’s over. Back to work.” FUCK. I looked over at my friend Danny. His beeper had gone off too and he was checking his messages. Some senior Merrill Lynch bank
er had left him a voice mail with marching orders that were going to keep him at the office all night. We wallowed in our misery together for a few minutes, and then both of us had to get back to the office.
Danny and I had each called our firm’s car service from the plane. We both jumped into our cars and told the drivers to get their asses moving back to Manhattan because we had important banker stuff to do.
Things had changed at DLJ. The place had grown from around 325 bankers when we had first started to over 600 a couple of years after that. I think the mandate was to get to 1,000 bankers by the year 2000. That just meant more people to boss me around. It seemed like every day more lateral hires were announced—more bankers coming in over the transom from other investment banks. It was like that old saying about knowing your enemies. At least when there were only 325 bankers I knew who my enemies were. Six hundred bankers was too many to keep track of, and 1,000 would be out of control.
Life went on and time marched by. I fell into the black hole called work. The next thing I knew, it was time for Marjorie to leave Chicago and move to the Big Apple. She called me and asked if I would pick her up from the airport. I promised that I would. She was moving to a new city. She was leaving her family, friends, and career in Chicago. She needed my support. When she stepped off the plane in La Guardia all she got was a guy named Gupta standing at the baggage carousel holding a sign that said “TROOB.” I couldn’t make it to the airport because an uptight manager director was busting my hump over some word processing document. When he angrily said, “Jump,” I politely replied, “How high, sir?” Marjorie went back to our apartment and cried herself to sleep. I was ruining the best thing in my life.
I thought about quitting, but what else could I do? How could I ever find the time to look for another job? And then it struck me. I was supposed to take a vacation to Greece in another two weeks. I figured that would give me the time I needed to clear my head and think. Maybe I could handle this banking stuff if I had a strategy. This vacation would give me the time to develop a game plan.
Marjorie was going to leave ahead of me with a girlfriend. They were going to spend some time in Turkey, then Marjorie was going to rendezvous with me in Greece. Wow, was I excited. I told all my deal teams that I was going on a vacation. One of my managing directors smiled mysteriously.
Two days before I was supposed to leave for Greece the managing director with the mysterious smile decided that I couldn’t go. He told me, “One of the deal team members has to cover the road show in both Kansas City and Seattle. We need somebody out there with management. Both me and the VP on the deal are busy. You’ve got to take one on the chin for the team. It happens to all of us. It’s part of the job.”
Part of the job? FUCK YOU, MAN! There was a pounding in my head that I couldn’t control. I wanted to pull a Wile E. Coyote on him and drop a big iron anvil on his head.
I was crushed. I asked the VP why he couldn’t go. He told me that he was having trouble with his girlfriend and that he needed to spend some time with her. He told me, “Don’t worry, it’s happened to me too. Welcome to investment banking.”
I had to call Marjorie in Turkey and tell her that I wouldn’t be meeting her in Greece. She was pissed, really pissed. There was nothing I could say to make her happy. How many more times could she forgive me? How many more times could I tell her I was sorry? This wasn’t the dream. I had thought that I would have more time and more fun. What was at the end of the desert anyway? An oasis? A mirage? Maybe I wasn’t in a desert after all. It seemed more like a never-ending jungle. I didn’t care anymore. Whatever I was in, I wanted to be airlifted out.
I was upset that I had missed my vacation, and I didn’t like the fact that I’d pissed Marjorie off, but neither of those was the deciding factor. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t like the person I saw in the reflection. I was disappointed in myself. I had no dignity. Greece would have been a break in the action but not an end to my misery. I wasn’t the man I wanted to be. I only had one thought: “Fuck this. No more.”
It was the last straw. There was no more fire in my belly. There was no more spark in my eyes. I had to get out.
Liberation
Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.
—Captain James T. Kirk
I had to find a new career. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I called a headhunter and I didn’t tell a living soul. Not even Rolfe. Any leak of information that I was trying to leave the bank and I would either be immediately fired or summarily castrated. Neither of those options struck me as particularly attractive. In order to find a new job I had to be ultrasecretive and move like a stealth bomber. I went on interviews in the mornings at 7:00 A.M. before work. I interviewed on the weekends and did interviews by phone. Months went by and nothing seemed to pique my interest.
Finally, I met a group of guys through a headhunter and coincidentally, through one of the deals that I was working on. They were value investors of distressed bonds. I liked the guys and they liked me. They had a good setup. They had six people with north of $400 million dollars in their fund. They were doing research, thinking, and making decisions about how to invest the money. The concept of actually using my brain intrigued me. They were looking for another guy to help them invest the money. They made me an offer. I didn’t have to think about it for very long—I accepted.
Now came the hard part. I had to tell DLJ that I was quitting. Whom should I tell? Whom did I really work for? None of the senior bankers dealt with personnel issues. The head of the whole shooting match, Gary Lang, didn’t know me from Adam, and even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass that I was quitting. So I called up Rolfe and told him. He was surprised and he seemed a little pissed off. I couldn’t worry about that, though. I had to figure out who else to tell.
I told Brock LeBlank. He was the vice chairman of the investment banking division. I liked Brock and respected him. He was a good guy. He had worked hard, caught some breaks, and had moved up the DLJ ranks in short order. He was one of the chosen ones, and he’d always treated me pretty well. I told him that I was leaving because I didn’t see a fruitful future for me at DLJ. He smiled. It was a crooked smile, though. There was a glint of evil in his eyes and I wondered momentarily whether he might throw a stapler at my head.
“Peter, you’re one of our superstars. I mean that. You could really excel here. Anyway, Peter, do you know those large houses in Greenwich on the water? Bankers own those houses. DLJ gives you the opportunity to have more money than you could ever dream of, and to have the biggest house in the neighborhood. This hedge fund you’re going to won’t ever give you that opportunity. The Street is cluttered with hedge funds. The one you’re joining could fail. And then what do you do? I think that you’re making a big mistake and I think you should reconsider. You have a bright future here. You’re well regarded and if you stay here you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. DLJ isn’t going to fail. I’d like you to reconsider. I’d like you to talk to Nussbaum and Weinstein. I’ll set it up.”
What a bunch of phony baloney. I knew that the biggest house in the neighborhood usually belonged to a construction contractor or the guy who invented the paper clip. He couldn’t fool me. Still, I had to give Brock credit for acting like he was truly concerned. He also had my hot buttons clown pretty well. The guy knew how to stroke my ego.
I went to see Nussbaum. He was the head of High Yield Banking, the group that I worked for. I told him about the job I had found. I told him that I wanted more free time, that I wanted a life. He was quiet for a minute, then he spoke.
“Peter, you’ll have plenty of free time later in life. Look, Peter, you have to pay your dues now but later you’ll reap the benefits. That’s how it is in life, trust me. Anyway, this job you’re thinking about taking, it seems like it sucks. You might get screwed by the partners. It’s too risky. I think that you’re making a big mistake. We’ll take care of you here. We’ll do anything tha
t has to be done in order to keep you. Is there anything we can change for you? If there is, then we’ll change it. We want to keep you.”
They’d take care of me? Sure, just like a wise guy “takes care” of a guy who gets caught with the wise guy’s wife. I figured that I’d humor Nussbaum. I’d see what I could get out of him. I told him that I didn’t want to work for Gator anymore, and that, in fact, I didn’t want to work for any of the vice presidents in the group. He said, “Done.” I knew it was bullshit. He was a good guy. He was trying to be helpful. However, he was a senior guy and he didn’t understand that there was a mass of investment banking humanity between the two of us and there was no way for him to control it all. I would continue to get crushed. He could see that I wasn’t coming around, so he decided to send me to Weinstein’s office to get the final once-over.
Weinstein. The Black Widow. I’d interviewed with him while I was at business school. He was a little pit bull. He stood about five foot six and was pissed about it. He was going to beat the tar out of me and scare me into staying at DLJ. I walked into his office and he immediately launched into his tirade.
“Well, well, well. So little Peter thinks that he’s going to a hedge fund to make lots of money. No way. You’re going to fail. I hope you have a backup plan because you won’t succeed. Your best chance of succeeding is by staying here. You’re naive and you don’t know what you’re doing. I hear that you want to enjoy your life and have more free time. Well, if that’s what you want, then you’re a pansy and you may as well go into the advertising business. C’mon, Pete, you know that you’re not ready to leave. I assume you’re staying. Now tell Brock you are back on the DLJ team.”
The Widow was shaking my confidence. It hadn’t broken yet, but it wasn’t exactly sturdy. I steeled myself. I was leaving. That was it.
I had just gone through the three-step banking process. These three steps are used in banking whether a banker is pitching a deal, executing a deal, or attacking a colleague who’s thinking of quitting. Greed, Fear, and Abandon. Those are the three steps. First, persuade by talking about money and success. Greed and the pursuit of money is the banker’s ultimate aphrodisiac. Stroke the ego and tell the clients what they want to hear. Act sincere. If this doesn’t work, move to the second stage of the process—fear. Scare the shit out of the clients and shake their confidence. Tell them that if they don’t join the bank in a deal, then they’ll fail and be miserable. If the banker can’t entice the client with money, then maybe they can use fear to achieve the desired result. Finally, if this doesn’t work the banker will abandon in an unusually rapid fashion. If there’s no deal, then there’s no need to continue any discussion.
