Installment 5 of the novel, Compensation, 82-95

GINA NEVER CALLED ME BACK, and by the time Friday morning rolls around I am already out in the Hamptons. Allen and I have driven out from Accabonac to Ditch Plain in Montauk to surf. Allen surfs now, for the past couple of years, when he shared a house near the beach with a younger crowd. I am not a surfer, but am giving it a try. Donning truncated scuba suits, we got up early, eight, propped two of Allen’s boards to his 1966 Mercedes convertible and strapped them down with bungy cords. We’re relatively clear headed. The cool air blows through our heads on the drive, giving lift to the surfboards lashed to the windshield which starts to rattle uncomfortably, but we ignore it and just stick our faces into the cool morning wind. Ditch Plain is one of the best surfing beaches, and gets crowded early. We found a parking spot on the second of three lots. The scene is already in progress: bodies tanned through June, male and female, hedonistic, heads everything from closely trimmed crew cuts to ratty shoulder length blond streaked hair to densely matted virtual blond dreadlocks, the bodies are milling around hulking sport utility vehicles, smooth, muscular swimmer bodies, pumped up in the gym, stoner eyes, naked kids tanned brown getting into swim suits, hippie vans, Volvo station wagons, Long Island accents.
Grabbing our boards, we walk on to the beach. Allen looks around. “I wonder if George and Peter are here?” They usually are by now. Oh well. Let’s go.” I am wearing plastic prescription swim goggles and feel like a geek. My body isn’t nearly as built up as those around me; even Allen, I notice, looks pumped up, superhuman. We jump into still cold water in June, early, not yet in to the heat of the summer, froth sliding on the surface of clear water revealing the tan and brown and golden rubble on the bed, smooth and slippery to the weight of foot. The heat of the day is just rising now, the sun already blinding, throwing glare off the undulating shifting glass sheen of the sea.
“Follow me,” said Allen. “We’ll paddle out to the rip, there.” He pointed to a slot of foam flowing outwards from the beach back into the distance of ocean. Once there, our boards flowed out too, as if sucked out on a conveyer belt. Swells breast the beach. The sun is up and hanging now, sky severe clear. Swells roll beneath us. Foam hisses around. Air masses pushed by the waves lift us and pressure us with cool caresses. Back behind us, water pounds the rocks near shore.
“It’s simple, Mark. Just watch me. If you think you can get on a wave, jump up and do it.” It is quiet four hundred feet out, the thin crowd of early beach goers miniaturized, insignificant. Rocking over swells, looking back and around for waves, surfers nearby left and right mount their boards and hit or miss the opportune moment.
“I’m taking the next one. I hope you’re ready.”
“Go ahead. I’ll be fine.” I’m not quite, not knowing what the hell I am doing. It looks easy enough, and I figure, already out here, I might as well go ahead and try to ride one in. I mean, how else do I expect to get back?”
“I’m taking this one,” Allen repeats himself. He hops upright on his surfboard—a gymnastic trick, as you must push yourself up from a face down prone position. Allen catches the crest gracefully and skirts down the foaming face of what looks to me a 12 or 13-foot wave, angling left to stay high on the wall of water. The air cools as the wave pushes in, under then upwards to the beach. You lose sight of a surfer as he crests the face of the wave while you descend its backside. Alone now, I figure I’d better do it before I lose my nerve. Allen says there is no way to prepare for your first wave other than doing it. That’s how he has learned from George and Peter, “locals” out here, Manhattanites who put their jobs in the city on hold for the summer to live the surfer’s life in Montauk.
I don’t want to ride a big wave, so I look back for what I think I can handle. I take the next one. Stumblingly, I press myself upright, wavering, wobbling the surfboard with my quivering triceps as it begins to slide down the front of the wave, zipping and zagging. Through luck and instinct I get up and point the board down the wave and am suddenly in it, a much larger wave than I expected. I lean instinctively and guide myself slightly up and around to avoid crashing straight down at what looks like shockingly shallow water, the trough of the moving wave. I can see the interspersed rock and sand bottom where the wave has drawn in all the water at its foot. I try to straighten my body, thinking of what I look like, as if that matters. Unsteadily, I am now riding the crest of the wave and close to sliding down the backside when I catch sight of Allen waving his arm and pointing, signaling me to turn back down into the front. That’s when I rush into what is later described to me as a beautiful curve down and across, like a skittering bug across the face of a 20 foot wave. I feel the spray, warm in the sun, but the air I breathe is wonderfully pure and quiet and cool. Water surrounds me, as if security.
It lasts seconds, then I topple out of the wave in five feet of water and the ocean crashes on top of me, and the surfboard waffles, shakes. Thousands of gallons crush me, swirl about in jets, and shoot the surfboard at an angle like a rocket or a watermelon seed pressed between your fingers. The line tethered to my ankle grips and pulls. Body and board fold round one another and we are whisked on the sand, twisted. My body tumbles laterally in the foam. The tethered anklet snaps off and I am released from the oblong surfboard and I shoot away and through the surf, hit the bottom with my right shoulder and crumple. Stumbling, I struggle to stand up, spitting and swallowing and inhaling salt water, which stings the back of my throat.
Allen cruises by and sweeps down off his board to grab the other. I drop amid the rocks some hundred yards from where we entered and blow snot and saltwater out of my nostrils. Before Allen can say, “Dude, that was hot,” I mutter, “ I need … a moment.” Hoarse, coughing and stuttering, heart banging in my chest. Allen laughs and drops back into the water.

Later we meet George and Peter. George has long frizzy hair and a surf honed triangular body. Peter was skinny, with short dark hair. George works part time as a model in Manhattan during the rest of the year. Peter is an independent film director who works for advertising agencies and film production companies. George with the long blond hair says, “These waves are pretty tame, really. You should see it here in October when hurricane season is really humming, heaving four hundred feet of white water, ten feet deep along the beach. Novices go home. Only the hard core then.”
“When I first started,” Peter says, “I wouldn’t go near the water on those days. I’d rather go wind surfing at Napeague instead. That’s a rush. But now, there’s no comparison to the open ocean during a fall blow. Within reason. Sometimes a real Nor’easter still scares me. You could be blown away literally and washed out and shattered in those rocks.”
“What are you guys doing tonight?”
“Maybe going to the Tiki Bar or the sushi restaurant. “
“Come back at sunset. We’re having a bonfire and Joe is bringing somne mushrooms from the west coast.”
Sunset, orange sky. We’re there with 20 other people, all good-looking, or at least passable on closer inspection. The chicks bare their midriffs, all tawn and down, to the cooling eve, chat about whatever. Allen is talking to Jill, a woman with smoked sun-bleached hair and baked skin. She's petite and chirpy, a slightly raspy voice. I like her. She’s older, sculpted body, smokes, and drinks a vodka and citrus drink. She’s not interested in me though. She is interested in Allen. But I can tell he is indifferent. George, the surfer, long yellow hair flowing, holds court amid a gaggle of novices. He is a veteran, it appears, and the girls really like him.
Peter and I sit by the ice chest full of Budweiser and Bass and other ales. The fire is going strong as the wind blows it up. We are grooving on mushrooms and John Coltrane out of the boom box. Joe has brought some ecstasy in his stash and has been giving it out. I’m tripping on mushrooms and ecstasy. I can hear Allen who is tripping on mushrooms and talking to Jill who may or may not be tripping. Allen, standing about fifteen feet away, is talking about me.
“Mark’s problem is . . . in fact I like him a lot. He’s one of my best friends. Nice guy. Very smart, but he doesn’t try to lord it over you with his brains or anything, his education. Well maybe a little. I ask him a lot of questions because he usually knows the answers. And when he doesn’t, he let’s you know he’s not sure. He’s always saying, “at least that’s what I know,’ or ‘it might be,’ or ‘I don’t know for sure, but my guess is.’ We got the house on Accabonac because we are both single and date a lot of girls and are into partying, me probably more than Mark. And we feel comfortable with each other. Sometimes I wish he weren’t so critical all the time and negative about people he’s just met or about what’s trendy. He’s an intellectual. I am more like let’s just go with it and have a good time. Really, what else is there? Who cares about the bigger implications of some merger in the media industry? How does that really affect the quality of my life? Sure, I may make money on it, but come on! Relax, forget about it, live in the present. For instance, he scoffed when I talked about getting a Porsche or a BMW, even though he drive s a Bimmer, but when I found this 1960 convertible Mercedes, he loved it. Mark thinks he’s not trendy, but he’s really just as pretentious about all the usual things, cars, women, money. He will only date smart professional chicks, lawyers, MBAs, doctors, etc. Oh, he’ll fuck younger girls and he’ll date them for awhile, but if she doesn’t live up to his standards of brains and beauty, forget her. Plus, they usually end up dumping him or flirting with me. Younger chicks want to have a good time. Not that Mark doesn’t know how to have a good time. He’s done a lot of L.S.D. and ecstasy, more than anyone I know, well not quite, but just about. He drinks a lot of alcohol too, beer, wine, scotch. Funny, he’s a real snob when it comes to wine and scotch, but he drinks Bud like he’s some joe sixpack guy. Once we were tripping at someone’s penthouse in the city. There were about ten or twelve guys, ten or twelve girls, and more people showing up. I hadn’t tripped for a while, a year or more, this was between Christmas and New Years, and we were drinking acid punch. By the time we realized we were tripping, we knew it was going to be intense. Everyone was starting to sway pretty hard; a couple of people were on the verge of freaking out and were pissed off, not looking forward to having a good trip. What a night. I hadn’t tripped that hard ever. I was hanging out with this chick Valerie. Hendrix on the system. I had met this chick the previous season out here. She’s out here now too. She’s a friend of George's. Do you know her? She has a share at the beach. She’s supposed to be out here later tonight. But anyway, we really are tripping hard and I look around and see Mark who was as surprised as everyone else about the punch, and he had drunk a lot of it and I know he’s out there by this point, but he’s having this discussion or even argument with some guy in a suit. We’re hours into it at this point. I can barely stand, Valerie and I are pushed back into the cushions of the couch, immobile. I mean, it was under control. I knew we would be ok, but we were riding out those hours after peaking while you just sit there trying to relax, listening to music and drinking beer, smoking pot, whatever to keep you comfortable. I don’t really like acid. Anyway, I watched Mark with a girl whose head was thrown back. He was obviously fucked up. I watched him snake his arm in and around her skirt. I could tell he was fingering her. They were in the den on a couch with the TV on and music on. There were a bunch of other people in there too, but I couldn't see much. Mark, however, looked up and smiled. He looked very drugged out, but somehow completely sober. I couldn’t believe it. I could barely walk, and Mark is making it with this chick on a couch with a bunch of people sitting around. I have no idea what happened. I was lucky to get out of there and make it home that night. I slept for like two days after that.”
Jill stares at him and says nothing for a second. Then, “ Wow. I used to party a lot, but I’m into health now. I drink occasionally, but it kills my work out the next day. I should really quit smoking.”
“Yeah, I hate cigarettes. I work out too, as you can probably tell.”
Later that night, high on mushrooms and ecstasy, I meet Valerie, the girl Allen is now potentially in love with, and I see that she is, in fact, the girl in my memory from the New Year’s Eve Party at Jeff’s penthouse on Fifty-first street. She shows up at the beach party around eleven or eleven thirty in a bikini top and a light button up shirt and nylon shorts, waistband folded down over itself; I see her come up to Allen and say hi, kiss, he takes her under his arm and she stands there for a few minutes, then turns away to get a beer out of the cooler. Most people are fairly high at this point, the music is being blown by the wind and the bonfire is flaming, flickering orange moments against small white waves cresting. I have just gotten out from a swim in the ocean, trembling from the combination of psilocybin and ecstasy, dry in the throat, and I thought a dip would be clarifying, which it was. Allen and come up to me as I’m shaking off near the fire, the salt starting to get sticky as my skin dries and I put on my clothes.
“Hi.”
“Mark, Valerie. You two met at New Year’s.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I say.
“Hi.”
“The water feels great, really warm in the night.”
“Are you tripping yet?” asks Allen.
“Pretty substantially. Yes. But I feel great.”
“I’d like to get some x,” says then smiles a crooked grin, teeth peeking out.
“I don’t know what’s left. Do you Allen?”
“No, man. I took a tab of x a while ago, but I’m not feeling much yet. Let’s go talk to George.” They go over to George, who’s squatting on the beer cooler with an empty look in his eyes. I shiver a bit from across the party and move even closer to the fire. There are about twenty people around, murmuring in a kind of group high. I see Jill, the woman who Allen was talking to for awhile now hanging out with Peter. I see from across the bonfire scoring mushrooms and surprisingly x, but I don’t see any money changing hands.
“Did he charge you?” I ask her when they come back around.
“Nope,” she says and smiles and gives me a tough, puma stare in the dark, challenging for such a petite girl. Bob Marley live comes on the boom box, and Allen and Valerie shift over to hang with a couple of her roommates. After about forty-five minutes, I feel like leaving, but don’t quite think I can drive. Val walks me over to her house to get some water, we walk in sync side by side, the night above cavernous. When we finally get to her house, after walking through what felt like long dark streets but couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile from the beach, the dark trees towering around us and quivering in the breeze, lights glowing and rock music emanating from other houses, I fall into a soft white leather couch, it’s cool, and she hands me a cold beer half of which I swallow immediately. We smoke a joint which I don’t even feel and she turns down the lights and turns up some layered brass jazz pretty low and I lean my head back and close my eyes. I’m not sure how much time goes by, but on the occasions that I open my eyes and look around, I absorb the warmth of low lighted colors, shadows, more and more people from the beach moving around, quiet, the music getting progressively louder, rock and roll from the beach, sixties and seventies, hippie music, the thick aroma of marijuana drifting through and at times filling the room along with cigarette smoke, the quiet murmur of voices echoing around inside and out of my head. I look over and see Allen standing and swaying to the music near the stereo, his skin gleaming but his eyes bulging, holding a bottle of beer. At one point, Valerie is sitting close next to me, I can smell her sweat, she’s tripping heavily I sense, and then she’s pushing against my side as another person sits down on the couch. I look over at her and smile into her eyes and her eyes stare back at me for a second and then go blank. My head crashes into hers, knocks her hair down around her face like a curtain around us.
I don’t know how many hours later, people have left, the light is the color of watery urine, Allen, Valerie, her roommates Jane and Lucy and a guy named Vincent who seems to be making Jane, are there. We shut the lights down completely, someone lights a couple of large candles. Coltrane comes back on and I get up to move around a little and end up crashing in Valerie’s bed with Allen and Valerie, we’re all schlumped together but I think me and Valerie are the most tripped out on the combination of psilocybin and x, though Allen seems to be pretty far out there with us as well. I recall Allen going out leaving me and Valerie in bed, at times wrapped around each other and at other times curled away from each other as the drugs pushed us through waves, sweating then feeling chilled, unable to get up we just lay there and feel the chemistry surge through our bodies. I smell her sweat through the bed. Around five in the morning or so—I have no real idea what time it was—Valerie gets on top of me and starts rubbing her crotch against me, but I’m so high nothing’s happening and she pulls her face down on to mine, her hair hanging down around my head like a curtain and kisses me with her tongue which is all soft and warm which is interesting to me because I feel cold and dry and then my dick starts to get hard and she reaches down and pulls it out from my shorts, spreads her pussy and mounts me lightly and I feel myself go into her and she’s all soft and warm and wet and as we sway together she gets hotter and hotter and then she kisses me again and after an unknown amount of time I come inside of her and she collapses onto me sweating and we breath each other’s smell into ourselves.
When I wake up, it’s bright out already I can tell as the yellow light streams in to even Valerie’s cavernous room on the ground floor of her beach house and I smell her all around me, her stuff, light colors, strewn about, clothes, toiletries, a mirror draped with silk, a couple of paperback novels, literary fiction, a mini component stereo, compact discs laying around, but she’s not here. I can barely remember what actually happened. Eventually, I get up, straighten my clothes, put on my pants, look around for socks as my feet are cold but then I remember the beach party and that I don’t have any socks and I wonder where my sandals are and then I just say fuck it, button up my shirt and walk out. It’s cool and I find no one in the house, just burnt out candles, ash trays filled to the brim, empty beer cans, their stale smell clinging. I walk out of the house, down to the beach but there’s no one there either that I know. I see neither Allen’s car nor mine and honestly cannot remember where my car is. So I strip down to my swim shorts and jump into the water and swim out beyond the breakers and lie on my back floating until my eyes start to burn, and I feel as if I’m going blind and I can feel the sun roasting my chest, so I swim back to the beach, find my clothes, try to dry off and walk up on the bluffs. I guess it’s around ten by now—I don’t have my watch—and the beach is starting to fill up and I look down and see a few people I know, some people from the party last night, but my jaw hurts from the x and my stomach feels vacuous from the mushrooms, so I warm myself up walking on the bluff overlooking the beach, find a green path back to the street and after taking several wrong turns finally find my B.M.W. convertible parked in the other parking lot with the top down, scratch into my pocket and am surprised to find my keys after all. I start the engine, smooth comforting thrum, and drive back to Accabonac, the sun thankfully on the back of my head and I can see very precisely as the pupils in my eyes are still dilated from the drugs, and I breathe in the smell of Valerie the whole way even with the top down. I pat down my shirt and grab a piece of it and smell it. That’s where it’s coming from. When I get back to our beach house, Allen and Valerie are there, as I see from Allen’s white circa 1960s Mercedes convertible coupe. They are hanging out on the deck.
“Dude, what’s up?” says Allen. Valerie splits a crooked grin at me, brown hair stringy around her face.
“I was fucked up last night.” My head is an empty cave echoing the sound of my own voice coming out of the back of my throat. “Where did you go?”
“I hung out for a while but couldn’t sleep, so I went back to the beach, but there was nobody there, so I drove into town to have a Margarita. Then went over to George’s. By the time I got back you two were completely crashed out.”
“Yes,” says Valerie, “I was really peaking and I could not move. It must have been the mixture of the x and the mushrooms because I’m usually fine when I’m tripping.”
“Yeah,” says Allen, “I just left you two crashed out. I met George and Peter at the bar. They weren’t that high anymore. Then I went back to Peter’s and fell asleep on the couch.”
“You’re kidding.” I say. “I can’t find my sunglasses anywhere. Do you know where they are?”
“Did you try your car?”
“They’re not there. Shit. I hope I didn’t lose them. You know, I feel surprisingly okay now, but my head feels kind of hollowed out.”
“I know what you mean,” says Val, and laughs lightly. She’s wearing next to nothing and looks lighthearted, with a slight smile just breaking on her face, looking straight at me and I have to look away and palm my face and go inside to find another pair of sunglasses. Inside, I stumble on a pile of beach towels, then my briefcase with a cache of papers I was supposed to review this weekend, and think for a second about what I need to do but I know I won’t be able to look at them at all. I know I’m still fucked up because when I close my eyes, I see purple and red twirling around in paisley patterns.
“So, bud, how you feeling, Mark?” Val teases me when I get back out to the deck, puts her arm around my shoulder.
“Good. I guess. I feel pretty fucked out, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” she smiles. “You were really out of it.”
Now, Allen’s bustling around inside the house, talking about fixing some food and even though it’s not even noon, he’s making motions to cook some steaks on the grill, except we don’t have any steaks. The sea air fresh surrounds us.
“How are you feeling, Valerie?” I ask. “You were pretty tripped out, too, last night.”
“I sure was. I’m still recovering, Mark. I feel fine, though,” she says moving close to me.
“When did you get up?”
“I’m not sure. I guess around eight.”
“Did you sleep at all last night?”
“Not really. I mean, I passed out a couple of times.” She stares into me.

installment 4 of the novel, Compensation, 58-82

BACK IN NEW YORK on Tuesday, getting into a cab on Broadway, I ride down to Midtown to my office. Yesterday was a bitch, I hadn’t been available over the weekend and hadn’t checked in at all. And now, there is a lot of work backed up. I get in at seven, get slammed with calls from all my clients, Carl in one of his expansive moods, my associate needing a lot of basic guidance on shaping the language to secure our client’s needs without changing the basic template of the document and the structure of the financing arrangement. It is two in the afternoon before I can turn around without facing another minor crisis. I work harried and jet-lagged, and don’t feel the slightest personal interest in any of it, neutrality being the value of legal counsel.

Carl has just gotten back from a week off, which he spent in Hawaii. It’s his second day back, and he’s still being brought up to date with various cases, being briefed by me and the other senior associates who report to him. Carl is a good looking guy with reddish brown hair, blue eyes, Jewish mother, father died or just disappeared—I could never get the story straight and he doesn’t talk about it, so he probably doesn’t know the full extent of it. Carl’s in his forties now, getting pudgy and soft in his professional success. He leans back behind his desk as he listens to my update, eyes wide and a little shining. He runs his hands through his hair, his palms pressing down and squeezing his hair back off his forehead.

“Charter is going ahead with the Silverado deal,” I say. The currency exchange rate is being factored in on a contingent basis with a clause to maintain a less than fifteen percent variation, which Larry is going to guarantee on the bank’s side. He says he can keep it to less than five percent and that the fee he’s getting for the acquisition makes up for it, but that doesn’t matter to us, I guess. “Larry’s pretty sure the whole thing will work out. He’s also got a couple of mergers cooking, one, some industrial manufacturer, Stokes in Illinois, has a deal to spin off one of its properties, and if he can shop a buyout for the rest of the company, he will do the high yield financing. As far as I can tell, Carl, the money can be raised. Larry’s embarrassed to go before his capital commitment committee a second time.”

“For what?”

“The board has to sign off on a bonus for the C.E.O. if they sell the company.”

“So what. They’re not going to care. If the deal is good, an extra twenty million won’t kill it.”

“I know. It’s an ego thing with Larry, I guess. He’d rather call in an outside partner. But I don’t know if he will. It’s so much easier to just have the bank stick the extra money in up front and get all its ducks in a row.”

“How come he didn’t know about it?”

In fact, the information came pissing out slowly, now ejaculating when you’re not ready for it as we get close to the deal. “There was a competitive offer from the U.K. which we had to meet with the agreement that the C.E.O. gets two seats on the new board of the new company, which may or may not work, depending on how much he can demand. I mean the company is arguably coming out of a swamp right now and he can take credit for the turnaround, his leadership and some bullshit, I don’t know if they’ll buy it, but, I guess it depends on how much they still like him now, you know, does he have an credibility with them at this point. We’ll still have to see with time. It’s all these social issues. It kind of depends on who else is on the board, I guess. We’ll try to knock it down to one. Then, it’ll be just him. But if he has no pull, what good will it do him? Beyond the extra money, of course.”

“What is the company worth now?”

“At this moment? Well, the rest of the company is not really worth anything, I don’t think, but conservative projection of revenues for this chip division is around eighty million a year. Out of that, I don’t know how many millions in profit. But the legacy debt is a drag on the numbers as a whole, so Larry’s got to set up a new financing vehicle for them, and they’ll syndicate that to five or six other banks, and he’ll sponsor the issue then securitize it. Free up the new company from the debt. There’s a big ass fee in it for them and then they’ll carry a piece of the points. I think it makes sense.”

“Sounds good to me, Mark. A little complex, but that’s the way it goes. A lot of work for you. You’ll charge a completion fee on top?”

“Right.”

“What does the company do exactly?”

“They have a proprietary interest in a method patent for a silicone spray process for integrated circuits that they are going to license to some Korean manufacturers and it’s supposedly worth something like five hundred million dollars over five years for contracts already signed. I’ve got a box of papers on it coming later today. They’re serious about extracting value; Larry said that they want to spin it off of the rest of the company, which is mostly rust-belt stuff, a lot of machinery, remnants that are still operating now, but won’t last much longer. It’s not worth it to reinvest since all that is going to China now. Just get rid of all that stuff and keep the intellectual property.”

“Thanks, Mark, excellent. It’s a beautiful feeling being pulled back into the flow of the business, after being away. Chasing down fees, hoping, begging. It’s a desperate business, but I love it. I can’t get away from it, I’m constantly thinking about deals, even last week, with the kids in Hawaii, I’m sitting by the pool and calling in to check my messages with Alexis. I hate that.”

“But you can’t show it, you’ve said it many times, Carl. You’ve got to stay cool. We’re not nonprofit here. And you do love it.” He does love it, and that cool insight unnerves me.

“Here’s what it comes down to for me. If I can get paid, if I can resolve an issue and collect a three hundred thousand dollar fee or three million or whatever, we’re not proud here, we’ll take small fees, hey that’s how it adds up, you can’t look down on the small money, can you? And then how sweet it is to say fuck off to all those who ever doubted us.”

“We provide a necessary service to the market. You’ve said it a thousand times, Carl.”

“Right. But you know what, Mark? Somehow, somewhere along the way, the money becomes proof, a way to measure yourself against the other guys. Amazing how quickly the money stops being the means to buying anything tangible and becomes a sign of superiority; it means something. But the funny thing is, it isn’t really. Money doesn’t make the man, the man makes the money. We’re all equal, at the start—under the law, and I guess, in the eye of God. But by hustling, working harder, identifying opportunities, some individuals make more money. Then we all sit back, even if we know it’s stupid, we sit back and look at how big a pile of money a guy has and think that’s how big a man he is. Big man, big pile. Money talks, but it’s not just that cliche. Money is a language. And we say things with it and we do things with it; we use it to declare who we are, announce it to the world, not just our status, but whatever we can say. Status is a part of it, but you can do more, you can say whatever you want. I mean, really, what do I really say in all this language that we use here in the law and in the market, here we are writing out all these agreements to nail down contracts for transactions, partnerships, fee agreements, financing, that’s it, the language. We do things with the words. That’s why it’s so important to keep your word; if you promise to do something, do it. Right?”

“Right, Carl.”

“Even the value of a deal, or a company, when you think about it, is articulated by the numbers, but it’s also asserted and acknowledged and accepted by others as the way it is, in language, right? It’s simple, in a way stupid, but nevertheless that’s what it is. And the performance of each individual, it’s like in sports, you know, we’re not all gifted athletes, but if you train, stick to your discipline, work out, you’ll get results. Look at Allen, he’s not some gifted salesman, he’s had to work to get where he’s at.”

“Brokerage is a pretty fast business. . . .”

“I know, but nonetheless. I may not agree with how he spends his money, but first you have to earn it, and to do that in any business you have to establish trust with your customers, you have to create a track record. Selling is hard work, it takes a lot of discipline, perseverance, time management, focus, there are a lot of things that can derail a sale, and a lot of it is how you present it, sure it’s not as complex as what we do, but in essence, to the client, our job is to simplify a complex process down to a few statements and that’s all he needs to know, we sell that and we earn our money by handling the rest. Selling stocks is the same thing, that’s the reality of it. The pace is different, it happens a lot more quickly, but the relationship has to be built beforehand, so you can call a client up and say hey you should be in on this and then I say okay what is it and thirty seconds later make a decision based on trust. There’s a lot more to it than just making money. It’s not that money makes the man, obviously, the man makes his money, and that’s his work, how society values him.”

“Sure, Carl. It’s printed on society, and that’s civilization. I mean, we could just beat each other up. Even elementary school, you knew who had more money by the clothes he wore or the car his mother picked him up in.”

“Look, Mark. There’s a direct correlation between what you’re worth and . . . what you’re worth, I mean, your net worth and what you’re worth, you know what I mean, what else is there? Sure, there’s a moral disparity here, but we’re not talking about your moral value as a human being here. I’m talking about economic value, what you are worth to others. You’re only worth a shit if you’re worth some money to somebody. That’s the market. Work, man, what you create, and you’ve got to make it so you get compensated for what you do, it’s labor, intellectual labor, but we leverage our knowledge and mastery of the law and sell that to our clients who are out doing whatever they’re doing, building buildings or renting out buildings or buying streams of revenue or lending money out to whoever might be doing any of those things. We build our base, our own capital, intellectual capital, and then we use it as a lever to multiply and accumulate more capital. For us, it’s knowledge, relationships, the terms and conditions of abstract obigations, the law. It has nothing to do with what’s right, but everything to do with what works in a given situation; it’s pragmatic. It’s mostly about organizing a system, controlling it, operating it, creating it to get things done, practically. And whatever it is that gets done is productivity, meaning financial profitability, return on investment. That’s the measure, Mark. You organize the work and create a system that generates return on investment. How else do we have all this stuff lying around us, buildings, phone lines, electricity, air conditioning, subways, highways, banking systems, legal contracts, vehicles, air planes, gasoline delivery systems, I’m talking about indoor plumbing, the whole world, the man-made world, we’ve created all this through work, labor and intellectual organization, invention and discover. That’s why everyday whatever you can put into the system, you’ve got an obligation to do it, whether it’s digging ditches, driving a truck or working out differential equations, who knows maybe that will help build the next generation of supercomputers that will decipher the human genome. What do you think the Nasdaq bubble was all about? Sure, it got ahead of itself, there’s always speculation, they’re spectators, people placing bets on the sidelines, and yes that becomes part of it, its own industry, and maybe it’s non-productive, I don’t know, or maybe it helps regulate the system, lubricate all the machinery that sifts the information of what will return a profit and what won’t, what allows it to bend with more flexibility, making it stronger yet more supple, more efficient as it comprehends a greater and wider field, and you don’t necessarily know a priori, can you, so you have to try it out. Sure, momentary swings of the market are inevitable as people change their minds as the facts come in, and yes there’s deception, of course, and you can make money and you can also lose money. That’s what we’re all doing here whatever we are I don’t care if you’re in Uzbekistan trying to make a living for your family and put enough food on the table and save some surplus to store away for later. And let’s face it, that’s what money does, the extra that you store up, if you want to know what something is, you have to understand what its function is. Aristotle, right? You get paid what others deem you’re worth, at what number they value your work. You know and I know, it’s not a perfect system, but for the most part, it’s better than anything else out there, communism, socialism, come on, they’re all failures, failed experiments, failed societies. People have tried them, and they’ve resulted in devastated societies. The market, man, the market is the only way to test the value of anything. Money is a fungible substance, and everything can be translated, exchanged, quantified by money. Whatever’s fungible. Whatever’s not, well, we’re not talking about that.”

While he talks, I think, the language of money, what is it? Like he said, everything you see around you, everything you touch, that’s been built, made, bought, sold, the pipes flushing the toilets, the metal mined to make the pipes, the sewage plants, the buildings, two hundred years old or brand new houses, the banks’ computers, the college degrees that decorate offices, the wooden table in the conference room, the pressed particle board modular walls of secretaries’ offices and of speechwriters and research analysts paid to address the public, to persuade, to sway, to get the media and the crowd to do what you want them to do, buy the stock, don’t sell, hold for the long term, or just assent to what you’re saying for the moment and let it pass until some other event occurs. Money, the language we live in and use to come to agreements, to strike deals, contract services, promise and guarantee outcomes, action, the labor, the work you bill by the hour, whether its by hand or some entertainer’s mouth or the computer programmer’s fingertips. Giving and taking, exchanging. It’s a simple language, this for that, you could go on forever, eliciting agreements to exchange one thing for another, saying things and having it make sense, making someone understand what you’re offering for what you expect return, in some context, communicating a universal functioning of a simple idea.

“I’m not saying money is the only thing,” says Carl. “Family, love, yes, relationships, they’re more important than money, health, yes, but I’m talking about, as far as what’s quantifiable. I’m glad to be back. This is not just a job, or a career, it’s human activity, an enterprise, a more or less smooth running machine. Sure, we need to make it run more smoothly, there’s always room for improvement, but it’s something I’ve built. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing I love more than taking time off with my family. You should see my kids. My boys are the most adorable kids you’ve ever seen. It’s a miracle how fast they grow. I love getting away from business. You really have to appreciate what you have, family, relationship, a nice place to live, the comforts. We forget how hard it was to secure it once we have it and then we take it for granted and think all the time about what we don’t have, can’t get and frustrate ourselves trying to get it and then that’s how we imagine success, getting what we didn’t think previously we were capable of getting or doing. It’s not just about big houses or money in the bank, but accomplishment, Mark, accomplishment. So, yeah, here we go again. Back on the chain gang. Slaving over money which will provide us with whatever we want. That’s the key to happiness, getting what you want, but life is unpredictable and there really are no guarantees. You never know when your investments will go sour—look at the Nasdaq over the last year. I lost so much money, I have to forget about retiring early.”

“Right, Carl. You weren’t ever going to retire. And if you really wanted to, you could.”

“Thanks, Mark. Thanks. Keep up the good work. Be responsible. Financially responsible. I am. You’ve got to be. How you succeed in your personal finances, by saving—it’s not how much you make, but how much you spend, though really it is how much you make--and it’s investing not spending except when it comes to your house, that should be your first investment,” he says, holding up his index finger, tendons straining in his wrist, “ It’s the number one thing, Mark. That’s what I don’t understand about Allen and even you—you’re spending all the money you’re making! That’s a mistake. There will come a time when you will wish you had saved that money, or invested it, it’s amazing how much growth you compound over time if you start early. I wish I had started earlier in life. And don’t borrow money, ever, except for your house, which is part of yourself, that’s the only reason to take on debt. It’s property, Mark, ownership. In fact, I can’t believe I’m margined on these stocks at all now, what a mistake, but it is just too easy. You don’t really own these things, you’re just holding them for awhile, with the idea of selling them in the future. Temporary ownership. I should close those positions now and just take the loss before it gets worse but I’m sure, I know it’s going to come back in, even though Allen doesn’t think so. What the fuck does he know? He’s just a kid. What, how long has he been working, five years or so? Sure. He’s worked hard, he’s got access to information from Moral Morgan but I think all that research is tainted, it’s obviously biased, no one doubts that it isn’t, but everything is biased really. I mean, yes, surely we should know, right? It’s our job to produce and interpret documents in such a way as to benefit and protect our clients. That’s all those research reports amount to really, documents, language. You just have to know who their real clients are, not me, no. Of course everything’s subjective, the whole fucking market’s the totality of individual subjective choices, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but, there are huge pools of capital….”

“But they’re still managed according to some set of decisions and processes, policies and procedures, and yes, gut feeling and subjective judgement calls, right?”

“Well that’s research, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but no research really tells the tale, you know that don’t you?”

“There’s always more, always another layer to the story, of course, Carl. All the banks have huge stakes in percentages. Some guy writes a four-hundred-page dissertation on the coal industry, what is that, who cares, and who reads that? Who is this idiot that would spend day and night for how long writing this up? I mean, in the end, you or me or some investment manager just makes a decision. That’s all there is to it. Isn’t it?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Exactly. You’re a fool if you listen to these guys exclusively.”

“Well, they do cover the market and bring ideas to people. They present their opinion and then back it up with reasoning, facts, interpretation of data, you know.”

“Oh, I know, but what I’m saying is that you can’t always listen to these guys.”

“Of course not.”


Carl told me about the turning point of his career as a young lawyer. “My mentor here at Stephenson Roberts Altrow, a great man named Abe Jameson, Irish guy, one of the guys who started the securities practice here. He pulled me aside once, after I had been working days on end, a string of all-nighters—we were so busy—and I was losing it. I used to drink then, and my life was a mess. It got to the point that for a week or so I couldn’t work, I hit the wall. I’d come in to the office and not be able to keep up by four, eyes dulled, couldn’t articulate and I started to slack off, slow down, trudge. Abe pulled me over one day and said, ‘Carl, I like you. You’re tough, smart, unpretentious. Just like I was. We want young men like you to make it here because you’re going to keep doing whatever it takes to get the work out. And, if you start to see the big picture, who knows, maybe you’ll get new business in the door. Maybe not. It’s not easy. We demand perfection. That’s how we approach potential clients. We tell them that we demand perfection. And perfection demands long hours. I know you’re tired. I can see the exhaustion in your face. But I also know that you’re not a quitter. Carl Stiehl, are you just going to settle for being a dime a dozen lawyer, practicing at some nine-to-five firm or on your own? Sure, I know you can make a nice living. But that’s not really why we’re here. We want ambition in our associates. If you don’t have it, then this won’t be the right place for you. We don’t want you. But I know you have it. You won’t be satisfied with just a mediocre standard of living. We only want the best. There’s no room for second place here, Carl. I want you to think about that. If you decide this is not the right place for you, that’s fine. No one will shove you out the door. You can stay as long as you want. But if you want to make partner, that’s a different story. Now you don’t have to say anything now. In fact, you don’t ever have to say anything. We’ll both know what you decide.’ I made partner seven years later, after busting my balls every damn day. And we never mentioned that conversation, Abe and I. But when he died, just a couple of years ago, you were here, I cried. I really did. He’s the guy who summed it up, what it’s all about, for me. Mark, I quit drinking that day, I think, or it was that week, if I remember. I mean, sure, I drink wine with dinner, but I don’t get drunk, not in public.”

Carl told me this story when I was in a similar situation, overworked, burned out from grinding my brain, reading, writing, trying to get the hang, get up to speed with the practice. I had just started running projects, and there was an overwhelming amount of work, details, contracts and concepts I didn’t understand, and the deals were big, tens of millions of dollars on the line, with clients calling me for this for that and I wasn’t even sure what it was they wanted or how it fit into the scheme of things. I kind of resented Carl relating his experience to me, as if he could see exactly where I was, what I was suffering, the doubts in my own mind, even though he was basically right, but still, I looked at him with his bulging eyes and emphatic demeanor and said to myself, fuck you, Carl. But I know that he was just trying to help me see from his experience that you had to push through difficult thresholds to break through to a higher level of work. And he was right. But for some reason I haven’t been able to forgive him for seeing me as he saw himself, even though in a way it’s the utmost compliment and sign of respect. I respect Carl, but there’s something fucked up about him that I guess is in me as well, something that I do not really want to see as part of me.

He went on, on that occasion, after telling me the story of about Abe Jameson, to tell me about meeting his wife. “I met Darlene that year too. She was a teacher in the city--can you imagine? Southern belle teaching in Brooklyn, it was some program to recruit qualified people into teaching in the public school system. I think it was her way of getting away from her father and the south, I think. Shiny auburn hair with a hundred different colors in it, it seemed. I fell in love with her immediately. We met at a party; she knew one of the other associates, Bill Hutchinson, who knew her from Georgia, I think. Well, I knew Bill too, and we didn’t like each other too well, but we were cordial, collegial. He was at the firm back then. You know him, don’t you? He’s a partner now at Thatcher Harlett. Never forgave me for taking away Darlene from him. They were a matched set, you know. But I had to have her, southern accent and all. Just lost my head. Oh, she didn’t like me that much at first, thought I was too aggressive, kind of rude, a New Yorker, a Northerner. Considered me a Yankee at first, silly, I know. But I just kept calling her. She had quit teaching and was working in marketing for a public relations agency. She never really was that serious about Hutchinson, though she had plenty of other men calling her and plenty of older men, successful, interested in her too. After almost a year of calling her, she finally let me take her out. We went to some fancy restaurant. I think I just wore her out, believe it or not, sad to say. I let her date whomever she wanted. I just made it clear to her that she wasn’t interested in hearing about it. Eventually, she saw that I was serious about what I wanted. My dream, to make partner, make some money, be someone. I shared that with her. And she saw, I think, how I persevered, and that I was going to do it. Oh, she could have married guys from rich families. But, you know, that didn’t appeal to her. Her dad was the local lawyer in her town in Alabama, who had made it on his own, too. We get along real well, now. Sometimes though now, you know, a lot of times, I want to fuck other women, women other than my wife, but, look, I ask myself, is it worth it, for some shapely piece of ass? I mean, it’s only natural when you see a beautiful girl, slim, modelesque, so hot it makes you hurt because you know you can’t have her and you can’t even try because you don’t want to screw over your wife. I mean there’s a lot of trust there, you know? It’s like an ethical commitment. Not that just because you see a hot piece of ass on the street or at some party you can have her, believe me, I know, it doesn’t always work out that way, and if it does, you don’t know where it’s going, so all that for a piece of pretty ass? It’s like the market—it’s set to fool you, do exactly the opposite of what you think it’s going to do, and the more you think it’s going to go up, the greater the risk of the fall is, but the higher it goes, the more attractive it seems, the more you desire it. But you shouldn’t buy it because the pure, nice rise has already occurred, of course, you should have bought it before. But it fools you, just because you want it, you want a piece of it, the rise. It’s tricky, there’s natural deception built in. I guess it’s us, how we think.” What he said made sense in a cover your ass kind of way, as if the way to live was to not screw up a nominally good thing. If you think a thing is good, why should you go about fucking it up? I mean he’s right in a straightforward, pragmatic, common sense way.

By late afternoon that day after getting back from Los Angeles, I was swamped again, renegotiating an agreement for Loeb and his client on the financing, and going over preliminary terms for that second potential acquisition. Gina had called during business hours, long distance from Boca Raton, Florida, where she was working on a deal with some private equity firm providing financing for a buy-out of a regional managed health care company. I got the voice mail, but didn’t have a chance to call her back. I’m sure she wants to know about my weekend in LA. Would I just tell her straight out that I had fucked her so-called friend, Audrey, throughout the weekend, or just let her read between the lines? No. I avoid confrontation. She won’t ask straight out, but she’ll want to know.

Bill, a second year associate who works for me, needs help rewriting the draft of
the review document which we may or may not but probably will submit to Larry’s capital commitment committee in response to the sale bonus clause for the C.E.O. of Stokes. Janice, another associate, is writing a letter addressed to the counsel for the independent members of the board. They have to be persuaded to sign off on the twenty million dollar bonus to the C.E.O., and as representatives of the buyer, we are weighing in on the desirability of acquiring. All this needs to be presented in just the right way, as we are on both sides of the deal. Bill doesn’t understand the main issue. If the board supports the management’s right to pay the chief executive and themselves what amounts to forty million dollar bonus, in the form of a retirement slash severance contingency options package, in the event of the sale of the company, that scuttles any fair market price. It’s a potentially prohibitive sale clause that calls into question whether the company’s sale is in good faith. But if we address the board through their independent counsel, we might be able to get them to reject the clause. Even if we don’t, depending on how tightly the C.E.O. has the board under control, Larry thinks he can raise the money, Bill finally gets it, takes it and does the rewrite. It still looks like shit, and I’ll have to rewrite it myself later, soon, probably by tonight. This is for Larry’s client who is now interested in the industrial parts manufacturer that I was telling Carl about, Stokes Steel. It’s a large-scale tool and die plant that produces steel and bronze parts and fittings for heavy machinery, trucks, light vehicles and ships. It also produces parts for commercial heating and cooling systems. It is the breaking up of its two divisions, the industrial manufacturer and the silicon-surfacing business that interests Larry’s client. The only problem may be finding someone to sell the tool and die plant to—who the hell wants a factory in the ancient rust belt now? The Chinese and the Koreans take care of that at this point, and it’s just a waste of money to run something like that here, with all the expenses, personnel, healthcare, pensions, taxes. It just easier and more profitable to export the whole thing out and import the products back. But, Larry knows some private equity guys who buy properties like this for insurance companies who offer to load them off temporarily to customers who need to show a loss, he says, and we might be able to broker a deal at the right price, which of course depends on the financing points, which he thinks he can cover through First Charter and its outside syndicate. The Fed Ex box the information arrived in weighs about 30 lbs. Leafing through the hundreds of pages of Excel spreadsheets I sense once again that I am not being compensated anywhere near what all this takes out of me. Although there is money in it and we’ll all get a piece of it if Larry is right and he usually is and you can sell off the industrial pieces, I guess they’ve got that lined up and if the method patent holds—which it should unless there’s some other method out there that we don’t know about, which is of course possible, but what the hell, I have no idea, you’ve got to go with what you’ve got, right? Or else what are you going to do?

I have a headache by the time I get done around seven in the evening, and I call Gina again to see if she wants to meet tonight or later this week. I haven’t seen Gina in over a month now. What is the nature of our relationship is a question to which I don’t have an answer. She’s not there as usual, so I leave a voice mail, knowing I won’t hear from her. At eight, I leave to meet Allen at a bar on 38th Street off Lexington. It’s ice cold inside. Drinking a bottle of even colder Budweiser, Allen tells me that he has called an escort service.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Come on. You can have the first shot at her.”

“Why do you want me to fuck her?”

“I wanted us to do something together. No, really. She’s really hot. Her name is Holland. I have hired her a couple of times. Petite blond. European accent. Really good.”

“Allen, this is starting to get embarrassing.”

“What?”

“Don’t you want to hear about my weekend?”

“Yeah? How’d it go? You screwed Audrey, right? You already told me.”

“Allen, I have to listen to your fucking stories endlessly.”

“Okay, Mark. What happened? Was it good?”

“Forget it. I’m supposed to talk to Gina, too.”

“Don’t Gina and Audrey know each other?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t they best friends?”

“Friends. Something like that. I thought so at least. But I don’t think they talk to each other that often anymore.”

“Since you’ve been in the picture.”

“No, man, this just happened now. I mean we’ve known each other socially for a while, years in fact. I’d always thought she was hot.”

“So now you’re doing her. Right?

“Forget it.”

We go back to Allen’s apartment on Seventy-ninth Street with Holland. I go first. She is nice, not much older than twenty-five and actually is from Holland with a very slight Dutch accent. What she’s doing in the business I don’t know. Maybe she has a job as an au pair and decided to have some fun and make some money. Allen has some cocaine out and we snort several lines. I slide her panties down her legs and push her short skirt up around her waist, her pussy is very small looking with fine hairs quite light brown. She sucks my cock. I reach around to my jacket to get out a condom. We are in the spare bedroom, and I can see Allen in the living room drinking a scotch waiting his turn. I don’t know why he wants me to share the call girl. It’s still five hundred bucks apiece.

Holland is working me up with the blowjob. I rub her hard little tits a couple of times then pushed her on to her back, pull her legs straight up and start to enter her. She needs lubrication, and she pulls a tube of KY out of her bag and rubs some of it into her cunt, then I enter her, she moans, “Oh God,” I groan and pull her on top of me. She is airily light. I fuck her hard for a few minutes and come.

Allen appears at the door. “That was quick.”

“How’d you know we were done?” I ask. Holland turned, reclined, and smiled.

“The door was ajar. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Whenever you’re ready, big guy,” says Holland in a soft voice, sweet, sarcastic.

“In a minute, Holland. How was it for you, Mark?”

“He is very concerned for you, Mark.”

“Fine.” I smile. “Listen, I’m going to take a shower and get going. I’ll leave you two to yourselves.”

“You don’t have to, Mark. Let’s do something, go out later.”

“No, I’m feeling wasted. I’m going home. I’ve got some calls to make.”

Coming out of the shower, shaking the water out of my hair, I happen to throw a look in on them over my shoulder. Allen is fucking her from behind, full extension. Holland is really taking it, I could tell, sweat glistening, arching and yelping a little. I walk out and take a cab to my place, yield a nod at the doorman and ride the elevator up to the 11th floor. Taking my tie off, I open a bottle of beer, strip to the waist and put on a fresh T-shirt. Sitting back and sucking on the beer, I drift off, exhausted. I am making one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars a year, which is something, but it’s not enough for what I do and it’s not enough period. I have a list of expenses and everyone I know makes more money than I do, Gina, Allen, Audrey. I need to make partner. It’s not even that there’s a list of things I want, I just know my current income is not enough. The problem is, there’s always a problem, the firm keeps a pretty tight lid on exactly how much everyone makes. Oh sure, the first years, the second years, and even the thirds everyone knows how much they’re making, though the bonus is discretionary. But I’m in my sixth year and I have no idea what my peers are making. Robin Jefferies made partner in his eighth year. Jane Albrecht in her ninth. I’m sure I’ll make it, it’s just a matter of time. Twenty minutes float by, and I touch the remote and the TV comes on, I click through 50 or so channels, holding on Bloomberg news on Fox cable, get up and trundle through the fridge for leftovers. Finding nothing, I call the Thai restaurant a few blocks over and have them deliver. Finally getting to it, at the phone, I call Gina back.

Surprisingly, she picks up.

“It’s Mark. How’re you?”

“Pretty tired. We’ve been nonstop around here, scrambling to get out a convertible bond issue but the market keeps shifting. We couldn’t nail down a price. Bear Stearns says they won’t buy more than six blocks of ten million dollars which is insufficient and we’re calling everyone else right now. It’s going to take a while, I’ve got to reconcile the interest rate on the offering and we can’t do it yet because no one has called us back, of course it’s eleven o’clock. If we don’t get full commitments tomorrow we may have to shelve the whole offering. Robert is stewing, oh, he doesn’t show it, but he’ll be pissed as hell if it goes under. But there’s nothing I can do. I don’t make the calls to those guys, he does. Maybe I should just go ahead and make the calls.”

“Why not? You know what to say.”

“But if something goes wrong, and they change their minds, or something comes up, it’ll be my fault.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Yes.”

“That sucks. Call Robert. Ask him what he wants you to do.”

“I’ve got calls out to him. You know, I’m just going to leave. Fuck this. I mean, it’s not my responsibility to close this deal with these investors. They’ve already committed in principle, but now with this interest rate change and the currrency fluctuation, it’s like, do they still want to do the deal?”

“Why not just assume they do?”

‘I can’t. The numbers are significantly different now, and the price has gone up three dollars.”

“Wow, that much. Sorry. Do you think you’ll be able to meet later tonight?”

“I don’t know. I can’t leave yet. I should be done in a couple of hours.”

“You want to call me?”

“Okay.” She sounds hopped up, though she does not take drugs. Just anxiety and excitement—what gets most of us going. Her boss, Robert Williams, she’s been saying, is determined to break his revenue record from last year. I know him and have worked with him in the past, smooth guy in his early 40s, tall, looks great in a pinstripe suit, tan skin, dark blond hair. One of the top managing directors at First Charter. Knows Larry well. They’re both group heads and senior bankers on the executive deal approval committee. Robert could easily be put in charge of corporate finance in a couple of years. Maybe next year. Last time I ran into Bob was at the Marriott Hotel bar in Phoenix. I had casually pitched him our services.

“Who did you end up hiring for the Global Western issue?”

“Gottfried, Schoenberg.”

“Were they great as usual?”

“Yes, but their junior guys are nerds.”

“I know Josh Billingsfjord over there, University of Chicago, a couple of classes ahead of me. Super smart guy.”

“Don’t know him. I usually work with Louis Apple. He’s a partner.”

“I’ve heard of him. How’s your firm doing?”

“Great. We’re doing an interesting acquisition financing. What do you think the junk market will do over the next six months?”

“It’ll hold. It’s fine. Not great, but solid. If you’ve got a good deal going down, stick to it, because people will buy it, oh they’ll hem and haw and act shy, but they’ll buy it. That’s my read right now, but I don’t do that much junk anymore, though I have in the past. Our clients are opting for convertibles right now.”

“We’re doing a few convertible offerings. We worked on I.C.G. with Moral Morgan. Also Southfield Energy Partners. My question is, Robert, how does the bank hedge the risk of holding the bonds, as the underwriter?”

“You don’t. Sure, some of our traders make money if they find about a little before it comes out, they’re not supposed to but everybody knows they know about it, but for us, look, it’s the fees, Mark. The risk is somebody else’s problem. As long as the commitment committee approves the deal, we push it. Sure, the bank will hold as much as necessary, as lead underwriter, but we always syndicate the issue within days or a week or two at the most. Or have so far. But you’re right. At some point, I don’t know when—the market is going to cough up the inferior paper. But that’s the nature of the business. There won’t be enough room for all these companies, especially telecom. Not enough demand from the end market. When that fills up, look out, issues won’t convert and people insufficiently hedged will get hurt. Market’s self-correcting, in all instances, eventually. Investment is a risk business. We all know that. A lot rides on timing. You should see the syndicates for these things. Everyone from stock funds to nondescript money markets own these bonds. No one owns a lot. It’ll be a drop in the bucket. Ultimately, it’s not my problem. The risk is placed and distributed among a large group of investors. We get credit for a big fee this year, the bank puts up money for a very short term, the company raises a hundred million dollars or whatever, then the debt is sold to others. That’s it.”

“Well, listen, Bob, We’d love to work with you. Give me a call anytime you need anything from Stephen Jones. We can do it, we’ll be happy to and we’ve always enjoyed working with you.” I smiled.

“I will.”

I got the drinks I came to the bar for and headed back to the table where I was sitting with Jane, a lawyer at Stephenson Roberts Altrow. “Who was that, Mark? I’ve been waiting for half an hour for my drink.”

“Sorry. He’s the head of Telecom Banking at First Charter. Cool guy.”

“What were you doing, pitching him?”

“It’s part of the job.”

“I know, but don’t you ever get sick of corporate business?”

“No,” I say. But it’s not true.

installment 3, 37-58

My arrival in San Francisco is going to be late due to runway jam here at LaGuardia. My firm, Stephenson Roberts Altrow, has compelled us to stop booking first class, but I do it anyway, as my frequent flier status allow easy upgrades. Business at the firm has slowed so much that Stephenson Roberts is getting worried. But there’s always work to do, contracts, transactions, regulatory advice, lobbying, litigation, securities issuance, bonds—the capital markets group can make money just treading water. People don’t realize how much private enterprise, public corporations, rely on the law—we’re the only ones who care and even know that this stuff exists because we’re the nuts and bolts, the ligaments, that hold the thing together, we’re the ones who write the agreements and definitions of terms creating the trust and confidence that allow one party to give something to another and expect to get something even back. It’s like a ghostworld, the legal framework for what companies can do to one another and what they can make with one another. Oh, there’s a lot of leeway, freedom, gateways in and out of the citadel—we can do much for our clients, and they know it. But there is a perimeter, and disagreements need to be resolved, articulated, and then recorded. Writing the paperwork, clerking the data, organizing the documents, compiling abstract information, it all ends up controlling or guiding what companies do, so all along the line there are people who direct the flow of information and language and there are other people who have to comply with the rules agreed upon, the taxes, payment schedules, transportation of goods, interest on loans. Seth Blackwell, the firm’s only original partner still alive, retired nine years ago and spends most of his time, I hear, on his sailboat around Shelter Island. Charles Syl, Blake Arturo, James Giacomo, Bill Wilson and Carl really are in charge of managing operations. Out of these full partners and the thirty or so junior partners, Carl is probably the most optimistic about present business conditions. He says that things will undoubtedly be difficult but that hard work and perseverance will position us for the upturn in the economy that’s just a matter of time coming, and that the character of a good business is its ability to take market share in a prolonged business slowdown. Nevertheless, everyone has been antsy at least since the beginning of the year, or perhaps since late last year. We’re in a downturn now, a recession, official or not, after the crash of the Nasdaq, in which everybody lost most of the money he or she had made in the previous several years, sure, we, everyone, Carl, Allen, me, we all said it was just the technology sector, but it started to bleed over to everything, not that everything went down all at once—it was a slow exhalation—but if you wanted to survive, you had to rotate through just ahead of a multi-month wave of institutional selling, so you could still make money if you were agile enough to leap from one peak to the next, nimble wealth, but the collapse of the Nasdaq was just the pinprick, interest rates were gyrating, Alan Greenspan, after touching off the crash by tapping the brakes, turned right around and started pushing rates down a cliff, all of us standing there watching them stumbling on ledges inches wide then dropping again, him trying to make it look like a controlled rappel. Thus while the stock market deflated, real estate prices floated up, in and around Manhattan, the entire northeast corridor, the West Coast, anywhere anyone could hope to have a job that paid over a hundred thousand dollars, and the banks were giving money away for free once you factored in inflation, everyone was borrowing and refinancing mortgages for millions of dollars for houses laminated with a hundred and fifty plates of sheet rock, and thinking that a four hundred thousand dollar house they paid nine hundred for would be worth one point eight million in five years. But we had work in our firm, and we were set on surviving, and Carl just kept saying, “Stay focused.”

The departure out of Laguardia is the usual experience of discomfort, crowded with hordes of tourists, immigrants and second class businessmen. I slide into the port thirty minutes before my flight, ignore the line at the front desk check-in, find my flight on the monitor screen scroll, go immediately to the gate and get on the plane and sip snorts of whiskey from a sliver thin glass pewter-mouthed flask that makes it through security. Chicago, then San Francisco to meet Larry Loeb. He is trying to finish up a deal with Sure-Rite, a large multinational consumer products company. They need to issue bonds, which the market is dancing around, maybe it’ll take it, maybe it won’t, all depending on the price, and they need to secure loans at a manageable rate in order to acquire a supplier in Thailand, but federal and now World Trade Organization regulations rewritten from the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade require them to divest some other plant in Mexico, and now First Charter Bank, the lenders, my client’s firm, wants a renegotiated waiver on the possibility during the first sixteen years of prepayment based on the fluctuation of the foreign exchange markets and additional capital investment. It’s a headache, but most of the tough part is done and agreed on in principle, I only need to review it with Larry and his client the C.E.O. and the C.F.O. of the company, and have their board approve it. The only issue is whether the sixteen years is too long to guarantee debt service at a fixed variable on the exchange rate, assuming the value of the variable in dollars doesn’t change in itself. Larry says it’s fine, but I think it’s too long, but he’s the banker so I guess he knows what he’s doing.

The flight attendant on United 323 servicing first class is a good-looking red head with a hot body, late twenties, early thirties, but the women who ply the aisles in coach, on the other hand, are matronly figures, tired looking and rushed. Tough luck it is in America these days if you don’t have the money to travel first class or at least business class. Of course in America the flight attendants work together as a team. I watch families of four push and stumble by, lugging bags on sloping shoulders burdening dragging feet. A father pulls his son forward while his mother coaxes him on. I look away, sip my bourbon—sweet-- try to relax my neck, lean my head back, close my eyes and wait for the jets to thrust me back into the cushion of my seat.

I get into San Francisco two hours late and have to call Larry to cancel our one o’clock meeting and reschedule it for the morning. He has to reschedule a morning meeting to fit me in at eleven. As a result, we will have an hour and a half to do a three to four hour review session. Another of his clients, a private equity firm, wants to buy a company in Illinois and has hit a bit of a mess—provisions in its charter to prevent us or anyone from buying it unless we pay what amounts to an additional forty million dollars in options of the new merged entity at forty percent of the final share price to the Chairman of the board and the CEO. It’s a hundred and fifty million dollar deal, so we figure we can chisel some money out of it or raise the rest in a supplemental loan, but the client’s lawyer is now raising the question: is it worth it, he doesn’t think it’s in his client’s interest to come up with the extra forty, so it’s our job to persuade him that it is, and the bank will come up with part or half of it if necessary, I guess, is what Larry says. I don’t know why they don’t just walk away from the deal, but Larry is going for it, it’ll be one of those deals that just goes on and on, and either starts to happen or just pisses out. What the hell, I’ll bill Larry, and he’ll bill his client or he’ll just have an associate work on the financials and keep it running and see if he can negotiate a fee at some point when some deal gets done. Sometimes he’ll have an associate run numbers and write pitchbooks for years and finally when some idea hits when the market is right, he brings in the bank to leverage the deal, just like that, and then after it closes, Larry calls the client for a meeting and negotiates a fee for two years worth of work. I can imagine him walking in, blue suit, crisp, verbally presenting a bill. What are they going to do, not pay him after all that relationship management? It’s sunny and cool in San Francisco as I get a cab to the Mandarin. The driver is a Chinese guy in his forties, hair gone almost totally white, but unlike in New York, he speaks perfect English. The Yankees are playing the A’s and we talk baseball for a few minutes. I ask him about real estate in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and he gives me an unusually detailed rundown. Prices are still very high, but everyone thinks that is going to change relatively soon. Rental income isn’t being generated at levels high enough to justify prices. Commercial real estate is available, but prices are too high, so there are a lot of empty storefronts. Apparently his daughter is a broker. I pay him twenty-five bucks and tip him.

At the hotel, there’s already a call from Larry suggesting we meet for dinner to get started on the review instead of waiting till morning. He has a problem with some of the issues. Larry is a managing director at Charter Bank; he’s Jewish, from New York, tall, wiry, thick black hair slicked back; he moved out to San Francisco five years ago and at first hated it. Though not religious, he hated that you couldn’t get Jewish food, that nobody appreciated dark humor. He wanted to leave badly, but First Charter kept giving him more and more responsibility, and when the senior banker in Los Angeles left or quit or was fired or got too rich and just retired, Larry became the head of West Coast Investment Banking, and now gets credit for almost every west coast deal except for Technology banking, and last year got his first 10 million dollar bonus. He is 42 years old. His wife refused to move out to the west coast full time, and they have a house in Pacific Heights and two houses on Long Island, one on Lloyds Neck, one in East Hampton. Little by little, Larry’s wife, Julia, began to adapt. Larry bitches about her, but I think he still has a soft spot for banging her. She’s petite, cute, bulbous breasts, wears expensive sexy clothes. I know that he used to cheat on her because he used to ask me to double date with escorts. He likes Japanese girls with long wild-looking hair. Larry, too, has two kids.

At dinner, even though we’re pressed for time, we take the time to catch up on personal topics. “ How’s Gina?” he asks. She works at the same bank, in New York, and they know each other, having worked on several assignments together. Even though Larry is my client, he remembers everything about me. It is one of the reasons he is successful in the business, he blends a personal touch with his professional focus. I learn a lot from dealing with Larry, so I talk a little about Gina, that we are still in a relationship, but don’t have that much time to see each other. “ She’s a great girl, you know,” he says. He thinks we should get married, but it’s a casual opinion, kindly avuncular, as if he cares about my well-being, but I know him well enough to know that he doesn’t. Why would he care? It doesn’t really matter to him. I say, “We’ll do what makes sense at the right time.” The truth is, there’s little chance we’ll get married, as we hardly see each other now and I have relationships with other women. I ask him about Julia and the children. “She’s great. We’re selling the place in East Hampton. She’s upset about it, but she has her mother on the Island. It’s just that I can never get out there, and it’s such a sellers market now, we’re going to end up getting over seven million for it. Jerry and Lisa are fine too.”

A couple of years ago, I went to a dinner at Larry’s house in the Hamptons, actually to meet Harold Stemming, chief executive of Cables Crossing, the company that Carl is so crazy about. When I told Larry that Carl was a big fan of the company, he called Carl and invited him out as well. Larry was doing some financial analyses on small potential acquisition targets, satellite properties in Australia and Korea. Carl loved Harold. He’d already starting investing in the company, but was amazed, like a boy at a ball player, at how this ordinary-looking bald guy had become such a player. “What a down to earth, normal guy!” Carl kept saying. We were having drinks in Larry’s backyard, the sun hanging halfway down, light still bright but the glare just starting to disappear, a breeze wandering through. Julia was there, and Darlene, Carl’s wife, and me and Gina, so it was a cozy, intimate situation, kids running around, hardcore business talk in a casual tone, the wives talking about other people’s houses, the kids, Julia saying that Darlene should have just brought her kids, Darlene saying what a relief to have a couple of hours away from the brats, Julia laughing. Poor Gina, single, dating me, didn’t quite know what to do. We were more serious then, and Larry had invited her himself. He had had an eye on her as a smart, hardworking banker and often asked her to help out on his projects, if it was alright with her boss, stealing talent. He needed it, as he was severely understaffed in California, and it was difficult to get people out there that would work the kind of hours he wanted. He needed a New York banker out west and was having trouble finding it. It had occurred to me at the time that perhaps Larry was turned on by Gina and vice versa. I knew she was vulnerable to authority figures. She strove for equality in our relationship, but there remained a slight undertow of obedience to the rules, which she then resented.

Even though it didn’t make sense for me, I went over to the pool to play with the kids where Gina had gotten trapped with Darlene and Julia. The barbecue was supposed to be casual, but Carl had been contending a point about professional basketball and luxury sport utility vehicles; Larry was jet legged from flying in and having difficulty unwinding. Carl and Larry have known each other for several years. In fact, Carl originated Larry and First Charter as a client for Stephenson Roberts Altrow; usually a large bank hires one of the large firms, but each group head is free to hire whomever they think can get the job done, and somehow Carl had gotten the business from Larry. Later, after the initial relationship, in which Carl really had impressed Larry with his superior work ethic, his fastidiousness in getting every stage of the project completed on time with no detail too small to put a team of associates on, Carl found himself uncomfortable around Larry and eventually turned over most of the legwork to me, which is fine as I get along well with Larry. Carl thinks of Larry as a smooth inside operator, and I think that he’s envious of Larry’s cool exterior and his ability to handle large corporate clients apparently effortlessly. So half of Carl wants to pump him for information, to see how he does it, while the other half wants to beat him at his own game without resorting to doing what he does, as if Larry had an advantage that he, Carl, would not need in order to beat him anyway, as if he were electing to use handed down equipment but through pure determination and superior effort, he’d outdo him. In fact, Larry went to Cornell, though he’s also a New York kid, born on Long Island, not much different from Carl who was born in Brooklyn; but Larry’s more comfortable in overpriced suits and doesn’t cringe at exorbitant hotel and restaurant bills. Larry sees it as the cost of doing business, and in fact most of it ends up expensed to First Charter. Granted the bank is a much larger operation that Stephenson Roberts Altrow, and perhaps that explains the difference. Carl thinks of every expense as coming out of his own pocket, whereas Larry is really spending other people’s money. Of course, Carl conceals his shred of resentment, usually with enthusiastic admiration, whereas Larry, in this situation as in others, will just smile and not say anything. “Larry thinks he so smart,” Carl once said. “Maybe he is, but damn it if he’s not a continuous liar. He’ll tell you anything you want to hear. He’ll manipulate and massage whatever he says. He’ll say one thing to me, something totally different to you, and still something else to some other, and then he’ll try to orchestrate the whole thing and massage the truth to whatever pays off the most for him.”

“Yes, but Carl,” I said, “he’s the client.”

“I know. But I get sick of these slicker than thou bastards.”

I wouldn’t say that Larry necessarily makes that much more money than Carl, and over the long haul perhaps not at all. Investment banking is a volatile business and you can be making millions one year and next to nothing the next. But on the other hand guys like Larry know that they are in position to access inside deals. He’s on the board of a couple of companies. If you aren’t making millions by the time your in your late thirties on Wall Street, you probably aren’t playing the game right or you just don’t realize that you’re not playing the right game--it’s not about working for a living, as I said, it’s about working to turn up that one deal that will put you in the position to call at least some of the plays, then you take that money and go from there, start your own firm, suddenly the bank you used to work for wants to loan you money, investors want to be your partners, etc. That’s what we’re doing here, waiting to make our move, not working. Carl thinks that creates a conflict of interest, but I know he would jump to serve on a board if anyone called him on it. But the fact is, no one wants him, whereas several other senior partners at the firm are on the boards of several mid-sized companies. Carl insists on seeing himself as an outsider, and thus that’s how people see him. Which is one of the qualities I like about Carl. Though there’s something I don’t quite have clear about him that I do not like. He’s my boss, I guess, is part of it, but beyond that I think the way he sees the world disturbs me, as if he were afraid to admit that everything isn’t tied neatly together in a package and everything doesn’t necessarily work out in a rational system of productivity, even if you work really hard and stay focused. That’s why I guess I have a secret desire of seeing what he’d do if his world collapsed. It’s as if he dismisses the random and chaotic element that makes any system unpredictable. But maybe that’s just me, how I like to see things. Anyway, he’s good boss to work for, you can learn a lot from him, yes he can be an asshole and he pushes you very hard, but that goes with the territory, really. How else could you get anything done in this kind of a competitive environment?

“Larry’s a good client,” I said.

“You’re right, Mark. What were are fees last year? Thirteen million?” Carl’s eyes bulged.

“Something like that.”

“Can’t complain about that,” he smiled.

At that time, two years ago, at Larry’s house in East Hampton, Harold Stemming was at the tail end of a process of building a larger presence on Wall Street, as he was a westerner based in Colorado. Of course he had spent time in New York, and had a corporate office operating in New York, and owned cable and telecom properties in the East, but his main interest at the time was expanding over the Pacific. Competition in the East was locked up, he was saying, with A.T. and T. and the baby bells and then Verizon and Sprint and Penoble controlling most of the business, and CSXT was a tier two company in the field. A modest guy, pudgy, soft skinned, pale thinning hair, early fifties, glasses, nascent jowls puffing up his neck, Harold was capable of competing with the big guys, but it wasn’t part of his psychological make-up to be or see himself as the biggest guy in the room. That’s why he got along so well with Larry, who isn’t the biggest guy in the room either, but he’s facile in making someone else feel comfortable with the idea of being the biggest guy in the room, even if he doesn’t really feel that way. Larry’s a great support guy. However, as Carl said, he wasn’t surprised the year before when Stemming had taken over a Nordcom, a major Eastern cable company and was now in the big leagues, with plans to provide telephone and D.S.L. services through his system to New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, complementing a build-out of cell phone towers that he was doing through two subsidiaries and several other companies that he had contracted. He was also planning on taking over Nordcom’s project of installing fiber optic cable in certain hub zones for higher load broadband, a project that would absorb billions of dollars. Larry had provided the initial financing for the Nordcom acquisition through Charter, three hundred and fifty million dollars in a primary syndicate, with a secondary follow-on three months later of another hundred and seventy-five million and there was another hundred and fifty million from private investment vehicles who got preferred warrants and convertible bonds; I had worked on the private investments and the regulatory statements for those investors, including Jack Samson’s private equity firm, whose previous company, Jupiter Satellite, we had advised on its sale to Cables Crossing the year before that. There were two other teams of lawyers, one to write the main financing agreements between the bank and Cables and the other to write the merger agreement. It ended up taking over a year to be approved by the F.C.C., but it was, and Harold was made not quite a billionaire on paper. Larry’s boss, Sam Reed, the C.E.O. of First Charter was put on the board of Cables Crossing, as the company was called, and Larry booked megafees for something like six separate transactions, not to mention the subsequent commissions in the secondary market. It was a huge deal for Larry’s standing in the firm, and for me with Larry and at Stephenson Roberts even though my part of the deal, writing the regulatory opinion. The private investment agreement was deemed by compliance small enough to be immaterial to conflict of interest for Carl, a managing partner, to hold his stock position, though he was advised by our internal compliance officer to freeze his position for six months. Plus, our client was First Charter, not Cables Crossing, and after the deal was done, we were out of it. It was after that that Carl really started to get bullish on the stock.

When I finally walked over to the pool where the women and children were, Gina flushed with a smile and roll of her eyes. I bantered a bit with the women, and was lulled into Darlene and Julia’s conversation, Darlene with her Alabama accent, Julia with her Long Island accent. Darlene was telling Julia about the Outer Banks, comparing it to the Hamptons. Julia hadn’t been there, having lived on Long Island all her life. She didn’t even like going out to the West Coast to see Larry. But she said she didn’t care. “Oh, let Larry work out there, that’s fine with me. I don’t care if I don’t see him for weeks at a time, sometimes just once a month. It’s not really any different from when he was working in the city. I’d just see him when he comes to bed around midnight. We try to spend vacations together.” Julia said yes Carl works too much too, like an animal. Then they both laughed. Initially, their voices had been cacophonous, Julia’s nasal vowels, her wide-eyed listening face, big breasts, interspersed with Darlene’s slower, summery drawl, smooth except for shifts in pitch, when she’d suddenly jump an octave to pick up on Julia’s expressions. I thought it was funny at first; then I admired how hard they were working to find some common cause in one another. Not exactly housewives, let alone matrons, they were still young, in their thirties, my age, and attractive and knew it and worked at it, wore expensive clothes, spent a lot of money on themselves. Neither of them had bothered to try to make it in the corporate world or anything else--I think Julia had been a school teacher for a while and Darlene had worked at some sort of agency in Manhattan, but they didn’t go to business school or anything like that, as if they knew they’d marry a banker or lawyer. Nevertheless, it wasn’t as if either of them wasn’t tough enough. You can still see the glint in their eyes, in the way they armor themselves in gleaming jewelry. In fact, these girls are a lot tougher than, say, Gina, who really holds out the expectation that she’ll do fine on Wall Street if she needs to, keeps her head down and works hard, chooses to stay in the business without getting pulled into the various internecine political battles, even though she doesn’t want to stay in the business for much longer. Then Gina walked away, back to the lawn chairs where Larry and Harold and Carl were drinking gin and vodka drinks. She didn’t fit in there either. I knew they couldn’t help but look at her sexually, thirty years old, thin, an MBA, no kids, dating me.

So over the last two years, Carl, except during that six month period, has kept buying Cables Crossing as it went from thirty down to twenty then up to forty on to sixty and by now, it was in the high eighties and nipping into the nineties. As I said, his position fluctuates now between one and two million dollars, but I have no idea of the actual cost basis to him. He has also begun to pledge those shares as collateral for margin loans on other investments. “Look at how the world has changed. We’re all closer together now,” he would say. “We’re entering a new world economy. Look at CNN, Fox, Sky TV, the global economy, China. Everyone is going to become a capitalist. Everyone is going to be a consumer. Look at the advertising potential for a company like CSXT. The world’s becoming a smaller place, I tell you. No one’s going to want to have a war with our trading partners. The potential’s unlimited, don’t you think? And I’m going to get out in front of it, exploit it, and get richer and richer.”

“Carl, don’t you think you’re being overly optimistic?”

“Don’t you think you’re being pessimistic, Mark? Look at Harold Stemming. He’s not being overly optimistic, is he? Started with nothing, bought a yellow pages book in Colorado, built that over the whole West, then bought Victory Wireless and Wire, sold that but was brought back in to run the new merged entity, even though he was supposed to be out. What’s he worth now, billions?” We argued. Carl seems to respect my views; I do a lot of work for him. It’s almost as if he’s my mentor entertaining himself by looking to gain insight by hearing the views of his acolyte, then arguing me down. I don’t really think his arguments are all that good, but he’s forceful, and moreover his success speaks for itself. I just don’t share the same world view. He thinks we’re on an endless progression towards some better future, and that as long as we can make it through the present, the future will be bigger and brighter than what is now. It’s not just optimism, but, I think, a kind of forced grandiosity.

“Hey, Carl, things can, it’s always possible, go wrong. You know that. Look at our business. Things get derailed everyday. We know as well as anyone how unexpected events can scuttle a deal. Remember the Marcus George and Rialtus merger? What a mess. Who would have thought that would collapse in fraud?”

“Nonsense, Mark. You always look at the negative. We caught it, didn’t we?” Marcus George was a commercial real estate development company that built strip malls all over the country then sold them for huge profits. Three guys in New Jersey ran it. Last year, they were taking an offer from Rialtus, a European funded investment vehicle, for four hundred million dollars plus warrants and shares. It was a significant deal. Well, it turns out that Marcus George had been misreporting its capital structure for a decade. They were running deals off of one another without paying back the investors who were themselves in the form of a subsidiary financing company they had bought back several years back. So a lot of this debt was just rolled over and never called. We had to turn it over to a bigger law firm. I don’t know how they did the financial reporting. It was nothing but a house of cards, but they almost sold it for four hundred million dollars, no, they did sell it and eventually the thing collapsed and the new owners are suing everybody, but we turned it over before getting involved. They finally sorted it out by classifying it as a private financing vehicle not subject to banking regulations.

Now, sitting down to dinner with Larry in the hotel in San Francisco, clink of silverware and wineglasses ring through the air, stiff bleached tablecloths and soft carpet cushioning and supporting the chime, Larry is still talking about personal relationships, not business yet. “The great thing about being married, Mark, is the externalization of your relationship with your wife, making it something outside of how you feel about each other on any given day. It becomes something real to the outside world, and then it’s the start to owning property, having kids, paying their school fees. When you’re single, and even before you have kids, you’re not invested in the system. It’s like you could get up and walk away from your job, your house or apartment, and just go somewhere else. But once you put down roots, I’m not talking about the Mayflower here, but suddenly it matters what’s going on in the neighborhood, however you define that, I mean you may not really think it matters in the greater scheme of things, but it’s where you are now and for the most part where you’re going to be. Julia’s great, but she is as nutty as ever. But now, she has Jerry and Lisa to nurture. It gives her purpose. It gives her a sense of security to be so absolutely needed, depended upon. And that gives me a sense of security. I mean, if there is a God, and I think there might be, that’s the way he determined it to be.”

“So I guess you’re not torn between the nature and nurture argument.”

“Not at all. I think it’s ninety percent nature and the other ten percent gets layered on top. Very superficial. But let’s talk about the deal.”

Larry is all business for the next hour and a half over dinner. Then he leaves and I go up to my room, make a bourbon and soda and turn on the television. The lights of the city reflect off the sliding balcony door. Walking out on the balcony, it’s cool, dewy but not damp, no need for the AC. I sit down in one of the outdoor chairs. My cell phone rings and it is Audrey, whom I know from law school and who used to date my friend Peter who worked at Salomon Smith Barney for eight years before becoming a partner at Mountain Creek Investments. Audrey never practiced law, but worked for McKinsey for three years, then worked in mergers and acquisitions for a private advisory firm in New York. Now she’s writing screenplays and is starting a film development and production company in Los Angeles. She also helps start-up companies get venture capital. She is in the City for another night and wants to get together. She knows I’m in town through Gina, who is one of her best friends. We agree to meet in an hour downstairs at the bar and then she is going to take me out.

Audrey is a couple of years younger than I, around Gina’s age. They went to Columbia as undergrads together, before Gina went to Stanford and Audrey N.Y.U Law; she studied classics, as I did, Gina economics. Tall, dark-haired, thin, but not anorexic, semi-athletic, though I don’t think she works out regularly. A great talker, smart, entertaining. “Hi, Mark!” I had been sitting at the bar for half an hour drinking another bourbon and bitters. We give each other a hug.
“I’m in town to pitch a script.”

“ Here?”

“Some investors are here.”

“Did you write it?”

“ No. Someone I’m working with.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s really great, but I don’t want to talk about it. I met with them today. It went well. But, you know, we’ll have to wait and see . I’ll tell you. It’s about a C.E.O. of a successful internet company who perpetrates a fraud on the shareholders. He and his top executives walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars, the company’s stock drops, goes bankrupt, the employee’s pension fund goes under and they, the employees, lose it all. It’s not so much about finance, not so much about the stockholders loss, but about what happens to the top guys. They get rich, slapped on the wrist, pay a fine and walk away with hundreds of millions among themselves. These guys lie, steal and cheat, yet are rewarded. It’s an exploration of that experience. I guess kind of like O.J. Simpson, getting away scot-free even though everyone knows you’re guilty. What happens then? Do people hate you? Do you have nightmares? Or in the case of these executives, can’t they just buy their way into social approval? Of course you know they can. In a way, all they were doing was securing their own financial futures—I mean the whole point is that no one is going to do it for you, not the government, not your employer. Sure, work hard and get ahead, but if you want to retire comfortably, securely, you need however many millions of dollars. Who can blame them?”

“Sounds interesting, Audrey.” She orders a gin and tonic. “The only thing is,” I say, “O.J. is black.”

“Right,” she smiles. “Rich white guys, rich smart white guys, don’t go to jail, or if they do, it’s not really jail. It’s not like they’re going to be sexually assaulted.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if white collar corporate criminals were subject to being fucked up the ass in jail, physically violated as criminals. I mean some poor schmuck black kid gets busted for drugs, he’s fucked literally. Not these rich white guys.”

“But would you really want that?”

“Why not?”

“What if it were to happen to you?”

“Well, it happens to other people. Sure, the penal system’s not fair. You make one move and then another and then another, and slowly you find you’re looking at some plea bargain, and you’re just in it. But these guys do get brought down, humiliated.”

“Really? Do they? How humiliating is it if you spend nine months in a low security prison, get religion maybe, look at Liddy or Milken, they come out and start a foundation or get on talk radio, I mean, think about it, these guys ripped off millions, enriched themselves beyond dreams and now Milken’s banned from the securities business? Isn’t that like being retired? He’s allowed to keep his money.”

“It is though. For them, think of the egos involved. You’re vilified in the media, your name is thrown around with the worst elements of capitalism, you know, the secret suspicion that the whole thing is a ponzi scheme, an insider’s money game, based on nothing but lies and deception, and so these guys’ names go down as the exemplars of that. Everything these guys are is wrapped up in their view of what they’ve done, not just the money, they think of themselves as the good guys, as what you’re supposed to be in America. Sure, do well for yourself, but in doing that you’re doing good for everyone else. You’re a leader, creating jobs, innovating. You know. How’s Gina?”

“She’s good.”

“I just spoke to her last night. That’s how I knew you were in the city. She said to call you up, so I did.”

“Great. I’m glad you did. I’m working on what looks like will turn out to be a hostile tender and I’m through for the night and most of tomorrow.”

“Great. I have another meeting tomorrow at 9 a.m., probably last about an hour.”

Audrey had invested in an early stage software company based in San Francisco a couple of years ago and sold her shares for several million dollars.

“Sounds like you don’t miss the East Coast at all.”

“I don’t. It’s so much nicer out here, and not just the weather. People are much more upbeat. Less whining and neurotic complaining. In New York, everyone is either depressed or neurotic. Enough is enough. L.A. is great. Don’t get me wrong though, I love New York. But out here, the weather is nice everyday, it’s not as expensive so you don’t feel like you’re getting ripped off everywhere you go. There’s a lot to do, great business opportunities. It’s a great place to work as a professional, a lawyer or banker. You should come down and check it out. You know tons of people out here. Jerry Lee, Jack McBride, Barbara Tungsten, Cheryl Dixon from Alabama is here—I mean there. Doesn’t your firm have an office there?”

“Sure, but it’s small.”

“You should come down this weekend. You’ll love it.”

I have a sudden vision of Audrey squirming out of her panties on her back, pulling her legs up, knees to her chest, her cunt smiling at me and then her head’s buried in my crotch and she’s unzipping my pants and my dick jumps, she slips it out, wets it down, slides it in and out of her mouth several times and then we’re outside in a copse of trees somewhere and I’m fucking her from behind and she’s leaning forward hands spread out on the bark of a trunk of a tree and her legs are splayed out with her pussy pushed out and I’m about to lose it and then we’re in a dark room and all I can see is Audrey riding me from above, her face, she’s about to come.

“Why not. No one will miss me over the weekend.”

“Great,” she smiles. “Have you eaten?”

“I had dinner already with Larry.”

She hadn’t, so we go to an expensive bistro in the North Beach area, where I have a salad and Audrey eats half of her steak frites and I have the other half. We drink Bordeaux and I listen to Audrey tell me about her movie business, one of the scripts she is working on, her new business partner, Johnny Yang, formerly of International Management and Investment, and some other guy she is thinking about dating, or is dating or just sleeping with. I was fairly drunk by then, and may have asked her straight out whether she had slept with the guy, Randall, somehow I remember his name, but now I can’t remember what she said. We didn’t mention Gina all night.

We go to L.A. the next morning, hung over on the nine o’clock flight and spend the weekend fucking. It starts out gently, like strangers, but by the Sunday afternoon we are snorting cocaine and fucking by the pool. At first I am afraid to fuck her because she is friends with Gina, but with Audrey’s legs and her ass spread out before me I overcome that fear, the fear of consequences, what Gina would say or do if she found out—in the back of my mind I know she will find out, and she did, of course, but what the hell, Audrey wants to do it, she is sucking my cock, my hand ruffling the back of her head, her smooth sandy blonde hair was cool like glass. And I am afraid that she won’t like it, but after a while I get over it because it doesn’t matter, she really wants to do it and it’s clear she’ll be happy with it and then the thought occurs to me that I don’t give a damn if she is happy with it, but afterwards we lie around and relax at her place, modern California, lots of light, a nice pool in the backyard totally private even though the other houses are right there, behind an eight foot high wood slat fence. I wonder how many guys she is fucking and ask her. But when she won’t give me a straight answer, I just smile and get another glass of white wine. She talks about her Dad, a partner at McKinsey, and how she didn’t get any special treatment when she worked there, but she was always trying to impress everyone, and I say, “Isn’t that what we all have to do if we have a decent job?” She wanted to get into the film business, but she says it’s the same thing. “Aren’t you rich enough not to work?”

“Sure, but you still have to do something, and that involves working with other people, collaborating, so you might as well do something you want, right?” And then we start to fuck again. I don’t get on a plane to New York until Sunday night and crash at my apartment in the city until the afternoon.