installment 2, 21-37

Last night, the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, we were at a party on Twenty-eighth Street. Jay Anderpaul, a stockbroker like Allen, was walking around with a smoldering joint held slackly in his lips, smoking it like a cigarette, thick gray fumes trailing him, and he was mumbling something about getting cocaine. Later, when I saw him come out of the bathroom with Jackie, a tall thin administrative assistant who works at my office, they were laughing and wide-eyed. I imagined the two of them getting it on later, her long skinny legs wrapped around his torso, a spider around your finger, but she eventually left with Ray, who’s at least 55, a photographer for fashion magazines, whom I thought was gay. She is tall and thin enough to be a model, but she doesn’t really care about that or any career. She’s young too, like all the girls at parties, in their twenties, happy to have a job even if it is a mindless job, answering the phone and folding up pieces of paper to go out in the mail; she could do more, as much as you give her, but she really wants to be out by six or six-thirty at the latest, which is ridiculous, so she gets irritable at seven-thirty or eight, red-faced a little, impatient to walk out of the office, cute. But she will still do what we ask her to. It’s not for everyone, the hours you put it to get a deal done. Even I am not sure it’s worth it.

Jay Anderpaul was fired from his job at First Union Swiss Bank for supposedly offering additional initial public offering stock to specific clients for higher commission rates and kickbacks to the corporate banking division; some of these guys, CEOs, would hire the investment bank for mergers advisory or managing stock issuance or other capital market services. Chetan Agarwal, the head of private client was supposedly out to get him, supposedly again because Chetan’s head was on the chopping block with the Securities Exchange Commission. Jay says he’s being made a scapegoat, that everyone in the industry has been doing it. But since he made over a million dollars last year, quadrupling his previous year, he doesn’t care. Yes, he worked hard, he said, but it’s not just work, it’s lubricating the gears, making sure everything turns round smoothly, screwing your buddies, lubricating your administrative assistant along the way if you can get away with it and if she’s hot. It’s knowing how to play the game and knowing that it is a game. “Let them sue me,” he said. “I’ll be ready and I will name names. They all knew about it, Chetan, Wilkes, Stewart, Welch, all the way up to Richard Johnson. Get real. They told us to do it. So fuck them. They paid me severance, I’ll keep my mouth shut, for now, as long as they don’t screw me.”

The Twenty-eighth Street party was at a luxurious apartment, two floors, circular staircase leading to a cut away bedroom, high up enough to overlook Broadway and Fifth Avenue downtown; open bar, good-looking bartender in a low cut deep-vee halter, tight leather pants bunched up in her crotch; music blaring, hip-hop, acid jazz and other dance crap. Numerous people from the law firm where I work were there, Joseph, Alex, Leann from Atlanta, Kate from Yale. Some friends of Allen, Jason who’s at Fidelity, Daniel who deals junk bonds for D.L.J. on the West Coast and their dates, a couple of chicks they met downtown, a blonde in a pale gray skirt slit up to her ass and an off-white sequined blouse with pearls and an Asian chick, tall and thin, from Hong Kong, who spoke with a British accent, had an M.B.A. from Harvard, now working at some ad agency downtown. Turns out she created the global ads for H.S.B.C. after they bought Bruce Wasserstein’s new firm. She was only twenty-seven and couldn’t stop talking. Cocaine, it seemed, coming out of her nose. Finally someone gave her a double vodka tonic with practically no tonic and after a couple of sips she quieted down. Later on, some people on L.S.D. showed up. Everyone that night was talking about the dream of making as much money as possible as quickly as possible, and getting out before the next leg down and the bottom of the whole market fell. It was a song really, and we were singing it, singing the dream of the beginning of summer, or, if you didn’t know the words, the language of money, what to say, just humming the tune, tapping your foot and by keeping time being part of the music.



THE NEXT WEEK I AM sitting on a plane to San Francisco to meet a client. We are waiting to taxi out of Laguardia. I have books of papers to review, but I drift to a situation with Carl Stiehl and Allen. Carl is my boss, Allen is my broker and also Carl’s broker, but not his primary one. He has two other brokers and is always trying out new guys at different firms. What the hell, he says, you transfer three or four hundred thousand dollars to their firm, they love you, and sometimes you get access to good information or deals, but you have to ask for it. Carl I would consider a sophisticated investor; he’s made a lot of money in the law business and in the stock market, knows the risks, and is cautious. But he holds the overall conviction and is committed to the principle that the sky is the limit, that’s the way he sees the market, you don’t know what tiny company could become the next Pfizer or General Electric of Microsoft. It’s one of his ideals, the infinite potential of the market as a rational information system and the intelligence and guts needed to be willing to shoulder properly assessed risk that should pay off, but Carl on any given day doesn’t feel satisfied, and he doesn’t believe he is rich enough to ward off whatever insecurity he believes the future might bring, so he always operates under the imperative to make more money now, as much as possible, as quickly as possible, that there isn’t enough time because of compound interest, opportunity cost, capital growth potential squandered to the passing of time.

Allen has been interested in making Carl a bigger client. In a sense, that’s his job. We are talking three-way on the phone about a basket of stocks, all companies that Allen’s firm, Moral Morgan, has strong recommendations on. They are all, or most, going up. Of course, as usual, Moral put on their buy recommendations after they started going up. But, it must be said, in fact, that I have made over a seventy thousand dollars, a third of my salary and bonus, so far this year on stock recommendations from Allen. Which is noteworthy since the major market indices are all down, especially the Nasdaq. But mostly following Allen’s advice, I’m making money. Of course, like everyone, I have lost a lot of money since the peak, but I guess it all depends on how you count it up, or what you count as your starting point. And of course, you feel smart when you’ve made money speculating. That may be the real incentive to investing, I think, the ability to make a judgement call on the future and be rewarded in concrete terms for being right. Carl says that as an investor that’s what he does, he looks ahead, as if he’s some ship captain looking out for icebergs, some watchman of risk. I too want to be able to look ahead and see the risks and profit from that foresight, from what I think the future holds. But it’s hard to know on analysis if you’re right. There are too many factors. Plus analysis becomes interpretation, and then you’re spinning around chasing your tail. So you’re kind of left just having to go ahead with what you’ve got, with what you know at the time, or you’re paralyzed and incapable of action. Allen says, the path to getting rich involves losing money, and you have to move on, fight another day, and that’s it. What he provides as a broker, sometimes, is a slight edge on the market, a little more and better information. Not illegal. Lot of times, it’s just looking at the numbers of a company, just a little bit differently than everyone else, just a little bit ahead of everyone else, or most people, I mean all the information trickles down too, you know, eventually. You talk to a friend who went to school with the C.F.O. of some company or a guy who works for the C.F.O., and you trade on a casual remark, if it works out, you buy your friend a case of wine, or box tickets to the Yanks or on Broadway, whatever he likes. If it doesn’t work out, well, you don’t mention it. Carl has made a pile of money this year too, I don’t know how much, but a multiple of what I have done, and he keeps intimating to Allen that these trades are a small portion of his total portfolio, almost leading him on. Allen keeps complaining that he doesn’t have a comprehensive picture of Carl’s total assets, and that he can’t advise him fully. But I guess Carl wants it that way. Why should he give him everything really? And Allen doesn’t care, doesn’t take it personally. To him, it’s just part of the business. People who think they’re smarter than everyone else always pay the most to learn the lesson that they’re not.

Carl has been a senior partner at Stephenson Roberts Altrow for years; he had been promoted to partner quickly because he came to understand early on that the paragon function of a lawyer at a corporate services firm, especially a small one, was to bring in new clients. He understood that the most successful lawyers were really salesmen. It’s just that what they’re selling is an intangible, confidence, security, judgement, advice. When you’re selling an intangible, you’re selling words, pieces of language arranged and formed to appeal to the buyer, creating or securing value in the agreements you’re making. So now Carl enjoys other people trying to sell him something intangible, an investment opportunity, the hope of getting rich or the fear which motivates security. Allen’s sales pitch is disarming. He doesn’t try to hide that he is selling you something, but he invites you to overlook that fact and just perceive him telling you why he likes a certain stock, and once you start listening to him, you take for granted that he’s selling it. Allen sometimes invests his own money in the stocks he recommends to his clients, when he’s allowed to by his company. Depending on the deal, sometimes he has access to information that involves institutional funds, though he’s not supposed to, when Moral is handling a large trade or something, and that starts to push the envelope of what’s legal. But sometimes through his contacts he hears about what some other firm is doing. And when he is excited about an opportunity or a company, he just lets us know and asks us if we want to join in. He tries to be like a friend. So we’re listening to Allen sell to us, “I think we buy Silver Ocala again, its down far enough, and the capital expenditure cycle is reaching a trough, that’s what we’re reading from Dave McCann, our equity strategist. So tech spending will have to pick up by the end of the year, and we ought to get in now, not when everyone else does, and that means pretty much now, I mean that’s why it’s a good buy, no one else wants it right now, they’re too scared that the bottom of the tech boom will fall out, but it already has, I’m telling you, it’s a buy here now. This is a great company, you know the financials, they have two billion in cash, and I know it’s down on the year, the stock price, but that’s what I’m saying, that’s why I’m buying, it’s not on any other recommend list either, yet. We’re getting in just a little bit ahead of everyone else, and that’s where we’ll make the money. Next week, or the week after, I don’t know when McCann’s piece is coming out, but soon. Clients first. It’s a great story for right now, I don’t think we should hold it very long, medium term, you know, three to six months, maybe more, we’ll see soon enough. Maybe longer. I know that where we’re at in the interest rate cycle, rates will go up, but not that fast, sure, they’ll go up eventually, whether by Greenspan or the market itself, but that’s not happening now, not yet. So these stocks will continue to run with money continuing to come in from the money markets that’s just sitting there. You’ve got probably trillions in money markets out there and I swear to you fund managers are going to start putting that capital to work, I know it. I’ve talked to these guys. It can’t go on staying on the sidelines, so it won’t, you watch.” And Carl finally agrees to buy one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars of three stocks, Ocala, more of a cable company, Cable Systems Crossing Technologies, a perennial favorite of his, that he’s been building a position in, and a natural gas explorer, while I buy about forty thousand of the same three stocks. However, I get the sense that for Carl, this is playing around money, that he doesn’t really believe Allen’s full story, but he recognizes that these stocks will go up, and he will sell them on his own judgement. Equities are volatile now, but to Carl, that’s no reason to be pessimistic. He knows that volatility represents potential profit if you’re willing to shoulder the risk, and he likes it. He’s a bull, and he always sees opportunities to buy and own, and he’s always looking for growth, upward moves. We speculate. That’s what we do to make real money, work is just instrumental to paying living expenses. You could never make enough money through work alone, I don’t think. Not enough to build wealth. That’s not what work is about, and that’s not what the market is about. Financial security includes investing, there’s no way around it. And to be a successful investor, sooner or later you realize it’s about exploiting differences in what people know, which, in the end, is the market.

These are some of the things I have tried to learn from Carl. But what do I know? You never really know for sure how something’s going to work out—isn’t that the universal experience? Risk and uncertainty are inherent in looking ahead. I don’t think I have some special power to see how things are going to turn out; in fact, I’d suppose, if you put me in the spotlight, most people have similar imaginations as I do, regular intimations of the future. It’s just that, for the most part, we, or they, are so interlocked within what we already believe the future holds that we tend to ignore this imagery. How can I tell Carl is headed for trouble? I don’t know. He wants to be confident, but you can feel the anxiety in his voice. Like he’s expecting the market to just keep going up. I don’t know how he could be so sure, he doesn’t know anything I don’t know, he doesn’t have any access to facts that I don’t have. It’s just his style. But that’s how we project ourselves into the future, our style, how we carry ourselves. We all do it, and we’re all right or wrong around half the time. But it seems to me that the more you’re able to live in the present and not have a preconceived notion of what the future holds, your images of the future, when they occur, have a greater chance of being accurate. Think about it: the man who ends up living the life he’s conceived for himself since childhood, he’s the guy who’s most amazed at how things turn out. It’s like he’s completely astounded that his teenage daughter is getting drunk and giving blowjobs to the cool boys in school, the school which was the reason they moved to the suburbs in the first place.

Sometimes I think I became a lawyer because I had the sense that no one was listening to me, that no matter how substantial I thought what I had to say, people just ignored me. But as an attorney, people pay you for your advice, so they actually listen; they’re invested in hearing what you have to say. Some of the time. Sure, it’s a lot of work. But that’s irreducible in this life. But regarding the future, if you think about it too much, a logical question arises: what do you really know about what’s going to happen, are you sure about it, how do you act to control it, if you can, or perhaps you just let it ride, let it all happen, unfold and watch it. Exploit it. Furthermore, how do you get people to listen to you without being considered a Cassandra? Well, first they have to trust you. Or believe they are going to get some good, some profit or benefit from what you have to say, or be protected from some harm. It’s like buying an insurance policy to mitigate the risk of expected mishaps or shortfalls, in the belief, almost superstitiously, that if you pay the money, it won’t happen, as if there were some kind of causal or theological relation, giving money to the church, to the representatives of God. And where does that money pile up? Well, that’s what the capital markets are all about it. The priests loan it out, or use it as leverage for more. But what are we buying with those payments if not making some kind of payment on the future? It’s as though we’re paying money into the future, installments, trying to buy it, the future, but we can’t afford it all now, so we have to take out a loan and we pay little by little to some company that actually holds it, like a promissory note or a title, a piece of paper with writing on it, it’s a contract, an agreement, a policy. But events do occasionally intrude. Risk can’t be wished away. Once I put it that way, however, as a logical question—can you know anything about the future and can you communicate it to someone else—I don’t have an answer. Of course, in a specific technical situation, in an area of which I have legal expertise, I can tell you what is likely to happen as a result of option one, two or three. But in general, you just go by feel and grope your way through the dark using the few guide lights you can muster. That’s all my intimations of the future amount to, in fact, guide lights.

Later that week, the first week of summer, I was supposed to see Gina Stephens, whom I’ve dated off and on for the last year and a half, but she couldn’t make it at the last minute and we had to reschedule. Gina is at First Charter, but wants to get out of the business, get married to someone who will deal with all the needs and services, and have kids. I met Gina through a dating service that Allen had recommended. They matched us up by our biographical sketches, and one of the things I liked about her was that she didn’t ask any questions about my background which were in the biographical material I gave to the dating service. She was whip smart, thin and ambitious. When we met she said, “So you’re Mark Price. That’s an interesting name.”

“Do you think so? I find it kind of plain. I work for a firm called Stephenson.”

“I know. We hire you guys all the time.”

“Right. You’re at First Charter. I almost forgot.” We were sitting at a restaurant on 21 Street; I’m having a scotch and soda and she’s drinking a lager, her bare legs crossed at the knees, and my eyes kept following them up. She smiled and kept talking.

“I like the business, but the hours are deathly. I mean, come on, you need a life, don’t you?”

“Definitely.”

“We were in China for nine days and we left on four hours notice. I didn’t even have a chance to go home and pack a bag. What is that? Is that civilized?”

“No. What were you doing there?”

“A potential investment in the main export bank, but the whole thing is just too complicated; they weren’t ready, we were going to go in with a private equity firm and another group of partners, but the rules of ownership were so complex, nobody could agree on the draft, and so it’s like still in long term planning mode. It’ll probably happen in five years or so, with the next wave of investment.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“It was, but you know, big banks getting bigger, it’s kind of monotonous too, boring, the inevitability. Of course there will be a dramatic struggle over who takes control and the partnership will be riddled with internal conflicts; that’s the way these things always are. After you’ve seen it at a certain level, it just sort of repeats itself over and over, with different companies, people, the only thing, the numbers multiply exponentially, the bank sort of ends up loaning money to itself, I mean, not exactly, but by the time you add the whole transaction up, it just becomes one huge blob of money on a balance sheet projected into the future, god knows how many payments coming in every month, like clockwork supposedly. Sometimes I dream about the whole thing collapsing.”

“Whoa. That’s getting apocalyptic. I kind of like that.”

“I know, but you know, this sort of thing happens from time to time. The system’s pretty flexible, it’ll recover, adjust, reshape itself, some entities will be hurt. . .”

“What do you mean?”

“Institutions. Others will stand back and watch and learn and next time around they’ll have another layer of risk controls but they’ll push it again, out to the edge. That’s the nature of the business.”

I had read her biography, but it wasn’t sticking in my mind, other than the fact that she worked at First Charter. Her mother is an artist and a professor in North Carolina, and her dad, they’re split up, was an economist at the treasury department and then at the U.N., development policy writer. At the bank, she knew Larry and occasionally was called in to do some work for him. It became kind of a turn-on to me that she worked for my client, and it made me want to do it with her even more, but we didn’t end up fucking for a couple of dates. I guess she wanted to check me out a bit, see if my manners were up to snuff. Luckily, they were. It was on or about the third date, and we went back to her apartment and I pushed her back on to an easy chair, kneeled down and hiked up her skirt and pulled off her panties and spread her legs out and smashed my face into her cunt which was sweaty and salty. I had picked her up after work and we were both tired but we had a bottle of white wine which rejuvenated us for the fucking. Her pussy was a delicate and meaty strip with pearly beads of sweat running along the edge of the opening and I pushed my tongue in it and thought about fucking her meanwhile she was starting to gasp and come and she started beating her hands on the top of my head, one tightly balled into a fist, the other open, slapping me on the side of the forehead almost poking me in the eye and then she started scratch my face, so I pulled my face out of her pussy and started to get my dick out and put on a rubber but she said no and slipped it in her mouth for a few minutes then asked me to fuck her, her legs splayed out on propped up on the armrests of the soft red and blue colored easy chair. I like her but it’s not an exclusive relationship I don’t think and it isn’t going anywhere, as I’m just not ready for a committed relationship, and my sense, with her, is that I’d always be trying to live up to her expectation, and that turns me off. She could make a lot of money in banking, but she says she wants to get out of the business, which I can totally understand. For now, at any rate, she takes a professional attitude towards it, which pays off dealing with clients and getting the job done; she’s a Stanford M.B.A., and they like her: athletic, runs, plays tennis, but soft with sandy blond hair. We have had sex about ten times, but not recently. We’ve both been too busy, and I am wondering if the summer will allow us to get it together at all.

That first weekend of the summer, when Allen and I went out to our house on Accabonac, we pick up Elaine at a bar in Amagansett where some people we know are drinking, a girl Allen knows, and end up snorting quite a bit of cocaine. We finally bring her back to the house and end up taking turns fucking her. She is very hyped-up on blow and then wants to do it on all fours while giving Allen a blowjob. It is a little weird looking at each other and her between us, her back all stretched out and undulating side to side. It is dark and there is moonlight coming off the water, it’s still cool outside at night, and we keep the lights off so we can see outside. She keeps sliding Allen’s dick out of her mouth and saying she wants us to come at the same time. It is somewhat embarrassing.

Back at the office during the work week, Carl keeps wanting to talk about Cable Systems Crossing Technologies, CSXT, the telecom stock he’s invested in. Carl has been mesmerized by its steady up performance the last several months. He started buying shares three years ago, when the company was in the process of securing the rights to an underwater intercontinental cable system in an agreement with old British Telecom, and they had borrowed all this money from the banks and followed with a series of high-yield bond issues; as a result, people started to like them and the market determined them to be an integral piece of the backbone for global data transmission. They were also expanding in the U.S., buying up regional telecom companies with all the leveraged debt. The stock price started to go up and Carl started to buy in, his initial investment of over two hundred thousand at a price somewhere in the thirties—as far as I know about it-- has tripled with the stock now in the nineties, and Carl has continued to add to his position throughout as the value of the stock has ratcheted up, buying even more on the dips. He is excited about it now, understandably, and I think he owns probably close to two million in it now and that’s why he can’t stop talking about it, at least when he’s around me, as he knows I own it too. In fact, each of us owns what is respectively a significant number of shares of this company, using Allen as the broker, though Carl owns much more than I do; significance, however, as the word suggests, is subjective, how much you value a thing or an amount of a thing. I bought a small amount in the high fifties in part because Carl was still buying. Actually, the amount I own is at least as large a percentage of my net worth, so presumably I should be as concerned, but I’m not.

In the back of Carl’s mind, there’s a cloying, scratching, nerve-racking annoyance that he wants to be richer, which I can understand and indeed in which I too share, as I believe everyone does, at least every adult male American, and at least half the female, and probably round the world as well—it must be a human thing, the need and the desire, the eros, for security, and the reasoning that a personal store of value is a hold on that sought after security, the object of desire. But as I cannot believe in an omnipotent God who will save you in the end and relieve you of all your petty fears and desires, nor can I wholly commit to the value of storing up as much money as possible. I don’t want to be totally tied down to the money I make. Nevertheless, I recognize the need and the desire in myself as well as others. For Carl, it’s not just the money and it’s not just the status. It is something more fundamental and pure, even animalistic perhaps, but quantifiable nonetheless—and that seems the beauty of it to him—no matter how zealous his desire for more, there remains a definite numerical value to its status, a number that gives a present accounting, and there is always another, larger number that defines his goal. The mixture of unlimited desire and discrete numerical valuation at every step enlivens him, gratifies his effort and his reach for solidity, substance. Like liquid cooling, congealing, solidifying. That’s why, I think, Carl loves this company, Cables Crossing, so much.

We had worked with Harold Stemming, its chief, before, indirectly, as the legal advisor to Jack Samson, who owned Jupiter Satellite Cellular, which had been acquired by Stemming at Cables Crossing several years back, and that’s when Carl first got passionately interested in the conglomerate. There were reasons for that and subsequent mergers, combining wireless and cable, cross-selling and marketing, synergies, advertising packaging, content delivery efficiency and ownership of the backbone of the Internet, all flags unfurled and let flutter by the company and its minions of bankers—Larry provided the financing through First Charter at very attractive rates in return for part of the advisory fee. Brokers, attorneys, accountants, marketing and public relations and communications consultants, at times it seemed as if the entire business services economy was part of the effort. The overarching urge to the idea was ambition, size, growth, and hunger and there was something in that that Carl saw of himself, a little guy who had gotten bigger and bigger by being smart and swift and through determination and work, above all, had become strong. Through an inner strength, deep within himself, he, a fighter, had become a winner. Of course, there were hundreds of companies like this, and we followed them all and were involved professionally with some of them. There was so many transactions and exchanges going on, stock offerings, mergers. It felt like we were at the center of something magical and important at the time. Cables Crossing, as the company was known, earned a reputation as a scrappy up and comer that would survive the wash out, and was now poised to take on the big boys. It would, in the end, however, take on so much debt, borrow so much money, dozens of billions of dollars, from the world’s major banks and the totality of the corporate bond market, virtually, collectively, all the owners of capital in the world, it seemed, and as its stock price broke through each subsequent level and kept climaxing higher and higher, it seemed justified in continuing to borrow and pay interest at every possible rate, banks and bond holders happy to collect the payments. What Stemming was doing with all that money, making acquisitions all over the world, entering into partnerships and corporate sharing agreements, each time handing out money to himself and his executive management in the form of large bonuses, options, and personal loans that would never have to be repaid, and to outside partners in cash and contracts and consulting fees, then buying real estate through the company, stock in yet other companies, other properties, anything any broker or business advisor or consultant could sell, in the end it turned out the company would never make a dime; as a whole, the company had nil free and clear earnings. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, the present being a tangled knot of the past and the future.