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.
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