by John LeFevre
Most of our free time and expendable income is spent partying at places like Home House, Tramp, and Annabel’s. When we get bored with London, we go to Paris or Stockholm. Because of the hours and company we keep, it becomes incredibly easy to get wrapped up in the culture. At this point, the only friends I have in London are fellow banking analysts and colleagues. Everyone else doesn’t get it: the lifestyle, the long hours and canceled plans, the binge drinking, and the nihilistic sense of humor. I don’t think any of them have ever woken up from a blackout on a subway car and gone direct to office still wearing last night’s tuxedo, only to be showered with praise. How could they understand? And they certainly don’t have the disposable income—although it doesn’t always feel limitless at the rate I spend it.
At the end of my second year, I once again land at the top of my class. Saint-Tropez is even more decadent, a week in a duplex at the Hotel Byblos overlooking the pool. Our days are spent trying to keep up at Nikki Beach and Le Club 55 followed by nights at VIP Room and Les Caves du Roy. It’s impossible not to have a great time, but all the same, a week in the south of France is a jarring reminder of just how much wealth exists in the world, and that in the universe of people who actually matter, investment bankers are still close to the bottom.
Shortly after my Saint-Tropez tan has faded away, I am back to struggling to make ends meet. Banking has given me a very distorted view of money, priorities, and what I deserve or feel that I am entitled to. Despite my paycheck, I feel poor. This detached sense of reality, combined with my increasingly selective social circles and a blindingly aspirational culture, has created a lifestyle as precarious as any middle-class one. The numbers are just bigger.
No matter, toward the end of my third and final year as an analyst, I am once again expecting to be at the top of my class in rank and bonus. So, I take my new girlfriend on a quick vacation to Jumby Bay in Antigua. If we break up before the summer, I’ll still be able to make the annual pilgrimage to Saint-Tropez after I get my bonus.
We spend our days sailing, snorkeling, and rotating between the beach bar, the pool bar, and the spa. Our nights alternate between mellow evenings ordering room service because we’re too lazy to put clothes on and drunken trips to a nearby casino, which has a dangerous policy of allowing us to charge chips back to our hotel.
After a gluttonous and glorious week on the beach, reality strikes in the form of a monster hotel bill of just over $25,000, including $12,000 in charges from the casino. The credit card I had used to make the reservation is declined. I try another one—declined. I then embarrassingly call and check the available balances on all of my cards; even if I split it up, I’m not going to get to $25K.
Asking my girlfriend for help isn’t an option. It’s not that I’d be embarrassed—after all, she was the drunken asshole who had spent four hours playing roulette—but I know that her only credit card has a picture of Hello Kitty on it. Plus, she’s currently in the gift shop adding to the tab in real time.
It’s a no-brainer. I’ll pay with the company card, and then simply call and pay it back before the statement comes due. It’s not terribly uncommon for someone to use a corporate card for small ticket items or dinners that don’t end up being reimbursed. But I have never heard of anyone doing it for an entire vacation. We’re still living in the wake of Enron and WorldCom, so job security is a constant concern irrespective of my performance reviews and class rank. As they say in Japan, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” I really don’t want to do anything to tarnish my reputation, but right now, I have no other options.
“I’m sorry, sir. Unfortunately, we do not accept Diners Club.” I think he’s amused that I even have a Diners card. All employees were forced to trade in their American Express cards a few years earlier when Sandy Weill decided to buy Diners Club.
The great Wall Street line comes to mind: “I’m tapped out, Marv.” There’s only one option left. I have no choice but to suck up my pride and call my parents, whom I hadn’t even informed of my extravagant vacation plans, given their opinion of my propensity for living beyond my means.
They are remarkably graceful and immediately offer up their credit card details, which makes me feel like a fifteen-year-old again—at boarding school trying to order something from the Patagonia catalog. They bail me out, but I know I’m not going to hear the end of this. Thankfully, my third-year analyst bonus is only a few weeks away, so by the time their lecture finally comes around, I’ll be flush again.
The following week, I attempt to reassure my mother that everything is fine. She knows how much money I make and how little time I have to spend it. She’s heard about the pressures and stresses associated with being a young banker. She’s seen how my career path has amplified my id, or as I like to say on our weekly phone calls when she asks me what I’ve been up to, “Just workin’ and gadaboutin’.” But the last time she visited me in London, she conflated my head cold with a possible drug problem.
“No, Mom. Of course I don’t do cocaine.”
The only way I can think to placate her concern is to invite her to London, particularly now that my new apartment is nice enough that she can stay with me. She jumps on the invitation without hesitation. Two hours later, I get an email with her flight confirmation; she’s arriving that following Thursday, coincidentally the day after my planned house-warming party. Thank Christ. I don’t really want her meeting my friends or cramping my style.
For a twenty-four-year-old kid, my new apartment is pretty sweet—two bedrooms, split-level, a block removed from King’s Road and just two blocks from Sloane Square.
The day before my party, my boss gets a call from Imperial Tobacco informing us that we’ve been short-listed for their upcoming Eurobond benchmark. We’ve been asked to make a final presentation to them in person the following morning. It’s a prestigious, must-win mandate for us and one we expect to be fiercely contested over by the banks.
I’ve been tasked with putting together the presentation—a few pages outlining European bond market conditions, a review of our credentials as the number one bond house in the world, and then our specific recommendations for Imperial Tobacco, which I hash out with our syndicate desk. By the time I’ve got everything together, my boss is gone for the day; he’s an old-school banker who came to Salomon via Schroders, which means 5 p.m. is martini time.
Normally, he simply trusts me to coordinate the inputs and put the presentation together without fucking up, but this is an important pitch. I fax it over to his house that evening for him to mark up any changes and fax back. I don’t mind; it’s always good to cover your ass.
Typically, I’d send the presentation upstairs to the printer and then have it couriered over to his house a few hours later, but my boss has another idea.
“I’m not waiting up while these get printed.” That means he’s probably had too many cocktails. “You hang on to them and then bring them with you in the morning. You wrote the presentation; might as well come to the meeting. We’re taking the express train from Paddington at eight a.m. sharp.”
Fuck. I had not counted on attending. I have my party tonight and my mother arriving tomorrow morning on the red-eye from Houston.
By the time the printer gets my presentations done, I’m already two hours late to my own party. When I walk in, there are twenty or so friends and colleagues packed into my living room. The entire place reeks of weed. Apparently, my girlfriend has started the party without me.
Perfect. This is exactly what I need to come home to. I just busted my ass all day on a last-minute fire drill, have to suffer through an early-morning meeting tomorrow, and then I’m hosting my mother for an entire week—primarily because she’s worried that I am spiraling out of control.
I take a hit and grab a drink. We spend the next few hours drinking and smoking and having a blast.
The next morning, my three alarm clocks earn their keep. It’
s 7:30 a.m.; I have to be at Paddington Station in thirty minutes. It’s nearly five kilometers away, which would take at least fifteen minutes, even in light traffic.
My apartment is a fucking mess. Thank God my Polish housekeeper is coming to clean before my mom arrives.
Five minutes later, I’m showered, suited, and headed out the door. My girlfriend is still passed out in bed. I stop to leave my key in my mailbox for my mom and then sprint toward King’s Road, presentations in hand. There’s another suit on my corner ahead of me, waving down the only available taxi in all directions, so I throw out a “Sorry, it’s an emergency,” and offer him a twenty-pound note. He lets me take the cab.
At 7:55 a.m., I get a text from my boss: “We’re standing adjacent platform twelve.”
At 8:00 a.m., I receive another text: “Boarding train. John, I am getting rather concerned.”
Finally, my cab pulls up in front of Paddington Station. I respond back, “Am here. See you on train,” and then jump out and race toward the concourse. As I come up toward platform twelve, I see the train starting to ease its way into motion. I think I can still make it. If I don’t, there is a strong likelihood that I will be fired.
That’s when one of those bluecoats sees me barreling toward the moving train. He steps in front of me. “This train is departed.” He looks prepared to stop me with physical force.
“Can’t miss this train.” I’m sprinting right at him. I head fake to one side and then make a striding leap around him, then jump onto the last car just as the doors close, at 8:02 a.m.
At 8:03 a.m., another text from my boss: “Sitting car one. You better be on this train. It’s the only express.” I’m so far back that it takes me a solid ten minutes to work my way up to the front, which must have been an eternity for my boss. But all is forgiven; we devote the next forty-five minutes to reviewing the presentation and outlining our pitch, and then spend the remainder of the journey in silence.
A short cab ride later, we’re at the client’s office, waiting patiently in a conference room for them to show up. I’m so proud of myself for pulling this off that I’ve forgotten how terribly hungover I am. I might still be a little bit drunk.
My phone vibrates. Unknown caller. I ignore it.
A minute later, my phone rings again. I ignore it.
My boss is perplexed. “We probably have another minute or two in case you need to answer that.”
It vibrates a third time. It could be someone from the office who didn’t know I was out for a meeting. I answer it.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” It’s my dad. I guess my mom’s plane landed an hour early.
I can’t acknowledge in front of my colleagues what’s happening.
“Yes, this is he.” I respond with unrelated, innocuous banter. I’m just hoping my colleagues can’t hear the screaming on the other end.
My dad doesn’t stop. “Your mother has just flown ten hours to see you and this is how you show your appreciation, by having her walk into a filthy crack house?” Fuck, I guess this means the maid hasn’t shown up yet. She’s fired.
“Uh-huh. Understood.” I have to cup my ear to prevent his fury from spilling out into the conference room.
He’s not finished. “What? What are you saying?”
“Okay. Got it. Just in a meeting right now.” Meanwhile the finance director of Imperial Tobacco and his team are starting to walk into the conference room. “That makes sense. Thanks for letting me know.” And then I hang up, quickly turn my phone off, and wipe my sweaty hand on my suit pants just in time to shake hands with the client.
The meeting goes great. My boss lets me do a considerable amount of talking. The client basically tells us that we are in the deal with two other to-be-determined banks. I get a “nicely done” from my boss as we’re heading back to the train station.
I explain to him that the phone call I had received had been from my landlord about a leak in my flat and that instead of heading back to the office with him, I’d have to go home and sort it out with the plumber.
When I arrive home, my mom is still in a state of shock.
The Polish maid never showed up. My girlfriend’s idea of cleaning up before she left was simply to open all the windows and air the apartment out.
As it is emotionally relayed to me, my mom walked into my apartment. The two French doors leading to the balcony were wide open and swinging in the breeze that was being channeled through the living room and out the gaping bay windows on the opposite side, leaving the oversized curtains dancing eerily on both ends—not exactly the welcome my mother had been expecting.
Vodka, tequila, and wine bottles, empty glasses and beer cans, are on nearly every horizontal service. On my dining table sits the remnants of a 2 a.m. trip to Al-Dar II, the local Lebanese kebab shop. I don’t even have any recollection of that, but apparently we put together quite a buffet-style feast in the middle of my living room. Amidst the stinky remnants of lamb and baba ghanoush is one of my degenerate friends’ idea of an art project: greasy kebab sticks on a canvas of hummus, lined up to form a swastika.
The silver Asprey wine filter my parents had given me is now being used to hold marijuana seeds and stems that we had separated out. My pretentious collection of stolen hotel ashtrays is filled with joints, cigarettes, and cigar butts. One of them, inexplicably, has a wad of bloodstained Kleenex. For good measure, there’s even an upside-down plate with traces of white powder on it. Honestly, it wasn’t mine.
This is apparently how I greet my mom on her trip across the world just to make sure that I have my life under control.
There’s nothing I can say. I can’t blame my maid for not showing up, because my mom would just be appalled that I would ever consider leaving a mess like this for her in the first place. I can’t tell her that I just helped win an important mandate for a €750 million bond deal, because she’d be even more concerned that this is how I spent the night before an important meeting.
“Wanna get some food?” Fuck, I hope she won’t get mad if I order wine at lunch.
The Handover
My move from London to Hong Kong is highly improbable. At the end of my first year in London, they ask me to think about moving to Asia. My simple response to my boss is: “Fuck no.”
First of all, I can’t fathom moving to Asia; I’ve never even been there. More important, every single person I know in the Hong Kong office hates it; they complain of tyrannical bosses, a rigid hierarchy, and never-ending hundred-hour workweeks. It’s not uncommon for me to get frantic calls from one of my capital markets counterparts in Asia at all hours of the day and night, begging and pleading for help on some US$ or Eurobond pitch book they’re working on.
There’s no way I’m moving to Asia. Some of the Brits do it because Hong Kong retains many of the creature comforts of having been a formidable British colony, and has the added benefit of a 15% income tax rate compared with the 50% effective rate we enjoy in London. Others move, as people did to any of the satellites during the colonial era, to find opportunities unafforded to them at home. Or, simply put, they have experienced varying degrees of failure and, as a “Square Mile Reject,” are looking for a fresh start—hence the well-trod acronym FILTH, or Failed In London, Try Hong Kong. This antiquated, colonial throwback notion is less relevant now given the surge of talent flocking to the region in the face of robust economic growth in Asia following the crisis of 1997. Nonetheless, an element of that FILTH stigma remains.
Fast-forward a few years, and my rabbi, Paul Young, the head of European syndicate, is also running the team in Asia. Now that the region is growing up, he wants to have one of “his guys” on the ground out there. This time it might be different; I am a little bit more senior than when I had previously been approached, and now I’ve got a legitimate sponsor in my rabbi.
Paul Young is an imposing figure on the London trading floor; “legend
ary” would be too strong a word, if for no other reason than he had only recently moved across from New York, but he’s revered as an old-school Salomon Brothers guy, tough but fair. This is the same guy who convinced me not to save any of my bonuses as an analyst.
He is also an infamous low-talker; no one can hear a word he says outside of five feet. It’s genius; he knows everybody has to listen to him, so by speaking softly, it requires they lean in like a bunch of little schoolkids. And that’s exactly how he wants it. God forbid anyone ever says, “I’m sorry, Paul, what did you say?” He’ll just stare at them like they’re an idiot.
I once had to go to New York with Paul for a meeting, so we decided (he asked me) to share a car from Canary Wharf to Heathrow Airport. It was a junior banker’s dream—airtime and exposure with senior management. I did not at all expect to sit next to him on the plane, but when we arrived at the airport, out of sheer politeness, I said, “Hey, Paul, where are you sitting?”
“Concorde, baby. See you in New York.” Then, he walked away.
So when Paul asks me to move to Hong Kong, he isn’t asking; he’s telling. Nonetheless, moving to Asia is a big decision. I had just settled into my elegant flat off King’s Road and I had finally secured Chelsea FC season tickets in the Matthew Harding Lower section at Stamford Bridge. I am also in a relationship that has recently become quite serious.
Despite all of these reservations, Paul convinces me to go there the following week for an exploratory trip. I’m on the Friday night British Airways flight to Hong Kong and, twelve hours later, in a taxi on my way to the Grand Hyatt. Flying in for the weekend will give me a better sense of a city that has always been very much an enigma to me. Would I like it? Would I be comfortable as a minority in a distinctly foreign country? Could I see myself having a viable career and making a life for myself? Most important, would I be happy? Those are the smart questions, and I have three days to find the answers.