Straight to Hell

by John LeFevre

  They have one day off a week—Sundays. With nowhere to go, and no means to do much of anything, they gather in groups and sit on the sides of the streets, the walkways between buildings, and in the other designated public areas. They construct cardboard box forts and spend the day (irrespective of the weather) playing cards, chatting, giving each other pedicures, and enjoying a homemade street-side buffet. For the most part, the maids are dedicated, hardworking, and devoutly Catholic. They save as much as they can to send back to their worse-off extended family members in the Philippines.

  The Hong Kong government is so discriminatory against domestic helpers as a class of people that, as a means of keeping them out of the public parks, they’ve made it illegal to consume food in parks—but only on Sundays. Also, many of the businesses and malls will close their bathrooms for “maintenance”—again, only on Sundays.

  Nonetheless, my new maid is ecstatic to have me as her sponsor. Not only do my requirements pale in comparison to those of her previous employer, I allow her to earn money on the side, which perversely is also illegal under Hong Kong law. Working for me and also for a few friends of mine, she’s going from killing herself for a family of five, earning US$500 a month, to making more than US$1,500 working for a few laid-back, single expats, who all work long hours, travel frequently, and aren’t particularly demanding. Given my busy work schedule and social habits, I don’t even require much in terms of cooking.

  Having said that, I still have needs. I need fresh orchids for the living room and cut flowers on the bedroom nightstands. My T-shirts, boxers, and socks must be crisply ironed. The pillowcases and sheets must also be ironed, and the duvet must have a perfectly perpendicular checkerboard pattern of subtle creases. Initially, as a legacy of hotel living, I request clean towels and fresh sheets daily, but in order to minimize the wear and tear on my expensive linens, I cut that back to three times a week. It has nothing to do with the environment; it’s just that good sheets are hard to find.

  I don’t need an alarm clock anymore; I’ve got the fresh juice wake-up call. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is a ginger-­carrot-pear detox. Tuesday and Thursday is orange or grapefruit juice: “I don’t care; surprise me.” I’ll follow that up with a to-go coffee and toasted bagel, perfectly timed and still warm for my short commute into the office.

  As bad as it might be to work for a crazy expat, nothing is worse to a Filipina than working for a Chinese or Indian family. By comparison, they tend to be cruel and relentless, forcing helpers to work longer hours and frequently on Sundays. They have been known to install locks on the outside of maid’s quarters so that they can lock them in their tiny rooms. They dock their wages arbitrarily to the point that employment borders on enslavement. In fact, there are often cases of retaliation or retribution, during which a foreign domestic helper will murder her Chinese or Indian employer, or vice versa.

  One of the more senior guys on the capital markets side, Wisal Lari, actually sent his maid to live with his mother in Pakistan for eight weeks so that she could learn all of his favorite childhood recipes. While I don’t have a huge amount of respect for him generally, I have to admit the food at his house is amazing.

  Another time, I am at a dinner party at the apartment of an Indian colleague of mine, the head of high-yield capital markets. On the table, they have this small remote control. It’s amazing; any time it is pressed, the maids (they have two) will come running out of the kitchen to service us.

  “Damn, where can I get me one of these?” I sarcastically ask my colleague’s wife.

  “I couldn’t find it here, so we had ours sent from home. In Mumbai, you can’t live without it because the Indians are so lazy and unreliable. The most annoying thing here is that the walls are so thick, I can’t get reception upstairs. So, if I want something, and I am in bed, I physically have to get up and walk halfway down the stairs in order to alert one of the helpers.”

  “Who knew that the reinforced walls that protect us in typhoon season would be such a pain in the ass? Why don’t you just call or text down your breakfast order?” It’d be impossible for me to be any more sardonic. But she doesn’t get it all.

  “Well then, what’s the point of having this one button if it doesn’t even work?”

  By comparison, I am saintly, but far from a saint. For Christmas, on top of a generous cash bonus, I get Fé a really nice shine box and shoeshine kit. For Easter, in addition to a few extra days of vacation, I surprise her with an extension device that allows her to clean my exterior windows without putting her life at risk. It’s no joke; there are multiple fatalities in Hong Kong every year from helpers leaning too far out, or even climbing onto the ledge of their apartments, attempting to clean the windows.

  Despite our many foibles, the Filipina helper community loves working for the gweilos. And by foibles, I mean behavior that is in complete disregard for all societal norms and basic human decency. My Fé has to deal with the carnage that comes with me coming home blackout wasted several nights a week. Each morning, she has the privilege of digging through last night’s suit pockets, pulling out receipts and wads of discarded cash, the totals of which would feed her village for months. She knows that I have no clue what’s in there, but it’s just not worth the risk for her to steal from me, even if she were so inclined. One mistake, or even the suspicion of one, and I, as her work visa sponsor, could have her deported almost ­immediately—no questions asked. Her life, or, at the very least, her livelihood, is completely in my hands.

  Occasionally, after a particularly outrageous misadventure, I will text her from the safety of my office and ask her to kick a girl out of my bedroom. That’s bad, but probably not as bad as the time I had an old boarding school friend visiting from Tokyo, and she walked in on him getting intimate with a transsexual prostitute. At least I enjoyed hearing her tell me about it.

  One day, Fé comes to me in a state of distress. “Hello, sir. I cannot work for Mr. Randall any longer. Is that okay?” She wants to stop working part-time for one of my friends who lives just a few blocks away from me. She’d rather earn substantially less money than have to deal with another version of me and the eccentricities that go along with being a single white expatriate banker in Asia—a job assignment most maids would kill for.

  “What’s the problem, Fé?”

  “Well, sir. Mr. Randall yell at me because I make mistake. He say I throw away his drugs too many times. I try to do my job, sir.”

  I just start laughing and immediately call him up. “So apparently you went apeshit on Fé and now she wants to quit cleaning your place. What the fuck happened?”

  He’s still seething. “That dumb bitch. I left a bunch of coke out on a plate last night. It wasn’t just a little bit. I was Jack fucking Nicholson in The Departed. The next day, when I get home, it’s all gone. And when I ask her about it, she just says that she cleaned everything up. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Should I garnish her wages for the cocaine? She’ll have to work like nine months to pay that off.”

  I gradually manage to calm him down; he forgives her, and she agrees to not quit. But from that point on, she is exceptionally diligent—with all of us. Any time she comes across a little white baggie in one of our pockets, she carefully places it on the nightstand. If there’s a plateful of coke laid out on the coffee table, she carefully cleans around it, even making sure to leave the residue that has spilled onto the table—just in case we get desperate. At one point, I look in a random drawer in my kitchen and find an entire collection of tightly rolled HK$20 banknotes.

  Deep down, I know that Fé loves me. She even leaves a note one Sunday telling me that she said a prayer for me at Mass that day. It’s comforting to know that Fé doesn’t want to spend eternity without me.

  This aside, Fé’s life is amazing in contrast to that of her peers, and she knows it. One day in the office, I get a text from her: “Hello sir. May you please help me. My daug
hter in Manila has a school exam and needs books. Please sir, can you borrow me HK$3,000 of my salary. Thank you, sir. God bless.”

  I relay the message to a Chinese colleague sitting next to me and ask for some advice. “Fuck her, dude. They know they can just take advantage of you white people. It’s a fucking scam.”

  “It’s just an advance on her salary. What’s the big deal?”

  “Don’t fucking do it. It’s the principle. If you give her the money, then she knows you’re a sucker. It’s all over after that.”

  I seek a second opinion. I stand up and shout across two rows of the trading floor, to one of our credit traders. He’s an ABC (American-Born Chinese), so I’m hoping for a more balanced opinion. “Hey, Andy, my maid just texted me. She wants to borrow money; she says it’s for her daughter’s schoolbooks back in the Philippines. What should I do?”

  “Fuck that. She doesn’t need any schoolbooks. She knows the only thing her daughter needs to learn is how to suck carpet or cock.” And then with that, everyone in the immediate vicinity just starts laughing, and a few people jump on in agreement: “Yeah, are you fucking stupid?” or “Fuck that.”

  I’m not hugely surprised. I had previously been chastised in the office for innocuously mentioning that I allow my maid to take a taxi any time she’s going grocery shopping for me. Some of my colleagues got seriously annoyed. “Dude, make her take the bus. You’re setting a bad precedent. She’s just going to tell her maid friends and then they’re all going to want to do it.”

  Fortunately, not everyone in the office shares the same dismissive attitude toward the Filipina helpers. After all, they’re only human. We can’t lose sight of the fact that the life of a Filipina maid must be a monotonous, solitary, and soul-destroying existence. It should elicit some sympathy—or in Ken Davies’s case, sympathy and opportunity.

  Ken is one of our back-office guys; he transferred to Hong Kong from the UK, specifically to satiate his yellow fever. Every Sunday, Ken will religiously patronize the bars frequented by the lonely Filipina maids looking for company on their day off—it’s not like all of them go to church and sit on cardboard boxes. Sometimes, he’ll have two or three “dates” on a given day. Ken’s dedication runs so deep that, unlike most expats, he chooses to live in the Wan Chai red-light district just so that he can be closer to the action.

  He even attended a colleague’s traditional Chinese wedding with a maid as his date. Watching our boss, the head of fixed income, and in particular his wife, attempt to make polite conversation with this woman, who had clearly borrowed an “evening dress” from one of her prostitute friends, had all of us rolling for days.

  While he says he prefers the Vietnamese girls because “they really know how to hold a position,” Sundays and public holi­days are all about lonely Filipinas. One day, as he proudly tells it, he meets and spends the afternoon drinking with a nice young Filipina girl in Wan Chai. Many cocktails later, she boldly invites him back to her employer’s apartment because he and his family are out of town.

  She takes him to a palatial place up on Old Peak Road, where he spends the night. Of course, they’re not going to confine themselves to the maid’s quarters; they make full use of her employer’s apartment.

  The next morning, Ken is in the kitchen helping himself to some juice, when he decides to check the place out in the light of day. Walking through the living room, he admires the tasteful contemporary Asian decor and impressive collection of artwork. He then moves across to a sideboard, showcasing an array of framed family portraits and travel photos. And that’s when he sees a very familiar face in almost every single picture. It’s Charles Widdorf, our regional head of equity capital markets.

  Our piece-of-shit back-office geezer just fucked Charlie’s maid in the bed Charlie shares with his wife.

  The Roadshow

  Selling a new high-yield bond (also called a junk bond) for a company usually involves conducting a full investor roadshow. It is an integral part of the deal marketing process and can be of pivotal importance in terms of lowering a company’s cost of borrowing. London-Paris-Frankfurt-Milan-Madrid is a typical European circuit, often traveling by private plane, always dining at the best restaurants and staying at the finest hotels. This might sound exciting and glamorous, but I can assure you, it’s anything but.

  In a nutshell, a roadshow involves taking borrowers—the bond issuers—to meet and sell their story to potential investors, who range from hedge funds and asset managers to insurance companies and pension funds. The issuers and their bankers go through a scripted PowerPoint presentation; address any structural, disclosure, or financial issues in the offering prospectus; and finish with a Q&A.

  Each day is a series of back-to-back meetings and group investor lunches, flanked by market update and strategy conference calls and punctuated with mad dashes to the airport. Roadshows are arduous, grueling, and often stressful.

  The worst job, by far, on any roadshow is that of the analyst. Analysts are the pledges of the financial world. It’s where everyone has to take his or her three years of licks after coming out of the training program. It’s masochism born out of stupidity. What at first seems like the big time soon turns into sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, most of it mindless crap like churning out pitch books and any other shit-work the associates don’t want to do.

  On a roadshow, the responsibilities of the analysts are to carry the presentation materials and to oversee the logistics, such as hotels, flights, cars, and dinners. All of this has to be done without fucking up—period. The job sucks, but analysts want to do it; it’s a coveted badge of validation. Just as the slowest and dumbest analysts rarely get asked to do coffee runs, and the boring-as-shit ones never get invited out for drinks, I’ll pick the most competent analyst to go on a roadshow. And if I’m going too, they better know how to have a good time. Nothing is more painful than being stuck in an airport lounge with a teetotaler from the Indian Institutes of Technology.

  At this point in my career, I’m senior enough that I don’t have to worry about any of the analyst bullshit on this roadshow. I’m here to represent our firm’s relationships with the investors and to help sell the deal. More important, I’m here to demonstrate to the issuer just how much we value our developing relationship with them. For frequent borrowers or less important clients, I usually delegate the roadshow legwork to a capable associate so that I can focus on executing other deals or winning new business. However, this particular deal is for a company that will pay Wall Street banks approximately $30–$40 million in fees this year alone, across capital markets and M&A advisory. While the fees on a bond deal might not be spectacular, being a bookrunner on these deals creates incremental trading revenue as a corollary. And since we are just starting to establish ourselves as one of their key counterparties, I’m there to shine. After all, my next bonus and promotion depend on it.

  It’s my job to shine; ergo, it’s also my job to proactively throw my competitors under the bus at every possible opportunity, regardless of the fact that we’re technically partners on this deal. So I’m the one taking personal credit for setting up the most important meetings, and then, when we get a big order, I’m the first one to deliver the good news. Conversely, this also means that I’m a matador when it comes to strategically sidestepping the task of delivering any bad news. On a deal that involves multiple bookrunners, banks rotate leading client update calls. So, if there’s a chance that it will be my turn to deliver a recommendation that the client isn’t going to like, I will disrupt the alphabetical rotation by inserting a last-minute “market update and investor feedback” call into the schedule. Not only do I now get to avoid delivering the bad news, I can purposefully paint a rosier picture on my call, just so that the next bank’s job is even more challenging. It’s all one big game; I didn’t make the rules. “I’ll let you know how your fucking lunch tastes” is my typical not-so-subtle reminder to my counterparts a
t the onset of any deal.

  It’s a war waged on all fronts, irrespective of what’s in the best interests of the client or the deal. When I was an analyst, if another bank was responsible for roadshow logistics and I wasn’t traveling with the team on the road, I would often give their analyst intentionally incorrect information—the wrong floor or the wrong tower for an investor meeting, anything to make them look bad. I don’t care if it causes the entire roadshow team to show up ten minutes late; that’s Deutsche Bank’s or JPMorgan’s problem. Although the banks may be working together on this deal, we’re always competing for the next one.

  So far, this particular roadshow has been a breeze. Investors love the deal. The client is happy, and the bankers are all playing nice. Heading into the home stretch, the day starts off just like the others. My BlackBerry alarm clock goes off at 6:45 a.m. The auxiliary wake-up call comes at 6:50 a.m., and the “waffle wake-up call” arrives at 7 a.m. sharp. A “waffle wake-up call,” a move that I am credited for having started, is more or less exactly what it sounds like. Upon first checking into a hotel, I prearrange breakfast room service with strict instructions for the butler (their term, not mine) to come in and make sure that I am awake and/or still alive. You can’t risk waiting to arrange this until right before you go to sleep in the likely event that you won’t have any recollection of getting back to the hotel at night.

  A 6:45 a.m. wake-up isn’t particularly early by my standards, but it is after the typical night out on a roadshow—wining and dining the client over dinner and enough drinks to recover from an exhausting and tedious day of nonstop meetings. Banks generally pay for the roadshow expenses out of deal fees, which are typically in the region of 2% for a decent high-yield deal. So the client wants and expects to have a good time, especially if the deal is going well. In many cases, it’s the most exciting thing these fuckers will do all year, so they want to make the most of it.