The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  So in the best McCoy manner, just as his father would have done it—except that he couldn’t imagine his father ever being in such a jam—Sherman had kept up appearances. He had breakfast in the kitchen with Campbell, while Bonita got her through breakfast and ready for school. Bonita had a portable television set in the kitchen, and she kept turning toward it to watch the news report of the riot in Harlem. It was hot stuff, but Sherman hadn’t paid attention to it. It had all seemed so remote…the sort of thing that happened out there…among those people…He had been busy trying to pump out charm and cheeriness so that Bonita and Campbell wouldn’t sense the poisonous atmosphere that enveloped the household.

  By now Sherman had walked as far as Lexington Avenue. He always stopped at a candy store near the corner and bought the Times. As he turned the corner, a girl was heading toward him, a tall girl with a lot of blond hair. A large handbag hung from her shoulder by a strap. She was walking rapidly, as if heading for the subway at Seventy-seventh Street. She had on a long sweater that was wide open down the front, revealing a polo shirt with a little embroidered emblem over the left breast. She wore some sort of go-to-hell white pants that were very loose and floppy in the legs but exceptionally tight in the crotch. Exceptionally! There was an astonishing crevice. Sherman stared and then looked at her face. She stared right back. She looked him right in the eye and smiled. She didn’t slow down or give him a provocative look. It was a confident, optimistic look that as much as said, “Hi! We’re a couple of good-looking animals, aren’t we!” So frank! So unabashed! So eagerly immodest!

  In the candy store, after paying for the Times, Sherman turned to go out the door and his eyes swept across a magazine rack. The salmon flesh jumped out at him…girls…boys…girls with girls…boys with boys…girls with boys…girls with bare breasts, girls with bare bottoms…girls with paraphernalia…a happy grinning riot of pornography, a rout, an orgy, a hog wallow…On the cover of one magazine is a girl wearing only a pair of high-heeled shoes and a loincloth…Except that it isn’t a loincloth, it’s a snake…Somehow it’s wedged in her groin and looking right at Sherman…She’s looking right at him, too…On her face is the sunniest, most unaffected smile imaginable…It’s the face of the girl who serves you a chocolate-chip ice-cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins…

  Sherman resumed his walk toward First Avenue in a state of agitation. It was in the air! It was a wave! Everywhere! Inescapable!…Sex!…There for the taking!…It walked down the street, as bold as you please!…It was splashed all over the shops! If you were a young man and halfway alive, what chance did you have?…Technically, he had been unfaithful to his wife. Well, sure…but who could remain monogamous with this, this, this tidal wave of concupiscence rolling across the world? Christ almighty! A Master of the Universe couldn’t be a saint, after all…It was unavoidable. For Christ’s sake, you can’t dodge snowflakes, and this was a blizzard! He had merely been caught at it, that was all, or halfway caught at it. It meant nothing. It had no moral dimension. It was nothing more than getting soaking wet. By the time he reached the cabstand at First and Seventy-ninth, he had just about worked it out in his mind.

  At Seventy-ninth Street and First Avenue the taxis lined up every day to take the young Masters of the Universe down to Wall Street. According to the regulations, every cabdriver was supposed to take you anywhere you wanted to go, but the drivers in the line at Seventy-ninth and First wouldn’t budge unless you were going down to Wall Street or close to it. From the cabstand they swung two blocks east and then went down along the East River on the highway, the FDR, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive.

  It was a ten-dollar ride each morning, but what was that to a Master of the Universe? Sherman’s father had always taken the subway to Wall Street, even when he was the chief executive officer of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Even now, at the age of seventy-one, when he took his daily excursions to Dunning Sponget to breathe the same air as his lawyer cronies for three or four hours, he went by subway. It was a matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the more gold chains they snatched off girls’ necks, the more old men they mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren’t going to drive him off the New York City subways. But to the new breed, the young breed, the masterful breed, Sherman’s breed, there was no such principle. Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. “If you want to live in New York,” he once told Sherman, “you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate,” meaning insulate yourself from those people. The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant. If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars?

  The driver was…a Turk? An Armenian? Sherman tried to make out his name on the card in the frame on the dashboard. Once the taxi reached the Drive, he settled back to read the Times. There was a picture on the front page of a mob of people on a stage and the Mayor standing near a podium, staring at them. The riot, no doubt. He began to read the story, but his mind wandered. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds. He could see it on the river, off to his left. At this moment the poor filthy river sparkled. It was a sunny day in May, after all. Up ahead, the towers of New York Hospital rose straight up from the edge of the highway. There was a sign for the East Seventy-first Street exit, the one his father had always taken when they drove back from Southampton on Sunday evenings. The very sight of the hospital and the exit made Sherman think of—no, not so much think of as feel the house on Seventy-third Street with its Knickerbocker-green rooms. He had grown up in those pale grayish-green rooms and trudged up and down those four flights of narrow stairs believing that he was living in the height of elegance in the household of the mighty John Campbell McCoy, the Lion of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Only recently had it dawned on him that back in 1948, when his parents had bought and renovated that house, they had been a mildly adventurous young couple, tackling what at the time was an old wreck in a down-at-the-heels block, keeping a stern eye on costs every step of the way, and taking pride in what a proper house they had created for a relatively modest amount. Christ! If his father ever found out how much he had paid for his apartment and how he had financed it, he’d have a stroke! Two million six hundred thousand dollars, with $1,800,000 of it borrowed…$21,000 a month in principal and interest with a million-dollar balloon payment due in two years…The Lion of Dunning Sponget would be appalled…and, worse than appalled, wounded…wounded at the thought of how his endlessly repeated lessons concerning duty, debt, ostentation, and proportion had whistled straight through his son’s skull…

  Had his father ever played around? It wasn’t out of the question. He was a handsome man. He had the Chin. Yet Sherman couldn’t imagine it.

  And by the time he saw the Brooklyn Bridge up ahead, he had stopped trying to. In a few minutes he would be on Wall Street.

  The investment-banking firm of Pierce & Pierce occupied the fiftieth, fifty-first, fifty-second, fifty-third, and fifty-fourth floors of a glass tower that rose up sixty stories from out of the gloomy groin of Wall Street. The bond trading room, where Sherman worked, was on the fiftieth. Every day he stepped out of an aluminum-walled elevator into what looked like the reception area of one of those new London hotels catering to the Yanks. Near the elevator door was a fake fireplace and an antique mahogany mantelpiece with great bunches of fruit carved on each corner. Out in front of the fake fireplace was a brass fence or fender, as they called it in country homes in the west of England. In the appropriate months a fake fire glowed within, casting flickering lights upon a prodigious pair of brass andirons. The wall surrounding it was covered in more mahogany, rich and reddish, done in linen-fold panels carved so deep, you could feel the expense in the tips of your fingers by just looking at them.

  All of this reflected the passion of Pierce & Pierce’s chief executive officer, Eugene Lopwitz, for things Bri
tish. Things British—library ladders, bowfront consoles, Sheraton legs, Chippendale backs, cigar cutters, tufted club chairs, Wilton-weave carpet—were multiplying on the fiftieth floor at Pierce & Pierce day by day. Alas, there wasn’t much Eugene Lopwitz could do about the ceiling, which was barely eight feet above the floor. The floor had been raised one foot. Beneath it ran enough cables and wires to electrify Guatemala. The wires provided the power for the computer terminals and telephones of the bond trading room. The ceiling had been lowered one foot, to make room for light housings and air-conditioning ducts and a few more miles of wire. The floor had risen; the ceiling had descended; it was as if you were in an English mansion that had been squashed.

  No sooner did you pass the fake fireplace than you heard an ungodly roar, like the roar of a mob. It came from somewhere around the corner. You couldn’t miss it. Sherman McCoy headed straight for it, with relish. On this particular morning, as on every morning, it resonated with his very gizzard.

  He turned the corner, and there it was: the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce. It was a vast space, perhaps sixty by eighty feet, but with the same eight-foot ceiling bearing down on your head. It was an oppressive space with a ferocious glare, writhing silhouettes, and the roar. The glare came from a wall of plate glass that faced south, looking out over New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Brooklyn and New Jersey shores. The writhing silhouettes were the arms and torsos of young men, few of them older than forty. They had their suit jackets off. They were moving about in an agitated manner and sweating early in the morning and shouting, which created the roar. It was the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.

  “Pick up the fucking phone, please!” a chubby, pink-faced member of the Harvard Class of 1976 screamed at someone two rows of desks away. The room was like a newspaper city room in that there were no partitions and no signs of visible rank. Everyone sat at light gray metal desks in front of veal-colored computer terminals with black screens. Rows of green-diode letters and numbers came skidding across.

  “I said please pick up the fucking phone! I mean holy shit!” There were dark half-moons in the armpits of his shirt, and the day had just begun.

  A member of the Yale Class of 1973 with a neck that seemed to protrude twelve inches out of his shirt stared at a screen and screamed over the telephone at a broker in Paris: “If you can’t see the fucking screen…Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jean-Pierre, that’s the buyer’s five million! The buyer’s! Nothing further’s coming in!”

  Then he covered the telephone with his hand and looked straight up at the ceiling and said out loud to no one, except Mammon, “The frogs! The fucking frogs!”

  Four desks away, a member of the Stanford Class of 1979 was sitting down, staring at a sheet of paper on his desk and holding a telephone to his ear. His right foot was up on the stirrup of a portable shoeshine stand, and a black man named Felix, who was about fifty—or was he about sixty?—was humped over his foot, stropping his shoe with a high-shine rag. All day long Felix moved from desk to desk, shining the shoes of young bond traders and salesmen as they worked, at three dollars per, counting the tip. Seldom was a word exchanged; Felix scarcely registered on their maculae. Just then Stanford ’79 rose from his chair, his eyes still fastened on the sheet of paper, the telephone still at his ear—and his right foot still on the shoeshine stirrup—and he shouted: “Well then, why do you think everybody’s stripping the fucking twenty-years?”

  Never took his foot off the shoeshine stand! What powerful legs he must have! thought Sherman. Sherman sat down before his own telephone and computer terminals. The shouts, the imprecations, the gesticulations, the fucking fear and greed, enveloped him, and he loved it. He was the number one bond salesman, “the biggest producer,” as the phrase went, in the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce on the fiftieth floor, and he loved the very roar of the storm.

  “This Goldman order really fucked things up good!”

  “—step up to the fucking plate and—”

  “—bid 8½—”

  “I’m away by two thirty-seconds!”

  “Somebody’s painting you a fucking picture! Can’t you see that?”

  “I’ll take an order and buy ’em at 6-plus!”

  “Hit the five-year!”

  “Sell five!”

  “You couldn’t do ten?”

  “You think this thing continues up?”

  “Strip fever in the twenty-year! That’s all these jerks keep talking about!”

  “—a hundred million July-nineties at the buck—”

  “—naked short—”

  “Jesus Christ, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t fucking believe this!”

  “Holy fucking shit!” shouted the Yale men and the Harvard men and the Stanford men. “Ho-lee fuc-king shit.”

  How these sons of the great universities, these legatees of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Frederick Jackson Turner, William Lyons Phelps, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and the other three-name giants of American scholarship—how these inheritors of the lux and the veritas now flocked to Wall Street and to the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce! How the stories circulated on every campus! If you weren’t making $250,000 a year within five years, then you were either grossly stupid or grossly lazy. That was the word. By age thirty, $500,000—and that sum had the taint of the mediocre. By age forty you were either making a million a year or you were timid and incompetent. Make it now! That motto burned in every heart, like myocarditis. Boys on Wall Street, mere boys, with smooth jawlines and clean arteries, boys still able to blush, were buying three-million-dollar apartments on Park and Fifth. (Why wait?) They were buying thirty-room, four-acre summer places in Southampton, places built in the 1920s and written off in the 1950s as white elephants, places with decaying servants’ wings, and they were doing over the servants’ wings, too, and even adding on. (Why not? We’ve got the servants.) They had carnival rides trucked in and installed on the great green lawns for their children’s birthday parties, complete with teams of carnival workers to operate them. (A thriving little industry.)

  And where did all of this astonishing new money come from? Sherman had heard Gene Lopwitz discourse on that subject. In the Lopwitz analysis, they had Lyndon Johnson to thank. Ever so quietly, the U.S. had started printing money by the billions to finance the war in Vietnam. Before anyone, even Johnson, knew what was happening, a worldwide inflation had begun. Everyone woke up to it when the Arabs suddenly jacked up oil prices in the early 1970s. In no time, markets of all sorts became heaving crap-shoots: gold, silver, copper, currencies, bank certificates, corporate notes—even bonds. For decades the bond business had been the bedridden giant of Wall Street. At firms such as Salomon Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Pierce & Pierce, twice as much money had always changed hands on the bond market as on the stock market. But prices had budged by only pennies at a time, and mostly they went down. As Lopwitz put it, “The bond market has been going down ever since the Battle of Midway.” The Battle of Midway (Sherman had to look it up) was in the Second World War. The Pierce & Pierce bond department had consisted of only twenty souls, twenty rather dull souls known as the Bond Bores. The less promising members of the firm were steered into bonds, where they could do no harm.

  Sherman resisted the thought that it had been even thus when he entered the bond department. Well, there was no more talk about Bond Bores these days…Oh no! Not at all! The bond market had caught fire, and experienced salesmen such as himself were all at once much in demand. All of a sudden, in investment houses all over Wall Street, the erstwhile Bond Bores were making so much money they took to congregating after work in a bar on Hanover Square called Harry’s, to tell war stories…and assure one another this wasn’t dumb luck but, rather, a surge of collective talent. Bonds now represented four-fifths of Pierce & Pierce’s business, and the young hotshots, the Yalies, Harvards, and Stanfords, were desperate to get to the bond trad
ing room of Pierce & Pierce, and at this very moment their voices ricocheted off Eugene Lopwitz’s linen-fold mahogany walls.

  Masters of the Universe! The roar filled Sherman’s soul with hope, confidence, esprit de corps, and righteousness. Yes, righteousness! Judy understood none of this, did she? None of it. Oh, he noticed her eyes glazing over when he talked about it. Moving the lever that moves the world was what he was doing—and all she wanted to know was why he never made it home for dinner. When he did make it home for dinner, what did she want to talk about? Her precious interior-decorating business and how she had gotten their apartment into Architectural Digest, which, frankly, to a true Wall Streeter was a fucking embarrassment. Did she commend him for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that made her decorating and her lunches and whatever the hell else she did possible? No, she did not. She took it for granted…

  …and so forth and so on. Within ninety seconds, emboldened by the mighty roar of the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce, Sherman managed to work up a good righteous head of resentment against this woman who had dared make him feel guilty.

  He picked up the telephone and was ready to resume work on the greatest coup of his young career, the Giscard, when he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. He detected it—righteously!—amid that great bondscape of writhing limbs and torsos. Arguello was reading a newspaper.

  Ferdinand Arguello was a junior bond salesman, twenty-five or-six years old, from Argentina. He was leaning back in his chair nonchalantly reading a newspaper, and even from here Sherman could see what it was: The Racing Form. The Racing Form! The young man looked like a caricature of a South American polo player. He was slender and handsome; he had thick wavy black hair, combed straight back. He was wearing a pair of red silk moiré suspenders. Silk moiré. The bond department of Pierce & Pierce was like an Air Force fighter squadron. Sherman knew it even if this young South American didn’t. As the number one bond salesman, Sherman had no official rank. Nevertheless, he occupied a moral eminence. You were either capable of doing the job and willing to devote 100 percent to the job, or you got out. The eighty members of the department received a base salary, a safety net, of $120,000 a year each. This was regarded as a laughably small sum. The rest of their income came from commissions and profit-sharing. Sixty-five percent of the department’s profits went to Pierce & Pierce. But 35 percent was split among the eighty bond salesmen and traders themselves. All for one and one for all, and lots for oneself! And therefore…no slackers allowed! no deadwood! no lightweights! no loafers! You headed straight for your desk, your telephone, and your computer terminal in the morning. The day didn’t start with small talk and coffee and perusals of The Wall Street Journal and the financial pages of the Times, much less The Racing Form. You were expected to get on the telephone and start making money. If you left the office, even for lunch, you were expected to give your destination and a telephone number to one of the “sales assistants,” who were really secretaries, so that you could be summoned immediately if a new issue of bonds came in (and had to be sold fast). If you went out for lunch, it better have something directly to do with selling bonds for Pierce & Pierce. Otherwise—sit here by the telephone and order in from the deli like the rest of the squadron.