I quickly became familiar with big market movers, such as leveraged buyouts, and financial strategies, which included greenmail, hired guns, white squires, poison pills, tender offers, toehold purchases, painting the tape, triple witching hour, front running, bottom feeding, leveraging up, averaging down, takeovers, reverse takeovers, amalgamations, bootstrap acquisitions, backward integration, cashing out, short squeezes, dawn raids, random walkers, Godfather offers, the Pac-Man defense, sandbagging, sleeping beauties, summer soldiers, supermajority amendments, knights that could be white, gray, or black, golden parachutes, and golden handshakes. These were different from the gold diggers who could be found at the local watering holes in high heels and short skirts starting around five p.m. When it came to terminology, the animal kingdom was subject to heavy play. There were bull runs, bear raids, bear hugs, greedy pigs, dogs with fleas, sheep to slaughter, black swan events, Fed hawks and doves, ostriches with heads in the sand, wolves on the prowl, killer bees, stool pigeons, porcupine provisions, dead cat bounces, lobster traps, shark repellent, crocodile tears, and penguins left huddled together for warmth.
As it turned out, most Animal Farm references were not inappropriate since some animals were indeed more equal than others, at least when it came to the possession of information. Atlantic City was much fairer in that all blackjack players, including the dealer, had the same data available to them, and in Atlantic City when you lost you
were still given free drinks, a hotel room, and a limousine ride home. Instead of the famous bronze statue of the Charging Bull in Bowling Green Park near Wall Street, with its testicles aglow from being rubbed by thousands of desperate hands, they might want to build another memorial called The Tomb of the Unknown Investor, symbolizing all those who’ve been defeated by the marketplace. Shady stockbrokers were known for always using credit cards that gave free miles so it was easy to flee the country once the cards were all maxed out and the game was over.
Traders had catchy everyday expressions such as “The trend is your friend,” “They’re crying, I’m buying,” “An object in motion tends to stay in motion,” “ Keep it simple stupid (KISS),” “What goes up must come down,” “Don’t try to catch a falling knife,” “Don’t fight the Fed,” “When there’s nothing to do, do nothing,” “Buy on rumor, sell on news,” and “No one ever went broke ringing the cash register.” Wall Street bosses loved to say to young dumb employees, “Do you want the short answer or the long answer?” The short answer was, “No way.” The long answer was, of course, “No fucking way.” There were no swear jars in the Financial District that I was aware of.
My favorite bit of expert financial advice was that if you wanted to double your money fast then you should fold it in half. Wall Streeters need a sense of invincibility and are therefore terrific self-diagnosers and self-medicators. Dismissing pain was also popular, like it was with coaches who’d instruct me and my teammates to “walk off” a shattered pelvis or collapsed lung.
A friend on the stock exchange, whom I’ll call Nate Goldberg, was having horrible abdominal pains but wouldn’t go to a doctor. Nate had grown up an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, where his father was a rabbi and his mother was, well, his Mother. Nate’s mother kept calling her son’s apartment like a telemarketer on crack to insist that he see a doctor. He stopped answering the phone. Then there was a knock at his apartment door. Nate was in too much pain to rise from his chair. “Who is it?” yelled Nate. “Mr. Goldberg, your mother called us from Brooklyn and we’re here to take you to the hospital. Open the door.” It was the Hatzolah, the volunteer emergency medical service supported
by Jewish communities. “Go away!” shouted Nate. “Mr. Goldberg, if you don’t open the door we’ll break it down.” “You’re not allowed to do that,” replied Nate. “Yes, we can. Your mother said you are trying to harm yourself.” Nate opened the door. They rushed him to the nearest hospital. His appendix had burst. In another hour he would’ve been dead. Nate later said it was the biggest “I told you so” in Jewish history. But the story gets better. Nate’s parents had wanted him to be a rabbi, but he’d become a trader and married a shiksa ballerina. They’d had a son together who was now nineteen, and his parents didn’t know about the marriage or their grandson. When Nate woke up after the operation he saw his parents, his ex-wife, and his son all standing over him. He screamed for the nurse and asked for morphine – lots and lots of morphine.
Working on the trading floor not only led to elevated idiocy levels, but also hearing loss and throat polyps. To be understood above the din we enhanced our continuous shouting with hand signals that were based on American Sign Language. In addition to confirming prices (fifteen and fifty sound a lot alike across a loud, crowded, caffeinated room) the hand signals were good for ordering lunch and telling someone you were making a quick dash for the lav, which was signed as “M-E” for “medical emergency,” since stepping away from the trading pit for even a second could be hazardous to your financial health. Best of all, no one could beat a team of traders with the secret weapon of sign language when it came to playing charades at parties.
Then there was the additional stress from the dozens of practical jokes played on a daily basis. One trader made a ritual of going to nearby Brooks Brothers and picking out a new hat at the beginning of every quarter. A couple of colleagues went to the store and bought the same hat in a half size larger and a half size smaller. They let him wear the new hat for a few days and then substituted it for the smaller one. After a few more days they swapped it for the larger hat. The next day their pal didn’t show up for work. Or the next day. They called his house and his wife said he’d checked himself into the hospital because his head was “expanding and contracting” and he was certain that he had a brain tumor. Fortunately, no brain surgery was performed and a “watch and
wait” approach was adopted, part of which involved the man measuring the circumference of his head every day and charting any sudden changes. A similar prank was pulled on a floor broker with a knee injury. He was getting around using a metal cane. One of his partners would shave an inch off the cane every afternoon while he was filing tickets in the booth. After a week of cane cutting the injured party went to his doctor and said he felt like he was sinking on the Titanic.
Ahead of the game or behind, eventually it comes time to get out. Shouting in a loud trading pit all day is not the best thing for one’s health, as evidenced by all those who’ve had heart attacks, bleeding ulcers, acid reflux, migraines, hypertension, insomnia, looked twice their age, or were repeatedly packed off to rehab. If your job requires that a defibrillator be installed three feet away, it’s something to think about. After five years on the floor of the stock exchange I decided to see what else the city had to offer.
It’s worth noting that along with the great bull market came a decline in the quality of students studying medicine, engineering, education, criminal justice, social work, agriculture, and forestry (money doesn’t grow on trees, just hedge funds). Suddenly, everyone wanted finance degrees and MBAs. The next best moneymaker was being a quantitative analyst (“quant”) or computer programmer. It’s a shame that the appeal of Wall Street prevented other important areas of study from engaging many of those young minds with a passion and a talent for them. On second thought, without all those techies we might not have the social network game FarmVille, where you can spend hours plowing fake land, planting fake seeds, growing fake crops, and raising fake livestock.
Chapter 21
Sects and the City
The New Netherland colonists were given freedom to worship in private from the get-go, despite occasional interference from various directors and clergymen. Religious tolerance expanded under English rule, though the residents had inherited some anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism from their parents. It was a mostly Protestant group, but also home to the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, dating to 1654. When Anne Hutchinson was banished from New England for questioning Puritan practices,
she headed to the more tolerant New Netherland. For people who had left Europe to escape religious intolerance, the Pilgrims were rather a my-way-or-the-highway kind of sect when it came to creeds.
Today, New York is often called the Secular City, and has even been accused of suffering from an “over-separation of church and state” because of a rule that bans organized worship in city school buildings even when no students are using them.
Capitalism and religion have mostly cohabitated happily in New York City over the centuries. In fact, the architect James Renwick Jr. designed both St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the former facade of the New York Stock Exchange. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, at 50th and Fifth Avenue, is the neo-Gothic home of the archbishop of New York. Completed in 1878, it is the center of the oldest Roman Catholic parish in the city. St. Patrick was chosen as patron of the cathedral because 100,000 Irish immigrants had already flooded the city by 1842, and the Potato
Famine (1845–1852) brought another 200,000. By 1860, of the roughly 1 million people living in New York, one-fifth were Irish, and by 1869 New York contained more Irish than Dublin.
Hundreds of thousands of people now come to see the Nativity scene at St. Patrick’s at Christmastime. In 2011, visitors were treated to a small miracle when a statue of a golden retriever popped up between the donkey and the cow, a likeness to the one owned by the monsignor in charge of setting up the crèche. The official comment from the church was that it would be logical for the shepherds to bring some of their sheep and a sheepdog to meet the baby Jesus.
Speaking of church rituals, it should be noted that smoke coming out of a New York chimney has nothing to do with electing a new pope. It’s usually just investment bankers and hedge fund managers burning their diaries and deal memos.
In response to the construction of the Catholic cathedral, the Episcopal Diocese of New York decided to build one of its own on Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street. The plans called for St. John the Divine to be the world’s largest cathedral, and construction was started in 1892. But after 120 years the cathedral remains incomplete (and in need of renovations) and is therefore often called St. John the Unfinished. As a result of its long gestation, there’s a jumble (fusion?) of architectural styles, including French Gothic, English Gothic, Spanish Gothic, Gothic Revival, Romanesque, Renaissance, Norman, and Byzantine.
Jews have the Romanesque Revival building that’s home to Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue at 65th Street, which is extolled for being one of the largest and most beautiful synagogues in the world. The current incarnation went up in 1929 on the site of the mansion once owned by Mrs. William B. Astor.
The first mosque in the city was the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on Third Avenue and 96th Street, which was completed in 1991. The building is rotated 29 degrees from the city’s north-south street grid in order to be oriented toward Mecca, the birthplace of
Muhammad.
Spiritual tourists may likewise find enlightenment visiting the Ganesha Hindu Temple in Flushing, Queens, where the list of services
includes everything from holy baths to hair offerings. Or at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island, which was designed and constructed by the local Italian-American community, and also serves as a convalescent home for previously venerated religious statuary. After 9/11 many residents left pictures and prayers here for their 274 lost loved ones.
In New York you can find every known religion, including Haitian Vodou, Kabbalah, Jainism, Santeria, Sufism, Bahá’í, and Jews for Jesus, along with the Church of Euthanasia (“Save the Planet, Kill Yourself”), the Church of the SubGenius (Paul Reubens aka Pee-wee Herman is a minister), the School of Kemetic Thought and Spirituality (if you get through the tapes and figure it out, let me know), and a handful of Marxist guerrillas. Churches throughout the city advertise services in dozens of languages, including Czech, Korean, Portuguese, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Armenian, Arabic, and Creole. Likewise, various Buddhist temples offer services in Thai, Tibetan, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, English, and Vietnamese. Teams of male Mormon missionaries encounter wisenheimer New Yorkers who ask which one is the designated driver and if they’re planning to marry each other. And hipsters in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, do the Walk of Shame on Sunday mornings past legions of elderly Polish ladies heading for Mass.
It’s because New York is so ecumenical that it can remain open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s never everybody’s holiday on any given day. If the Greek diners are closed for Christmas then the Indian restaurants are open. If the Italian restaurants are closed on Easter then the kosher delis are open. If the kosher delis are shuttered for Passover then the Persian restaurants are serving. If the Persian restaurants are closed for Ramadan then the Chinese restaurants are open. And if the Chinese restaurants are closed for … well, they’re never closed, lucky for us. That’s because Chinese restaurants don’t serve breakfast and all the workers can sleep until eleven a.m. Despite the name, egg rolls aren’t for breakfast.
In New York “evil-doers” aren’t people working with international terrorist conspiracies but those who ruin your dry cleaning, hold the subway doors open so the train can’t leave, and deliver your food cold.
And for some reason lots of Jewish people order from Chinese restaurants, but you never see Chinese people ordering from kosher restaurants. Maybe they should try offering matzo balls with fortunes inside.
Atheists in New York are actually quite busy, because in such a diverse place there are so many different gods not to believe in. However, it may not be a good idea to admit you’re an atheist, not for fear of discrimination, but because everyone will ask you to cover for them at work since technically you don’t get to take off for any religious holidays, and every day is somebody’s holiday (refer back to the parking schedule). Then again, one might question the very existence of atheists in New York, at least ones with cars. Just like the old saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” there are no atheists looking for parking places in New York. Prime spots have been known to generate believers the same way sharing the secret art of the MetroCard swipe with baffled tourists has made us all into Good Samaritans for at least one minute per week. New York is also home to a fair share of agnostics. They believe that if heaven and hell do exist then heaven is actually hotter because heat rises, except when it’s been collecting on subway platforms.
Most Manhattan graveyards are either full up or built over, but the Bronx is home to the splendid 400-acre Woodlawn Cemetery. More like an outdoor museum, where visitors are welcome and tours are given, it’s the final resting place of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Max Roach, composer Irving Berlin, and many other luminaries from all walks of life. Meantime, Brooklyn contains the picturesque Green-Wood Cemetery, home to Jean-Michael Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, hotdog inventor Charles Feltman, and New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley (despite his advice to “Go West, young man”), along with a very much alive colony of colorful monk parakeets. A cemetery provision barring anyone who died in jail should have applied to notorious Tammany Hall leader “Boss” Tweed, who took his last breath while doing time for corruption in the Ludlow Street Jail (which had been built under his direction). But the Boss managed to sidestep the rules even in death, and his family was able to have him interred at Green-Wood. Legendary New York journalist Pete Hamill told a friend that
he bought the plot next to Boss Tweed, and therefore a reporter will be keeping an eye on the political operator for eternity. The plot of sewing-machine inventor Elias Howe includes a grave for their family dog Fannie, who had “limpid eyes” according to the poetic epitaph.
Both cemeteries are nonsectarian, but they’re also considered to be exclusive final resting grounds and therefore pricey. Like any good address in New York, a cemetery can be expensive even if you pass the screening committee. A priest friend gave me the suggestion that if you buy one plot, it’s possible to return later with a big plant along with the ashes of any added family members and discreetly inte
r them yourself.
It comes as no surprise that Mayor Ed Koch wins the award for funeral irony. Born in New York to Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland, he’s buried in a Christian cemetery in a largely Dominican neighborhood. And despite a penchant for shellfish, he certainly wasn’t trying to “pass,” since his headstone says the word Jewish four times. Perhaps most remarkably, the words “How’m I doin’?” do not appear once.
Still, as far as characters go, Damon Runyon may have surpassed Koch not only in life but in death. Runyon wrote sardonic but sentimental tales celebrating gamblers, gangsters, horse players, con artists, bootleggers, boxers, goldfish swallowers, swells, floozies, boozehounds, lowlifes, actors, and showgirls with nicknames such as Hymie Banjo Eyes, the Seldom Seen Kid, Sam the Gonoph, and Dream Street Rose. Runyon’s stories were often based on real acquaintances and experiences, and two of them became the basis for the famous musical Guys and Dolls. When he died in 1946, the creator of so many colorful Broadway characters had his ashes (illegally) scattered over Times Square among all the hoofers and hustlers he’d immortalized.
A favorite joke in this city is that Jesus could’ve been a New Yorker – he lived at home into his thirties, worked in his father’s business, walked everywhere, became a marketing guru, and his mother believed he was God. But seriously, it’d be hard to tell if Jesus were to choose New York for his return. There are so many long-haired dudes wearing sandals who are trying to build a following in this city. Plus, if you call out “Jesus” in a crowded place, a dozen heads will turn. New
York’s strong feminist contingent argues that Jesus could’ve just as easily been a woman because he had to feed a crowd at a moment’s notice, he was constantly talking to men who wouldn’t listen, and even after he was dead there was still a ton of work to be done. These gals are certain the Wise Men weren’t women or else they’d have brought along gifts more useful than gum resin.
Life in New York Page 15