For the Love of Money

by Sam Polk

  At the end of the meal, we stood up from the table and walked through the bar to the front door. Marshall let the rest of the party go ahead of us so we could have a private word.

  “How are you doing, buddy?” he asked. “Your thoughts seem elsewhere.”

  I smiled at him. “They are. Happens a lot these days.”

  “I’m proud of you,” he said. “It takes courage to do what you are thinking about doing. I may not agree with it, but I admire it. I only wish you had a plan for once you leave.”

  We stood there silently. This would indeed all be easier if I had a new profession to dive into after leaving Wall Street. But I didn’t. All I knew was that I needed out. I wanted an adventure.

  I was scared. When I’d tell Wall Street guys I was thinking about leaving the business, the number one question they’d ask is, “How will you fill your time?” I understood the fear behind that question. It was scary to fathom days, weeks, and months where I didn’t have to be somewhere, didn’t have someone telling me what to do. One of the most terrifying passages I ever read was Thoreau writing about how sometimes he would spend an entire day sitting in his doorway, watching a field. But what, I wanted to scream, did you DO all day? Part of me realized the absurdity of fearing boredom from a life where I got to choose exactly what I did each day—I was afraid of the very thing I most wanted.

  In Netherland, Joseph O’Neill wrote that one of the great consolations of work is its abbreviation of the world’s space. I think he meant that at work, you know where you stand. Working in a successful hedge fund, with rich, successful people around me, I knew that, by the standards of the world, I was a success. Sometimes I would have the bizarre experience of reading about a rich finance guy in the paper and for a moment envying his life and success before remembering that I had reached the exact same success, and it had left me feeling empty. Now I was beginning to create my own definition of success.

  And what if I was wrong? What if this whole plan to leave Wall Street was, as Marshall seemed to think, a well-­meaning but adolescent process I had to go through that would ultimately lead me back to the sage realization that financial success was indeed what life was really about? If I stepped off the track, the race would go on. Each year, guys would make huge bonuses, get promoted, start new hedge funds. And I was proposing to do . . . nothing?

  Since I could remember, I felt threatened by other people’s success. Now, the entire world might pull past me. Guys I had left in the dust, like that trader in Vegas who had chanted, “Thirty-five sticks! I’m up thirty-five sticks!” would outearn me in a year or two. How would it feel to read newspaper articles in twenty years about guys I had started with on Wall Street who were now CEOs of investment banks or billionaire hedge fund managers?

  It seemed safer to play by the rules I had always played by. What if I left Wall Street, and the rest of my life amounted to nothing? I was afraid that the infinite world would open up before me, and I would disappear into its terrifying maw. I believed that since I didn’t know what was coming, then nothing might.

  Marshall and I stood quietly for a second longer, lost in our own diverging thoughts. I was glad he was next to me. The difference between Marshall and my dad is that if I step away from Marshall’s world, I know he will still have my back. I loved him for that.

  “So you are going to see Kirsten now, huh?” Marshall said. “She sounds like an amazing woman.”

  I nodded, excited. I hugged Marshall, endured a round of handshakes, and then walked out into the brisk fall day.

  As I walked to Park Slope from Williamsburg, I thought about what had happened in the thirteen years since Kirsten and I first met. I was an almost completely different person. I hoped she liked who I had become.

  I was thirty minutes early, and when she finally walked into the coffee shop, she was even more beautiful than I remembered from a few weeks before.

  This time she asked me about my life, and I told her I was thinking about leaving Wall Street. She told me that when she left J.P. Morgan, they had her talk to six or seven different people and each one was supposed to convince her to stay. When it became clear her mind was made up, each one started telling her about how they wanted to do something else with their lives.

  One woman told her she wished her career involved helping people. A senior executive told her he had been trying to leave for a decade but year after year failed to muster the courage. The last guy she talked to said he’d never been happy on Wall Street, but he couldn’t leave, because he felt compelled to maintain his family’s lifestyle.

  Even on Wall Street people live lives of quiet desperation.

  It wasn’t that Kirsten had it all figured out. She wasn’t smug about being a doctor instead of an investment banker. She, too, struggled with feeling inadequate. Underneath the successful doctor was a shy, sometimes socially awkward woman. I was glad for that. I stared at her in that coffee shop and thought that I could spend my life with this woman. I wondered if someday she might love me.

  After coffee, we walked around Park Slope in a light rain for hours. We went into a chocolate store and had dessert. Afterward, I kissed her on the cheek and left and felt like something important had happened.

  On our second date we went to a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant in Brooklyn and talked about our families. I told her about my dad, my alcohol and drug addiction, the crimes I’d committed—who I was, warts and all.

  She started to talk about her family and quickly burst into tears. Her father was an alcoholic—he’d tried to keep his drinking hidden to protect her; she’d felt burdened by his secret. She told me about the beers in the garage, the hospital visits. She said my openness about my family, and myself, made her feel safe to talk about hers. She told me about siblings who’d struggled with drugs and crime. When she was finished talking, she looked vulnerable and exposed. I leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  We both had masks. But we seemed ready to be honest with each other. Within a few dates, I’d connected with Kirsten on a deeper level than I had with any of my past girlfriends.

  One night Kirsten and I went to dinner at a small café in my neighborhood, and from there we walked by a quiet neighborhood park. I pulled her to me and kissed her and remembered what her mouth felt like thirteen years before.

  I was still scared of really letting someone see the real me. I was also afraid of what kind of husband I’d be. I worried that no matter how much work I did, I’d inevitably end up like my dad.

  Kirsten and I were both gentle with each other from the start, as if we understood that something important was possible between us but that it was fragile. A few weeks later, I dreamed Kirsten and I were riding in a horse-drawn carriage. She was wearing a white hat and a white dress. We were coming home from our wedding. It was an incredibly corny dream. I was embarrassed I’d even had it. When I told Kirsten, she burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 35

  Hear It in the Deep

  ¤

  The Pateras Christmas party that year was held at the Metropolitan Club, one of the most elite private clubs in New York. Jacket and tie were required, and the cocktail hour was held in a jaw-dropping room with fifty-foot ceilings, million-dollar chandeliers, and marble floors. New York wealth and power made manifest.

  I stood in a circle with the other traders, laughing and joking. I’d wanted to belong to a group my whole life, and now I did. We spent more time together than we did with our families. But another part of me saw that standing in a group of Wall Street guys can be the loneliest place in the world. What passes for conversation is a series of insults—Great sweater, fuckface. Nice one, d-bag—and comments about the waitress’s ass.

  It wasn’t just the shallow conversation. It was the whole shallow career. I’d been mulling over a famous Bloomberg message that had been sent out by a Goldman trader to the entire market. The subject line read, “Size Does Matter”; th
e message said that he’d buy or sell $5 billion worth of an index of derivatives in a single phone call. It was the largest index market in history.

  Taking a situation to its extreme can illuminate an otherwise obscured absurdity. Why would anyone need to trade $5 billion in derivatives at a single moment? The infrastructure, brainpower, and expertise needed to facilitate trades like that were way more costly than the benefits to the world. I was standing with a group of very intelligent people, and we were expending enormous amounts of energy developing sophisticated levels of expertise. But we were not building anything or creating anything of value. I knew hundreds of derivatives traders. I was a derivatives expert. And it occurred to me that the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. I’d become an expert in a profession that wasn’t worth a damn.

  I’d come to Wall Street for validation. I believed my value was in achievement, that achievement was conferred by institutions and rendered in money. I’d joined an army of bright young men and women dressed in business-casual uniforms, streaming into the service of massive corporations without any sense of why we’d chosen to dedicate our lives to further enriching the already rich, except that we needed proof that we were valuable, because at heart we didn’t really believe we were.

  One of the things I most loved about Wall Street when I first started was how connected I felt; I was paid to understand what was going on in the world. I actually had a reason to read the Economist.

  Standing with the traders that night, I saw how disconnected we really were. We talked about people’s lives as if they were variables in an equation. As if the most important thing about what was happening in the world was whether it would make stocks go up or down. Reading the newspaper had become like studying a chessboard—people were pawns in a trillion-dollar chess game.

  What I’d mistaken for a connected life was a life lived inside a glass bubble. I sat safely ensconced in a Manhattan skyscraper, looking down at the world, judging it and making my bets so that I could accumulate more money.

  And Sean had bought a gun. My withdrawing $7,000, Eldrick’s obsessive accumulation, and Sean buying a gun were all the same thing. The bottom line for us meant protecting our wealth.

  Our obsessive accumulation of money had led to the widest inequality in centuries. Our hoarding had left millions of people unemployed, starving, and marginalized. Prison populations were swelling; families were starving. Our greed was the source of that poverty. We were the source of that marginalization.

  I’d recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-part series about Dr. King and the civil rights movement. I’d read about the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists in the ’60s who rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test whether the recent Supreme Court ruling abolishing segregation was being upheld. I’d held my breath as the buses pulled into the Birmingham bus station, into a crowd of three thousand armed, screaming bigots. The Freedom Riders looked out the windows to see the furious mob wielding tire irons, bicycle chains, iron pipes, and guns. They opened the door and filed out. They walked into the mob. To take the vicious beating they knew was coming. And it came.

  That image had seared into my mind. I told myself that if I were alive in the ’60s, I would have been on that bus. What bullshit. There were countless injustices out there—rampant poverty, a porn and sexual assault epidemic, swelling prison populations, an obesity crisis—and I wasn’t doing a thing about them. If I’d lived in the ’60s, I would not have been on those buses with the Freedom Riders. I would have been betting on which companies would benefit from the civil rights movement. I would have been long the stocks and bonds of taxi companies and hospitals during the Rosa Parks bus strike, and I would have been short the department stores that were being boycotted. My words would have been on the side of the civil rights activists, but my actions would have been on the side of enriching myself.

  I looked up at my colleagues and realized that I’d been lost in thought for the last several minutes, and no one had even noticed.

  We had a special musical guest that night. Gavin DeGraw was a Grammy-winning musician. He was my age, and while I only knew a few of his songs, my sister was a devout fan. She’d shrieked when I told her Gavin was performing at my holiday party.

  When I got to the table, Gavin’s placard was next to mine. When he arrived, I shook his hand and told him my sister was a huge fan. That was the last thing I said to him the whole night. My teeth clamped; my tongue tied. I sat at the table, listening to Gavin talk about his music. I tried to will myself to participate in the conversation. Something held me back, as if my jaw had been wired shut.

  In a flash, I saw myself in this opulent room, a pale-white, suit-wearing millionaire sitting amongst other pale-white, suit-wearing millionaires.

  I realized how Gavin must see me. I wanted to pull him aside and tell him that I was different than all these Wall Street guys. But I realized how hollow that would sound. Where I stood was more important than what I said.

  A few minutes later Gavin went onstage. He tested the piano and guitar and made a joke about feeling like a fish out of water. The crowd sat there, stiff in their chairs, with their linen tablecloths and silver and three wineglasses, and watched him. After each song they clapped perfunctorily. I watched, rapt, as he lost himself in the music.

  In January, Kirsten and I sat in canvas chairs on a Santa Monica beach, watching the waves, waiting for sunset.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I’m scared, too,” I said.

  We had been dating for only three months, and some big decisions were upon us. I would receive my bonus in a couple weeks. Kirsten would graduate from medical school in the spring, and she was starting the process of choosing where to do her residency, a five-year postgraduate training program required of new doctors. We had come to California to talk about the future.

  A few months before I met Kirsten, I asked a friend of mine about how he came to ask his wife to marry him. He said when he met her, he just knew. “When you meet the woman who will be your wife, Sam,” he said, “you will just know.”

  I had doubted him, because relationships had never been like that for me. With girlfriends I was always keeping score in my head—a list of pros and cons—as if someday I would render a deciding verdict and the matter would be settled. But I was forever plagued with doubts and reservations, and I’d come to believe that that was what relationships were like.

  With Kirsten, I learned that my friend had been right. I just knew. It hadn’t happened at the snap of a finger. I had too many defense mechanisms still active from a childhood of seeing relationships modeled as a lifelong cage match. But I kept walking through those fears until one day I simply knew that this was the woman I wanted to be with.

  Here we were, three months into our relationship, deciding where to spend the next five years. Kirsten would go through a process called the Match, where medical school graduates are paired with residency programs where they will work for the next five years. Kirsten had interviewed at eighteen programs, in New York, DC, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and would be submitting her list in a few weeks.

  Kirsten loved New York. But I was ready to leave. The thought of quitting Wall Street but still being around all the money and ambition seemed overwhelming.

  There were so many unknowns. We sat there in silence and watched the ocean, the same ocean I had fallen into at camp when I was a kid and learned in that one terrifying moment that I had to fight in order to survive. As the sun touched the water, and pinks and peaches exploded over the cloud-­speckled sky, I watched the waves roll in. My eyes fastened on a single wave in the distance. First, it was a swell, then it became a peak, and finally it crested over into an explosion of white water, which then dissipated as the wave trudged onward toward the land, finally turning into little more than a ripple that the
n, exhausted, spilled itself onto the sand in one last gasp toward the destination it had been rushing toward for months, across hundreds of thousands of miles. The water finally came to a point, as far up the sand as it was destined to go. Some of it sank into the wet sand. Some was picked up by a boy with a bucket, and the rest turned back whence it came, becoming one with the next wave. As I looked out past that next wave, I saw a line of waves as far as the eye could see, all unique and all carrying the history of a great journey within them and yet all, in some sense, the same. I realized that my life was like that single wave, that I was on a great journey, over great distances, but at the end what had happened to the wave would happen to me.

  Suddenly I knew that none of the questions I had mattered. It didn’t matter whether I got richer or not, whether we lived in New York or LA, or even Philadelphia. It didn’t matter, because there was no correct destination.

  I was calmer than I’d ever been in my entire life. Because I finally understood that I could stop trying to prove myself, stop trying to make it to the top. I finally understood that I was enough . . . had always been . . .

  CHAPTER 36

  The Bright Light of the Afternoon

  ¤

  Two weeks later, on a Friday, my bonus hit my bank account. I planned to wait a week and then resign. That afternoon, I noticed that Sean, Eldrick, and Peter were engaged in intense conversation in Eldrick’s glass office. A few minutes later, Sean walked out and went into his office. Peter and Eldrick continued talking. After a half hour, they both emerged and stood near my desk. Sean came out of his office. Peter cleared his throat.

  “Everyone, please come over here,” he said.

  He waited till everyone was gathered around the trading desk. “We have an announcement,” said Peter. “Sean Mallory resigned today and will be leaving the firm next month.”

  Boom.

  I was one of five senior traders on the desk. With Sean gone, Derek and I would be the leading candidates to run trading. Peter and Eldrick thanked Sean for his contribution; there was a round of applause. Sean went back into his office, and the crowd dissipated. A few seconds later, I received a message from Sean asking me to go back there. I stepped into his office and closed the door behind me.