by David Bledin
• Fake Crab Rolls. Fake, you surmise, as in processed out of a taro potato? Those crafty Japanese; you wouldn’t put it past them. It’s not until after you’ve wolfed down a six-pack of California rolls, ready to swagger up and down the joint with your chest puffed out like a peacock, that somebody at the next table wonders how they’re able to make other types of fish taste so convincingly like crabmeat. Right at this very moment is the crucial hurdle of the entire progression: You either make a beeline for the restroom and eject such foulness in a torrent of doubly reconstituted pseudo-crabmeat or you shred the list of things you’re willing to swallow and boldly venture forward in an unblinking free fall . . .
• Rolls with Tiny Shreds of Fish Inside. You’ve overcome the non-crab crabmeat and you’re going to give this your best shot. Maybe your second-best shot: tiny pieces of fish rendered completely tasteless by clumps of rice, soy sauce, those weird pink flakes you’re beginning to like, and dollops of wasabi.
• Rolls with Big Chunks of Fish Inside. Hey, this raw fish thing isn’t too bad.
• Nigiri—Strips of Fish on Rice. Really, this raw fish thing isn’t too bad.
Finally, after you’re officially addicted to the $7.99 lunch specials (including miso soup and salad):
• Sashimi—Strips of Fish Without the Rice. Screw the carbohydrates, Aki, my man, and pelt me with more raw tuna.
We’re both at the nigiri level, the Woman With The Scarf and I, awakened to our burgeoning craving for raw aquatic matter but not yet ready to forgo the rice altogether. It is essential for two people to be at a similar point in the Sushi Progression to truly enjoy their meal together; otherwise there’s always going to be one enthusiastic person with lips smacking—oh, man, you’ve really gotta try this!—while the other sits back and makes glum faces.
The Woman With The Scarf delicately swallows a piece of unagi. She closes her eyes and sighs.
“My god, this is so delicious.”
Of course she’s going to love the barbecued eel. According to Aki, the one-eyed sushi chef slicing and dicing behind the bar, the secret ingredient is maple syrup.
Preparing a second piece with a shard of ginger and a fleck of wasabi, she says, “So, tell me again why you’re a banker. You don’t exactly fit the mold.”
“And what, pray tell, is the mold?”
“Now you’ve put me on the spot,” she says, smirking. “I don’t know: brash, arrogant, myopically materialistic—”
“Myopically materialistic?” I cock an eyebrow.
She waves a chopstick at me threateningly.
“Buzz off, mister. Let me get back to reducing your creed to a cardboard stereotype. Let’s see . . . Armani-wearing, Mercedes-driving, Wall Street Journal–skimming, summerhouse-tripping, sushi-eating . . .”
“What are we doing right now?”
She shrugs. “Hey, lawyers are just bankers without the bulging wallets. At least the junior ones.”
I reach for a squishy mound of fatty tuna.
“I guess I could make something up, try to pretend I find something noble in it, greasing the wheels of capitalism to crush the corruption behind communism or whatever, but the truth is, it’s just a lack of integrity.”
The Woman With The Scarf smiles.
“But it’s true, right?” I continue. “I mean, you’re finishing up your undergrad in econ or poli sci or the mating habits of Eskimos, and everybody is competing for the same top-tier jobs, consulting and banking, and though you might have a disconcerting inkling that perhaps you’re meant to draw comic books or round up elephants in Tanzania, still, you kind of just shrug it off and get swept up in this need to succeed according to other people’s expectations. I’m sure this is all really obvious.”
“Yeah.” The Woman With The Scarf nods. “But it’s nice you can admit to it. You’re not in denial or anything. Though I don’t think people studying the mating habits of Eskimos are going to be seriously pursuing investment banking careers anytime soon.”
“Probably not,” I agree, grinning. “Anyway, I can’t see myself doing this forever. Only two years at most. What about you—I mean, why are you a lawyer? It doesn’t exactly seem like you’re too happy with your profession either.”
The Woman With The Scarf laughs.
“Touché. Well,” she says, taking a sip of her Asahi Super Dry, “I can’t say I’m coming from the exact same place as you. I really do like the law; I think there’s something respectable in its practice. I honestly believe it’s the legal system that sets us apart from other animals, this ability to govern our societies. But somewhere along I guess I was lured away by the prestige and money as well. Look at me . . . I’m a tax lawyer. I can’t exactly argue I’m forging a more noble society while sitting behind a desk assisting corporations exploit tax loopholes, can I?”
“I’m sure you do the best you can.”
“Yeah, here’s to ambiguous accounting scandals.”
We clink our glasses and settle into a really comfortable silence. It’s weird to have reached this stage so early in our relationship; normally it takes a few solid months before I stop feeling the need to say stupid things in order to fill the awkward gaps in a conversation. When the check comes, I whip out my credit card. The Woman With The Scarf puts up a fuss, but I put up a greater fuss. It helps matters that I’m not really forking for this anyway, expensing dinner for myself and the Prodigal Son (who’s never around, hence the default when we go over our allotted allowances).
We grab our coats and exit into the first snowfall of the season. Flurries of white whirl gracefully through the sky and land on our noses and fingertips. We walk a couple more blocks, tentatively holding hands, then holding hands more naturally, before she turns to me.
“This is going to sound very brash, and I don’t normally do this, especially after I’ve only known someone for a short while . . . all right, enough with the justifications. I’d really like it if you came back to my place. You know, for some hot chocolate and stuff.”
“Now?” I gulp.
Those alternative-energy comps I’m supposed to put together for Postal Boy are due first thing tomorrow morning and I haven’t even started them yet.
She nods. “Yeah, now. Right at this very second.”
She grabs onto my loosened tie, narrows her eyes, and yanks my head toward her. We’ve kissed before at Starbucks, a quick peck or two before heading to the elevators, but this is something else, taking things up to the next level. I reach out and touch the dangling ends of her neck scarf. She slaps my hands away.
“Don’t touch the scarf.”
“All right . . .”
“I’m just messing with you,” she snickers.
Then she pulls me toward her again. We go at it for a couple more minutes, the snow falling on our heads, passersby without their winter hats scowling or smiling depending on whether they’re lonely or not.
“That was great,” she beams.
“Yeah.”
She’s shivering, hugging herself and looking insanely beautiful.
“So, you’re up for that hot chocolate?”
“I, um—”
And in the duration of a stammer, the mood comes crashing down on our heads, the romance replaced by a jarring unease.
“You don’t have to.”
“No, I, uh—”
She’s already turning away.
“It’s not that big a deal.”
I walk in stride beside her.
“I’m not letting this turn into a cliché situation. You walking away before I can speak my piece. I promise, there is nothing I want more in this world right now than to have a hot chocolate with you. ‘Hot chocolate’ as a euphemism for—”
She eyes me sternly.
“Okay, just double-checking. But look, I also promised this colleague of mine who’s in a tight crunch that I’d help him out tonight. If it was my own work, to hell with it. But I don’t know—”
“It’s fine. I sort of understand.”
She definitely doesn’t understand.
“It’s not like—”
But she’s already strolling off, waving her fingers without looking back. I stand there peering after her, snow settling on my ears, until she’s turned the corner.
Eight
Bonus time is rapidly approaching and the Toad looks like an absolute wreck: sagging bags under his eyes, a gallon of coffee in hand, tie askew, and suit jacket covered in wrinkles. It’s all part of the Toad’s underlying strategy, the Defeated One’s explained to me: Exude an aura of extreme haggardness to suggest he’s sticking around the office till the wee hours of the morning (try till 6:30, which is at most half an hour later than the rest of senior management), painstakingly determining whether Postal Boy really deserves that extra five hundred dollars or not, all designed to detract from the painfully obvious reality that he’s really just useless overhead. Seriously, even the janitors are more value-added scrubbing the piss from our urinals.
This is not to say that coming up with junior employee bonuses isn’t an incredibly important task. Because the economy is plodding along nicely right now, with everybody shrugging off the sluggishness of the post-9/11 bear market and embracing a return to obscenely lucrative profits, attrition rates are shooting through the roof. A fundamental truth: There isn’t a modicum of loyalty in this industry. I once mentioned to the Philandering Managing Director in passing that I really felt the Bank was becoming my home—god knows what I was thinking; probably sucking up early in the game when I didn’t know any better—and he unabashedly laughed in my face. Come Thursday, as we’re shepherded into the Toad’s office to receive our manila envelopes, we will all be weighing our options carefully, a toss-up between following one or another of several stepping-stones on a banker’s generic quest to undermine income equality and crush the rest of the financial world: defection to another Bank with higher pay; a perhaps risky move to a hedge fund started up by an older brother; or, if you’re especially lucky, if you have great contacts and know how to work them, the holy grail of the trade, the shuddering multiple orgasm for every B-school graduate, Private Equity. Sell side. The ability to triple your salary and cruise around in a private jet while the clients come begging you for money, not the other way around. Thus, it’s all up to the Toad to prevent a mass exodus of liberated analysts.
Nonetheless, despite acting like Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders, it’s not like he’s in this alone. Every bank on the Street has its own Toad equivalent responsible for determining junior employee bonuses, a squat doppelgänger sighing and grumbling and despising the little piss-ant analysts who are all too eager to defect should anybody wave an extra thousand bucks in front of their noses. Over the next few days, this consortium of Toads will sneak into their respective offices and covertly call each other. After some collusion and coercion and crumbling under peer pressure, they’ll arrive at an allowable spectrum for junior bonuses that is compressed into a narrower band. It’s then up to each individual Toad to determine where they want to hit.
According to the Defeated One, our Bank aims for low to middle of the road.
“You’ll walk away feeling cheated, a bit nauseated in the pit of your stomach, but not bad enough that you’ll sprint toward the nearest exit. It would almost be better if you really got screwed over; then you’d be forced to come up with a feasible escape plan.”
I’ve been trying to finagle him into tightening up my forecasted range. Right now it’s fairly open-ended. I’ve decided upon an absolute minimum of $20,000 for six months of work—anything below that would be unacceptable, though I still haven’t worked out the consequences of this—and an optimistic peak of $32,500. Including my base salary of $60,000, this amounts to an annualized all-in of $100,000 to $125,000. It’s tempting to think this isn’t too shabby for a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of an undergraduate degree. Yet, as the Toad hands you that envelope, all the crap you’ve put up with over the last few months is focalized on the sparse piece of paper folded neatly inside: weekend after weekend shot to hell; all non-Bank relationships deteriorating into oblivion; slaving away with flu symptoms at three in the morning; acting as designated whipping boy for cretins like the Sycophant.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“I can’t,” he says, leaning back in the chair. “It’s against company policy. The Toad would have my head.”
“Give me a break.”
“What’s your best estimate?”
“Twenty as the minimum—”
He snorts.
“As the minimum? What, you think a couple months as an analyst is worth—what’s that over the year —?a hundred grand?”
“Piss off.”
The Defeated One revels in these sadistic mind games. As I’m about to swivel back to my spreadsheet, he asks, “And what’s your upper bounds?”
I’m reluctant to tell him.
“Give it up, Mumbles.”
“Thirty-five. No, thirty.”
He guffaws, slapping his knee.
“Thirty-five? Over a hundred and twenty for the year? You’ve got to be kidding me. What the hell do you think we’re doing here, neurosurgery?”
He looks around the room.
“Because I ain’t seein’ no deconstructed brains around these parts, are you?”
“I hate you.”
“Awww, Mumbles has his feelings hurt.”
“I’m not kidding. I’m beginning to seriously hate you.”
The Defeated One shrugs before swiveling back around.
Two thousand and forty minutes until the day of reckoning . . .
I’m trying for the hundredth time to make sense of our ultrasophisticated fax machine, a Hewlett-Packard capable of collating and stapling but never seeming to manage what it’s technically supposed to do, in this case, transmit a client invoice halfway across the world. Invoicing is typically an assistant’s job, but the senior guys no longer entrust the Utterly Incompetent Assistant with the task after she neglected to bill the federal tax on a million-dollar fee. A mistake costing the Bank a hundred grand, more than double her annual salary, and yet she’s still sitting at her desk, a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts poking out her top drawer. It’s truly amazing what sleeping with the Philanderer will get you.
As the fax machine spits out my page yet again, I can’t help but wonder if she knows how to work this contraption. It’s a bit of a stretch, but the Defeated One has already gone to grab lunch, and the Client was expecting this five minutes ago. I brush aside my humility and interrupt the Utterly Incompetent Assistant licking the icing sugar off her fingers.
“Could you help me fax this?”
She rolls her eyes and snatches the page out of my hand. Sauntering over to the fax machine, she pushes a few buttons, her fingers a blur, and the device hums to life. Of course she’d be able to get it right, if only to exude this irritating smugness. As the page is fed through, she shakes her head slowly, eyeing me up and down like I’m a complete invalid.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
“Whatever,” she grunts.
One thousand five hundred and thirteen minutes . . .
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Apologies again for the conclusion of our evening a few nights ago. I always seem to be apologizing for things, don’t I? Guess that’s the eternal curse of the investment banker. Anyway, I saved my co-worker’s ass; now that the Good Samaritan bit is out of the way, I was wondering if you had time for coffee this afternoon? Let me know.
Two hours later and there is still no response.
One thousand three hundred and ninety-three minutes . . .
The Sycophant bursts into our office, one notch down from full-fledged nuclear meltdown.
“What the hell is going on? Where are those comps, already?”
He’s stumped me for a moment. Which comps?
Then I realize he’s referring to the comps he dropped on my pl
ate less than fifteen minutes ago. Give me a break; even three Stars laboring away concurrently couldn’t have pulled it off in less than an hour. I struggle to keep my voice level.
“I’m going to need a bit more time.”
He’s been unreasonably demanding like this the entire week, more so than his usual repugnant self. It’s because of bonuses, the Defeated One’s hypothesized; the Sycophant hopes a few days of acting all bossy will compensate for being a spineless creep the rest of the time, his sudden authoritativeness earning him that ever-elusive promotion. Sure enough, I spy the Philandering Managing Director schmoozing the Utterly Incompetent Assistant just beyond the door frame, well within earshot.
The Sycophant leans over my shoulder and peers at the monitor. He’s picking at his teeth with the end of a paper clip.
“That TEV/EBITDA ratio is blatantly incorrect.”
I haven’t even calculated a TEV/EBITDA ratio yet.
“And why didn’t you include Dodge Phelps in your list of North American producers?”
I’m this close to pushing off the edge of my desk and propelling my chair backward, and then, when the Sycophant is knocked down, quickly wheeling back and forth over his head, reducing it to pulp. I can’t imagine it being all that difficult. Easier than a watermelon, I’ll bet.
“Fix this up and have it to me in fifteen minutes.”
He tosses the paper clip toothpick to the carpet and storms out of the room. No pulp, then. Heh, I’ll have to content myself with the knowledge I nearly screwed his wife.
Three hundred and ninety minutes . . .
I’m guzzling down caffeine with Postal Boy and Clyde at two-thirty in the morning. The Defeated One copped out early in the hopes of smoothing things over after a nasty scrap with the girlfriend.
“So, we’re going to tell one another our bonuses, right?”
Clyde cocks his head back and lets loose a resounding belch. Wiping at his mouth, he says, “Yeah, I don’t mind.”