by Turney Duff
“Come on over to the White House after work,” Randy says.
“No,” I say. I quickly hang up the phone. I don’t want to go back for at least a month.
I love Sunday nights. As a trader, there isn’t much to do. Sure, I could be studying some charts or reading Barron’s, but who wants to do that? I’d much rather be sitting on the couch with Jason and Ethan watching Sex and the City. My cell phone buzzes. I programmed Gus’s number into my phone, but I did it under “Turbo.” It makes me smirk every time I see it flashing. I click Ignore. Then my phone buzzes again. “Turbo can’t take a hint,” I say. But when I look at the caller ID, I see it’s a number I don’t know. I press the Talk button.
“Hellooooo,” I say in my best Barry White.
“It’s Lily,” says the voice.
Lily? I repeat her name in my head a few times. But I have no idea who she is. It’s not that unusual for an unknown female voice to be calling me—I’m social. I play it cool, ask her what’s going on. When she says she’s at a friend’s house and just got done watching Sex and the City, I grab the remote and mute the closing credits. Soon we both run out of things to say and an awkward silence ensues. “So, you’re really good at the towel dance?” she asks. How does she know about that? “We should get together so I can show you in person,” I say.
“Okay,” she says sweetly. “I’m busy until Labor Day, but how about after that?”
I take Lily’s number and agree to give her a call. After I hang up, I ask Jason and Ethan if either of them knows a Lily. They both shake their heads. It’s not until later that night when it comes to me. Lily! The bartender at Wetbar with the Jennifer Aniston hair.
In September 2002, my roommates and I decide to move. Much of Manhattan—the Upper West Side high-rises in particular—is like an upscale Soviet Union. People live in apartments that all look alike, they awake at the same time, eat the same granola, dress in the same corporate uniforms, and line up for the crosstown bus or take the stairs down to the subway. The sameness can drive you crazy. We all agree: it’s time for a change.
Right now there’s only Ethan, Jason, and me living here. We knocked down a wall to open up the living room. Ethan is my cousin. He’s an actor a couple years out of college. He’d be perfect for an afterschool special playing the morally responsible friend. I need to corrupt him a little bit. He looks like my cousin, Duff nose and all. Then there’s Jason. He looks like a chubby Ben Affleck. The kid could make you laugh at a funeral. He’s a media buyer; he purchases airtime on television for his clients. All my other roommates have moved out.
Now, it’s not like I can’t afford an apartment on my own. I can. My salary is up to two hundred grand a year at Argus. And that’s not including my bonus. In 2001, I got six hundred grand. We didn’t make any money, but Krishen rewarded me for taking the risk of leaving Galleon. What would be the fun in living alone? The thought of being unaccompanied, hungover, in a fancy one-bedroom apartment is depressing. I want to live with my friends until I fall in love, get married, and start a family. When I was a kid all I wanted to do was become an adult. Now as an adult, all I want to do is remain a kid. Anyway, I always told my friends that if I made it I was taking them along with me. It’s time for me to back up my words.
Only one question remains: Where? Once, when I was headed to a restaurant downtown in Tribeca, I saw a converted factory building with a black wrought-iron staircase and porch across the front. At the time, I thought: I’d love to live in a place like that. But the idea of moving to Tribeca might have actually formed on a date that everyone remembers.
On September 11, 2001, Argus Partners had been up and running for only a couple of months and we were in our temporary space on Sixth Avenue in Midtown. Along with several other senior people, I was in a meeting that morning when an administrative assistant came into the room to tell us a prop plane had hit one of the twin towers. When the second jet hit, Krishen asked everyone to evacuate the office. We gathered on the sidewalk outside of our building. Looking down Sixth Avenue, I could see the smoke billowing from the upper floors of the north tower, which, by then, stood alone. I remember turning away to light a cigarette. When I turned back, the top of the tower was gone. In that moment, the building had begun to collapse into itself. I spent much of that day with Jason, Ethan, and some other friends in the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. We smoked cigarettes and scanned a sky that was far too blue for more jets. Later that evening, we all went to a local bar. For once I didn’t want to go. But I didn’t want to be alone.
Three weeks later, I threw a party for the Twin Tower Fund, a charity that raised money for children who were left orphaned by the September 11 attacks. I’d called every contact I had on Wall Street. The party was held at a club in Tribeca called Shine, and raised more than twenty-five grand for the charity. Wall Street still talks about that night. More than a thousand people danced until four in the morning just blocks from the still smoldering site of Ground Zero. Though I’d always thought of Tribeca, with its cobblestone streets and converted factories and warehouses, as a magical place, after 9/11 the idea of living there brought out in me an almost patriotic fervor.
It’s Jason and I who go looking for apartments. One of the last we see is in the Sugar Warehouse building, a redbrick ten-story structure on a cobblestone block called Laight Street. When the structure was built, before the Civil War, it was one of the tallest buildings in Manhattan and part of the city’s skyline. Now the building consists of duplex and triplex apartments. The doorman tells us that the apartment we’re looking at is the only rental in the building—the rest are tenant-owned.
The door to 5A swings open to reveal huge floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the Hudson River. An orange sun sets over New Jersey and its rays form a shimmering path that cuts the river in two. A cruise ship slides by. The view is stunning. The living room is sunken and spacious; the shiny wood floors glisten at our feet. There’s a full dining room and a kitchen filled with top-of-the-line stainless-steel appliances. A huge master bedroom is on the second floor. Here, with even bigger windows than in the living room, the view is even more amazing. The master bath has beautiful southwestern tiles and a monster steam shower. Across the hall is another bedroom with its own bathroom. The third floor is perfect for a pool table (if we stick Ethan’s bed in the corner) and has a sliding glass door that opens up to a 1,500-square-foot roof deck. Jason and I stand on the deck. We can see up and down the Hudson River from the George Washington Bridge to the Statue of Liberty. Like the iconic New Yorker cartoon, the rest of the country lies beyond the river. I light a cigarette and the white smoke curls and dances away with the breeze.
“I’ll take it,” I tell the broker.
“But I haven’t told you what the rent is,” he says.
I don’t care. I have to live here. “How much?” I ask.
“Ninety-three hundred a month,” he says, looking down at his sheet of paper.
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
We move in a week later. But it’s not as if we carry box springs and mattresses up flights of stairs, especially after I break a cheap mirror trying to remove it from my wall. We hire professional movers. And from the Sixty-Seventh Street apartment they bring my almost new, custom-made, twenty-foot sectional velvet couch and my fifty-inch console television. I buy stuff in Super Bowl—party measurements. In the new apartment, my bedroom is enormous. I have a Charles P. Rogers iron sleigh bed that I position in the middle of my bedroom at an angle. Someone once told me that positioning your bed this way is rebellious, a fuck-you to interior decorators. That might be so, but I could have two beds at an angle and the room would still look empty. My new walk-in closet is bigger than the bedroom in my first apartment in New York. The third floor is empty too. And the roof deck also needs furniture. When I decided to take the apartment—I was willing to pay most of the rent—I hadn’t actually thought much about furnishing it. Leaving aside the money it’s going to cost, filling the apartm
ent is going to take some energy.
But like a good team, the next day we come up with a plan. We’ll begin by acquiring the essentials. Jason and Tridge, an old roommate who flew in from Ohio, take my cash and go to look for a pool table. Ethan takes my credit card and leaves to go to J&R, a music and appliance store, to buy speakers, wires, and portable telephones. My old roommate Johnny Hong Kong, who’d moved back to Colorado, flies in to see the new apartment and lend a hand. He and I stay behind and wait for the cable guy to come. After the three boxes are installed and the cable guy leaves, I turn on the set in the living room to see if it’s hooked up properly. The movie Zoolander with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson is on. I love this movie. It’s even better when I’m high. I tell Johnny where I’ve hidden my stash and we light up a bowl. Now, in the movie, Owen Wilson, who plays a rival to Ben Stiller’s supermodel character, has an apartment with a “soil room.” Essentially, it’s a room filled with dirt. This is a terrific idea, I decide. I’ve come to this conclusion, of course, after several bowls of some very, very good pot.
“We need a soil room,” I say to Johnny, whose face is plastered with a Mary Jane smile.
“Yes,” he says, nodding. “We do.” And so, red-eyed and giggly, we head out the door in search of one.
ABC Carpet, unfortunately, doesn’t sell soil. But it has just about everything else. Walking into the store on Broadway is like walking into a Rockefeller garage sale or the plunder-filled hull of a pirate ship. It’s not cheap. High or not, I would have never gone here before working on the buy side. But it is a trippy place nonetheless.
This day, the store is packed with customers. I bounce off of shoppers like a floating plastic carnival duck. Suddenly, the din that surrounds me seems to mute and I become laser focused. In front of me stands something called an Indian daybed. It has a beautifully hand-carved canopy with four wooden posts that stand seven feet tall. The sides are white Egyptian cotton see-through drapes. In the middle hangs an antique iron chandelier with tiny red cylinders and jewels hanging from it. I tug at Johnny’s shirt without taking my eyes off the bed. I step closer.
“This is it,” I say.
“What about the dirt?” Johnny asks.
“It’s perfect for the living room,” I say.
Johnny looks at the price tag and whistles. I flag down a salesperson on the floor. I’m wearing flip-flops and a T-shirt. My hair is unkempt and my eyes are red-rimmed. “I’d like to buy this,” I say to the man. He looks back at me suspiciously.
“Are you aware of the price?” he asks. I’m not really paying attention to him. Instead, I’m looking over at the cashier’s station, in front of which is an enormous line. It might be paranoia from the pot, but the line looks like a run on a bank—the faces are distorted in anger and frustration.
“Look,” I say to the man as I hand him my American Express card. “I really want this bed thingie.” The salesman glances down at the credit card and back up at me. His expression says he doesn’t know what to expect next. “But I can’t wait in that line.” He completes the transaction in no time. Johnny and I practically run from the store. Twenty minutes later, we’re home smoking the rest of the pot and clicking the channels to find Zoolander again.
“We never got the dirt,” Johnny says.
“I know, man, I really wanted the dirt too,” I say.
Over the next few weeks, I spend money like I’m getting divorced and my soon-to-be ex-wife’s lawyer hasn’t had my assets frozen yet. I purchase twenty thousand dollars’ worth of artwork and photographs, including a few from Mixed Greens, a gallery specializing in mid-career artists. I buy a gigantic photo of a fish called Bi-polar, and a huge, out-of-focus photograph of James Dean; I buy floor lighting and tiny multicolored spotlights that shoot from the floor to the ceiling, a thousand-dollar shag carpet, and a three-thousand-dollar frosted glass bar with four stools. I buy a couple of TVs, assorted chairs and lamps, and a surround-sound system for the living room. I buy an original Ms. Pac Man video game. Each day, the triplex fills a little more until it looks like a cross between a lair and a nightclub. The spoils of the buy side, I say to myself one day as I lie on the couch. And, yes, it’s only as substantive as a single thirty-two-year-old guy’s fantasy could be. But it’s a fantasy come true, and a long way from Kennebunk.
Once we’re settled from the move, I decide to call Lily. For my date, I wear my favorite jeans that are perfectly frayed and faded, and a baby blue short-sleeved shirt with a name patch that says “Trenton” on one side and “Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth” on the other. I look in the mirror for a quick assessment of the outfit. Not bad, I think. If the whole Wall Street thing falls through I see a future for myself in oil changes. I’m meeting Lily at Dos Caminos, a Mexican restaurant in Soho. It’s just a short walk from the new apartment.
She sits at the bar wearing a cream-colored tunic that hangs from her shoulders by spaghetti straps. When she stands to hug me I realize how petite she is. Her golden-brown skin is soft. The hostess leads us to an outside table. I follow behind Lily and notice the way her tunic sways with her walk. We munch on chips and salsa while we wait for our margaritas. During our last phone conversation, she talked about her son and I immediately ask about him. He’s seven, she says; he loves sports and really loves his dad. There’s the slightest hesitation to her words, which leads me to believe that there’s some bitterness between her and her ex. Lily lives on Long Island and commutes at night to the club. Geography and single motherhood aside, I find myself very attracted to her. Though unquestionably beautiful, she possesses something else that tugs at me. Over margaritas, she asks what I do for a living. The question catches me off-guard. I was sure she knew I worked on Wall Street. When I tell her, she’s surprised. “You don’t come off that way,” she says. I think she means it as a compliment. She has a bartender’s-eye view of Wall Street. All she sees is guys in ties on the cocaine-fueled prowl. “I mean, you’re not at all like your friend Randy.”
Later, I ask for the check. The waitress tells me it’s already been taken care of. I run through a mental checklist of people who might have picked it up. It certainly wasn’t Melinda or Rich from the desk. Though they know about Lily, they didn’t know I was taking her out tonight. Anyway, my relationship with them is much more of the locker room variety. Once, when Rich was out of the office for a couple of days, I told everyone who called for him that he was home with his sick cats, Mr. Buy and Mr. Sell. When Melinda picks up one of my calls and I’m off the desk, she often tells the caller, especially when it’s a girl, that I’m having an episode of my chronic diarrhea. She learned that trick from me. It would be much more likely for either of them to send a clown with balloons than pick up the check. I don’t think it’s Randy—he’s hosting at the White House and has just texted me, asking if Lily knows how to drive stick. There’s only one other person who knows where I am and who I’m with. I’m really underestimating Turbo.
When we get to the sidewalk, I rush to establish position on the outside. I was told that when a man walks with a woman he should be closer to the cars in the street in case a vehicle loses control and takes out a few pedestrians—I think that’s the reason. Lily allows me to claim my spot as we head down West Broadway. The shops and businesses are still open. It’s a charming few blocks before you get to Canal Street. I reach down for her hand. It’s small and soft. She looks up at me and smiles, and then quickly looks forward again. When we get to Canal Street, I ask if she wants to see my new apartment. In my head, I can hear Melinda calling it the “cockpit.” With a tiny shake of her head, she declines. “I have a babysitter,” she says with a small smile, behind which lies an inner meaning that I can’t quite make out. I lean in and give her a gentle kiss on the cheek.
“Can I call you again?” I ask.
“I’d like that,” she says.
BY OCTOBER 2002, the market is coming back from 9/11 and the summer lows that followed. Though we didn’t expect to bust out of the gate, Argus has bee
n struggling this last year just to stay even. Only in looking back can one see just how seminally dysfunctional 2002 was on Wall Street. It was the year that Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Enron’s Andrew Fastow, and ImClone’s Sam Waksal formed a Mount Rushmore of greed and underhanded dealing. It was also back then that a New York State attorney general had the temerity to believe that a stock analyst’s rating should reflect what the analyst actually believed. Of course, that was before said attorney general became “Client 9” with midcalf socks. But as I’m living it, 2002 doesn’t seem as much scandalous as challenging. The heady gyrations of the pre-9/11 market are a distant memory. Every day is a struggle, as if we’re fighting an inexorable force.
By now, I’ve been a head trader at Argus Partners for almost a year and a half. Though my off-the-cuff remark to the Goldman MBAs at the Chelsea restaurant might have been decidedly un–Ivy League, there was more truth in it than anything they received from their famous-author faculty. In some ways, my tenure as trader has let me understand Gary Rosenbach more. Maybe it’s the pressure, or the amounts of money we deal with, but traders do some crazy shit, especially when it comes to people who want our business. I made a promise to myself that I’d never use my position in the mean-spirited way Gary did. And yet, for a laugh, I have no problem using my status at Argus to make people dance a little.
Once, during my Argus days, Brad, my sales trader from Lehman, calls. There are a dozen or more guys like Brad who’ll do anything for commissions. I’ve been out with Brad numerous times, for dinner and at clubs. I like him. He’s a couple of years younger than me and holds a junior position on Lehman’s trading desk. Actually, I see some of the old me in him: he’s a little overwhelmed and people like to pick on him. Brad is a good sport about it. He went to Syracuse University and comes from Jersey. Now he’s on the phone, begging for orders. But before he gets to business he rehashes a recent night out.