The Buy Side

by Turney Duff

  I’m not sure how much Argus lost out on the MDRX deal, or how much Gary Rosenbach and Galleon made. Maybe the amount was a few hundred thousand dollars. Yes, it’s a lot of money, but for a billion-dollar fund it really doesn’t move the needle. But that’s not the point. The point is, I have to change. Here I am, hitting full stride in my career, and I’m caught up in this bullshit. I don’t even care about the money. Yes, I’m still upset that my friends at Galleon think I used them, that I put their jobs in jeopardy. But I’m not going to let people like Gary push me around, and I’m not going to feel guilty about pushing back. And if someone else gets hurt in the process, well, that’s the cost of war. You do more damage being tentative than making a wrong choice. From now on, I’m all in. If I’m going to be a successful trader, I can’t do it by just trading stocks. I have to be willing to club baby seals, park in handicap spaces, and demolish an orphanage to build a strip club. On Wall Street, the timid get trampled. I’m tired of the hoof marks.

  A BLACK Cadillac Escalade is waiting as I walk out of my building on a Saturday afternoon in late October. Carlos, the driver, has a cooler full of Corona in the back. We drive up past Canal Street and head over to the East Side. Randy, casually dressed, is standing on the corner of Fortieth and Third Avenue. He jumps in and I trade him a chilled beer for a bag of cocaine. I peel open the bag, wet my pinky, and stuff it right into the heart of the coke. My finger comes out looking like a sugarcoated biscotti. I jam it up my nose and snuff it. The Escalade turns onto the East River Drive. Traffic is thick, but moving. I continue shoving coke up my nose, but I count the ride in beers. Two Coronas later, we can see Yankee Stadium.

  The usher takes us to the first row above the dugout. The stadium is full, but our row is empty. We make it just in time for David Wells’s first pitch. We get two draft beers and two hotdogs, but the dogs are out of some sense of tradition. As coked-up as we are, there’s no chance of us actually eating them. I stick mine under the seat and look up at the crowd. Hundreds of rows of smiling faces climb to the sky; World Series bunting hangs from the upper decks.

  We’re so close to the field that we can hear the pop of the catcher’s mitt, see the glistening sweat on Wells’s forehead. The score is 1–0 and the Yankee fans are a little restless. They always expect to win the World Series. I grew up a Cleveland Indians fan but also rooted for the Red Sox when we moved to Maine. I remember going to a game in July with my mom and dad when I was about seven or eight. Boston was a two-hour drive and we took the family station wagon, the Green Machine. It was a big deal. I remember being startled by all the cars and people but amazed at Fenway. The green field looked almost neon. I think Luis Tiant was pitching. We sat on the field level, behind third base, but way back. My father paid something like six bucks each for the tickets, whereas Randy, no doubt, paid a couple grand or more for our seats—and he bought eight tickets for just the two of us.

  “You gonna get paid this year, right?” Randy asks as he wipes away his beer foam mustache. I give him a What do you think? look, a coked-up version of Tony Soprano. “If I don’t make at least seven hundred and fifty k, I’m leaving,” he says. Along with the market, the trading volume is way up. If people are trading, then the sell side is making money. “I should know by December,” he says. Randy flags down the beer guy and orders two more. “Once the check clears I’ll decide.” No need to let anyone know you’re looking for a new job until that check clears. In January everybody’s a free agent.

  Wells is struggling. There are runners on base. The pitcher looks like someone you’d meet at Red Rock West. Maybe I did.

  “Dude … so funny,” Randy says. “Last week we had a sales meeting.” He grabs the two beers. “They used your account as an example on the slide presentation,” he says, laughing.

  “Come on,” I say, wondering if he’s putting me on.

  “Yup. They said this is the correct way to grow an account and they showed your commission growth for 2001, 2002, and the first three quarters of this year,” he says.

  “Did they show slides of eight balls and bottle service?” The Marlins hit into a double play. Inning over.

  “Let’s use two of the tickets,” Randy says. We get up and make our way to the bathroom, find two stalls in the back. I jam my apartment key into the bag and rip three quick bumps. Yankee Stadium is one Zip. I hate doing blow here. So many people in and out, no privacy. When we’re done in the stalls, we head for the exit. The ticket taker warns us that there is no reentry.

  “We know, we know,” I say. Six extra tickets for three smoking-breaks. Once outside, we fire up two cigarettes. We finish them and light another. After we smoke our second we hand the same ticket taker two new fresh tickets. He should be an undertaker. His smile indicates nothing.

  By the time we’re back to the seats, I already want another bump and cigarette. I look up at the scoreboard. It’s the top of the second—no, it’s the third. The game is still 1–0, and Florida has a couple of guys on. “So, you think you can get me a new job?” Randy asks.

  “Dude, in fifteen minutes,” I say. I pull out my phone like I’m going to make a call. He asks me where I think he should go and I tell him Lehman or Merrill. “They do big business and there’s not a lot of office drama,” I say.

  “You sure you can get me in there?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “If I hooked Pete up, you should be a layup.”

  It was this summer that I met Pete. I awoke with a hangover in the beach house I shared with a few other Wall Street guys. In the pocket of the shorts I wore the night before was a bar napkin on which was written a phone number under the name “Pete—White Squall.”

  Over bagels and Gatorade on the porch, my housemates tell me that Pete is the bartender at John Scott’s, a local beach bar. Slowly, the previous evening’s festivities came into focus. I was calling Pete “Bailey” after the character from the TV show Party of Five. Pete was insane. At one point he put twenty cigarettes in his mouth and lit them. He didn’t charge us for a thing. I loved him.

  “But why do I have his number?” I asked.

  “You promised you’d help him get a job,” came the reply.

  Pete told me he works in the back office of a firm called Knight Securities. That Monday morning I called Knight’s trading desk. “This is Turney Duff from Argus Partners,” I said. “We have a couple billion in assets and we want to open an account.” There was the appropriate moment of silence on the phone. Imagine a lotto agent calling your house and telling you that he wants to sell you the winning ticket. What I’d just dangled meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions for them.

  “Just one request,” I said to the stunned trader. “I need Pete in the back office to be my sales trader. No Pete, no deal.” And that’s how Pete went from the relative obscurity of the back office to the trading desk and the beginning of a very profitable Wall Street career.

  “Listen,” I say to Randy, “I don’t want to sound like a dick, but you should know this: I can get you in anywhere.” The coke is beginning to tweak me out. I start thinking about Randy and his questions. I don’t even know who he is, really. I’ve never seen him outside of a party setting. What does he do besides party and trade stocks? Randy catches me looking strangely at him.

  “What?” he says.

  “What’s your favorite color?” I ask.

  “Blue,” he says.

  “When did you lose your virginity?”

  “Thirteen,” he says.

  Gross. “Who’d you take to your senior prom?”

  “Tina Trombone of the Trombone sisters,” he says.

  “If you could watch only one movie for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

  “Boogie Nights,” he goes. I talk to Randy every day and I don’t really know anything about him. We’ve shared hundreds of war stories about drinking, drugs, and women. But I don’t know him. And he doesn’t know anything of substance about me. The crowd roars as Jeter drives someone in.

/>   “I wanted to be a journalist,” I tell him. Randy looks at me like I’m bleeding from my ears.

  “Really?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, “and when I was at Morgan Stanley I took a course in screenwriting at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.”

  “The place with the yellow stands?” he asks. “I always wondered what that was about.”

  “I have a friend from college who works in television commercial production out in L.A. We wrote a horror screenplay together and called it Horrorscope. We emailed the script back and forth. It even was read by someone at Miramax but didn’t go any further than that.”

  “That’s cool,” Randy says.

  I tell him that when I was at Galleon I produced a small film. I titled it I Killed Eminem and my friend Jesse Itzler wrote and performed a track for the movie. “No shit?” he goes. The film ended up being shown at an independent film festival in California and a hip-hop festival in the Bronx. Not Sundance, but pretty cool nonetheless. “I didn’t know. That’s really something,” he says, but his eyes now are flat and have a cocaine sheen. Now I’m sorry I said anything to him about my writing, my producing. I decide not to tell him about my dream. I don’t tell anybody about my dream: I see myself on the cover of GQ or Vanity Fair. I’m holding the strings to two puppets: one represents Wall Street, the other Hollywood. When I look up at the scoreboard it’s now 3–1, Florida Marlins. How’d that happen?

  “Whaddya think about the execution model? I know it’s hard without any research, but Gus is getting a forty percent commission payout,” he asks, as if we haven’t been talking about anything other than business.

  “Everyone says it’s going away, people have to justify their commission dollars with a research product,” I say. “They’ve been saying it for years and it hasn’t happened yet. If you have me and a few other guys and put up about three million dollars in commissions, you can make over a stick.” Wall Street loves to play with the language. For example, if a stock is trading up a dollar you might say it’s “up a taco,” thanks to Taco Bell’s ninety-nine-cent menu. Or if you trade your own money and you lose $125,000, you might say, “Fuck, I rolled a Ferrari today.”

  “Let’s hit the stalls,” Randy says. We head up the aisle and back to the bathroom. When we exit the stadium again, the same ticket taker eyes us. This time he says nothing about needing tickets to get back in. Instead he just gives us that funeral parlor smile.

  The score is 3–2 by the time we get back to our seats. Someone hit a homer when we were outside. Bernie Williams, I think. We heard the roar. We begin to talk about my bonus. I tell Randy I’ve figured out Krishen’s philosophy of paying his employees. On down years he pays up. And in up years he pays people exactly what they deserve, relatively speaking, of course. This way he ensures loyalty from everyone who works for him. If someone takes care of you in a down year, you really remember it and it’s hard to complain on the up years because you are making good money. The Marlins bring Dontrelle Willis into the game to pitch. I like him. He’s got swagger.

  “Whaddya think you’ll get?” he asks. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  I hold up seven fingers.

  It’s the bottom of the eighth. The Yankees are losing 3–2, but have a rally going: back-to-back singles by Williams and Matsui. The crowd is on its feet. Randy still has two unused tickets in his pocket. It’s dark now and cold, but no one else seems to care.

  “I have a surprise for you back at the White House,” Randy says. Posada digs in at the plate.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  IT’S THE next Thursday, or the Thursday after that, or maybe some other Thursday—I’m not sure. Thursday is Wall Street’s Friday. I’m getting ready to go out. I have a business dinner with some guys from Bank of America. I put on my cowboy shirt with a lace-up tie in front. It’s navy blue with white shoulders that meet down into a V right where the lace-up part of the shirt starts.

  When I get to Pastis there’s a crowd standing on the corner of Ninth Avenue, smoking cigarettes and talking. Some people think the Meatpacking District is becoming a little “bridge and tunnel,” but new clubs and restaurants are opening up every week. There’s electricity in this neighborhood that charges you. The gravity feels stronger, like you go out for two drinks and get sucked into a good-time version of a black hole and come home two days later.

  Inside, the bar is two or three deep. I wedge my way to the service end. Waitstaff cruise in and out in their white aprons, white shirts, and black pants. A few minutes later I see Rob, the pharmaceutical trader for Bank of America. He walks in with a big smile and opens his arms to give me the Wall Street hug: one shoulder leaned in to make body contact and the other arm reaching around to fist bump my back. I reciprocate. “Dig the shirt,” he says. He tells me we’re waiting for two other guys but asks me if I want to sit. The hostess is beautiful. She has short blond hair with one streak of jet black that hangs to the side. Her skin is flawless, like Egyptian cotton. Rob tells her we have a reservation and we’d like to be seated. She asks if we’re just two. No, he tells her. We’re waiting on two other guys. She can’t seat us until our whole party has arrived, she says with a polite smile. Rob thanks her and turns for the bar. But I don’t move.

  “I don’t think you understand,” I say as I gently touch her elbow. “I’m on the buy side.” She looks at me, expecting an explanation. I just stand there looking at her.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she says. “I can’t seat any party until they’ve all arrived.”

  “But I’m on the buy side,” I say, with deadpanned precision.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she says, trying to stay polite. She thinks I’m rude, but I’m trying to be funny.

  Once the other two guys show up, we get seated immediately. At dinner, they know the deal. They don’t bring up business unless I give them a window. I try not to, but sometimes it just comes up. We order our meals and another round of cocktails. Once the food comes we order another round of drinks and my whole body chemistry begins to shift. I’d love to do a bump of cocaine in the bathroom right now, but I don’t have any. When the waitress removes our plates, I get up and excuse myself to smoke a cigarette.

  Then I’m in a cab. I just leave. I don’t say goodbye or thank you. The Bank of America guys are sitting at the table, waiting for me to come back. I hate this feeling. I’m going to have to trade at least a million shares with them tomorrow.

  The doorman nods in recognition when I enter the lobby of the White House. I blaze past him to hit the elevator button. Inside the apartment, I notice Randy’s door is ajar and there’s porn playing on the television, but nobody’s in the room. I turn right and try to get into the bathroom, but the door’s locked. While I’m still holding the handle, the door flies open. It’s Victor, another buy side guy. His eyes are stretched wide and his lips look like rubber, but his jaw is cemented in place. He attempts to say hi, but his teeth are grinding so badly that it comes out more like a groan. There’s cocaine caked all around his nostrils. He darts past me into Randy’s room, where the porn is playing, and shuts the door. Thank god I don’t live here. I hear Victor lock the door before I even get into the bathroom. I feel bad for his wife and kid.

  I make my way into the living room, where I see a few guys I know. Dr. Fish and two of his coworkers are off to one side, bitching about drug dealers. They barely acknowledge my presence. Then I see another guy by himself in the corner, rocking back and forth just talking to himself. It looks like Night of the Living Dead in here. I move to the kitchen. Gus is there. But he’s so wired from coke, he scares me. He starts telling me about some hooker he had sex with about three hours ago and how great it was. It’s hard to follow him because he’s speaking in fragments and he keeps launching tiny beads of spit from his mouth. I do whatever I can to avoid being hit by his saliva. Randy and James are in the kitchen too. Randy gives me a smile and nod, but James just glares at me. Randy pours some cocaine onto a plate and slides it over to me.


  Then I’m back in a cab, heading to Brother Jimmy’s on the Upper East Side. The cocaine in the White House has evened out my tequila drunk. I have a folded-up twenty-dollar bill in my pocket filled with the hefty amount Randy gave me.

  Pete is at the corner of the bar doing flaming Dr Pepper shots with a few of his high school friends from Garden City, New York. I know them from out at the beach. This is a going-away party for him; he moves to Chicago on Monday. White Squall, as I prefer to call him, has done quite well for himself since I got him promoted at Knight Securities. He chuckles when he sees me. He orders me a flaming shot. I excuse myself and hit the bathroom for a quick bump. Two Zips. When I return to the bar, I fire back the shot and then tell Pete I have to make a phone call. On the street I light a cigarette and scroll through my contacts. I click Call and wait for Barbara to pick up. Finally, in a raspy voice, she says hello.

  “Hey, it’s Turney,” I say.

  “Who?”

  “Turney,” I say louder.

  “Ernie?”

  “No, Turney,” I repeat. “Can I come over?”

  “Umm, sure,” she says. “Do you have my address, Ernie?”

  “Yes.”

  When she opens the door she’s pleasantly surprised—as if I’m the last person she expected to see. She has dark circles under her eyes. Her hair is now fifty percent blond and fifty percent black. She looks like she’s aged ten years. Her apartment is even lonelier than I remembered. The mattress is still on the floor and the Christmas lights still line her apartment walls. The television has a crack in the screen and there’s tons of empty Cheez Doodles bags and beer cans on the coffee table. She pulls out a heap of magazines and newspapers embedded into the couch and invites me to sit down. I notice the bruises on her arms and the burn marks and spiderweb veins up and down her legs. She sits on the couch next to me and puts her hand on my knee. She leans over and kisses me on the cheek. “Soooo,” she says. “You wanna do me?”