by Turney Duff
Jenn found a house online one night around midnight. “I shouldn’t show you this,” she said. “It’s out of our price range and it’s ten miles past Cold Spring Harbor.” (I was up watching the remake of Amityville Horror. Only in hindsight do I appreciate the irony.) What can I say—a six-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian with a guest house and pool looks magnificent on the computer screen.
Jenn and I had had discussions, starting back when we were dating, about living in a house one day. But Jenn’s investment in the idea was always stronger than mine. She’s a Long Island girl, born and bred. For her, a house in the suburbs was a default frame of reference, what she thought was normal, where happiness lived. Though I’d grown up in a house too, I’d fallen in love with living in the city. I didn’t want to live anywhere else.
But those dynamics changed when I got back from rehab. Though staying sober was my new priority, even higher on that list was keeping Jenn and Lola happy—and making a lot of money. I still loved the city, but moving into a house was perhaps my only hope of saving the relationship with my girlfriend and daughter. To get used to the idea, I conjured images of Lola riding in the driveway on a bicycle with training wheels or playing in the backyard.
When I landed the Berkowitz job, things fell into place pretty quickly. We knew we’d have little trouble selling the apartment. The 2006 bonus season I missed was a good one, and there was no shortage of up-and-coming Turneys out there dying to move into a two-million-dollar co-op.
The drive to Huntington Bay seems to last forever. The Long Island Expressway is a parking lot. If we take the house, I’ll have to make this commute twice a day, five times a week. Finally we pull into a circular driveway. I have to admit, the place is pretty spectacular. It might even be worth the ride. Sitting up on a hill, the huge Queen Anne Victorian, recently painted a brilliant white and fronted by voluminous hundred-foot European beech trees, seems to come alive as we drive closer. It glistens in the sunshine. The lawn and bushes are a landscaping masterpiece. Along with the beech trees, there’s a hybrid Japanese maple that looks like a giant bonsai and sixty- to seventy-foot-tall buckeye trees. Around the property’s perimeter are stretches of twenty-foot privet hedge. But the most striking feature of this dreamscape is the house, especially the porch, which wraps around the Queen Anne like a great silk scarf. The estate is listed at $2.4 million.
Jenn and I stand on the porch taking in the lush two acres of property. Without saying a word, we both know. I pick up Lola and ask her if this should be our new home. She squirms out of my arms and starts to run back and forth on the porch, blissfully immersed in her new surroundings.
My first day at Berkowitz, I hear Jim Cramer’s name evoked at least twenty times. He hasn’t been with the firm since 2001, but he still haunts the office. I’m a bit confused by the firm’s rah-rah attitude toward their former boss. On television he always strikes me as somewhat of a clown. I’d only met him once while I was at Galleon, and I was underwhelmed. Cramer had hired Todd-o, Galleon’s options guy, to run his trading desk, and a get-together was arranged to smooth any ruffled feathers over that departure. What Cramer didn’t realize was, Galleon thought he was doing them a favor, Todd-o and Gary weren’t getting along. The dinner was held at a Midtown Wall Street hangout and attended by Raj, Gary, Slaine, Keryn, and me from Galleon, and Cramer, Jeff Berkowitz, and their new hire, Todd-o, from Cramer Berkowitz. As I remember it, Cramer spent the entire evening spouting off about how smart and savvy he was. It seemed to me he was desperate for Raj’s approval, but that’s just my take. It wasn’t until the Cramer Berkowitz contingent left that the dinner got interesting. Raj and Gary mocked Cramer, mimicking his squeaky voice and making fun of his tales of trading twenty-fives and fifties. They called him an odd lot.
Though the Street still calls the place Cramer Berkowitz, Jim Cramer’s name has been gone from the door for years. And despite his omnipresence in the office, he’s not my boss. Jeff Berkowitz is. I like Jeff, and I think Jeff likes me even though our careers couldn’t have been more different. His is the classic Wharton Business School–Goldman Sachs intern Wall Street pedigree, while mine, Ohio University–Galleon, is from the other side of the tracks. It’s like, growing up, he was on the debate team and I was John Belushi. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he hired me. On Wall Street you always want what you don’t have. Berkowitz made a name for himself in the nineties during the hedge fund boom. And when Cramer was drawn to the bright lights of the television studio, Jeff bought the firm from him and has been running it ever since. But J. L. Berkowitz has had a few rocky years, and that’s the main reason Jeff hired me: to help turn it around. Compared to Argus, my new firm—with assets only around $150 million and shrinking—is like a start-up. Working here is also a lot less exciting than the early days of Argus.
When you strip away the private jets, floor seats, limousines, and parties from the buy side, all you’re left with is the job: buy and sell tickets, salesmen, and ticker tapes. Now that I’m not drinking or doing drugs anymore, work is just that: work. I guess I’m going through an identity crisis. I’m no longer the guy next to the stage at the Naughty by Nature party; I’m not the fun-master with a drink in each hand. And though I realize my old persona was wrecking my relationships and career, without it things just aren’t as stimulating. It’s just not that much fun. But I’m here for one reason: the paycheck. The paycheck will help pay the mortgage. The mortgage means keeping the house. Keeping the house means Jenn and Lola will be happy.
We move into the house on Memorial Day weekend, 2007. In full spring bloom, the yard is beautiful. The original owner of the house, which was built in 1906, was a landscaper from Europe and brought with him many of the trees that make the property so attractive. We agreed on a price of $2.1 million. After the broker fees, the co-op flip tax, and the mansion tax, I have $500,000 from the sale of the apartment to contribute toward the down payment. To that, I add $100,000 from my checking account, which just about drains it, and then I borrow $1.5 million from Wells Fargo. Sure, it’s a lot of money, but real estate is bulletproof.
Each morning, my alarm goes off at four thirty a.m. and I’m in the car by five. The drive into the city is about an hour. When I’m a few miles away, around 5:45 a.m., the skyline starts to come into focus and I wonder: Is there a kid like me leaving Barbara’s apartment right now? Is Barbara still an escort? Is she alive? Is the kid leaving her apartment freaking out? Wondering how he’s going to work today? I’m thankful it’s not me. The workday is from six a.m. to six p.m. With traffic, it takes two hours to get home. Please kill me. The first day is a nightmare. I’m beeping, changing lanes, and on the verge of tears when Jenn calls my cell phone. She wants me to pick up dinner on my way home. “No problem,” I say. I want to scream.
The commute gets a little easier when I buy a Honda hybrid so I can use the HOV lane. But neither the fast lane nor the blare of all-sports radio I listen to all the time can drown out the worries I have about the house. The problem is, it’s old. Over a hundred years old. It’s older than we both realized. The list of projects needing to be done gets longer by the day: the interior needs painting, some of the floors are warped, and the wiring seems to date back to when they first switched from gaslights. With each contractor’s bill I pay, money flies out one of the newly installed windows. Then we come up with the great idea of putting in a movie theater. I see myself screening my own films there. When we moved in, the third floor of the house was a converted garret with linoleum flooring, low ceilings, cobwebs, and dust everywhere. The walls were a nasty stained brown. Jenn miraculously transforms it with plush carpeting, a bamboo canopy, and movie theater seats that sit in front of a 106-inch pull-down screen. But it ends up costing $150,000, which I borrow. The plan is to use my bonus to pay it off. I’m building equity, I remind myself. But the outlay is enormous.
By the end of the summer I’ve found my groove at work. Over the first few months, I’d instituted some cost-cutting changes. I had unus
ed Bloomberg terminals removed and got rid of some needless research services, and, as promised, I started to cut commission and hedging costs, a move that will ultimately add $15 million to the firm’s bottom line. But it takes some time for my trading to become sharp again. I’m coming off a four-month layoff, and two years of turbulent drug use before that. I find myself getting physically tired in the middle of the afternoon. I have new systems and computers to learn. But mostly, I have to get comfortable in my own skin. Eventually it all comes back, and when it does I start trading confidently again. And begin making money.
One day, Jeff emerges from his office and tells me to sell all of our Apple position. “Lehman is in the process of downgrading it,” he says. “We gotta get out.” He’s almost frantic and wants it done immediately. Just the week before, he’d told me Apple was one of our best ideas. But now he’s pulling a complete one-eighty. I know a sell is a bad move—every fast-twitch fiber in my trading muscle tells me so. But I’m still new at the firm, and I want to be as respectful as I can, because he’s my boss.
“Is there anything to the downgrade?” I ask. “Anything of substance?”
“No,” he says. “It’s bullshit, some valuation call—they don’t know what they’re talking about.” I walk into his office.
“Jeff,” I say, “if it’s our best idea, we shouldn’t sell any. We should be excited because we get to buy more.” He’s already instructed Heather, a junior trader, to sell fifty thousand shares.
“It’s going down three to four dollars on this Lehman call,” he says to me.
“Who cares?” I say. But I can see that Jeff is determined. He yells for Heather to sell another twenty-five thousand shares.
Immediately, the stock starts to drop. At my desk, I watch as it goes down four dollars, exactly how Jeff predicted. But I still know I’m right. And an hour or two later, the stock starts to rally. We don’t buy any back. By the end of the day it’s trading above where Lehman initially downgraded it, but now we have seventy-five thousand fewer shares. Jeff doesn’t say a word to me, but I know he knows I was right. More important, I know I was right.
It’s interesting, though, that almost at the exact time that I realize I’ve shaken off the rust, it comes to me that I have no one to tell. And almost immediately following that thought comes another—that I miss the camaraderie of the Healthcare Mafia, where I could tell the story of my being right this time and they’d know exactly what it meant to me, because we’re all in the same position, we knew all the players and backstories and nuances. I have conversations, of course, with Jenn. But Wall Street stories have always made her eyes glaze over. It’s even hard to talk to people in the new office. Sometimes, when the old Turney comes out—when I break out in song or pull a practical joke—my new coworkers will laugh, but mostly they’ll look at me like I’ve lost my mind. It’s different now. It’s not the Wall Street I fell in love with.
Then one afternoon, Gus calls and tells me he wants to catch up and grab dinner. I haven’t been on a business dinner since I returned to the Street—not that meeting Gus constitutes a business dinner in the traditional sense. Besides, he knows I’m not drinking or doing drugs. I tell him I’d love to. I need to do something besides commute, work, commute, and sleep. It’s really starting to bring me down. Gus also wants to show me his new apartment on Seventy-Fifth Street. He lives with his girlfriend now. I tell him maybe another time, let’s just get dinner and then I can maybe get home before Lola goes to bed.
We meet across the street from my office, at Houston’s. Actually the name of the place is now Hillstone, but everyone still calls it Houston’s. It’s in the Citicorp building. After the spinach dip and chicken fingers, I’m about to call it a night when Gus asks if I’ve seen Randy or James recently. I haven’t since I’ve been back. I talk to Randy every day because he’s now covering me at my new firm, but I haven’t seen him yet. I haven’t even talked to James—our relationship was strictly party/business and I’m not doing business with him right now. But I miss the old times. At the meetings I was going to after rehab, they told me to stay away from people, places, and things that might trigger my addiction, but this is getting ridiculous. Just because I can’t drink doesn’t mean I have to lose all my friends. Besides, if I’m going to do business on Wall Street, I have to have some presence. I’m not going to do cocaine. I’m not going to drink. So what harm can it do? “Let’s go see them,” I say. But Gus doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He wants me to come back with him to see his new apartment and meet his girlfriend. Next time, I tell him.
The White House looks exactly the same, only dirtier. There are four guys in the kitchen, with Randy and James gathered around a plate of cocaine. When they realize I’m there, their expressions go from shock to guilt to being happy to see me. I hug it out with everyone, a genuine moment followed by an awkward silence. We’re all looking at the plate on the counter with a healthy amount of cocaine in the middle of it. Everyone’s afraid to do it in front of me. Maybe they’re waiting for me to do it first. “Don’t worry about me,” I say, waving away the plate. But I feel uncomfortable.
I move away from the counter and light a cigarette. Randy rips a big line and then comes over to talk with me. “We’re moving,” he says. Before I can ask why, James bursts into the conversation.
“Didn’t you hear?” he says, all coked up and manic. Obviously, I didn’t. “Remember Kenny?” he says. “I do,” I say. He wasn’t a Wall Street guy, but a half member, half dealer to the White House. He hung out here all the time. What about him? “He got pinched,” James says.
“Rumor is, he’s a snitch,” Randy adds. “He’s not allowed in here.” It feels like the whole room starts to spin. My thoughts go to the lurker in the Baltimore Orioles hat, the dark sedans parked in front of the apartment. All the time I thought it was about underhanded dealings at Galleon. But maybe it was just the cops, looking to bust some junkie Wall Streeters. I have to leave immediately. I want to get back to Huntington Bay. I want to hold my baby.
A FEW days later, I’m in the office and on the phone talking to Randy. He’s inviting me to the White House farewell party. It’s supposed to be the last hurrah. He tells me they’re having T-shirts made with a bloodshot eye on the front and a phrase I coined on the back: “We don’t wait in lines, we snort them.” Not sure I’m going to make the snort-fest, I say, but I’ll take a T-shirt. I hang up the phone. No way I’m going anywhere near the White House. Not with rumors of someone being busted who’s possibly a narc.
But the night of the party, the thought of it still resides in my head. After work, I’m in the parking garage near my office. When the attendant sees me, he flashes a smile, grabs my ticket, and runs to get my car. I get the same guy almost every day; I always tip him between three and five bucks, so he remembers me. With maybe one or two exceptions, I always exit on the Fifty-Sixth Street side of the garage so I can bang a right and jump on First Avenue and get immediately on the Queensboro Bridge upper level. But when the car elevator doors open, the attendant, now behind the wheel, looks at me and then points to the Fifty-Fifth Street exit. Why would he do that? If I exit onto Fifty-Fifth Street, I can take a right and head over to Second Avenue, then I can drive downtown to the White House.
Despite the near certainty I will use cocaine if I go to the White House, and despite knowing that if I use cocaine my relationship with my girlfriend and daughter will disintegrate, I begin to consider it. Once the door of consideration is open, it quickly becomes an urge. I close my eyes and try to squeeze the thought from my head. Don’t do anything stupid, an inner voice warns. Just go home. When I open my eyes, the attendant is looking at me curiously. I slowly wag my head back and forth and point toward the Fifty-Sixth Street exit and home.
Though a part of my brain has made a prudent decision, the rest of my body is still in revolt. My hands grip the wheel like the car has just gone off a cliff. I can feel perspiration gather under my arms and drip down my sides. I light up a c
igarette. I just need to get on the bridge. Once I get on the bridge, there’s no turning back. The traffic is thick. It takes me several red lights to get past Fifty-Seventh Street. I light up another cigarette. A hit of cocaine would be so nice right now, though. It would never be just a hit, I remind myself. Then my mini-fantasy goes where it always takes me: alone in a hotel room, with enough coke and porn for a short forever, and a bottle to even my world out. I look down at the keys to my house in the console. I grab them and pretend to dip them into a tiny imaginary bag of cocaine. I bring the key to my nose and snort it in one aggressive pull. My head snaps back, my eyes are closed. Then a horn sounds behind me. When I open my eyes, the cars ahead have moved along. I throw the keys back in the console. I just need to get home. At the moment of no return, just before I enter the ramp, I feel one last intense tug to peel out of the traffic flow and head back downtown. But then I realize the cars that surround me have sealed my fate. I inch up the ramp and onto the bridge.
Later that same week, I stay in the city, at a hotel on Lexington Avenue. The commute is killing me. And with Lola at her grandmother’s and Jenn having plans to spend the night with a girlfriend, I take a much-needed break from the world’s longest parking lot. After I check in, I call my friend Kevin. We meet at an Upper West Side outdoor café and eat french fries and drink Cokes. “Have you found any meetings out there?” he asks.
“Not yet,” I tell him. “During the week, I get home so late, and my weekends are filled with Jenn, Lola, and doing things around the house. The weekend is the only time for us to really get stuff done.” Kevin nods, but his expression lies somewhere between helplessness and compassion.