Ghosts of Manhattan: A Novel by Douglas Brunt
PART I
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
1 | JERRY CAVANAUGH
November 15, 2005
I CAN’T STAND OTHER PEOPLE HALF THE TIME. I’M NOT a cynical person by nature, but sometimes if you look up, you realize everything around you has slowly been turning to crap. Time screws with everything, and thirteen years on the Bear Stearns trading floor selling corporate bonds can change a person.
There are few careers in life that require a person to be a genius. Business and politics are not among them. Selling bonds and bank debt for Bear is certainly not among them, but I’ve done it for more than a decade and made a lot of money. It’s a lifestyle I knew nothing about before I got here, and I try to keep a barrier between this life and all the people who knew me before. As if I were a CIA agent, other people know only my cover and nothing about how I actually live day to day. They know only that I work in finance and get paid very well.
“Farmer!” I ignore the yell. “Farmer!” Jerry Cavanaugh shouts again from over my left shoulder. Jerry runs the trading desk for the fixed income products we buy and sell every day. Bond issuances for casinos, airlines, shipping and transportation companies. Stuff like that.
“Nick! Farmer!” It’s a thuggish, Staten Island accent, incongruous with a dress shirt, tie, and an annual bonus of three million dollars.
I turn around with hands in the air and an expression as if to say I heard you the first time.
“Where are we on the Continental bonds? I want to be out of that position by the end of the day. What level can you get?”
“Ninety and a quarter for most of it. I’m waiting on a call back from Chappy.” We trade mostly distressed stuff. Companies that raised a lot of money, hit some hard times, and now the market wonders if they can pay it all back and service the debt. We factor in the risk that the company will fail to repay by making a market for the debt at less than the issued value.
Jerry scowls. “What do you mean, ‘most of it’?”
“I’m working on it.” I watch the scowl deepen. Jerry has a round, Irish face, red-brown hair, and translucent white skin like the belly of a fish. He looks younger than his thirty-eight years, though I suspect that may be because he’s so fat. If he stopped adding weight, his skin might have a chance to wrinkle. I turn back around and call my client at UBS who has interest in the bonds.
I like Jerry. Not as a real friend, but as far as spending time with work folks, he’s fine. He has a way about him that he likes to argue and fight, but in a good-natured way as though everyone should be enjoying the fight along with him.
I run a sales desk and have five guys working for me—all in their twenties. We work closely with Jerry’s team of traders, executing the buy and sell orders from the traders as they change their positions. They’re responsible for allocating Bear Stearns capital across these positions, what we call “running a book.”
None of this is rocket science. You need to be aggressive and confident and develop a drinking or cocaine habit to help with the socializing. Trading is mainly about having the relationships on Wall Street with other sales and trading guys to get the deals done. That’s why there are so many former college jocks—it’s a fraternity. It’s how I first got the job too. I played lacrosse at Cornell, and a player who graduated a few years ahead of me was a trader at Bear. I had never even met the guy, but he took me in like a blood relation. Lacrosse is a particular favorite on Wall Street, and it helps to have the nepotism extended when you’re twenty-two years old and looking for a job.
A lot of traders and sales guys like to point out how stupid they are, that they were always the ones struggling at the bottom of the class but are now the ones making all the money and having the last laugh. They like to attribute it to a different kind of smarts, but it’s really only a matter of finding a ticket in and having the will to stay.
A person can lose perspective on the value of a dollar here. In almost any other industry I know, for three hundred thousand dollars a year you can hire a smart, experienced guy to come work for you. He’ll work hard, take pride in his work, and live a good lifestyle on that money. Wall Street is different. After a few years on Wall Street, that guy’s a loser. After ten years at Bear, if you’re not making two million, or five million, you’re failing. A guy trading bonds for ten years who makes only three or four hundred grand a year doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen anything even close to that.
Jerry pops me on the shoulder as he walks by. A friendly shot to the arm to say, “Hey, brother, you and I are in the trenches together.” Jerry is known for jabs to everyone’s arms. I watch him trail off to the men’s room, newspaper unabashedly under his arm as his enormous backside fills the aisles between the long rows of desks of the hundreds of traders and salesmen on the floor.
It’s an enormous ass with lower back fat coming over the belt. He’d been a good Division III football player in college. He started at Bear just before I did and I remember he was thin then. You have to work hard at eating and drinking to accomplish that transformation—blowing up like a tick engorged on blood.
Jerry passes the food concession shops and rounds the corner to the men’s room, the profile of his butt the last thing I see. I don’t understand how a toilet seat can be one size fits all. It defies the laws of physics. A skinny twelve-year-old kid could fit in Jerry’s back pocket. Whatever seat can support Jerry, that kid should fall right through.