Ghosts of Manhattan: A Novel(3)

“What the hell. Let’s go.” William and Ron hop up immediately. I wasn’t aware they were off the phones and listening, but clearly their twenty-something-year-old bodies and fast recuperation rates are ready for another night of drinking.

Off we go, abandoning our phones and monitors and the seventh floor, armed with the knowledge, at least I think we all are, that what we do isn’t all that important even if we can convince the world otherwise. We’ll spend enormous amounts on drinks and food, tip the waiter the equivalent of a month of his rent, just to show how grand we are. But really we know we don’t run any company or build any product. We just found a seam in the economy and know how to game it. If we don’t show up to work tomorrow, some other monkey will make the same trades for us.

I go knowing that 4 p.m. drinks will turn into dinner, more drinks, and cocaine. Dinner, drinks, and cocaine will turn into strippers, more drinks, and more cocaine, and I’ll be lucky to make it home by 2 a.m. This on a Tuesday. Trading bonds has been hell for my marriage.





2 | WILLIAM


November 15, 2005

THE FIVE OF US LEAVE THE TRADING FLOOR LIKE KIDS let out for recess. With a need to cure my hangover, even I’m a little excited to get out of there and get going. The first couple drinks I always look forward to. It’s drinks ten and beyond that get me down.

“Nick, slight change in plan.” As we ride down the elevator, Jerry cocks his head like he’s about to hand me my Christmas stocking. I raise an eyebrow. Nothing is ever slight with Jerry. “Melon’s for some burgers.”

“You want to go to the Upper East Side?” I live in the West Village. I lean against the wall of the elevator, a little tired at the thought of a long car ride. It’s a posh elevator with leather and real wood and brass fixtures. The kind of elevator you see only in the top law firms and the big banks, the companies that make so much money that even after the huge bonus payouts they don’t know where to put it all except expensive lobby art and nice elevators. It’s the corporate version of the people who make the too-huge bonuses. You can always tell the people who don’t know what to do with all their money if they spend way too much on stupid accessories, like a Burberry umbrella. I can’t hang on to an umbrella for more than one or two rains before I leave it behind somewhere. Burberry umbrellas and gorgeous elevators. They’re really the same goddamn thing.

“No problem. I called a limo—it’s waiting outside for us. We’ll be there in no time.” Jerry loves limos, the way little girls love ponies. I can smell the leather and the polish on the brass.

“Yeah, okay.” I feel like the old man. The twenty-something-year-olds are like bulls about to be released in a rodeo, bucking against the walls of the elevator, ready to get a drink on. They still have that youthful reserve of energy that can be called up whenever they want it, no matter what they did the night before. I’m already at the age that I need to grope around for it.

We stroll outside the lobby of 383 Madison and Jerry immediately spots the driver in his little driver hat holding a white sign that has “Cavanaugh” written in black marker. “Here we go, boys,” Jerry says, and opens the door for us before the driver can get there to do it for him.

Frank, Jerry’s younger, slimmer image, jumps into the car in a sort of headfirst dive. William and Ron go next with a smoother, scissors-kick-style entry. They both have their new tailor-made suits that I can’t stand. The suits are snug as can be and the jackets have three buttons instead of two. This is the way fashionable people are getting suits now.

William and Ron both button the top two buttons and leave the third loose. Every time they stand up from their chairs, even to walk ten feet, they go through this buttoning routine. Jackasses. It’s at least two thousand bucks to have a tailor run a tape measure around your body and cut a suit from a bolt of cloth. More, depending on the cloth. Good for them for making a nice paycheck, but they should spend it somewhere else. Or at least get a suit with only two damn buttons on the jacket. They look like a couple of mopes.

The driver says there’s construction on a few of the avenues going north and it will be better to go out to the FDR. The highways around the outside of Manhattan are the only roads that move reliably, so we take the limo all the way east and, like children who can barely swim and who run around the edge of the pool to get to where they want to jump in, we ride the perimeter of the island north, then exit the FDR to come into the Upper East Side.

Jerry pours out five glasses of scotch from the limo wet bar and hands them out as though answering our ring of his doorbell on Halloween. Everyone ritualistically sucks down the crappy scotch and talks about the trades that happened earlier in the day and the dopes on the other end of the deals. With the limo for the evening and the drinks at Melon’s, we are at a price tag of about two grand and counting for the night. Usually Jerry has a broker from Chapdelaine, which everyone just calls Chappy, or one of the other shops take him out for the more expensive nights. He’ll have no problem expensing this back to Bear, though. We could call up the Goldman guys to come meet us to talk about the Continental bonds to add some semblance of legitimacy to it, but why bother?

The limo drops us in front of Melon’s on Third Avenue at East Seventy-fourth Street. The place feels like it hasn’t changed in a hundred years, including the bartenders. I don’t mean just the type, I mean the actual guys. It’s no frills here. There are no cute, sexy bartenders and waitresses. Here it is old men bartenders who look like they’ve been around alcohol their whole lives. If you order a mojito you get a glare that holds like stone until you realize you need to change your order. These guys don’t know any drink that came into fashion after 1950. For them, it’s old-fashioneds, rusty nails, maybe a grasshopper for the ladies. The place is narrow, with old New York relics hanging on the walls, rickety chairs, and simple tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. There is a long, wooden, old-style bar running the length of the left wall with two bartenders who are such curmudgeons you have to love their style. We make directly for them. The place is usually jammed up but we’re early enough to find room for five to stand huddled at the bar.