The trouble with being punctual is that there’s nobody there to appreciate it.
—Harold Rome
This is a chapter about the copy center. It’s not about big, fat investment banking salaries. It’s not about stocks or bonds. It’s not about leveraged buyouts or parties where overpaid old men look for love from their secretaries. It’s about the copy center. It’s not intuitive, but it’s what matters. Before Troob and I ever became bankers, if somebody had asked us what the most important areas in the investment bank were we would have said “the trading floor” or “the institutional sales department.” Maybe we would have said “the golf course.” Under no circumstances, though, would we ever have said “the copy center.” It wouldn’t have made sense. We were bankers. We did deals. We didn’t make copies.
We learned quickly.
Our success, or lack thereof, in banking would be dependent on a long row of Xerox copiers operated by a platoon of patriotic Puerto Ricans. They were the revolutionaries, capable of being either our greatest allies or our most heinous enemies. To get on their bad side was to commit hari-kari. A banker with no copy-making abilities is impotent, so the militants in the copy center became our best friends. There were times when we would have given a round of blowjobs to the entire copy center staff if they’d requested it. We would have done it with a big smile on our faces, and we would have swallowed. Anything for the copy center guys.
The word processing department is the brains of the operation. The brains are no good, though, without a pair of hands. A genius can think up brilliant ideas all day, but if he can’t make them happen, then the ideas aren’t any better than a clock with no key to wind it up. The copy center is that key. The copy center takes the ideas put on paper by the word processing department and makes copies of these ideas. The copy center disseminates the ideas so as to make them come alive. The copy center is the pair of hands that turns the brain’s ideas into something real. It’s where the ideas become actual, tangible things—big fat stacks of paper and pitch books that say “Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette” on the spine.
Some investment bankers measure their success by the amount of paper that they generate. They’re known as the Paper Bankers. For the Paper Bankers, more is better. Paper Bankers make copies of financial statements, models, and research reports and pass them out to everybody, even people who aren’t connected with their deal. That helps them cover their ass, and keeps people from screaming, “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this!” later on. Sometimes the Paper Bankers don’t even need a reason to make copies. They’ll just send a stack of miscellaneous stuff to the copy center and get fifty copies made because they haven’t gotten many copies done lately. It soothes their savage beast within.
At DLJ, the copy center wasn’t actually run by DLJ employees. It was inside of DLJ, though, and anybody who wasn’t paying attention probably thought that it was actually a part of DLJ, but it wasn’t. The copy center function was outsourced to a service company that ran copy centers at a bunch of big companies in New York. Many bankers are rude to anybody who they think is making less money than them, and that includes all of the service people who help them get their jobs done. A lot of the DLJ bankers, though, figured that they could be extra rude to the copy center people since they weren’t actually company employees. It was like they thought that they could be as rude as they wanted to, and if the copy center people lodged complaints, then the banker would threaten their big boss—“Those goddamned copy center employees of yours, if they don’t get a better fucking attitude we’ll take the service contract away.” The good bankers didn’t usually make that mistake more than once.
The copy center is where the bottlenecks always pop up in the pitch book–making process. Bottlenecks occur in word processing, but not to the magnitude of copy center bottlenecks. In word processing the fonts inevitably get screwed up or underlines are botched. Although annoying and time-consuming, all of these problems are easily fixed. Also, during the word processing stage the associate feels time pressure, but nothing like what the associate feels during the copy center stage. By the time the copy center stage is reached, the associate knows that the pitch is going to occur the next morning. We believe that we’re accurate when we say that never in the history of investment banking has a pitch book been sent to the copy center twenty-four hours in advance. If a banker has the time to dicker around with a document, then he will. So a banker will never allow a pitch book to be complete before it absolutely, positively has to be complete. And that is exactly twelve hours before the presentation of the pitch book to the prospective client.
Like clockwork, a junior banker with the most important pitch of his life will walk into the copy center at 2 A.M. with a pitch book ready and tell the guy behind the counter, “I need twenty copies by seven A.M.” and the copy center guy behind the counter will say, “Join the crowd, my brother. Join the crowd.” The copy center guy will then point to a huge stack of other pitch books that have to be made by 7 A.M. and tell the banker, “You’ll be lucky if we get it done by noon tomorrow. Sorry.”
Now, understand that it’s not like the banker can run out to Kinkos to get the job done. This is a major production process—colors, bindings, inserts, acetates—the copy center guys, for all their shortcomings, are the only ones capable of cranking out these pitch book behemoths. Taking a job like this to Kinkos would be like trying to clean up an offshore oil spill with a dish sponge.
So at this point, the interaction can take one of two potential paths.
Path#1: The associate flies into an immediate rage. “You fucking idiot! This has to be done by SEVEN FUCKING A.M.! Do you read me? Comprende? My job, this here job, takes priority! This is the biggest goddamned deal this fucking bank has pitched in the past decade. Do you understand what that means? Do you have any understanding outside of that miserable little existence that you call a life what I’m telling you here? Of course you don’t. Who the fuck am I fooling? Look, get this through your thick head—THIS JOB TAKES PRIORITY! Now goddamn it, get it done by seven A.M.!”
This is exactly what the copy center guy wants to hear. This is precisely the kind of respect that a guy making seven bucks an hour figures he deserves. An apoplectic born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth asshole from Westchester County is telling the Pride of the Barrio that he’s a fucking idiot. And, moreover, he’s telling him that he’s an idiot while concurrently begging for his help. The rich honkey banker has just made it clear through his very rage that he’s in a pickle. Nobody gets that mad about something unless their ass is in a sling.
The world is an unjust place, and the inequities inherent in Wall Street’s money game push the outer limits of that injustice. The copy center, though, is the one place on Wall Street where the little man has his day. When confronted with a livid banker demanding service, the copy center guy gets to give the rich pricks their comeuppance. It’s a kangaroo court for assholes, and the copy center guy is judge, jury, and executioner. The copy center guy can turn to the raging banker and tell him, “So sorry, but your job doesn’t have priority here. This is my shop, this is my decision. Your job’ll get done when I get to it.” The banker has no choice. He has no idea how to make copies, especially color copies, and he has no idea how to bind a document. He has no idea where the dividers are, the blue sheets, the covers, the acetates, the back covers, or anything else. Unlike word processing, which any half decent associate could do himself if push came to shove, the associate is unable to do the copy center guy’s job. No way. The associate is screwed. He’s up shit’s creek without a paddle. The associate has no choice but to surrender to his destiny. The associate has to suck up his pride and develop a new approach. He must head down path number two.
Path #2: Money talks. The associate relies on his skills of negotiation and bribery to move the job to the head of the priority list. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, because the sort of cold cash payments to the copy center guys that would provide incentive enough for them to push all other jobs aside are only allowed at holiday time. At all other times of the year, the bribery has to be more subtle and the associate has to be more crafty in the approach. The senior bankers don’t understand this part of the game. A managing director has no idea how to build a relationship with the copy center guys. The managing director may be at home in the corporate boardroom talking turkey with eager CEOs with deal fever, but when it comes time to get a priority rush on some pitch books from Julio in the copy center they’re useless. They have to rely on their lieutenants—the associates.
The good associate recognizes from day one the value of good copy center relationships. The good associate greases the wheels of progress, even when there isn’t an imminent need for express service in the copy center. The good associate orders up five or six pizza pies for dinner every couple of weeks and sends two of the pies up to the copy center. The good associate runs around the corner to the deli once a month, picks up a case of beer, and delivers it to the copy center guys. The good associate stuffs a twenty-dollar bill into the pockets of the key copy center guys at Christmas time and engenders some goodwill, or he stuffs a fifty into those same pockets and engenders twice as much goodwill. And then, when the need for express copy service actually arises, the good associate finds his job pushed to the head of the line while the badly mannered bitter associate spews forth futile vitriol, and gets the job returned three hours after his deadline. One hand washes the other.
The copy center is a factory. It’s full of big industrial-size copy equipment, the kind of heavy machinery that’s not supposed to be operated by anybody under the influence of NyQuil. The copiers in the copy center are living, breathing creatures capable of tearing off a thousand copies in the time it takes to light a cigarette, and stapling those copies before the first soothing fix of nicotine hits the bloodstream. These aren’t copiers where you punch in the number of copies you want and hit a big green “COPY” button. These are copiers with a command console that looks like something out of a nuclear submarine. They’re scary, and the only people who know how to make them work are the copy center guys.
Copiers aren’t the only equipment in the copy center. There are also big industrial hole punches, heavy-duty paper cutters, monster scissors, gigantic stapling machines, and huge, intricate binding machines. The binding machines have a big steel handle on the side. When you pull the handle, two rows of metal jaws pull the plastic binding apart so that the copy center guy can slip the pages into the binding. Like birth stirrups for a newborn book. The copy center’s not the kind of place that you want to be caught naked in. There’s too much opportunity for something to get caught, twisted, pulled, or cut off.
There are a million variations on the basic black-and-white copy available in the copy center. There are standard copies and there are color copies. There’s white paper, beige paper, and blue paper. There’s velo binding, staple binding, and spiral binding. There are horizontal covers and vertical covers, with and without little windows. There are acetates and back covers that are green or black, with the DLJ logo printed horizontally or vertically. The permutations are limitless. Copies can be grouped, collated, stapled, or hole-punched. The copies can be delivered to somebody’s office or picked up. A banker can give the copy center a single sheet of paper and get back a copy of that sheet on laminated bond paper, bound into a booklet with an expensive-looking green cover with “Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette” embossed in gold letters. It makes that one sheet of paper look very impressive. That’s what making the pitch books is all about—making mundane information look impressive.
When a job gets delivered to the copy center the associate has to fill out a requisition form. The requisition form includes spaces for all of the options. It looks like a test form for the SATs. It’s important for the associate to mark the requisition forms very carefully, because the copy center guys do exactly what the requisition forms request. They aren’t there to think, they’re there to do. If an associate gets a job back, and is convinced that the copy center has screwed it up, he’ll march into the copy center and start yelling. His copies are screwed up and he wants to see some heads roll. The copy center guy behind the counter will look beneath the counter for the requisition form. Most of the time, he’ll pull it out and, with a big smile on his face, show the junior banker that the form was marked wrong. That makes the copy center guy feel good. If the copy center guy says that he can’t find the requisition form, that’s the secret code for “We fucked it up.” The copy center will never openly admit that they fucked it up, though. They know how to cover their ass.
Troob knew how frustrating the copy center could be. Part of the reason for that was that he did a lot of work for Jack Gatorski, and Gator loved to get copies made. Troob once told me that he thought Gator had a strange thing for copies. It went way beyond just being a Paper Banker. He swore that he’d once seen Gator get a big stack of copies back from the copy center that were still warm, and that Gator had closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and started stroking the warm paper.
Gator was crazy when it came to getting copies made. He especially loved color copies. Charts, graphs, maps, pictures, he loved all that shit. Whenever I did a pitch for him we’d sit down to run through a draft of the pitch book and I’d be saying to myself over and over, “Please, God, not too many color copies. Please, Lord, not too many color copies. Just don’t let him ask for too many color copies; please, please, please.” My supplications were never answered. The good Lord never came to my rescue. Gator’s penchant for color copies always overcame whatever practical sensibilities he may have had.
The problem with the color copies was that they gummed up the entire pitch book–making process. With all the state-of-the-art high-technology equipment that they had up in the copy center, the process of actually assembling the pitch books was barbaric. The black-and-white copies got made on one machine, and the color copies got made on another, much slower machine. Whichever copy center guy was putting the books together then had to collate everything by hand. The copy center guy would have fifty piles, each one a separate copy of the book, spread out all over the room and he’d be pulling copies off the color copier and sticking them into each of the piles where they were supposed to go. Well, if you’ve only got three or four color pages in each book then there isn’t all that much room for error, but in one of Gator’s books there were usually more color pages than black-and-white pages, which meant that no matter how conscientious the copy center guy was, chances were that something was gonna get screwed up. Layer on top of that the fact that the copy center guy was only making seven dollars an hour so he didn’t usually give a fuck, and he had twenty other bankers calling him every fifteen minutes to ask him when their more straightforward black-and-white jobs were gonna be done, and it was a recipe for disaster.
What it all meant was that every time I got a set of pitch books back from the copy center, I had to page through every single copy by hand to make sure that all the pages were in order, that all the copies had been made on the same kind of paper, and that some random crap hadn’t made its way into my pitch book from somebody else’s pitch book. It was like doing piecework for an Eighth Avenue sweatshop. When I did find the inevitable mistakes, I couldn’t bitch and moan about them to the guy in the copy center who had screwed things up, because he’d just end up getting pissed off and fucking me over the next time I needed a favor. In fact, I usually had to take the books back up to the copy center and act like the mistakes were my fault, and beg and plead for the copy center guys to fix the books so that I could meet the deadline, which was usually within ten hours. The copy center guys hated it when I brought back jobs that they thought they’d seen the last of, so I usually had to provide them with some extra incentive to make things right. My big sales tool was lap dances down at Shenanigans. I’d offer to buy the guys a few lap dances each, and they’d usually take care of me.
There was one time when I got my pitch books back at 4:30 in the morning. The copy center guy who had just finished them up had taken off for home as soon as he was done and a new copy center guy was on call. Well, as usual, the pitchbooks were all fucked up. I had to be on a flight for Cincinnati with the books in three and a half hours so I had a little bit of a problem. To explain the problem to the new guy and go over what he’d have to do to fix it would take hours, and to do it myself was impossible because I didn’t know how to use the machines. So a fifty-dollar bill emerged from my pocket and two pepperoni double cheese pizzas helped to cajole my newfound friend in the copy center—Manuel—to help me go through each book, book by book, and fix them.
Manuel and I went through each book and through both pizzas. First, each book needed a new page twelve. Fourteen books and each one needed page twelve changed. Then the back cover needed to be put on each book, then page thirty-four needed to be replaced by a color graph. Page seven had to be removed and a new page seven had to be inserted. Pages twenty-four and twenty-five were inverted so they had to be switched around, and page forty-two was behind page forty-three, so that needed to be fixed. All of the books needed to be checked again.
It was 6:30 A.M. when we got done, or so I thought. When I checked the books some were still fucked up. The monotony of making the same changes in every book was mind-numbing and Manuel and I were incapable of keeping all the changes straight. So, back we went to the spiral binder and copy machine to fix the mistakes. Basically, everyone else’s jobs got screwed, but I had forked out fifty bones and two pizzas. At 7:30 we were done. I had half an hour to get to the airport. I had packed a bag the night before and left it in the office knowing that something like this would happen. It inevitably did. I ran to a cab with fourteen pitch books, an overnight bag, my briefcase, a cell phone, and no sleep.
For the past year, I’d been dating this girl Marjorie. Since she lived in Chicago, we had been doing the long-distance thing. Lately, things between us had started to get more serious. I called her from the cab and left a message on her answering machine saying hello and “I’m sorry.” I felt bad. The previous weekend she had come to New York to visit me and had ended up sitting in my apartment the whole time because I had to work. Thank God for 1–800-FLOWERS.
In the cab I checked the books and ten were good, two were slightly messed up, and two were completely fucked up. I took one of the messed up ones for myself and prayed that after giving one good one to Gator there wouldn’t be more than nine guys from the company who wanted pitch books. I dumped the two fucked-up pitch books in the garbage at La Guardia.
I made it to the gate at the airport just as they were about to stop letting people onto the plane. I made my way to my seat, and there was Gator reading the Wall Street Journal and looking fresh as a spring daisy. He glanced up at me and said, “It’s a good goddamned thing you made it, because if you hadn’t there would’ve been hell to pay. You look like shit. You’re an embarrassment.”
Gator and I had gone through a lot over the previous year. I had a grudging respect for him. I can remember him being a good guy—at times—but this time he was an asshole. Maybe the pressure to perform pushed him to be a fuckhead. Whatever the case, I almost yanked him up, pulled his trousers down, and shoved that whole bag full of pitch books straight up his ass.
There wasn’t a lot of love lost between Troob and Gator after this incident. I think that in another life they might have been friends. They might have enjoyed each other’s company. They weren’t in another life, though. They were in a life that involved color copies. For the time being that made them enemies.