Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
—Mae West
The first weeks and months that Troob and I spent at DLJ as full-time associates were painful. The constant pitching, the endless valuation shenanigans, the long nights spent kissing the asses of the coterie of word processing pixies, and the gifts to the copy center Barrio. These exercises in futility clearly weren’t the activities that a young investment banker’s wet dreams were made of. We continued to hold out hope, though. Hope that we’d turn into deal doers and rainmakers. Hope that we’d have a compensation review session where the head of our department would bestow upon us a zillion-dollar bonus. Hope that John Chalsty, DLJ’s CEO, would call us into his office and tell us, “You’re my guys. I need you. I’m gonna build the business around you.” Selective perception was still operating at full tilt, and for the most part we were still seeing and hearing mainly those things that helped fuel the dream.
Deals came and went. Different companies, different needs, different industries, and different deal teams. The only real constant in our daily lives was that we walked into the office every morning knowing that our day was going to be completely different than the day before had been. We learned to expect the unexpected, and became accustomed to operating as if absolutely everything we worked on was critical to the future welfare of the free world. We were learning how to operate in a pressure cooker without getting basted.
Although each day was different there was a broad sort of daily routine that we all followed. Being a junior banker meant being a night person. That, in turn, meant that none of the associates usually rolled into the office before about 9 A.M. Inevitably, when we did roll in, there would be something that needed checking. Mornings were checking time. Maybe it was something that we’d left to get turned through word processing on our way out the door the night before. Maybe one of the analysts had built a new financial model and left a copy on our desks. Whatever it was, we’d spend the morning going through it line by line to make sure we weren’t going to get our heads chewed off as a result of somebody else’s screwup.
The checking routine usually lasted until around lunchtime. Now, at most jobs lunch divides the day into two. There’s “before lunch” and there’s “after lunch.” Once the majority of corporate America has made it through lunch, it’s a downhill ride. Investment banking doesn’t work like that. An investment banking associate has four parts to his day: “before lunch,” “after lunch,” “after dinner,” and “after midnight.”
Lunchtime at DLJ meant that the day was just getting started. We usually ate lunch at our desks. That was the low-risk way to keep our heads down. Sometimes, if we were feeling adventurous, we’d round up a crew of our comrades and head down to the cafeteria. Eating in the cafeteria was a dangerous game, though. The big risk was that Doug Franken, the managing director in charge of staffing, would see us there and interpret our presence as a sign of sloth. It was a game of Russian roulette whenever Franken caught us down in the cafeteria. We knew that one of us would end up having to take a bullet for the team, we just never knew which one of us it would be.
The “after lunch” part of the day was usually taken up with meetings. Meetings with clients. Meetings with potential clients. Meetings with deal teams. Meetings with lawyers and accountants. If we couldn’t meet in person, we’d do it by conference call. We had deal team meetings before the client meetings to figure out what we were going to talk about at the client meetings. We had deal team meetings after the client meetings to talk about what we’d just gotten done talking about. As associates, we grew to hate meetings because meetings were the places where little ideas capable of generating huge amounts of work were spawned. The words “I’ve got an idea…” were anathema to us. When we heard them, our hearts dropped into our loafers.
There were some managing directors who didn’t confine their idea generation only to meetings. Some of them preferred to perpetrate evil through the voice mail system. The Widow used to use the voice mail system to avoid human contact altogether. He would sit in his lair and create voice mails full of new ideas, and then send them to my mail box without ever actually calling me. Many an afternoon I sat at my desk and saw the message light go on without the phone ever ringing. Whenever that happened, I knew that it was one of the Widow’s insidious mail bombs.
It was tough to get any real work done while the senior bankers were still around. That’s why so many days included “after dinner” and “after midnight.” The managing directors usually took off by dinnertime, which meant that the phones would finally stop ringing and that we’d be able to get cranking on the latest fire drill. Before we did, though, we had a nightly routine whereby Troob, Slick, and I would corral three of our other comrades-in-arms for a tête-à-tête. These three other regulars were Isaac “Big Man” Johnson, who worked in the high-yield group and who had once walked straight into a wall as a result of sleep deprivation; Mike “Wings” Roganstahl, who always dressed to the nines and thought he worked in the merchant banking group but in reality was a generalist peon like the rest of us; and our friend Deepak “Tubby” Verrna from the M&A group whose fat gut and tiny ass usually made his suit pants look like an opera diva’s muumuu. Each night we would commandeer a conference room, order dinner, and spend at least a half hour crapping all over everybody who’d crapped on us earlier that day.
Dinner was full of insults and profanity. Nobody was called by their real name. Everybody was “pricko,” “fuck-face,” or “jackass.” We reveled in insulting each other’s dignity. The free-for-all at dinner was the glue that held us all together. On a nightly basis, it gave us the opportunity to try to convince each other that the dream was still alive, while we collectively came to the dawning realization that we were investment banking automatons marching in lockstep to the same inevitable fate. Dinner was our group therapy.
Dinner wasn’t just five nights a week. We were usually there on weekends, too. Every night at dinner there was one thing we could rely on—Slick’s dinner order. Slick ordered the same thing every night: penne bolognese, tira misu, and two small bottles of San Pelegrino sparkling water. The rest of us would mix it up a little, but not Slick. He never deviated. In our first year at DLJ, Slick was probably on the road a total of fifty days. There were probably a total of another twenty days that fell on weekends when he was out of the office at dinnertime. That means that we sat in a conference room watching Slick down penne bolognese, tira misu, and two little bottles of San Pelegrino sparkling water 290 times in that first year. That’s a lot of bolognese. Troob and I think that penne bolognese was Slick’s emotional anchor. No matter what happened during the day, Slick always knew that the penne bolognese would be waiting for him at night. It was like a girlfriend, only better, because the penne bolognese was always on time, didn’t get mad at him for being at work all night, and didn’t yell at him when he had to cancel a vacation.
“After dinner” was creation time. God may have created first and rested later, but an investment banking associate rests first—at dinner—and creates later; 8 P.M. to midnight was prime time. We drafted pitch books, built models, updated comps, and wrote memos. Computers cranked, pencils flew, and steam came out of our ears. It was the one time of the day when we felt like we were actually moving ahead and weren’t either treading water or slowly sinking. If we were lucky, if the fire drill wasn’t so urgent that something had to be created for the following morning, we’d be able to head home by midnight. Often, though, that wasn’t possible.
If the fire drill was real, then the day rolled into the “after midnight” segment. After midnight the associate became a conductor. The creation of the raw material was complete, but the transformation of that raw material into something presentable was only beginning. After midnight the associate stepped up to the riser, raised a baton, and brought the orchestra to life. Word processing, copy center, and the young analyst monkey boys each played their part in the symphony. Some movements played fast and furious, others slow and serene, but the music rarely stopped. If it did, the associate would slip into an adjustable chair and close his eyes for a few moments of bliss until the music began again. The after-midnight segment could end at 2 A.M., 5 A.M., or it could end at 8 A.M. All we could hope for was that it would end at least a few hours before the routine was all set to begin again the next morning. Spending two, or even three days straight on the Ferris wheel with no sleep wasn’t easy.
So with all this crap, all this garbage that we were piling through, what was the bottom line? A lot of anguish, never saying no, and about 100 hours a week spent in the trenches. There are only 168 hours in a week, and working 100 of them meant that we had to work every day, seven days a week. Taking corporate car rides home, showering in the mornings, and searching for our lost identities before we went to bed at night enveloped 20 hours of our week. Making a lame attempt at a social life engulfed 15 hours of the week. So that left 33 hours of our week for sleeping. That meant an average of four and a half hours a night. So with this little sleep, there are two obvious questions: (1) Were we productive? and (2) Weren’t we constantly tired?
The answers to these questions are simple. We shouldn’t have been productive, but we were, and yes—we were always tired. Investment banks are savvy. DLJ was no exception. It knew how to squeeze every drop of productivity out of our little bodies. The investment banks keep the climate perfect for an around-the-clock working environment. Within DLJ the lighting and air-conditioning systems were like a Las Vegas casino. The lights were bright and fluorescent. The air was kept cold, crisp, and dry. It always felt like the middle of the day, even at five in the morning. When we finally left our investment banking casino and stepped into the outside world we came crashing down. But while we were inside the walls we were as productive as little beavers building a dam. We scurried around like lab rats in a cage and were full of nervous energy. Like casino gamblers, we had a lot to give and expectations of much in return.
DLJ tried to lessen the pain of this grind through the liberal application of its own corporate narcotic—money. Unlike a lot of other firms, DLJ was clearly with the program. What that meant was that DLJ didn’t nickel-and-dime us to death on our expenses; the firm knew how to keep our appetites whetted. When we had business dinners they were always first class—the 21 Club, Aureole, Le Cirque 2000. When we traveled, the charges didn’t get questioned. The firm knew that extravagant tastes were the best defense that they could ever hope to have against our departure. And when it came to purely social events, the firm threw just enough corporate clambakes to keep the junior bankers from engaging in open rebellion.
The premiere DLJ party each year was the holiday party. When DLJ threw its holiday party it was no joke. We’re not talking about paper tablecloths, folding chairs, and spiked punch in plastic cups. The DLJ holiday party was the real deal. It was an opportunity for the top dogs to loosen the purse strings, pull out a few gold coins, and impart a brief evening of unrestricted hedonistic pleasure to the masses.
When DLJ threw a party it was always done with style and with no regard for expense, but the holiday party was special for another reason. The myriad dinners, receptions, and dances that we were becoming accustomed to as associates at DLJ were the exclusive province of the bankers, brokers, salespeople, and traders. For many of the thousands of DLJ employees, however, the ability to live large on the firm’s nickel was nothing but a fantasy. Once each year, at the holiday party, that changed. Every secretary, banking assistant, and receptionist was given five hours in which to taste the good life. It was an opportunity for them to develop a sense for just how much money an investment bank was capable of generating, and how well paid those higher up the food chain actually were.
In the weeks leading up to our first holiday blowout, the senior associates schooled us in the essentials of DLJ holiday party tradition. The rules were simple: (1) get stone drunk (2) avoid vomiting on any managing directors, and (3) make every effort to get a banking assistant into bed by the end of the night. As legend had it, fishing off the company pier at the holiday party was more than just a time-honored tradition, it was an obligation that was borne by all. For me, the possibility wasn’t just a challenge, it was a burning necessity. To start out with, I’d never been a guy who got a lot of play from the ladies. Now that my every waking hour was spent at the office, short of paying a hooker, the only way I’d ever get any loving was if a generous BA decided to take pity on my sorry state and provide me access to her honey pot.
The DLJ holiday party was traditionally held in the middle of the week. This was far from ideal from my standpoint, since it inevitably meant that the day following the party would degenerate from a typically wretched banking day into one made all the more evil by a pounding headache and probable bouts of dry heaves in the toilet stalls. Those responsible for the welfare of greater DLJ, however, were convinced that holding the party in the middle of the week would somehow cause the riffraff to exercise some degree of moderation in their pursuit of joyous holiday spirits. They should have known better. In practice, the midweek scheduling merely meant that the majority of the junior bankers and support staff would be taken completely out of commission for the day following the party. They’d all be hunkered down in the stalls next to me noisily heaving their own innards out in supplication to the porcelain gods.
On the day of the party, the end of the working day for the secretaries and BAs signaled a mass migration to the women’s bathroom for the grand transformation. Most of the women brought either cocktail dresses, evening wear, or other seductive clothing—all of which had the potential to cause me and the other sex-starved young bankers to work ourselves into a hormone-soaked lather. Due to the quantity of hair spray that was applied during the preparation period in each of the women’s bathrooms, it was widely believed that the introduction of an open flame anywhere in the vicinity could prove deadly.
DLJ’s holiday party was traditionally held at the Rainbow Room, a New York City landmark that takes up an entire floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and provides spectacular views of Manhattan. For one evening each year in mid-December it belonged to DLJ. The date of the holiday party was always known well in advance by everyone at the firm. In any sane profession every opportunity would have been made to clear the decks beforehand to enable everybody to attend. This was investment banking, though, and the masters of game theory were at work.
The more naive of my first-year associate classmates worked hard that week to finish the work that they knew would be coming due later in the week. In their ignorance, they actually believed that doing so would increase their chances of being able to attend the famed holiday party. If, in fact, all the other associates had been operating under the same set of assumptions, and if, in addition, the workload distribution among the associate class had been anything close to fair, the strategy probably would have been a good one. There were smarter, more devious forces at work, however.
The optimal work strategy leading up to the evening of the holiday party was really no different than the optimal work strategy on any other given day of the year, the stakes were just higher. The naked reality was that there was absolutely no benefit to making an effort to get work done ahead of time. There were two reasons for this.
First, completion of work well ahead of a deadline simply gave the senior bankers that much more time in which to demand changes or additions to the work that had already been completed. These requested changes were rarely necessary, but there was a pervasive and deep-rooted belief that more analysis was necessarily better analysis. Reams of analysis had become a security blanket for many of the bankers, who had lost the ability over the years to make informed assessments of what was really necessary to get a transaction done. Instead of spending fifteen minutes to draw upon their experience and determine what the critical path for closing a deal was, their reflex was to demand analyses covering every possible contingency in a deal. Delivering work significantly in advance of a deadline, then, usually just resulted in a bout of self-doubt for the senior banker on the deal, which inevitably just resulted in requests for unnecessary additional analysis and more trips back to the word processing department.
The second reason to avoid completion of any work ahead of time was a result of the vagaries of the staffing process. There was no monitoring of the parity of the workload among the associates. When a managing director needed to staff an associate on a deal, he would begin making the rounds to determine who had the capacity to take on additional work. It made no difference whether a given associate had done two all-nighters over the previous four days, all that mattered was what was on everybody’s plate over the coming couple of days. So, completion of work ahead of schedule exposed the ambitious offender to the likelihood of having to take on even more work. It was an insidious catch-22.
These two realities resulted in a system in which the only way to maintain a manageable workload was to push everything off to the last possible minute. When a senior banker came looking for an associate, the only acceptable line of defense was to rattle off multiple last-minute projects that had to be completed and that would prevent the associate from working on any new assignments. The downside was a perpetual state of acute urgency that was contributing heavily to our rapid burnout.
By the time our first holiday party rolled around, some of my associate classmates hadn’t yet figured all this out. These unfortunates were still operating under the mistaken belief that timely completion of their work was the responsible course of action, and that by working hard ahead of time they’d ensure their ability to attend the glorious holiday bacchanal. And so it was that when calls for associates went out on the afternoon of the party, these poor souls were the ones who had to answer the call of duty, while those of us hiding behind our wall of last-minute deadlines were free to pursue our anticipated evening of debauchery.
Troob and I headed out to the holiday party together that evening, and as we exited the office on our way to the Rainbow Room we popped our heads into the offices of those we were leaving behind. “Tough break,” we told them. “Too bad you’re gonna miss the blowout.” Inside we laughed, though, for their misery was our small triumph. The staffing process was a zero-sum game, and it was impossible to maintain our own sanity without sending some of our mates to the gallows.
DLJ’s holiday party was owned by the associates and analysts. We were the ones in the middle—the only ones who knew people all the way up and down the banking hierarchy. The senior bankers lived in their own world, dealing only with other bankers, capital markets people, and company executives. The managing directors gave us our marching orders and expected us to get the work done, but most of them had not processed a deal in years. They couldn’t have found their way to the word processing department or the copy center without a map. As for the support staff, they had no idea who most of the senior bankers were either. They knew them by name, and possibly by appearance or reputation, but they didn’t have any direct dealings with them. They just knew them as the guys who made a lot of money and made life miserable for those of us in the middle.
The junior bankers were the only ones who played both sides of the system. We knew everybody: the senior bankers, the capital markets people, the BAs, the secretaries, the copy center guys, the frolicsome thespians from the word processing department, and the mail room staff. This became obvious as Troob and I got into the line for the elevators that would take us up to the Rainbow Room. It was a textbook demonstration of the caste system, only we weren’t in India.
The senior bankers stood in pairs talking quietly with each other. The word processing boys, for their part, chatted gaily among themselves. Half of the copy center guys stood in a group ripping maniacal rhymes with each other, while the other half cast furtive glances at the primping secretaries. Troob and I stood in the middle, directing the verbal traffic and drinking it all in. Small talk with the managing directors? Not an issue. Busting a move with the copy center guys? No problem. We were the Renaissance men, and we had visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads.
By the time the elevators finally made it up to the Rainbow Room, the party was already in full swing. Tuxedoed waiters met us with trays of champagne as we came off the elevators. Troob and I each grabbed two, chugged them down, and headed out to survey the scene.
There were a number of different rooms, each with its own distinct personality. Each had multiple bars, fully stocked with top-shelf liquor, and buffets laden down with an impressive collection of seafood, meats, pastries, fresh fruit, and other delicacies. The Grand Ballroom was at one end of the building and featured fifty-foot ceilings and a full orchestra playing big band music. This was where most of the managing directors and upper management were hanging out. Off one end of the Grand Ballroom was another room that ran the entire length of the building. It was filled with small cocktail tables and booths, an intimate setting in which I hoped, by the end of the night, to be engaging any number of passionate young ladies in sensual repartee.
The main event, though, from the associates’ perspective was taking place in another large ballroom at the opposite end of the building from the Grand Ballroom. In both physical location and atmospheric demeanor, it was about as far from the Grand Ballroom as one could get. The room was filled with analysts, associates, secretaries, and BAs. Instead of big band music, there was a DJ pumping out house music. Instead of muted conversation about professional matters, there was a race to inebriation and hopeful coupling. A buffet dominated one end of the room, and immediately adjacent to it was a large dance floor. The convenience of this setup can’t be overstated. It facilitated every fool’s ability to simultaneously demonstrate his or her disco dancing skills while grabbing slices of roast beef from the buffet and slinging them airborne across the length of the room.
When I first arrived that evening there was little dancing going on. The junior bankers, BAs, and secretaries were all focused first on getting ripped, so that their subsequent gyrations on the dance floor could be explained away afterward as the result of a drunken frenzy. I didn’t have any problem with this approach to things, as it was a strategy I had often employed myself when hunting for love. There was, however, one sticking point in its implementation. There was a monster bottleneck at the bar. Fortunately for me, I was practiced in the fine art of maximizing my alcohol intake under adverse conditions, and a long line was not an insurmountable obstacle. When my turn at the bar finally came, I ordered four mixed drinks and a couple of beers. What the bartender didn’t realize was that the entire stock was for me. If the price of inebriation was warm drinks with melted ice, so be it.
My rude, selfish actions were a model for others. The trail I blazed would not be a lonely one. Soon, double-and triple-fisters could be seen leaving the bar with smiles on their faces. I felt warm inside, knowing that I had done my small part to lead the way and bring alcoholic happiness to those who needed it most. The evening was starting well.
As the crowd continued to pour a river of liquor down its collective throat, the dance floor began to fill up. The spectacle that ensued was solid evidence that if there’s one thing that money can’t buy, it’s rhythm. When it comes to pure foolishness, a room full of drunk investment bankers prancing around a dance floor pushes the limits of the imagination. To this day I pray that it’s a sight the civilized world will never be forced to witness.
The scene that was unfolding was one only a limited number of the managing directors and senior officers of the firm would ever behold. For the most part, the senior bankers knew better than to penetrate this fortress of unfettered libido in the rear ballroom. There were a few, however, who were willing to try. In general, the MDs who made their way back to our province did so because they were themselves looking to scavenge up a little bit of young love for the evening. The large-scale search for young love by decrepit managing directors was, to my understanding, a yearly occurrence at the holiday party. Unlike many of the other work-related social events on the bankers’ calendar, the holiday party was for DLJ employees only. No wives, husbands, or significant others were allowed. A licentious old managing director, then, could pursue a BA in her mid-twenties for the evening with no worry of the proverbial shit hitting the fan. The only people who would ever know would be the thousands of other DLJ employees who’d seen it happen.
As for me, I made a few trips out to the dance floor to show off my balletic talents but spent the better part of the evening parked at a table adjacent to the dance floor, knocking back glasses of warm gin and yelling vulgarities to my boys. It was fine entertainment to watch a fifty-year-old managing director and a twenty-seven-year-old associate sandwich a busty banking assistant between them and give her the bump and grind. If nothing else, I knew it would provide me with fodder for some gossip the following day.
There was a clear point of delineation that night before which I was a somewhat normal, functioning member of civilized society and after which some might have considered me a heathen. Physiologically, I probably crossed the bridge into chaos at some point between my eleventh and twelfth mixed drink. Mentally, though, my deliverance coincided with a spontaneous act of natural vitality, one that seemed entirely appropriate at the time.
I was sitting in my chair just off the edge of the dance floor mired in a mild alcoholic daze when I felt the heaviness of the last few drinks settling in down below the belt. I happened to be sharing my table at the time with two managing directors, each of whom was mired in his own alcoholic stupor, and one of whom had been a class-A prick to me when we’d worked on a pitch together a couple of weeks before. Given that I was in my late twenties at the time, I’d been potty trained for nearly twenty five years. Maybe it was just that after twenty five years I was sick and tired of having to relieve myself the way that everybody else did. In a toilet, that is. More likely, after only four months on the job at DLJ I was already yearning to piss on the shoes of some of the SOBs who’d been making my life hell. Whatever the case, as the pressure below increased, I began to contemplate alternative options to trudging to the bathroom for a quick draining of the plumbing. The managing directors on either side of me were no issue. I knew that it would be a stretch for either of them to believe that the associate sitting next to them was tinkling under the table. They’d have to be looking out for it to become suspicious. The table was covered with a white linen tablecloth whose edges hung halfway to the floor—a perfect shield for my lone act of defiance, and I had just finished a bottle of beer—a fitting receptacle for my golden gift. All the pieces were falling into place. I sidled up closer to the table, slipped the empty beer bottle down below, covered my lap with the tablecloth, and relaxed….
The first five seconds of relaxation were pure bliss. Not only was the physical relief first-rate, but I was performing an act most unbecoming of an investment banker. That made me proud. Someday, I’d be able to tell my kids about this seminal moment in my professional life and they, too, would be proud of their father. As the bottle grew warmer and heavier, I realized that I should have put a little bit more thought into my plan up front. By the feel of things, there were only about two ounces of space left in the bottle. The problem was that there were at least twelve ounces of golden delight left inside of me, and far too much momentum to turn off the spigot. I let the bottle drop to the floor and continued to tinkle unencumbered, showering both the Rainbow Room’s carpet, and the managing directors’ shoes, with my goodness. If either of the managing directors to my sides checked their wing tips upon returning home that evening, they would have noticed a unique speckled pattern covering their lovingly shined shoes. It was my personal tribute.
Now through all these comings and goings I hadn’t forgotten my original goal for the evening—the identification and pursuit of free love. In fact, throughout my evening of sedentary pleasure there at the table I’d had an ongoing dialogue with a number of prospects, but none of them had come to full fruition. As I saw Troobie walk by, I corralled him.
“Troobie, what’s going on?”
“Not much.”
“I’m all fucked up. I just peed underneath the table.”
“You did what?”
“I peed underneath the table here.”
“Well then why the hell are you still sitting there? Move your lazy ass somewhere else, you filthy pig.”
“Yeah, I guess I’d better.”
“Well, what do you want to do, Rolfe? The party here’ll be going on for another hour or so, then they’re gonna shut it down. The question is whether we stay here to take our chances or go and get a sure thing.”
“What do you mean, sure thing? You mean a strip joint?”
“Yeah, what else.”
Right there, Troobie and I should have realized how far we’d sunk. We were so hard up to get a peek at some ass that we were about to leave a fully paid, top-shelf party, full of all kinds of women just itching to get laid, so that we could hunker down in a seedy sex parlor and pay a bunch of gyrating Delilahs to let us fondle their anatomy. And while some might argue that perverts are born, not made, I’d take exception to that. The job had shifted reality for us. It was making us crazy. We had no life outside of work because we were working hundred-hour weeks, which meant that Friday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday nights found us sitting in the office more often than not. We didn’t have enough time on the weekends to go out on dates, meet women, and establish relationships. When we got the rare night off we wanted a guarantee that we could make the most of it. The only way we knew of to guarantee something was to keep throwing money at it until it happened. The night of the holiday party, that meant that there was no way we were going to waste time working on a 50 percent chance of getting one of the BAs to come home with us when we knew we could hit the peep shows, lay down some cash, and have a 100 percent chance of at least seeing some poontang. In our minds, there was no comparison.
Troobie and I put our heads together. The way we saw it, there were two alternatives. We could go to one of the usual upscale places like Scores, Tens, or the VIP Lounge or we could be more debaucherous, roll the dice, and go to the Vault—a sex club down in the meatpacking district. The Vault offered up the not so standard S&M fare: men with minor self-esteem problems lying in the piss trough, dominatrixes leading their subservient partners around the room on leashes, spankings, hot wax, and cat-o’-nine-tails. It was the Betty Crocker’s kitchen of sadomasochism.
We decided to split the difference and go to the Harmony Theater. The Harmony was filthier than the strip clubs but not as low as the Vault. It was a Shenanigan’s meets Peepland—a full-contact booby bar where a single dollar could buy you a grope up on the main stage. When we got there, Troob and I parted ways for a while to find the women of our dreams. I saw Troobie getting a lap dance at one point while the stripper used his Hermès tie like a big piece of dental floss between her legs. Troob told me later that he had to barter the tie away for another lap dance after he ran out of money. As it turned out, Troob and I weren’t alone in our desires. After about an hour our colleagues Tubby, Slick, and the Big Man all walked in. I guess that they were looking for a sure thing, too.
From my perspective, the only repercussion to come from our night of holiday bacchanal was a burgeoning realization that our lives were pathetic. For Troob, though, the effect of our night out was more profound. I walked into his office the following day with a huge smile on my face, despite a wicked hangover. I’d come to recount the previous evening with him, and revel in our naughtiness. What I found, though, was a chastened Peter Troob.
“Troobie, man, that was GREAT last night! We gotta do it again soon. I gotta get back down there to the Harmony. I love chasing the ladies with you.”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t feel so good about it.”
“You don’t feel good about it? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s Marjorie, man. Don’t tell anybody I said this, but I feel guilty about last night.”
Marjorie was the girl from Chicago that Troob had been dating. He had met her over a year before, and their relationship had seemed to stick. She knew he worked hard, and he had been forced to bail on her before, but since she lived in Chicago she didn’t really know just how bad his work hours actually were. That was good. I knew that Troob liked her, but that hadn’t ever stopped our debaucherous pursuits before. I could see that Troob was starting to get that look in his eye that you see in your friends right before they leave the bachelor brotherhood. That look scared me. He was my comrade-in-arms, my partner. Troob was already getting up the curve on developing a conscience. That was troubling.