I’d rather be at the office.
“Must be nice to get back inside a hockey rink,” says Dick as he approaches me from behind. I stand in the suite we booked at the Devils’ home arena, the Prudential Center, to celebrate the closing of Project Litmus.
“Been a long time,” I say.
“You try the lobster? I had my guy at Le Bernardin deliver it. Best you’re gonna find on the East Coast,” says Dick as he tilts a can of Stella up to his mouth.
“Gonna dive in after this period,” I say. Both our eyes settle on the game action. A Devils winger intercepts a pass, and a three-on-two develops. Dick taps my arm with a finger.
“Here it is,” he says.
The crowd rises in unison, buzzes in anticipation before emitting a collective groan when the puck carrier decides to dump the puck and go for a line change—the right play, given it’s their fourth line and the end of a long shift.
“Dammit,” says Dick in a good-natured way. “Gotta get that on a net,” he says looking for corroboration. A moment passes. “Skate much these days?” While I understand the effort to shoot the shit with me, I’ve barely left the forty-fourth floor the past few months, and while I’m certain he doesn’t care, he must realize that his deal dictated my life. But it’s okay. Part of deciding to pursue banking was to reset my life, pave a new path, and leave hockey behind.
Part of me considers explaining to Dick that I don’t even know where my equipment is. That being at this game is in some ways devastating. That the only seat I want at this rink is on one of the benches. And that, once I quit hockey, that was it. I was done with it.
“Lace ’em up from time to time,” I lie. It wasn’t a clean break. I felt like Happy Gilmore on the first day of my internship—“Hi, I’m a hockey player, but I’m doing banking today.”
Dick shakes his empty Stella can. “Need another?” he says.
“I’m good,” I say as I raise the Bud Light I’ve been nursing.
A puck deflects into the stands and play stops. My eyes hone in on the Devils bench, where I watch a player cover his mouth with a gloved hand, lean slightly to the guy next to him, and say something that elicits a chuckle and a squirt of water onto the ice.
Ernie then walks up and stands next to me, holding a plastic cup containing some fizzing clear fluid and a lemon wedge.
“Uh-oh,” I say. “Vodka soda?”
“Perrier,” says Ernie as he pokes the lemon wedge with the small black straw. “Gotta go back to the office tonight. Just got staffed on a CRM due Friday.” I shake my head and want to complain on his behalf. Ernie just smiles.
“You’re a hockey player, right?” he says.
“Was one,” I say.
“But I heard you played in Europe, right?” he says. I nod. “Why didn’t you try for the NHL?”
“Was too good. Wouldn’t have been fair for to the other players,” I say.
Ernie smiles. “So were you a guy who scored goals or more defensive?” he asks with the charm of someone who genuinely knows nothing about the game.
“More of a locker room guy,” I say. He turns and faces me with furrowed brows. “Like my most useful contribution was anywhere but the ice.” I can tell he wants to get it, but still isn’t quite there yet. “Like on Litmus—you ran the model for the most part, right? So you were the guy scoring the goals. I was more—”
Ernie tilts his chin up and nods. “Yeah, I understand now…I gotcha.”
A Devils winger enters the offensive zone with speed, then cuts across the middle with his head down. A split second later, he’s on his back.
“Dang!” says Ernie. “He got slammed!”
The dazed player struggles to one knee and leans on his stick to stand before skating slowly, bent at the waist, to his bench. The crowd is up in arms, but the hit was legal, and it was a beauty. As I watch the trainer lean over the player’s shoulder to ensure he knows what planet he’s on, I think I miss that feeling in some way. Not the pain, but knowing I can withstand it and play on. I remember the first time I got hit in Squirts. I cried, and no one gave a shit. My head shouldn’t’ve been down skating through the neutral zone. There’s something to be said for getting physically hit by your peers during childhood within the confines of a game. It humbles you in a way I’m not sure anything else can. What’s really humbling though is spending the better part of your life dedicating yourself to something and failing to reach the top. It’s enough to make you blindly pursue another all-consuming endeavor to help you move on. It doesn’t.
During a break in the play, my eye is drawn to the white boards that line the arena that are peppered with advertisements. There’s a diversified-industrials company that I did a pitch for and another chemical company that I worked on a term-loan repricing for. I wait to see if I feel something, anything—maybe pride?—but I don’t. The ref drops the puck, and the game resumes.
The buzzer sounds as the second period finishes. Ernie and I navigate our way through the various conversations between management team members and senior bankers and arrive at the buffet next to one of the junior Goldman bankers, who shovels a lobster tail into his mouth.
“You guys look at the deal toy designs yet?” asks the Goldman analyst between bites. He’s the type of guy who, despite being in his early twenties, looks like he desperately wants to be forty-five. I imagine his ideal Saturday night is heading to a high-end hotel bar in Midtown and hitting on 501(a)(5) accreditor investors.
“Yeah,” says Ernie. “Just need to get sign-off from our seniors, but think the gray one from Altrum is our favorite.”
“You excited about the new job?” I ask the Goldman kid. “Industrials-focused PE, right?” Any time shit got bad during the deal, he’d be sure to mention how he didn’t care, since he had a job lined up.
“No,” he says, shaking his head while chewing. “Actually, a little more untraditional route.” He swallows the bite of lobster. “Small PE shop started by some ex-Goldman guys—invest in business services companies,” he corrects me.
“Ernie said you have a sister who works at Goldman too. Same group?”
“She’s in private wealth management.”
“I should give her my bonus to invest. Feel like I’m not any better at it than before banking.”
“Her clients have twenty million dollars of assets, minimum,” he says.
The game remains close through the third period. One-goal leads are exchanged twice, until the Devils tie it at three apiece with two minutes left.
Above all else—talent, hard work, all that shit—success in hockey is determined by being present in the moment. It’s this feeling I may be searching for more than anything else. In banking, there’s little time to think (and it’s generally frowned upon), but the endless tasks are merely distractions from being present. Sure, I’ve been lost when working in Excel models, but I never lose myself in the work like some of my peers do. I’m the guy operating on the fringes, just getting by and making it work. The detachment I’ve developed almost makes me more attractive to some MDs who feel the need to convince me how great the job is. It’s that internal drive, motivated by oneself, that I’ve lost, but that I see in all the players on the ice, acting on base human instincts. Now my world is motivated by external factors, the need to please others. What a way to go through life. Maybe that’s what growing up is. I sure hope not.
With thirty-two seconds remaining, the Devils player who’d gotten steamrolled in the second period pickpockets a defenseman, then releases an unexpected snapshot through the goalie’s legs. Dick celebrates with some fist-pumps, then a howl—his breath more devastating than the bone crushing hit the guy who scored the game-winner endured.
The night in the suite ends with handshakes, back slaps, and chatter of future deals.
“My driver’s here,” Dick announces. “I’ll give you guys a lift to the Ritz,” he says to the management team.
Ernie and I wait on the subway platform downstairs, where our driver, some guy wearing goggles who steers the 2 train, ushers us from the 34th Street Penn Station stop to Wall Street. The office is abuzz when we get to the forty-fourth floor around 10:30 p.m. Ernie gets to work on his new staffing, while I head to my cube and absent-mindedly check my email.
My mind drifts to the image of the guy who scored the game-winner. I miss that feeling. A part of me never left the rink.
I’m not sure it ever will.
The forty-fourth floor is like an airport terminal without the excitement of impending travel. And I’m not talking the JetBlue terminal at JFK with the good food. I’m talking LaGuardia’s sterile terminal B that reeks of old eggs and recirculates air so greasy you can taste it.
A few cubes over from me sits a senior associate, a small Asian girl who for the past few months has blockaded herself into her cube with brown boxes of deal toys. While she and her analyst wait for a pitch book to be printed in repro, I see a Zillow web page open on one of her monitors as they research the address of the MD whose apartment they’ll be couriering pitch books to in a couple hours.
“Forty-five hundred square feet…on Park Avenue,” says the analyst. “Absolute baller.”
Ernie emails me the tombstone for our deal, a small graphic that will be placed in all subsequent pitch books, extolling the bank’s deal experience. A few analysts in M&A were sacrificed along the way, but the deal closed.
It’s just after 11:00 p.m. when I sling my jacket over my shoulder and head home. The lobby attendant at the 60 Wall Street station is busy chuckling at YouTube videos on his phone as I beeline through the turnstile, then the revolving door.
A breeze rushes through the towering buildings on either side of me, but quickly subsides as I turn left and walk north on Water Street.
The homeless couple who shelter in sleeping bags near Starbucks in a small, depressed enclave created by a few stairs, rummage through mounds of garbage bags stacked on the sidewalk, collecting as many bottles and cans as they can before the garbage truck’s predawn arrival.
All four lanes of Water Street are unlit and appear deserted, until a set of bright yellow headlights pierces the darkness. A large SUV races south on Water Street. As it nears, the tires veer left, crossing the median, before swerving back to the other side of the road.
The buzz of the BlackBerry against my right thigh grabs my attention.
“Hey!” yells a man appearing from the shadows across the street. He runs toward a dark figure lying in the middle of Water Street. “Are you okay?” he says.
Reaching into my pocket, the horrifying, tiny red light blinks—over and over and over: one new email. It’s from Dick.
I look up from my BlackBerry. I can barely make out the red taillights of the SUV as it disappears south on Water Street.
I scan the email: “Spoke with CEO on drive home from game…interested in bolt-on acquisition…put together a couple pages…good to have first thing in the morning.”
Fifteen feet from me, the man helps the woman to her feet.
I turn around and walk back to the office.
The forty-fourth floor is eerily silent for 11:30 p.m. on a Thursday. At my desk, I read Dick’s email in full—a doable request I can finish in a couple hours.
A few minutes later, Rose makes the rounds, pushing her industrial-sized trashcan and emptying the mini trash bins under the desks of each cube. I reach under my desk, grab my trash bin, and hand it to her. She empties it in her large bin.
“Is nice,” she says as she eyes the vest Joel got everyone in the group, which hangs outside my cube.
“Thanks.” I turn slightly and give it a long look. “You know someone who might like it?”
Her cheeks broaden as a smile lights her face.
I remove the vest from the hanger and hand it to her. She beams as she carefully folds it and tucks it in between her cleaning supplies. Then she’s off to the next cube, reaching under the desk and grabbing the small bin, emptying it into the larger one.
By 2:07 a.m. I’ve finished a draft of the pages Dick requested for the following morning. The floor is dark and silent as I attach the PDF of the deck and hit send on the email. Seconds later, a notification pops up on my monitor—one new email. Bullshit or horrific?
My computer dings again—another new email. It’s from Masters—“Subject: AMEX call????”
I don’t bother reading either of them. They’re all bullshit emails—none are horrific. They never were. I power off my computer, stand from my desk, and as I head for the exit, the overhead lights illuminate.