was great. I’m trading size already, you know? They want me to just hit the ground running.”
“What does trading size mean?” I asked. Reese pretended to cough to muffle his laughter.
“You know, big trades. Moneymakers, not the little dinky trades that don’t matter if you fuck them up.”
“I sit on a folding chair. I guess I’m doing the opposite of trading size,” I said.
“Adam, tell Alex how you did it. Teach her how to work the ropes. Tell her the whole story like you told me.”
Adam was loving the attention. “So there’s this company called Cox Communications, a major player. So this guy I’m working with is a fellow Tiger. He’s a great guy and really lets me get involved—we were in the same eating club. He took the order from his client and then told me to shout out the order to the trader.”
Here I had to interrupt, because I knew he was lying. “Adam, you haven’t passed the Series 7 or the Series 63 yet. You aren’t allowed to trade. There’s no way they let you do that. It’s illegal.”
“Well, no, I didn’t execute the actual trade, but his client wanted a big chunk of shares. I had to tell the trader to start building a position, but it wasn’t an actual order.”
Reese continued to prompt Adam to finish the story. “So, Adam, what exactly did he tell you to do?”
“I had to stand up and scream across the floor to the trader that I was a large buyer of Cox.”
Reese started laughing and asked Adam to repeat what he’d said.
“You said what?”
“I said I was a large buyer of Cox. Everyone started clapping and cheering. It was awesome.”
I’d heard it before, but now I saw it was true: book smarts and street smarts are not the same thing. As far as street smarts went, Adam was clearly a complete idiot.
Reese stood there, his arms folded across his chest, slowly nodding his head. Then he stepped forward and put one hand on each of Adam’s shoulders. “Adam, we’ve got to teach this girlie how real men operate. So, one more time, show us how you yelled it on the floor.”
“I’M A LARGE BUYER OF COX!” he yelled proudly.
Reese dropped his hands from Adam’s shoulders. He tilted his head to one side, never losing eye contact with him, and said ever so slowly, “If I were you, Adam, I wouldn’t be crowing about having announced that you’re a pole smoker. I’m sure the guys in equities have been laughing their asses off at you ever since.”
Adam’s body went rigid. He turned bright red as the full force of his own stupidity hit him. He tried to pretend he was invisible. He wasn’t. His brow furrowed like he was in pain, and quietly he said good-bye, this time getting my name right. He walked away slowly, his shoulders slumped forward, no longer pulled back in their arrogant Princeton posture.
I stood silent. I wanted to laugh, but he was my peer, my counterpart on the equity floor. If they could make Adam—undeniably smart and aware—humiliate himself that way, what on earth did my team have in store for me?
Reese patted my head again. “Still think we don’t like you, sugar?”
“I can’t believe they did that to him.”
“See, that’s what people will do when they don’t like you. The more time you spend here, the more you’ll see how badly we can torment someone when we want to make him miserable. If the worst thing that has happened to you is that you don’t have a real desk, then you have nothing to worry about. Play the game, sugar, just play the game.”
“I don’t know how to play the game.”
“You’ll learn. Until then, just keep your head down and wear beige … you get what I’m saying?”
I did. It was the first thing I genuinely understood since I had started. That was something to be thankful for.
“I get it. And I should keep fancying the swine, right?”
“Always fancy the swine, sugar. Now, stop holding up the railing. Get over there and start mingling! You’re in sales, for God’s sake. We don’t need any wallflowers in the group. Work the crowd, make people like you, and pretend to like the assholes you can’t stand. That’s all part of your new job.”
“Thanks, Reese,” I said as I followed him into the crowd with a renewed sense of confidence and enthusiasm. “For the advice, I appreciate it.”
“You’re one of us now, sugar. One thing about our desk: we always have each other’s backs. It doesn’t mean we won’t fuck with you mercilessly, though.”
“Sort of like older brothers?”
“Exactly. Forty of them.”
Reese had given me my very first sales lesson, and it was probably the most important one that I would ever learn: if I wanted to be successful, then I needed to get really good at pretending to like people I didn’t.
Four
If I Wanted to Educate the Youth of America, I’d Have Been a Fucking Nursery School Teacher
THE FIRST WEEK of October, I celebrated a very important occasion with Annie and Liv at a sushi restaurant downtown named, ironically, Bond Street. I had passed all my exams. It was a Friday night and we were all in good moods, so we hit the downstairs lounge of the restaurant and threw back martinis, sushi, and Bloody Marys made with wasabi until two in the morning. It was a good thing we all had apartments to go home to or I have no doubt Liv and I would have fallen asleep on the train and ended up missing our stop on Metro North. Chick didn’t register much when I proudly handed him the printouts proving my passing grades on all three exams. I don’t know what I expected him to say. Maybe “Good job, Alex.” Or, even, “Take the day off, Alex.” But he didn’t. He glanced at the paper, gave me a fist bump, and went into a meeting. I tried not to let it bother me.
I THOUGHT MAYBE I’d get my own desk after I passed my exams, but November arrived and I was still stuck in the folding chair. Someone had written “Girlie” on the back of it with a Wite-Out pen, so I never had any trouble finding my seat. I wish I knew whom to thank for that.
Every few days I’d move my chair along the row to sit in between two new salespeople. It was impossible to remember the names of my coworkers, because everyone had multiple aliases and was called by various combinations of first, surname, and/or nickname at any given point in time. I didn’t know how I was ever going to keep them all straight. There were multiple Johns, Joes, Bobs, and Peters plus those who went by Murph, Sully, or Fitzie, and their names may or may not have also started with John or Joe or Bob or Peter. Then there were the guys with nicknames that replaced whatever their first names were, usually because of personal quirks or idiosyncrasies. There was “Loaf,” named for his horrendously thick head of hair that looked like a loaf of bread; and there were “Tank,” “Moose,” and “Pigpen.” There was a guy called “Mangia” because he ate a lot, and one called “Two-Bite” because he didn’t. There was “Shrek,” “Barney Rubble,” and one tall guy with an unusually
