of alpha girls I knew in junior high. I had gone to the University of Virginia, an intellectually inferior school as far as they were concerned. I felt, warranted or not, like an outcast. Not exactly how I wanted to start my first day.
The hierarchy in most Wall Street firms is clearly delineated. You spend your first few years as an analyst, responsible for learning as much as you can, and making sure the rest of “the team” gets their lunch orders picked up from the lobby in a timely fashion. From there, you move up the ranks to associate, then to vice president, then director, then managing director and, from there, I was pretty sure you jumped to the executive committee or something. For my purposes it didn’t really matter. All I needed to know was that I was as junior as junior could get, and I therefore worked for everyone. I figured as long as I kept that in mind, I would be okay. At least I hoped so, because from what I had heard, forgetting your rung on the corporate ladder was a very bad idea.
I was one of ten analysts who stepped off the elevator when the doors opened on the eleventh floor, all of us assigned to various “desks” in the fixed-income division. There were people waiting in the hallway for us as we exited the elevator, everyone somehow knowing which clueless analyst he was supposed to claim ownership of. As I stepped onto the marble floor I was immediately intercepted by a stocky man with shocking green eyes and short brown hair. He was imposing and suave, attractive in a rugged way, the kind of guy who instantly commands your attention. I figured he was in his midforties, due to slight graying at his temples, but it was hard to tell. Men are annoying like that. He seemed to excrete charisma from his pores as easily as a normal person sweats. His khaki pants and blue-and-white-checkered shirt were pressed within an inch of their life, and his brown tweed blazer fit him perfectly. He looked like a brunette Ken doll, live and in the flesh. When he extended his hand to greet me, I noticed that his fingers were thick and squat, but that his skin was smooth and his nails were perfectly manicured. Here was an interesting dichotomy: a guy who oozed machismo but who also valued immaculately buffed nails. This was my first introduction to a legitimate Cromwell salesman and, more important, my first introduction to Ed Ciccone, otherwise known as Chick. My boss.
Chick was a trading floor veteran. I’d come to learn that he’d spent twenty years in the Business, fifteen of them on this very trading floor. He was smart, ferociously competitive, and could sell just about anything. He was well known on the Street for his hard partying, his lavish entertainment spending, and his ability to function on little to no sleep. He was wildly successful, extremely popular, and hugely intimidating. He didn’t waste time with formalities; after a perfunctory shake of my hand, he turned and walked toward the trading floor, a vast room that encompassed nearly the entire floor of the building, except for the foyer by the elevator bank, a coffee stand in the hallway right outside the elevator vestibule that was swarming with people who probably didn’t need more caffeine, and a few offices lining the perimeter. I could hear screams on the trading floor from the elevator vestibule and felt my hands begin to sweat. It seemed like total chaos. People—nine out of ten of them men—raced through the hall, their loafers crushing the once-plush carpet fibers flat and thin, talking, laughing, cursing. Some wore ties and jackets. Most wore khakis and their moods tattooed on their foreheads. We wove in and out of people as we approached the small staircase that led down to the floor, and for the first time I could see huge banners hanging from the ceiling marking the accolades the division had earned over the years, the way the championship banners hung in Madison Square Garden. The room was enormous. A girl could get lost in there and need the dog teams from the New York City Police Department to be found. I felt my legs begin to tremble.
Chick spoke insanely fast, like his lungs didn’t need oxygen at the same rate as a normal person’s. His smile was friendly and his demeanor was welcoming, but at the same time I had the sense that if I screwed up he would make sure I spent the rest of my Cromwell career stuffing FedEx envelopes in the mailroom. We made a left before we hit the small staircase that led to the floor and walked down a hallway lined with glass-enclosed offices. Small plaques mounted next to the doors displayed the occupants’ name, a small sign of stature that differentiated the office-endowed from their peers. Only very senior managers received offices, because they were a scarce commodity on the floor. The majority of employees only had a seat on “the desk” on the trading floor; no hope of privacy, no direct-dial phone numbers, no chance of having two minutes of solitude during the day unless they locked themselves in the bathroom. Chick wasn’t one of the majority.
We walked past his secretary, who Chick quickly introduced as Nancy, and pushed open a heavy glass door into his office. I found myself staring through floor-to-ceiling windows on the opposite wall that afforded an uninterrupted view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Photographers could have used Chick’s office to shoot postcards to sell in Times Square—I wasn’t entirely convinced they didn’t. If I had this view, I’d sit in here all day, but it didn’t seem like Chick spent much time in his office at all. His shiny lacquered desk and aerodynamic chair were squarely in the middle of the room, and there were two leather-backed chairs facing his desk. The walls that abutted the adjacent offices were completely bare, although with the view I guess he figured artwork was unnecessary. I scanned his desk, which held a monitor with two keyboards, and a phone, and was covered with disorganized stacks of papers and books. A mini basketball hoop was attached to the rim of an empty wastebasket on the wall on the right, next to a large fish tank containing three tropical fish. That was about it.
He sat down behind his desk, with his back to the view of the water. I found it kind of funny that the people who occupied these offices sat with their backs to one of the most iconic New York landmarks, but I guess Cromwell figured the view was meant to impress guests, not employees. “Take a seat,” Chick commanded from his chair as he motioned to the empty chairs facing him.
I did as I was told and placed my hands on my knees to keep them from shaking. This guy terrified me.
“Okay, Alex,” he said as he put his hands behind his head and his feet up on his desk, so that I was staring at the soles of his brown Gucci loafers. He leaned back in his chair and talked to me while he stared straight up at the ceiling. It was very disconcerting having a conversation with someone when the only way you knew for sure he was actually talking to you was because you were the only other person in the room. “I run my group pretty openly. There aren’t a lot of rules you need to know, but I’ll go over the basics. You’re smart, I know, because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here. I promise you, though, that you aren’t the smartest person in this building. What that means is that I expect you to work hard; I expect you to be the first person here in the morning and the last person to leave at night. Unless, of course, you think that you know more than some of the guys who have been busting their asses for twenty years. Do you think that, Alex?”
I wasn’t really sure if the question was rhetorical. It was difficult to tell when he still hadn’t taken his eyes off the ceiling.
“No, Mr. Ciccone. I don’t think that.” There was a piece of pink gum stuck in the tread of his left shoe.
“Good. I’m here by 6:30 every morning, so you do the math and get in before me. That’s rule number one. Rule number two is don’t call me Mr. Ciccone. I’m not your high school math teacher and we’re all adults here. Call me Chick like everyone else. You will not ask for anything. The way I see it, you don’t deserve anything. No one knows you, you haven’t done one productive thing to help this group make money, and until you do, you should just thank God every day that you’re able to clear the turnstiles in the lobby. Your job, until I tell you otherwise, is to learn as much as you can by observing the rest of the team and asking questions without annoying them to the point where they punch you in the face. Help out when they ask you to. If that means you pick up someone’s laundry and drop it off at his apartment, or buy a birthday present for his wife, then you do it and you do it with a smile. It might not be in the job description, but you can take comfort in knowing that you will at least be the highest-paid delivery girl on the planet. I personally interviewed more than eighty applicants for the one spot in this department this year, so I know
