If John had come of age on Wall Street in another era, he would have gradually accumulated money and influential friends and a reputation for success. In time he’d get involved in trading or money management and he’d move to the Island and rent an empty house with lights that would blaze all night while slept on a raft in his pool. Instead, his career stalled before it began; he had barely begun to wear cuff links when the big name dot-coms began to burn out and t he Nasdaq began its precipitous drop.
By early 2001, everyone who worked on the Street knew an end was coming but no one wanted to stare facts straight in the face. If the tech market was collapsing, that meant all of us who made our living by commenting on tech stocks were in trouble, too. The smaller hacks had been disintegrating for months, but by late winter all the companies in the financial sector were cutting workers, even firms on stable footing. Firing people was the new fad. It was certainly easier than making actual money.
Smoky called a meeting at McGrath & Swinburne one evening at seven o’clock – he pulled in the head of finance, the H.R. lead, the chief of research, and me, representing our legion of writers and editors. At the start of the meeting Smoky wrote a seven-digit number on the whiteboard. He underlined it twice with a red pen.
“This number,” he said, “is your new god.”
To worship this new deity, we had to sacrifice staff till we could save that much dough per annum. The meeting went well into the night – we ordered Chinese and the delivery guys got lost, and we ended up not eating our cold wontons till almost midnight. Meanwhile, I began to feel vaguely disgusted by what was happening around me: all the leaders were saving their own skins and gutting their staff, cutting talented people in a blind slaughter to bring those seven digits down to none.
Near two a.m., we all agreed to call it a night and resume tomorrow with the debate and negotiations. I fell in step with Smoky as he walked back to his office. As we walked near the riverfront windows where I’d done all that soul-searching a long time earlier, I delivered the proposal that I’d been quietly planning. I told Smoky to get rid of me.
“I’m the perfect candidate,” I said. “I make three times what most of the staff do.”
“Don’t be a hero, Mejeur,” he said. “You’re not the type.”
“I’m not trying to be a hero.”
“Tell me this – who’d put up with my crap if I cut you?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Nor did I have an answer to his follow-up question: what, exactly, would I do if I didn’t work for him? He knew just as well as I did that I didn’t have a life outside the confines of McGrath & Swinburne.
In the Financial District, any ground you gain – whether it’s office space or a clear patch of sun in a tiny street park where you eat lunch – is a hard-won, tightly held bounty. And so when considering what my peers did with their staff, consider the paucity of space and picture the teeming masses of the insular, incestuous world of Wall Street; then remember, too, that to get the job I had, I worked six days a week nearly ten hours each day for years and then kept at it because there was always someone eager to annex my place in the sun and call it his or her own.
Imagine if I had resigned as I was threatening to do? No one really was hiring on the Street due to the market. I had a journalism degree, yes, but I had not really written a feature story or thought about framing a narrative in ages. As a last ditch idea, I considered what if I went back to the quiet, well-mannered Midwest and took up a more humble life doing something useful, like teaching a community college course.
But a return to the place where I was born would never happen, could never happen. My Uncle Horace had admonished me to leave, to go out into the world and succeed; and I could only come back on the terms of success, and even then only if Horace granted that I had made something winning of myself. But Horace would never bestow this. He died not long after I left for college. He had a heart attack while test driving a bright red Chrysler Le Baron convertible – he’d wanted a convertible for years but never bought one. Impractical in Michigan, he’d said. The car rolled off a bridge and landed in the river upside down. There was a picture in the paper of scuba divers trying to bring up the wreck.
The next day I showed up at work and joined Smoky and the others in the conference room. We started in on staff cuts again and right away Smoky turned and asked if I had some names in mind. I nodded and cleared my throat. I gave up something in that moment, something genuine and optimistic. I sometimes still wish that I had grasped his slightly meaty shoulder the night earlier while standing there at the windows and told him that there was no chance I could stand by and watch other people get hit while I survived, unscathed. But I did no such thing then and I certainly did not do it a day later in that conference room while all my peers watched me.
“This is going to hurt,” I said, “but I don’t see any other option.”
The lay-offs occurred on a snowy Tuesday morning in late March; the management divided employees between clean and unclean, and John was cast out among the cloven-hoofed and the reptiles. I had to cut almost half of my staff and as a recent hire he didn’t make the grade. He didn’t say much after he was told of his dismissal. I would guess that he didn’t want to look like a martyr. Better to sign the severance letter, shake a few hands, and disappear down the street just like all the rest, no need to pretend to heroics or hurt feelings.
After leaving the building, all of the lepers gathered at Fraunce’s Tavern and the survivors came trundling after them, and we huddled around and told them more of the usual reassuring words: this was for the best, this was like a get-out-of-jail card, this was fate. The dim light and the dark oak panel walls helped obscure the hurt; so did the extra stiff drinks from Joe G., our favorite bartender. I’m not sure we paid for half of what we drank. Among that crowd, realizing this was my last chance seeing so many of them, I frosted up with sentimental sorrow.
John had no precedent for lay-offs or for this kind of wholesale job cutting. At the end of the bar, he sat hunched over his preferred drink for obliteration – Maker’s Mark neat. In moments like this it was clear how little experience he had in the corporate world, how young he was, a mere boy of 21. He always seemed so competent, so without need for input or guidance.
I came to him abashed and offering all the apologies that I could muster. I explained how I had had little choice in the matter. I promised to give him a letter of recommendation that he could plunk down on the desk of any prospective employer. (That’s assuming he could find an employer who was hiring.) Despite all the words I used on him, he stared out the window at the whorls of snow cascading down between all the tall glass buildings.
“You can quit apologizing, chief,” he said to me at last. “I know it’s not you.”
“This kind of thing just happens,” I said, nodding. “And it’s not because you’re not talented.”
“I get that. This is all the usual corporate B.S. Sure. No, what I can’t believe is that I haven’t seen Smoky once. He’s nowhere to be seen. He’s been hiding all day. You’d think he would at least say to folks, hey, thanks for the hard work, but we’re going in a different direction.”
I could not disagree with John and so instead I bought a round of Captain and Cokes. And then another round. And another. By the end of the night, he had me nodding along to all of his points – especially when he hit on the lack of simple decency among the managers of McGrath & Swinburne, maybe among anyone at all on Wall Street.
To the tune of John’s rant, I said I’d like to see Smoky show up here. I’d tell him what I really thought of him, with his little black cigarillos and his insipid matchbooks. I pantomimed punching him in the fat gut – “right between the suspenders!” – and torching his matchbook collection. John laughed too hard and spilled his drink down the front of his black shirt.
For a time, that night, we were the best of friends, as if we were two people who would live and walk in the same world for the rest of our days. This was an illusion, of course. At last call, when we said goodbye he looked off into the street and into a world that I could no longer witness.
We shook hands on the curb. He hadn’t zipped up his coat and I could see the wet black mark on his shirt where he’d spilled a drink on himself. In the dark it looked like blood from a wound, as if someone had stabbed him in the chest. And wasn’t that, after all, essentially what I had done? True to form his face didn’t show a trace of pain or hurt.
“See you around, chief,” he said, and then he was gone.
Rather than return inside I went hailed my own cab for home. Hurtling round the lower tip of the island, I considered telling the cabbie to take me somewhere other than Chelsea. I wanted to go visit someone I cared about and who cared about me. I couldn’t think of who that would be. I considered uptown, downtown, in Queens, in Jersey—nothing. Years of dedication to the idea of my job had left me with a sense of accomplishment, an ample salary, and no discernible skills for the world outside the Financial District.
In that surging loneliness I considered giving the cabbie the address of Jordanne Orleans, one of our lead analysts at work. For years I had nurtured an unrequited crush on her. From time to time she consented to meet me for drinks but there was no hope of anything between us. To make matters worse, during a tidal surge of the Nasdaq recently she and I drank highballs till we were tittering like college kids and her hand brushed mine and rather than play cool instead I placed my palm along the contour of her cheek.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, leaning into my palm. I wanted to lean over the table and kiss her. And I would have. Except she began to cry then, real large tears that stood in large pools on the wood tabletop. “You know how long it’s been,” she said, “since someone touched me just to be sweet?”
We lingered there for nearly a minute. I felt a real, true connection with her, a feeling I thought might unfurl into something deep and mutual. Then her mobile phone rang. Boyfriend.
The next day Jordanne called me up, saying she would be late with the morning analysis; she moaned about her head and said she could barely remember the night before but she hoped she did not do anything too embarrassing. Her sweet Georgia belle accent made everything she said sound genuine and demure. Of course not, I told her, and then we went on with our day, and our lives, resuming the role of chummy co-workers, although she didn’t ask me out to drinks again. And I didn’t ask her, either.
For a long time after that I avoided the bar where we’d had our drink. I was afraid, I think, that it might not actually exist; that, if I pushed open the wood-paneled front door again, inside I’d find empty floors and naked plumbing fixtures and cobwebs that had been in New York longer than I had been and would outlast me.
Outside the window of the cab, the street lamps of the West Side Highway whipped past and I tried to think of John Marion as just a person from my past, as someone I’d move beyond. Just one more missed connection, a lost chance at a lasting friendship. Except this wasn’t as simple as that. I was to blame, after all for what had happened. I had kept my cushy career and life and assumed a debt that I had no real intention of repaying.
Later, after I was home, and staring at myself in the mirror over the sink in my bathroom. I stared hard into my face and said, in a voice barely loud enough even for myself to hear, “You’re a jerk, Ace. You’re a jerk, get used to it.” But no matter how many times I said it – and I was drunk enough to say it many times – I still couldn’t reconcile myself to the idea. I still had hope for myself and for finding a way to redeem what I’d done.
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