- •Vernon gant.
- •It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, about four o’clock, sunny and not too cold. I was walking along Twelfth Street at a steady clip, smoking a cigarette,
- •I was certainly sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As
- •I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been
- •I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of
- •I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
- •It out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re
- •In. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.
- •I sat staring into my own drink now, wondering what had happened to Melissa. I was wondering how all of that bluster and creative energy of hers could have been
- •I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well, you certainly haven’t changed.
- •I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue a it
- •I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark and quiet as it can get in a city,
- •I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling
- •I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
- •I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and
- •I was eventually called back over to Brogan’s desk and asked to read and sign the statement. As I went through it, he sat in silence, playing with a paper clip. Just
- •I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
- •I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in
- •I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.
- •In the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, k & d’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but
- •I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.M., and lay in bed for about an hour before I
- •I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I
- •I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time
- •I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly –
- •I laughed. ‘I might be.’
- •I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently
- •I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant,
- •I sketched out possible projects. One idea was to withdraw Turning On from Kerr & Dexter and develop it into a full-length study – expand the text and cut back
- •I nodded.
- •I stepped over quickly and stood behind him. On the middle screen, the one he was working at, I could see tightly packed columns of figures and fractions and
- •I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start daytrading
- •I resolved to begin the following morning.
- •I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out
- •It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock,
- •I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d
- •I paused, and then nodded yes.
- •I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and nonjudgemental
- •I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my pc, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two
- •I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the
- •It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless,
- •It did seem to me to be instinct, though – but informed instinct, instinct based on a huge amount of research, which of course, thanks to mdt-48, was conducted
- •Its susceptibility to predictable metaphor – it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God – the stock market was nevertheless
- •I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and
- •I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my
- •I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the
- •Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing
- •Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’
- •It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than
- •I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.
- •Very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or
- •I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at
- •I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.
- •I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.
- •I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was
- •I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.
- •Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.
- •I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large,
- •I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control
- •Vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of mdt –
- •If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.
- •I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass
- •I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.
- •I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the
- •I nodded.
- •I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
- •I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’
- •I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.
- •I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be ok, that I had quite a few mdt pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually
- •In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds.
- •It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: mdt-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the
- •I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about
- •I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got
- •I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
- •In this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.
- •I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing
- •Involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as
- •I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I
- •Investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.
- •Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I
- •I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I
- •I stared at him, nodding my head.
- •I took a tiny plastic container with ten mdt pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into
- •I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next
- •I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.
- •I should have expected trouble, of course, but I hadn’t been letting myself think about it.
- •I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but
- •Information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.
- •I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to
- •In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the
- •I studied the pages for a few moments, flicking through them randomly. Then I came across the ‘Todd’ calls. His surname was Ellis.
- •I left the office at around 4 p.M. And went to Tenth Street, where I’d arranged to meet my landlord. I handed over the keys and took away the remainder of my
- •I looked back at Ginny. She pulled out the chair and sat down. She placed her clutch bag on the table and joined her hands together, as though she were about to
- •I half smiled, and he was gone.
- •I glared at him.
- •I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
- •It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.
- •Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle,
- •I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’
- •I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night – probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard – had seen the
I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and nonjudgemental
– noncompetitive – might have struck some kind of a chord in people, especially in people who were stressed out and on their guard all the time. At any
rate, these days I had the talking thing a bit more under control, so I decided to let Kevin take the lead. I asked him about Van Loon and Associates.
‘We’re a small investment bank,’ he began, ‘about two hundred and fifty employees. We do venture capital, fund management, real estate, that kind of thing. We’ve
brokered some fairly big entertainment deals recently. We did the MCL-Parnassus purchase of Cableplex last year, and Carl Van Loon himself is currently in talks
about something else to Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL.’ He paused, and then added, as though telling me he’d just been picked for the soccer team, ‘I’m a
managing director.’
But when he elaborated on this a bit, explaining that he was one of seven or eight managing directors in the company who babysat their own deals and then came out
with huge commissions, I realized for the first time that Kevin wasn’t just some Wall Street schmoe. From what he was telling me, I quickly reckoned that he probably
cleared about two or three million a year.
Now I was impressed.
‘What about Van Loon? Is he …’ I asked, not even having a real question here, obviously succumbing a little to the magnetic pull of celebrity that still surrounded
Kevin’s boss.
‘Carl’s all right. He’s mellowed a lot, you know. Over the years. But he still works as hard as ever.’
I nodded, thinking How hard could that be?
‘The firm wouldn’t be what it is today without him.’
This was a man who probably cleared about two or three million a week.
‘Hhn.’
‘So … how have you been?’
‘Me? Fine.’
I didn’t remember much of our previous encounter, but I was pretty sure I’d mentioned my book, and probably without saying that it was part of a cheesy series for
a second-rate publisher – so, at least as far as I knew, Kevin thought I was a writer of some kind, a commentator, someone with their finger, so to speak, on the pulse
of the Zeitgeist … someone he could have an intelligent, self-congratulatory but non-threatening conversation with, and about stuff like the new economy and
megatrends and digitalization.
But I got to the point fairly fast.
‘What do you make of all this electronic day-trading, Kevin?’
He thought for a second. ‘It’s just noise. These guys aren’t speculators, or even investors, they’re gamblers – or else sorry geeks who think they’ve democtratized
the markets.’ He made a face. ‘When this bubble pops, let me tell you, there’s going to be a lot of blood spattered on the walls.’
He took a sip from his drink.
I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my pc, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two
days.’
Kevin looked at me in horror for a few seconds, taking in the information. But he was also confused, and obviously didn’t know what to say. Then it registered.
‘A quarter of a million?’
‘Hmm.’
‘In two days? That’s pretty good.’
‘Yeah, I think so. But I find I’m weirdly – how can I put this? – dissatisfied with it. I feel constricted. I need to expand.’
As he tried to come to terms with what I was telling him, Kevin shifted on his stool and maybe even squirmed a little. He was a confident guy, clearly very successful,
and it was odd to see him mired in uncertainty like this.
‘Ehm … perhaps …’ he scratched his nose, ‘you could … why don’t you try one of those day-trading firms?’
I asked him what difference that would make.
‘Well, you’re not isolated, you’re in a room with a bunch of other traders and on the principle that no one in an environment like that wants to see anyone else
failing, you help each other out, and share information. Most firms also offer high leverage, anywhere between five to ten times your deposit. You get a better feel for
the behaviour of the markets, as well,’ – he was getting back into his stride here – ‘because it’s often just a question of being able to gauge the collective mood, and
then deciding either to go with it or … I don’t know’ – he shrugged his shoulders – ‘against it.’
I asked him if he could recommend one of these places.
‘There are a couple of good ones I’ve heard about – actually on, or at least around, Wall Street itself. Though if you ask me, Eddie, it sounds like you’re doing
pretty good on your own.’
I wrote down the names he reeled off and thanked him anyway. Then we each took sips from our respective glasses.
‘So … a quarter of a million in two days.’ He whistled in admiration. ‘What’s your strategy?’
I was about to give him an edited version of events when two guys in suits came up behind us and one of them slapped Kevin on the back. ‘Hey Doyle, you old dog,
what’s happening?’
These were money-scented financial-sector jocks, and when Kevin introduced me but didn’t say that I was a managing director or an executive vice-president with
this or that outfit, they more or less ignored me. During the ensuing conversation about the emerging markets of Latin America, and then about the tech stocks bubble, I
could see Kevin struggling with his fear that I was going to start talking again about day-trading on a PC – and in front of these guys. So when I stood up to go, I think
he was a little relieved.
I told him I’d phone him in a few days’ time and let him know how I’d gotten on with that thing we’d been discussing.
*
Lafayette Trading was on Broad Street, just a few blocks down from the New York Stock Exchange. In the main room of a sparsely furnished suite of offices on the
fourth floor, twenty tables were arranged in a large rectangle. Each table held enough terminals and PCs for at least three traders, and of the fifty or so traders I saw
there on my first morning – all male, each seated in comfortable executive-style chairs – I’d say more than half of them were under thirty years old, and of those about
half again were wearing jeans and baseball caps.
The deal was that you put down a minimum deposit of $25,000 and Lafayette then provided all the hardware and software you needed in order to trade. In return
for this, they charged a commission of two cents a share on each trade you made. If you wanted it, and most people did, they also offered pretty high leverage on your
deposit. I registered with them, paying a deposit of $200,000 and then arranged to leverage myself to two and a half times that amount – which meant, effectively, that I
was starting off this new phase of my trading career with half a million dollars at my disposal.