7:44 PM |
I had a long-term relationship with a married man when anyone on Wall Street who showed up for work (and many who didn't) made scads of money. Scads of money in the '80s was millions of dollars, not tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, or, god forbid, billions. We heard of Texans who used the term unit. Unit was a hundred million dollars. Good god. Millions of dollars would buy you a nice house in Greenwich (you had to take the train, but the schools were good, your wife could drive her Audi, and the taxes were much, much better than in the city). And a pied a terre.
If you worked on a trading floor, you got out at 5 o'clock when the markets closed. If you were in investment banking, you worked all the time. I mean all the time. I knew people who went home once a week to shower. There were no hedge funds (except those extra secret ones you had to recite the Skull and Bones password to get into). At the time, the government bond market was the largest and most liquid in the world. Three trillion dollars. And it was a sham. There were (I think, we did too much coke for me to remember exactly) 19 primary dealers. You were a primary dealer if you agreed to bid something on each new bond issue. The dealers regularly met at Harry's and split up the auction.
My first mortgage was at 14 7/8 percent. Those were the interest rates. You were very embarrassed if you didn't pay your Bergdorf's credit card bill because you would be paying 24% interest. A year! It was also before it was okay if your card "didn't go through" and you would try another one. Well, those high coupon bonds were very attractive to buyers in London. It was a very exotic thing to do, to trade internationally. I figured out that I could buy up a ton of paper every day and then blow it out in London at 5 o'clock in the morning the next day at a good profit. By the time everyone else showed up, I'd be done. So, I'd sit there, chew on my pencil, pretend to use the special bond calculator that translated price into yield and vice versa, or look over the green lined impact-printed sheets that came from the computer department somewhere that showed all the possibilities for stuff you owned just in case you couldn't work the calculator. I also got a PC. It had a 5 1/2 inch floppy drive and 56k. I still have my first resume on a 12 inch Wang disk. Wangs were the first word processors. You moved them around on a cart, tethered to some, well, processing place. There was probably one for every ten people.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, the only ones at the bars or eating dinner were traders and salespeople for stocks and bonds and so on. You try to find a date at 5 p.m. in New York City. There were Interdealer Brokers. These were the black boxes of the time. You couldn't know who was on the other side of the trade because then you'd get an idea of how to bet against them. These IDBs talked to you on one phone and the other guy on another phone and match you up. You didn't have to dial the phone. Your three or four dealers had direct connections to your desk and you just pressed the button. I know lots of people who have destroyed their phones and their chairs when things didn't go their way. And actually when it did sometimes. The support department had extras.
It was said, however, that the real function of IDBs was to make traders happy. They took a split on each dollar traded. With the volume we went through, at 24, I was putting 50 year old guys' kids through college. I was unusual being a woman. We still had traders putting assistants over their knees, picking up their skirts, and spanking them. I once had a broker take me to dinner. He was very nervous. I called and told him I wanted to go out for a steak and a beer. He was relieved. We got to a (very expensive) steak house and I ordered a glass of wine. Would you like some?, I asked. No thank you. I tried wine once and I didn't like it.
IDB jobs are like firefighters'. They are passed through generations, usually Irish Catholics. It was like winning the lottery, and the spoils were kept amongst themselves. Naturally, all the tickets, women, drugs, limos and booze you could ever want were provided by the IDBs
Later, I worked developing trading systems. My first task was to draw pictures of computer mice for the guys on the desk so that they could get used to the idea. They drew ears on them. I met my guy on the floor. He was funny as hell, from North Carolina textile country. His son was named after one particularly prominent mills. He was a sharp dresser. Suspenders (or braces, rather, suspenders were for socks) were du rigeur, as were french cuffs and cuff links. For all I know, that's still true. My guy always had a handkerchief in his pocket. His wife was one of those gorgeous blonds on a cigarette billboard. Go figure.
We had a grand old time. Explored bathrooms everywhere. At bars. At restaurants. In airplanes. The guy who worked next to him, Billy Bob or Johnny Lee or whatever, got a real kick out of it. He was devoted to his wife, but found our wildness a laugh. We all three went to Jamaica together and drank Mrs. I Can't Remember Her Name's special tea. You could also buy special cake. We were messed up all the time. Even to this day, I can't remember a better time.
You know how you develop little code words for what you do, and how you are very smug about being in the know? Well, I was the theater, or the-a-tur as it is pronounced in the south. The the-a-tur was either closed or open. Years later, I called the two-named assistant and told him the the-a-tur was open again (I was just divorced). We howled. I don't think I counted my guy in my 16. I guess I'm not the social laggard that I thought I was.
By the way, I didn't get hurt. Everyone said I would, but we had our "I guess that requires a little blue box" moments. It worked for me. Still does.