Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits (10 page)

MIDWAY THROUGH THEIR
second beer, Jeremy Miller-Reed and Samson White started discussing the best ways to kill themselves at work.

“If the goal is, like, how do I inflict maximum psychological damage,” Jeremy said, “then I think just going up to your desk and blowing your brains out in the middle of the day would be the best.”

“Nah,” Samson said. “You know what would happen? All the other analysts would get an e-mail from the associates saying, ‘Can you guys clean this up?’ And then everyone would go back to work.”

It was mid-March 2011, more than halfway through their first year at Goldman Sachs, and Jeremy and Samson were both trying their hands at gallows humor. Their initial excitement about working at the most esteemed bank on Wall Street had quickly evaporated, and devastating depression had taken root. Sometimes, their misery manifested in humor—calling Goldman’s 200 West Street headquarters “Azkaban,” for example, after the prison in the Harry Potter series where inmates’ souls are sucked from their bodies. Other times, it took on a more serious tone. More than once, while walking to work through the streets of Battery Park City before dawn, Jeremy had pondered how much time he’d get off from work if he was hit by a car, and whether the trade-off of a few broken limbs would be worth it. Samson, who had once been among the huge throng of Goldman workers who gathered at the corner of Murray Street and West Street every morning while waiting to cross the West Side Highway, now crossed the highway by himself, a block further north. The detour cost him five minutes, but it made him feel less like part of a platoon of soulless banker automatons, and more like his own man.

All of Goldman’s first-year analysts had gotten their first bonuses several weeks earlier—a $30,000 stub bonus that represented half of their total bonus for the twelve-month period. It was an uncharacteristically large number on Wall Street that year, and it would mean that all of them would be making $130,000, all told, for a first year of postcollege work. That was serious money, well above the median national income, but Jeremy and Samson didn’t particularly care. They were barely getting by, and it had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the ways in which Goldman Sachs had taken over their lives.

They had started smoking weed together on Jeremy’s roof deck—first occasionally, then nearly every day as their outlooks on life worsened. And, during some of these smoking sessions, they had started plotting a mass exodus of first-year analysts out of Goldman, in which everyone would announce their departure on the same day, then take to the Internet and tell their horror stories of working at the bank. They called this fantasy “Wall Street Drop Day,” and had even taken the liberty of reserving the domain name wallstdropday.com, just in case it ever came to fruition.

For Jeremy, who had started out on such a promising note on the Goldman commodities desk, most of the change could be encapsulated in a single word: Penelope.

Penelope was a managing director in Jeremy’s group. A tall brunette with mesmerizing blue eyes and a lean physique toned by a decade’s worth of yoga and spin classes, she had been feared and despised by her junior analysts for years. Some of them had taken note of her strong resemblance to the actress Julia Roberts and given her the nickname “Pretty Woman.” And stories about her wrath were legion.

Jeremy had come into the commodities group working mostly with Graham Campbell, the executive who was nicknamed “the Senator.” But after a few months at Graham’s hip, he’d been staffed in quick succession on a number of projects with Penelope, who had all of Graham’s intensity with none of his charm. Penelope had spent the last fifteen years at Goldman amassing political capital inside the firm and building up an impressive book of clients, and her temper had grown along with her seniority. She spent much of the day yelling at support staff and colleagues for a never-ending string of offenses. She would yell about missing lines of credit, errors in trade bookings, and restaurant maître d’s who couldn’t get her a reservation at the last minute. (Jeremy knew, from overhearing her phone calls, that she had a particularly chilly relationship with the mechanics at Land Rover of Manhattan.)

Jeremy had been unhappy enough observing Penelope’s belligerence from a few desks away, but in December, she’d turned her wrath on him. She assigned him a twenty-page memo for one of the group’s clients, outlining the potential terms of a revolving credit facility that would give the bank more competitive pricing on future commodity deals. Then she went on vacation, leaving him to figure out the project on his own.

When Penelope returned a week later, she told Jeremy that while he’d done good work, she needed a few tiny changes before the client presentation. Over the next four days, those “few tiny changes” expanded to thirty or forty revisions, many of them contradicting earlier revisions, and some as minor as changing double quotation marks to single quotes. And with each revision, her tone would harshen, and her temper would flare.

On Friday, Penelope went to present Jeremy’s memo to the client. And during her presentation, she discovered that a chart she’d expected to be nestled neatly on a specific page wasn’t there. She was furious. She came back from the meeting, went straight to Jeremy’s desk, and proceeded to upbraid him in front of his entire group.

“You had all week to get this right!” she screamed.

That night, after going out to a bar with some friends, Jeremy went back to his usual spot on the roof of his apartment building, lit up a joint, and broke down. It was raining outside, and the tears streaming down Jeremy’s face merged with the water droplets running down from his hair.

I can’t do this anymore
, he thought.
No one deserves to be treated like this.

He flashed back to a conversation he’d had with his then-girlfriend in August 2009, when he went to visit her at her family’s beach house during his summer internship, before his commodities rotation began.

Back then, he’d told her about what had happened that summer—how he’d gotten two bad desk scramble assignments, busted his ass anyway, and ended up charming one of the senior executives in commodities and landing a third rotation with his group. If he got a full-time offer from the commodities desk, he told her, he’d essentially be setting himself up for life.

“I mean, Lloyd Blankfein started in this exact seat,” he said. “I’d be getting the same job that made Lloyd Blankfein.”

His girlfriend, who didn’t fully understand what was at stake but sensed it was important, paused and thought for a moment.

“You know,” she said. “If you get this job, it’s going to change your life.”

Her line stuck with Jeremy, and buoyed him all over the last and most difficult weeks of the summer analyst program. He’d gotten a high from the knowledge that Goldman would, in fact, change his life. He imagined himself using his Goldman gravitas to launch himself to a position, in whatever field he chose, that would afford him real power and influence.

But now, as he found himself in an industry in decline, surrounded by Penelope, the Senator, and dozens of other people whose aspirations extended only as far as their GC counts, he wondered if those words had been more omen than encouragement.

Several days after his encounter with Penelope, Jeremy opened a blank document on his computer, and began listing all the places he’d rather work. He listed things like working at the genome institute run by the famed biologist Craig Venter, Google Ventures, and a sustainable energy start-up. He gave the document a name: “Escape Routes.” And then he returned to work, knowing that his days were probably numbered.

Samson, too, had been made a target of his boss’s wrath over a mistake.

That spring, Samson had been assigned a huge project—an exchange rate model he’d had to build for a client who was looking to invest in the Brazilian real estate market. He’d worked on it for weeks, pulling many nearly-all-nighters, fueled by dozens of 5-hour Energy canisters, to finish.

After he finally turned it in, he realized that he’d slipped up on page 27 of 40, and accidentally duplicated a previous page’s formulas. He thought the mistake might slip by unnoticed, but at breakfast the next day, he got an e-mail from his associate.

“Hey, grab me when you’re around,” the e-mail read.

When he got in, he plodded into the associate’s office, and saw that she wasn’t smiling.

“Do you see a problem with these two pages?” she said.

Samson played dumb. “Uh, no?”

“Are you serious?” she said. “They’re exactly the same.”

“Oh.”

The associate glared at him.

“Listen. Do you want to make it here?”

“Um, yes,” Samson said.

“Well then, you need to pay attention. You’re not there yet. And you’re not going to get there unless you stop making stupid mistakes. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Samson was crushed. He’d been entrusted with more and more important projects every week since arriving as a full-time analyst. He’d had a few moments of mediocrity, but overall, he thought he was at least treading water. But now, he was realizing that his performance was below average, and the confidence blow was staggering. It occurred to him that in his entire life, from his early childhood up through his time at Princeton, he’d never truly been bad at anything.

That winter, Samson had seen his work problems manifest physically. He’d been gaining weight, drinking to excess, and getting far too little sleep. And he was sinking into what he feared was an acute case of depression. In an attempt to turn himself around, he began taking improv comedy classes at a theater in Midtown. He went to Vegas with his roommates for a weekend-long bender. He’d started working out at the Goldman gym, and took pains to reconnect with some old friends from college. But nothing was helping.

When he started at Goldman, Samson had begun a daily routine of going up the elevators with a friend at the bank—an analyst named Greg—to Goldman’s Sky Lobby. The Sky Lobby was Goldman’s name for its spacious eleventh floor, where the firm cafeteria, coffee bar, gym, and lounging area were located. Samson and Greg would escape there for ten or fifteen minutes, get a pastry at the coffee bar, and catch each other up on the gossip of the day. But that winter, Greg noticed that Samson wasn’t saying a word during their catch-ups. He would just sit there, looking vacant and exhausted, often so nervous that he would forget to eat his pastry. Greg tried to coax Samson out of his slump by cracking jokes and sharing funny gossip about their coworkers. But it was no use.

“I just don’t feel like being here,” Samson told Greg one morning.

That winter, Jeremy and Samson bonded over their common misery. They hung out together outside of work nearly every day, and would often end a tough day of work by smoking on Jeremy’s roof. On weekends, they’d talk until sunrise, after which Samson would leave and go back to his apartment to sleep. (These all-nighters happened frequently enough that the apartment building’s doorman began to suspect that Jeremy and Samson were dating.)

In early March, Samson went out to a bar with Jeremy and a group of his friends. He could always rely on his friends, even the ones who didn’t work on Wall Street, to understand him. And, as the drinks flowed, he’d poured forth his woes, letting everyone close to him know how unhappy he was. Several days later, Samson’s roommate Mark walked into his room, bearing a gift-wrapped box about the size and shape of a skateboard.

“Dude, I have the perfect present for you.”

Samson opened the box. Inside was a large, electric clock with illuminated red letters and four sets of numbers marked, “Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds.”

“It’s a countdown clock,” Mark explained. “You can set it for the day you want to leave Goldman, and start counting down.”

Samson smiled. A countdown clock was perfect. Even if he didn’t end up quitting right away, having a device to remind himself that his Goldman tenure was a finite experience would help him immensely. With Mark’s help, Samson mounted the clock onto the wall above his bedroom door. He set it for 336 days—the amount of time between that day and when he estimated the following year’s bonuses would be paid.

Three hundred thirty-six days
, he thought, looking up at the glowing sign from his bed that night.
I may not be able to handle an entire career at Goldman, but three hundred thirty-six days I can do.

PASSPORT, CHECK. TOILETRIES,
check. Shoes, socks, pants, belts, shirts, umbrella, power adapter—check, check, check, check, check, check, check.

Arjun Khan was going through some last-minute preparations for his big trip to Italy. It would be his first vacation since joining Citigroup’s M&A division, and he and two of his college friends, who were accompanying him on the trip, had already devised a rough agenda. Together, they would visit St. Peter’s Basilica, marvel at the Sistine Chapel, explore the Colosseum, wander the markets at Campo de’ Fiori, and eat every pizza and pasta dish they could get their hands on.

At his desk that afternoon, while looking up tourist attractions online, Arjun got a call from a 212 number he didn’t recognize.

“Arjun, this is Dr. Friedman,” the voice said. “Do you have a minute to speak?”

Arjun tensed. Dr. Friedman was the general practitioner he’d seen a few days earlier for some medical issues that had been bothering him. For weeks, he’d been coughing a lot, losing weight, and generally feeling more tired than usual. At first, he’d attributed the symptoms to a chest cold, and to the long hours and sleepless nights he’d accumulated while closing several big deals. But when his symptoms worsened, and he began coughing up blood, he called for an appointment.

He expected a minor diagnosis, something treatable with a few pills and a day or two of bed rest. But what came out of Dr. Friedman’s mouth was much more serious.

“Arjun, your lab work came back,” the doctor said. “There appears to be something quite abnormal going on.”

Arjun’s heart dropped. “What is it?”

“Well, I’m not entirely sure, but I’d like to have you tested for Goodpasture’s syndrome.”

Arjun wrote those words on a Post-it note at his desk, and circled them over and over with his pen as Dr. Friedman explained that Goodpasture’s syndrome was a very rare autoimmune disease, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly begins attacking proteins in the lungs and kidneys, causing internal bleeding and inflammation. Its exact causes are unknown, but the disease can cause permanent lung and kidney damage, and require dialysis and other serious measures if left untreated. In some cases, it can even be fatal.

For the next fifteen minutes, after asking for a referral to a specialist and hanging up with Dr. Friedman, Arjun sat at his desk, paralyzed. It was cloudy outside, and the Citigroup staffer was roaming up and down the bullpen aisles, assigning projects to various analysts. Arjun had no idea what to do. Should he call his parents? Was he supposed to ignore the call and keep working? Eventually, he took his coat, went for a walk around the block, came back, went to the bathroom, washed his face, and returned to his desk. He felt overwhelmed with both pain and panic, and more than that, he felt confused. Rare diseases weren’t something that happened to people like him. He had never been a smoker, never done hard drugs, never so much as broken a bone. Sure, he probably slept far too little during the week and drank far too much on the weekends. But overall, he was a healthy, productive twenty-four-year-old.
What the hell was going on?

A few hours later, while folding laundry for his trip, Arjun got another call from Dr. Friedman, who gave him some referrals to specialists and suggested he see one of them as soon as possible.

“Well, I’m going on vacation tomorrow,” Arjun said. “I’ll be back in a week, so I’ll go see one then.”

“If I were you,” Dr. Friedman said, “I wouldn’t wait. I would want to know for sure what’s going on. I think you should go in for a biopsy.”

That word—
biopsy
—burned in Arjun’s chest. And he decided not to take his chances.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stay here and get it checked out.”

Two days later, while Arjun had planned to be eating
pasta alla norma
on a cobblestone street, he was instead in a hospital, where a specialist tested a piece of his kidney and found that the ailment afflicting him was, in fact, Goodpasture’s syndrome. He would need immediate treatment to keep it from worsening, the doctor said, including heavy doses of corticosteroids and a one-month regimen of plasma exchange, a dialysis-like procedure that would filter the rogue antibodies out of his blood before returning it to his body. Arjun’s disease was in a fairly advanced stage, he said, but if they attacked it aggressively, he’d have a decent chance of making a full recovery.

Arjun panicked, his mind filling with worst-case scenarios. He thought about how his friends would react, how his treatment would feel, how he’d explain his sickness to people, and how fully he’d bought into the myth that youth and health go hand in hand. He kicked himself for not getting his symptoms checked out sooner, and had flashes of lying in a hospital bed, being fed through a tube while a group of worried-looking doctors gathered around him, trying desperately to save his life.

Eventually, his thoughts turned to work. How would it look on his year-end reviews if he had to take time off for treatment? Who would pick up the slack on his deals? Would being sick hurt his chances of getting a private equity job, or a big second-year bonus?

In the following days, Arjun thought a lot about work. He didn’t think it was possible, medically speaking, to get an autoimmune disease from working too much. But he wondered if the sacrifices of his body and mind he’d been making for the sake of the bank had exacerbated his condition, or made it harder for him to notice that something was wrong. The more he thought about the antibodies attacking his organs, the more offensive it seemed that he had skipped so many gym visits, done so many rounds of shots at the bar with his colleagues, or pulled so many all-nighters while making tiny edits to pitch books and trying to figure out whether a corporation was worth 8 or 8.5 times pretax earnings.

“This has reinforced to me that my job is not the most important thing,” he told me, around that time. “The be-all end-all is the other stuff that happens in the next sixty or seventy years, if I live that long.”

Two weeks later, after he’d undergone his first round of treatment, Arjun decided to try going back to work. He’d been given a paid leave of absence shortly after he got his diagnosis, but he missed the energy of the bullpen, which he hoped would distract him from the dread and anxiety of being sick. And so, for the next few weeks, Arjun shuffled off to Citigroup every morning. Getting back in his old routine helped ease his nerves, even though he still couldn’t completely ignore his pain. His boss made sure his workload was light while he was being treated, and he got get-well cards and gifts from what seemed like half the bank.

It all felt infantilizing, being coddled and sympathized with. Arjun knew it came from a good place, but he also feared that, somehow, he would be penalized for his weakness. This was Wall Street, after all, where mind over matter was the law of the land. He had heard about traders who had worked through blinding migraines, bankers who had come to work with 104-degree fevers, and men who had missed the births of their children because they’d been working on a deal. He’d told himself early on in his banking career that he would never miss a day of work, for any reason, and he hated having to break his own rule.

What Arjun feared most was sticking out. He had always prided himself on propriety and decorum. When he was walking with an older banker, he always let the senior employee walk a step ahead of him, so as to preserve the pecking order. He made liberal use of “ma’am” and “sir” at work, and always took care to give up his seat to senior bankers when they came late to meetings in packed rooms.

It frustrated Arjun to no end that he had spent a year clawing his way onto the linear, upward path at Citigroup after his Lehman disaster, only to fall off a year later. How unlucky could one guy get? But as his mother reminded him constantly, his health came first. Whenever his mind drifted to work-related stress, he thought back to something she had often told him: “Nothing is as important as living.”

If he survived this, Arjun told himself, he would change his lifestyle. He would take the same never-say-never attitude that had gotten him in the door at Citigroup and apply it to his physical well-being. Worrying about his health wasn’t optimal, but it was the only choice he had.