The Fall of Princes Read online

  Conti went first. Nobody knew his first name, or, if we had, we had forgotten it. Peter, the obituary in the Wall Street Journal said. He was twenty-two, an intern, and a true shark. He had moved a cot into the boiler room so that he didn’t have to commute to work. See, we were all brilliant. We all worked like dogs. The only way to distinguish yourself your first year was to work harder than anybody else, in Conti’s case, to work yourself literally to death.

  So, Conti slept in the boiler room, and never saw the light of day. One afternoon, after pulling six all-nighters in a row, his heart blew up while he stood at his desk, on the phone. His heart blew up and killed him dead, at twenty-two.

  EMS was called, and he was pronounced dead and wheeled off the floor on a gurney with hardly a pause in the action.

  The next day, though, there was a minute of silence to mark his death. Even the Big Guy came down and said a few sympathetic words about what a good candidate he had been, made of the stuff The Firm expected and demanded, the energy, the enthusiasm, the brilliance. It was obvious the Big Guy wouldn’t have known him if he’d run over him in his Bentley, but still, a death is a death, and we waited out the full minute in silence, well, not exactly silence, since the phones didn’t stop ringing for a second, and our fingers were itching in our pants to answer them. So passeth Peter Conti.

  After he died, the winner of the nightly game of Misery Poker was always called Conti, probably still is, even though the reason for the name has no doubt long since been lost in the speed and click of the rolling dice.

  The second death was even more shocking: Harrison Wheaton Seacroft IV, who we called Helter Skelter because of the aggressiveness of his attack mechanism. A true pit bull. He was a big guy, a rugby player, and nobody’s voice was louder. When Helter Skelter made a deal, everybody knew it instantly by the roar he bellowed across the floor.

  We had been sort of friends. I had spent a weekend with his family at their huge pile in Southampton the summer before, a house not bought, just one of those things that was “in the family.” I met his parents, nice people who did things with the kind of elegant simplicity that is only bought with a great deal of very old, very honorable money. His father had a seat on the Exchange.

  There were lawns, immaculately groomed, a discreet pool that couldn’t be seen from the house—too vulgar. Servants who unpacked your suitcase for you. Lunch beneath a big tent on the lawn served by women who had been with the family since before I was born, seemingly before time began. Dinner at eight thirty, dressed appropriately in sherbet-colored linens, a light cashmere sweater when the chilly breezes sprang up from the ocean so that candles flickered and danced as they had at this same table in this same gazebo for four generations of Seacrofts. One could feel the genial ghosts of all the Seacrofts sitting at the head of the table, barefoot in pastel linen, a life in which far more is saved than is ever lost.

  He believed that credit cards, which had been invented in his lifetime, were the doing of the devil, the scourge of the middle classes. He didn’t believe in debt. He felt that if you couldn’t afford something, you simply didn’t buy it, although the old boy was so rich it was a rule that rarely had to be invoked. They had the largest Manet still in private hands hanging in the library of their summer house. Harrison

  was heir to all this, and was rapidly building his own place at the family table.

  He had been two years on the trading floor already and, at twenty-eight, was richer than most people dream of being, ever. Their minds just don’t count that high. He was looking at retirement at thirty-two. And he killed himself. He got a phone call, a private phone call, an almost unheard-of occurrence, but one that caused him to leave his station on the floor and take it in his private office, white carpeting, a Richard Prince on the wall. It was all clicking into place for him, and then he got this call, which lasted no more than thirty seconds, and then he wrote a short note and addressed it to his parents.

  He came out onto the floor and sought me out and shook my hand, curiously, and then handed me the note and asked me to see that his parents got it, by hand, not by mail. On the bottom left of the envelope, he had written, “kindness of . . .” and then my name, and I took the letter, not knowing what was going on, and I watched as he went back into his office. I saw it all, while nobody else even raised a head to watch as he did what he did.

  He took off his shoes and placed them neatly under his desk, picked up a fire extinguisher and slammed it through the plate glass window of his office, killing two people on the street below, and then he jumped out the window, and fell seventeen floors, roaring as though he had just made the biggest trade of his life, which I guess he had, to land on the roof of one of the waiting black cars. The rest of the guys on the floor didn’t even notice his absence until the cops showed up later. Somebody picked up the phone still lying off the hook on his desk, a man in Zurich still screaming as though nothing had interrupted the urgency of the deal that was taking place, and we gently cradled the phone on the receiver. End of deal. End of Helter Skelter Seacroft IV.

  This was obviously not supposed to happen. Ours was a life of continual advancement. Failure and weakness were not allowed. It’s one thing to have your heart explode at the age of twenty-two, it’s another thing to jump out the window with $13 million in the bank.

  Of course, we all put on dark suits and went to the funeral, looking appropriately stark, the wake and the funerals held necessarily at night, since nobody would be fool enough to think we would leave the trading floor before seven o’clock, but we knew in our hearts that he and Conti were both losers.

  After the funeral, at the small reception at the Colony Club, his mother came up to me. Nobody had known who to invite since nobody had known who Helter Skelter’s friends were, even his parents, who claimed that I was the only friend of his they had ever met, my entrée being good lineage in an old Southern family. We noticed that his father had not attended the funeral.

  His mother took my elbow, “Come sit with me for a minute,” and we tucked ourselves into a quiet corner and sat on the edge of two gilt chairs, ridiculously fragile, Mrs. Seacroft in a stark and perfect black suit with a single strand of pearls at her throat, her face drained of color, awash with grief and loss. He was their only son, out of five

  children.

  “His father wouldn’t come. He was outraged, and says he’s washed H Four from his memory forever. He says there is no forgiveness. Mothers are different.”

  She paused. She didn’t know where to go next.

  “He had the disease. That cancer. He was a homosexual. I can’t even say it. It’s unbearable to think of. He had everything. Girls adored him. I loved him with all my heart, my first child and my only son. How could he do this to me, to us? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I had no idea. I swear I didn’t.”

  “That he could bring this shame into our house. That’s what his father will never forgive. He would not, he will not, have a son who was, who was . . . that way.”

  “He was a nice man. A lovely guy.”

  “He was a liar. He chose to destroy us, not even by jumping out the window, but by living that lifestyle, by lying to us about who he was, because he knew we would never ever accept it. If he hadn’t jumped, he would have been without family, he would have died with nobody to hold his hand, to give him the slightest comfort.”

  “It wasn’t his fault. I would have held his hand.”

  Suddenly vehement, she flashed her icy eyes at me. “Of course it was his fault. Do you think we did anything to . . . to . . . make him that way?”

  “God made him that way.”

  “And God punished him. His father won’t allow him to be buried in the family plot, where we have all been buried for four generations. His name is never to be spoken again. We’ve thrown out every picture of him. We’ve burned the clothes hanging in his closet. We could catch it from his clothes. I had two children born dead. I wish he had been one of them. I recovered from those
deaths, I went on, because that is what you do. This, this . . . I will never get over it. I am just as infected as he was.” Her voice rose to a pitch of anger I could not have imagined in her. “He ate off of our china. He slept in my sheets. I will burn every one of them.” And she started crying, wracked with sobs. I put my hand on her shoulder, she shrugged it off violently. She pulled herself together and said calmly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have taken it to the grave. But there was nobody else.

  “He was my boy. My only son. And he was a liar, and a deviant, a disgrace. I will never be happy again. Could you leave me now? There are hands to shake. Appearances will be kept up. The grieving mother, bravely taking in the death of her beloved son. A lie, all of it, but it must be done. Good-bye. You’re welcome to visit us at any time.” The words were spoken without the slightest conviction.

  I walked home. Helter Skelter a queer. He jumped because he had just been given a death sentence, and because he couldn’t let the world know how he had gotten ill. And I thought of all those nights in all those clubs, the dark bathrooms where men and women mingled high on drugs, grabbing for whatever skin there was, fucking any orifice that was offered. My face flushed with shame. What if? What

  if I was going to get the same phone call one day soon? I still insisted to myself that I was not a homosexual, but there was no denying I had done the things Harrison had done.

  God help me, in those bathrooms, in the balcony at Studio, I had fucked men and I had enjoyed it. I was infected, and suddenly the streets were filled with men who were infected, too, just like me. We were all dying. All walking through the night, in dark clubs and alleys, high on coke and meth and Quaaludes and smack and flesh. Highest of all on flesh. And for that we would die. For the sweetness, the loveliness of touch, the feel of skin against your own, we were all to die.

  We couldn’t stop and we couldn’t go back.

  Harrison IV. HIV. A martyr to love. Riding the express train to being banker-splat on the top of a car that would have taken him home and into the night where he could not, would not live lying about the sex between his legs and in his heart.

  Dying for love, that kindest of emotions. Pause for a minute and weep on 24th and 7th, surrounded by brooding, handsome boys in leather jackets, in muscle shirts, all those young men, all around. Me.

  Maybe I had missed the bullet, but I didn’t think so. I didn’t deserve it. I would wake in the morning with the same hungers, and the party, although it was over and had turned lethal, the party would never stop and I would play until it killed me.

  Dying. Dying for love. God help us.

  The wages of skin is death.

  In the morning, I felt as though my mood of last night was foolish. I felt invincible, despite the half gallon of vodka I had drunk when I had gotten home. The liquor had washed me clean. I was invincible and nothing would kill me, certainly not a few drunken moments in the dark at Steve Rubell’s House of Sin.

  After all, at twenty-eight, what’s a little bad behavior? I was just being maudlin. In the light of day, it all seemed foolish. Seacroft was unlucky. The streets would not be piled with corpses. It was an age in which bad behavior was not only allowed, but encouraged and rewarded.

  Up to a point. Bellowing like a bull in heat was encouraged. But certain things just weren’t done at The Firm, and we learned them in our very first years.

  Do not dress better than your boss.

  Do not get drunker than your boss.

  Never insult a client, no matter how stupid or rude they are. After all, these are people who have the requisite $20 million in cash it took to open an account at The Firm, and the one thing that was to be respected, above all else, was money—and the people who had it.

  Come to work neat and pressed like a fine pair of sheets. But if you didn’t look rumpled by nine a.m., you weren’t working hard enough. Tie undone, sleeves rolled up, shirttails hanging out of your pants. A sartorial wreck, but with the ruddy glow of victory on your face.

  A horrible apartment at a good address is better than a great apartment at a bad one.

  Never wear an Hermès tie. Leave those to the lawyers and golfers.

  Never be daunted in public. If failure comes your way, if a deal goes south, walk away as though you had nothing to do with it.

  If your boss gives you a Mont Blanc pen at the end of a salary negotiation, you’ve just been taken to the cleaners.

  Do not die before forty. Never, ever kill yourself. Even if, like Helter Skelter, you have the good sense to leave a $1,000 pair of shoes neatly under your desk. After he died, nobody would touch the shoes. The security people were left to clean out his personal effects, photographs of his parents, his siblings, a man none of us knew, but even they wouldn’t touch his shoes. They sat there for days until one day they were mysteriously gone. They lasted longer than the memory of Seaforth himself.

  If one of your colleagues is fired, never speak to him again. If you pass him on the street, or sit next to him at a football game, do not acknowledge him. Failure is catching. All your friendships on the floor are purely circumstantial, contextual, and vanish when your colleague is marched out the door, his phones shut off, carrying his pitiful box of personal items accompanied by a security guard. If you continue to hang out with him, you will be tainted with failure yourself, a scent of doom that will never wash off.

  Never wear cheap shoes. And, when you get a pair of new shoes, polish them twenty times before you wear them on the street. Your shoes should look, not like you bought them, but like you inherited them from a rich uncle.

  Never get a cheap haircut.

  Never let your heart blow up at your desk. It shows excessive zeal.

  Never never never. Always always always.

  The culture of success marches on, and you better stay in step or step out of the way because you will get flattened.

  I got flattened. But, I have to say in my defense, I went out like a man. I flattened myself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Trotmeier Takes a Drive

  Louis Patterson Trotmeier came up with me. He won the poker thing. It wasn’t always the same poker thing—the old man changed it every time so people couldn’t pass the answers along. Louis’s was a single hand of Five-card Stud.

  Louis had jacks and fours. No telling what the old man had. The old man drew two cards, and Louis knew the man across the desk wasn’t drawing two cards to fill a pat hand. He wasn’t just holding a pair and a kicker. So Louis threw in his pair of fours, and drew three cards. One was a jack.

  Louis laid his hand on the table. The big man across the desk just folded his cards and threw them on the desk.

  Louis looked him in the eye. “Sir. The odds of drawing a full house after being dealt two pairs of anything are 7.7 to 1. If you had had three of a kind, your odds of drawing a full house are 10.7 to 1. I figured the numbers were on my side. Sir.”

  “You’re a numbers guy.”

  “Crunch the numbers then play by your gut. Numbers don’t tell you what’s going to happen. They just give you an opportunity. I’m a numbers guy with balls. I play the hard hunch, and what did I have to lose? There are other places to work.”

  He started the next day. His specialty was going with the informed hunch, and it took him very far very fast.

  We called him Louie. He had the looks of a verifiable Greek God. A long, aquiline nose, a perfect body after hours and years at the Sports Training Institute, and a machismo that needed no verification. Louie colored his hair, the only man I have ever known to do such a thing, and his delicate but undeniably masculine features were corona-ed by golden curls cut by Frederic Fekkai himself. I have never seen a man more beautiful, even when he was sitting in the chair with squares of Reynolds Wrap all over his head.

  He was a great trader; face it, he was flawless at everything, flawless, and he ran through a string of girlfriends that impressed not only his friends but occasionally the papers as well. Trading bored him,
sex did not, and so he was even better at sexual conquest than he was at trading, and he was, as I said, a damned fine trader.

  Another thing he had brought with him from generations of Trotmeiers on The Street, something not one other person we knew had the least inkling of, was how to save money. The day he got his job, he went to a bank, opened an account, and borrowed a thousand dollars and put it away somewhere where even he couldn’t get it. Then he paid it off. Then he borrowed five thousand dollars, and so on, forever, even though he began making ridiculous amounts of money, while the rest of us were living like the tsars, going to restaurants like Frank’s—a meatpacking district legend where Fat Frank presided, under an enormous portrait of himself, from two a.m. until seven, serving fried eggs and beer and bacon to the butchers who hung out there, and then turning it over to his son who ran the lunch crowd, and then the dinner crowd, serving up four-inch sirloins that made you scream with desire, Bloody Marys so high in alcohol that you could see through them—as Fanelli said, “If you can’t see through them they’re not doing their job”—and martinis that looked like they’d been made by Fabergé, at prices that made your hair stand on end. There was a great, late-night period of crossover, when the boozers and beefers were still sucking back $400 bottles of Pomerol, as the butchers, their hair still slick from the shower, still wiping the sleep from their eyes, began to roll in for breakfast before work at two. The street outside was filthy, everything was filthy in New York in those days, garbage everywhere, used needles, rats the size of watermelons, but Frank’s was particularly filthy out on the sidewalk, since the whole street was covered with meat scraps and rats and tranny hookers leaning in the windows of the stretches and telling drunk traders that they, the trannies, knew exactly what they, the boozed-up bankers, really wanted, right more often than not, so the stretches circled the block, the windows steamed with fellatio and pot smoke until the sun was well up.