From: New York Times
IN
my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry
because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to
raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more
money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I
was addicted.
Eight
years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First
Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I wanted to be
rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what wealth
meant. I’d come to Wall Street after reading in the book “Liar’s Poker”
how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work
on a trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and
February, I think about that time, because these are the months when
bonuses are decided and distributed, when fortunes are made.
I’d
learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a
modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to
materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a
million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality
he sold kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck
to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.
Dad
believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I
walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing
flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with
enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a
fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my
life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a
spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to
be — rich.
IT
was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all. While I was
competitive and ambitious — a wrestler at Columbia University — I was
also a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine,
Ritalin and ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had
resulted in my getting suspended from Columbia for burglary, arrested
twice and fired from an Internet company for fistfighting. I learned
about rage from my dad, too. I can still see his red, contorted face as
he charged toward me. I’d lied my way into the C.S.F.B. internship by
omitting my transgressions from my résumé and was determined not to blow
what seemed a final chance. The only thing as important to me as that
internship was my girlfriend, a starter on the Columbia volleyball team.
But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d sometimes
end up with other women. MORE
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