L.A. IS FINE, THE SUN SHINES….
It was Malibu lazy at 4:00 a.m., with light just breaking out over the mountains to the east. Now Malibu lazy can make for “prodigious breakers, man,” especially if there has recently been a storm at sea. They would break firmly but easily below him as his alarm sounded exactly two minutes later. Shit, shower, and shave in seven minutes and onto the Pacific Coast Highway at 4:15 for the mad dash to the 8:00 a.m. EST conference call from New York. He was instantaneously in eighty-mile-an-hour traffic and within minutes he was below the Santa Monica cliffs and ready for the first phone call of the day, reserved for his assistant Shauna, a magnificent, tall Ethiopian with legs from the middle of her damn rib cage and a face from ancient royalty. Totally bald and smoking hot.
She was due at 4:30 sharp, and always answered the call, “Wanna’ screw me or the customer today, big boy?”
Ruthlessly loyal, she had accompanied him over from UBS in his last move to the bigger time. Three years, signing bonus, higher payout, and a much higher guarantee moved him and the vast majority of his twenty five hundred accounts. More importantly, all his key clients, some ninety in number, had made the move with him. And Shauna came with him, closer to home with a forty percent raise and a small piece of the action. A single mom, with her own mother at home, she nearly always left promptly at 1:00 p.m. to pick up her child from school. As he hit “the 10” freeway it was news from KABC with the death of Spiro Agnew and reflections from the ‘96 Altanta Olympics, which was an economic success but not without their problems. And some group called the Taliban had captured Kabul, Afganistan.
“What’s my day?” he demanded.
“Call at eight, Dr. Rose at 10:30—got the muni information—and lunch here with Mary about your tax shelter from three years ago. She said, ‘It won’t go away.’ Ordering two Greek salads.”
“Dinner at Joanna’s, 6:30. Pouilly Fuissé delivered at the house by 4:00. The futures are up sixty, and I’m still in line to suck Walter Cronkite’s toes.”
He loved her early morning reports. Always accurate, on target and filthy. Just what the doctor ordered. He hung up and allowed his mind to go to one of her frequent bendover bonanzas, a maximum full-bosom view purposely given as a continuing statement of her loyalty. The fact was that big money and risk turned her on. They had never slept together, and that tension made it work. It was about the action.
He had always been a planning nut. He believed in getting to the client with bad news immediately, to keep up the transparency. Time and again in his investment banking youth, he would delay a call hoping things wouldn’t get worse, and sure enough, the complaint would be, “I wish you’d called me sooner. I’m gone.” But that was back in Boston during the beginning. Fifty cold calls a day. Meetings to hustle new issues that were so bad they should have had chapter eleven stamped on the prospectus … but with a good payout. When the company paid, and not the investor, all was well with the world.
Oh Christ, he had had some laughs, though! The doorman from the Ritz who made his yearly journey to the office on the second Tuesday of the new year, every year, carrying five or six Lord and Taylor bags. Tips. He’d go into the conference room with a guy from the back office to count the cash. Always more than one hundred fifty thousand dollars! Every year: good economy, bad economy, jobs, no jobs. And that’s not counting his hotel pay and the other favors done for booze, Celtics tickets, and a blow job or two.
And then there was Abe, an eighty-four-year-old, round, hairless broker who was connected to one of the main philanthropic Jewish families in the area. Smoked like a mortar on the DMZ. Ashes all over the place. His desk top looked like a model of the Maginot Line. Rumor had it that his wife Goldie, fed up with his incessant habit, put a tarp on the living room floor and moved his Lazy Boy to its center to protect their home. He was loved for two reasons.
First, he was the guy who’d say, after hearing a hustle from some extravagant new issuer visiting the branch to sell his company’s new shares, “Lemme ask you a qvestion. I got ten thousand dollars to buy your company or I can buy IBM. What’s the smart play?” In those days, a game stopper.
Second, he would be coming to the end of the month with little to show for it. Three days left. All month, watching the tape, smoking those facacta cigarettes. Then suddenly, and for the first time that week, the phone would ring—and watch out! There would be ashes and paper flying everywhere. Once he even lit himself on fire. Abe couldn’t hear worth a damn, so the decibels reminded one of the organist at Boston Garden between periods.
“Five thousand what? What the hell do they do? Well, I’m just asking. Ten thousand IBM? GM? What? Speak up, there’s too much noise in here. I can’t hear you worth shit.” And on it went for twenty minutes. Spitting, burping, farting. He had a full deer-in-the-headlight look working. Twenty-five or thirty tickets from some museum trustee or other netted him a ten thousand dollar day and “a living.”
His mind was back on “the 10,” the freeway to riches and power. Traffic slowed at 4:45 and he slipped onto the downtown exit ramp, using the breakdown lane to avoid rush hour traffic, people due at 5:00 a.m. desks. He swung his top-of-the-line Lexus convertible into the reserved spot, looped his tie around his neck and, briefcase in hand, made the move up thirty stories to opulence and controlled insanity.
Two minutes late, but only pleasantries missed. He nodded thanks at Shauna, began to unwrap a large blueberry muffin and cracked the plastic on a medium black. He then swung around to see the glass walls of the inner office, punched a button and they’d go opaque. And there was the magnificent view to the ocean from whence he came.
A full look at each product category was over in thirty-five minutes, and six clients were on his notepad for contact. It was 6:00 a.m. PST. He pushed the button to close the door to his outer office and punched a frequently dialed number on his phone. Joanna answered after two rings with a “rough night” rasp.
“You have a great cock but a Hall of Fame tongue, you amazing little boy.”
“And good morning to you, young lady. Is today your audition for the Cirque de Soleil contortionist opening?”
“Don’t you wish, Robert Lane,” she sighed.
“Six-thirty, I’ve got the wine?”
“You got it!”
“Got orders for the open. Bye.”
He’d been working one of his three video screens, entering ideas and orders over which he had legal control. Shauna had three lines on hold. And so it went. Dr. Rose bought two and a half million California Municipal Bonds at a substantial discount and the market was up with strength, so the day was winding down in the East with a smile.
Mary Jones and her “Jones and Sinnot Accountancy” had worked with Bob since his arrival in southern California some three years ago. An attractive and driven Beverly Hills resident, she specialized in financial and entertainment clients, handling soup to nuts and charging up to five percent of yearly income, making her a very happy camper. It was her firm, but she believed that a feeling of size and experience came with two names and loved the idea conveyed to potential clients by the firm’s more substantial name. Her client book was replete with names that ranked as celebrities, mostly television, which was where the money is.
Bob Lane had been somewhat taken back at hearing her cost package, because the East usually charged one and three quarters percent of total money under management and an hourly fee for accounting. He wanted personal objectivity and deemed himself an expert on everyone’s money … but his own. He liked her brain and her brawn, and saw the need for hedging against a down year.
At exactly 12:01, Mary Louise Jones strode off the elevator and moved down the hall towards Bob Lane’s office without a hint of introduction. Her poise and determination spoke volumes to the receptionist, who had had one run-in with her a couple of weeks before. Delay in clearance had stimulated the terms “sycophant” and “troll,” among a range of other invective. Shauna saw her coming and was up to the task with a positive account of fantasy weight loss and fashion genius, combined with “Go right in.” Mary sat, uninvited, as Bob