Sick evil fuck that I am, I decided to swing by Lehman Bros. headquarters yesterday evening for a little rubbernecking. Broadway between 50th & 49th was flooded with news vans, reporters and photographers. Three NYPD officers patrolled the building's entrance alongside six uniformed private security guards. Even the tourists knew what was going on as they waddled by in thick packs stinking of bemused horror coupled with a deeper unease, snapping photos and smiling as, well, tourists do.
A good friend of mine, who also happens to be a financial journalist, claims the shitshow was much worse earlier in the day, when the first wave of newly unemployed began emerging from the revolving doors at the base of the three-story jumbotron fronting the Lehman building. Another reporter with a New York paper, whom I promised not to identify, speculated that The Axe must have been working its way from floor to floor, department to department, as the sad suits tended to hit the street in groups every half-hour or so.
It was hard to miss the smug satisfaction with which We, the observers, greeted Them, the freshly untethered greedhounds. We seemed to be in agreement that the investment banking industry is best defined as an enterprise whose price of admission is a combination of meager intelligence and the kind of moral flexibility that urges one to never look too deeply or for too long at the collateral damage inflicted by its undertaking.
The Fucked were easily marked -- apart from the pink ties in tight Double Windsor knots and the haircuts that cost more than my last loan payment -- by their gym bags, uniform green duffels with the Lehman Brothers logo stitched on one side, the Nike logo on the ass-end. On any other day these bags are mostly empty, containing a pair of running shoes, a shower kit, probably a ball of sweaty clothing inside a plastic bag. Maybe a water bottle or a Clif bar or a three-pack of flavored Trojans. Yesterday they bulged at the seams with framed pictures, odd office acoutrements, back-up dress shirts, and, I wager, stacks of revised resumes printed on the best stock still laying around the supply closets.
There were piles of those bags in every corner of Emmett O'Lenney's, the bar to which we repaired for eavesdropping. Emmett's is one of the roughly 2 million upscale pubs dotting the midtown terrain like disconcerting blots on a chest x-ray. To my right drank a group of freshly shitcanned that grew to 16 at its peak. The bartender tells me this is their usual haunt. None of them could have been much older than 30. The men, clean-shaven, close cropped hair, wore high-priced suits in various degrees of disarray; the women form-fitting tops over tight black pants or knee-length skirts. These are the alpha males and the prom queens, the Type-A's at the gym every single morning, the New Greed. The scene looked more like a J. Crew catalog than a group of people employing alcohol to brunt the cold, hard truth that they can suddenly no longer afford the lifestyle to which they had grown accustomed.
I had made the mistake of arriving while they were on round one or two. So I drank, waited, rooted for some sort of substance-fueled collapse of the social order that was bound to happen around that fifth martini. I wanted fear and panic and repressed sexual aggression to rear their heads all at once. I wanted a violent, bloody orgy with tattered Banana Republic blazers used as crude pillows and high-end lingerie lodged in the ceiling fans. A young man about my age who looks like the kind of guy to keep a tub of Builder Protein in his desk drawer, ordered a round of Kamikaze shots and the group toasted, "To the future..."
And nothing happens in the two hours I'm there. Fair amount of drink, very little sulking, seeds sewn for the evening's sexual transgressions. No violence, crying, gnashing of teeth. Just a lot of talk about law school or which MBA program makes the most sense. After all, this is America. Even in a world where top-shelf vodka and $200/gram cocaine are the preferred narcotics, the one drug nobody can kick is Hope. Making $300 thousand per year in your mid-twenties will do that to you, I suppose. Even after the Invisible Hand bitch slaps them across the face, these people, having never been given good reason to suspect otherwise, go on assuming everything will just work itself out.
No comments:
Post a Comment