The Fall of Princes (12 page)

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

L
ouis 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.

Overpriced food and bad service were the main virtues of the restaurants we liked, that and room for the limos to wait.

God, Frank’s was great on bonus day, when we ran up $3,000 wine bills, smoking $400 illegal cigars, rolled by hand on Cuban thighs.

Trotmeier stayed on in his first apartment on Twenty-Third Street, where the rent was an astonishing $575 a month, not that it didn’t show, an apartment so foul we called it Roach’s Revenge, through the doors of which passed, nightly, the most beautiful, glamorous, completely fucking deliriously luscious girls in New York. He did not give these girls Birkin bags from Hermès or square-cut yellow diamonds at Christmas. He gave nothing but the eloquence of his youth and good looks and his ostensibly gigantic willie. He was a millionaire several times over by the time he was twenty-five.

Trotmeier would live with each of these girls for some weeks or months, even a year here and there, and the parting was never rancorous. He was not the kind who went around writing his phone number on girls’ tits in nightclubs. He was, as they say, a gentleman. The affairs would always end with the same bittersweet regret, and he truly loved every one of them. He loved the way they smelled, and the glide of their tender skin, and he loved their conversation, always so bright with promise. He left not one of them worse off for wear, and they would always remember that he was not one of the bad ones.

His great-grandfather had been on The Street before the century turned, and every man in his family had made his living the same way, so they were a kind of royalty, although he was as much a flâneur as anybody, relentlessly social, at the Mudd Club or Area or Reno Sweeney every night, glorious girls on his arm, eating in all the best restaurants, attracting other rich, famous people to him, like Vitas Gerulaitis, who gave him tennis lessons. But he never, not for one minute, took his eye off the meter. He intended to be done with work by the time he was thirty, and he was well on his way. He was also one of the kindest people I have ever known.

Then Susanne Leiber came into the picture. She was from California, pretty although not the prettiest, but she had something. She was a brightness on her way to a greater brightness. She designed fabulously expensive jewelry for an iconic store on Fifth Avenue, so she worked, and she was wide awake from the minute her lustrous dark eyes opened. Trotmeier fell hard for her, although Trotmeier fell hard for them every time. Sometimes he would watch a girl walk through the door of a bar and say, “Oops, here comes my next mistake.” At any rate, he fell, and it wasn’t long before she had packed her loupe and whatever else and moved into Roach’s Revenge.

So, for Trotmeier, there was at least the promise of connubial bliss. He went out less. Susanne and Louie gave dinner parties in his wreck of an apartment, four flights up, beef tenderloin and micro greens catered by the best in town. And Mrs. Trotmeier descended, the first time she had ever set foot in Roach’s Revenge, and her general disappointment in Louie’s choice of abode was instant and almost overwhelming. She declared the place unlivable, and proceeded to dismiss and discard all of Louie’s furniture, the ratty futons, the cheap mattress on cinder blocks, the tatty rugs, all of it, replacing it with down sofas and Persian rugs and curtains from Clarence House and real china.

More important, she brought along Lenny the Exterminator, who took one step inside the door, breathed deeply, and announced, “You have a serious infestation problem here.” And she brought along Loretta—“She’s just like family”—
whose job was what it always had been, to clean the Trotmeier’s houses, down to running a toothbrush through the cracks between the floorboards.

In the end, it looked like an English chintz and Chesterfield sofa country house trapped inside a dark, decaying, rat-infested shoebox. Which, I guess, is what most English country houses actually are like.

So everything was all set. The future clear as crystal. The royal couple, the perfect pair. Mrs. Trotmeier was ready just to call Saint Laurent for the dress, book the Colony Club, and get the damned thing over with, and Susanne and Louie were not averse to this idea. Susanne wanted to walk the vastly long aisle at St. Bartholomew’s, where every Trotmeier had been married since 1897, bridesmaids and flower girls scattered before her like confetti on New Year’s Eve. Susanne wanted a baby. Louie did, too, strangely. Our golden Louie, the first to fall.

Susanne flew home to consult with her mother in California. There didn’t seem to be a father. DYK. In this case the “D” meant either Dead or Divorced, but in any case his absence was hardly noted.

Even with Susanne away, Louie stayed away pretty much from the night scene, eating Japanese takeout at the Duncan Phyfe table his mother had installed.

One night, a bitterly cold night in the winter, Louie was in bed at 12:30 when the phone beside his bed rang. It was Vitas on the other end.

“Get up, take a shower, dress nice, and be downstairs in front of your door in half an hour.”

“I’m asleep.”

“Wake the hell up. I have a surprise for you. I’m sending the car.”

“Vitas, you’re evil.”

“
Semper paratus
, baby.
Semper paratus
.”

This story is true. It really happened. Most of the stories you hear about the eighties in New York really happened, like the woman who took the windows out of her tenth-story apartment so she could get a crane to raise a fifteen-foot Christmas tree up and through them and into her cavernous living room. That really happened, too. I don’t think many things like that happen now. Maybe they do. Not my street anymore, as they say.

Anyway, one o’clock found Louis standing on the street corner, under the light, in a fine cold mist, his golden mane sparkling. Gray slacks, Oxford button-down and a cashmere blazer with horn buttons, never brass. The Trotmeiers didn’t believe in overcoats, whatever the weather, except for funerals, and then only black Chesterfields from H. Huntsman and Sons in London, some of which were generational, having passed from father to son.

So the rain, the mist really, of a winter’s night, was backlit and Vitus’s yellow Rolls-Royce pulled around the corner, and the driver, who spent his days stringing rackets for Vitas, got out and smartly opened the door and a long arm shot out into the cold night and the hand at the end of the arm was holding a glass of brandy. Can you see it clearly? Can you see it now? Louie could, and he, drawing a short breath and thinking of Susanne one last time, sitting now with her mother in California talking about tulle and
peau de soie,
probably, and that long walk down the aisle at St. Bartholomew’s, stretched out his own hand, took the brandy and drank it down in one gulp, and got into the back of the car, the door closing noiselessly. The hand belonged to an arm that was attached to a woman who was the current queen of pop divas, a creature so magnificent she had only one name.

“Hiya, baby,” she said. She was wearing something in the winter night that was practically nothing, and she pulled Louie forward with her long arm and kissed him and she could taste the brandy on his breath, and then she pulled back and said, “Hiya, baby,” again, which was practically all she said or ever needed to say.

The Diva’s “Hiya, baby” changed the game forever for Louis Paterson Trotmeier. The panther, the stalking carnivore in him, long caged, was at large and on the prowl, and he looked at the Diva and he said, “Hiya,” back, shyly, and then he devoured her whole, at one gulp, like an oyster shooter in a Mexican bar.

That night, in her vast suite at the Sherry Netherland, where she was staying at huge cost, in the darkness of a bedroom, in a bed on which the sheets were so fine, so crisp, you might have written your will on them, the Diva was everything to Louie. She was not a woman, she was a world, her white skin like a vast desert over which he swooped, touching down here and there, the dry places and the moist, the oasis where he drank himself into life.

Trotmeier, his patrician body worked to perfection, learned that, until that night, he had known nothing about women, about how to please them and how they could give pleasure in return. The Diva gave Trotmeier an all-access pass into her life and her body, took Trotmeier into her arms, and it was not just great, it was wonderful, and it changed Louie’s life forever.

During a pause, he said to her, “Baby. I live with a woman. I love her and we’re probably getting married. So whatever happens between you and me has to stay absolutely secret. Secret to the grave. Promise?” And the Diva promised, crossing her heart where a small gold cross glittered in the night, and then proceeded to fuck the brains out of Trotmeier until the swallows woke on the windowsill with the rising sun, and Louie had to go to work where he promptly told me and several others that he had made love to this tabloid headline, this total creation of sequins and sex, and the Diva, after a long and peaceful nap, got on the phone with her publicist and told her everything.

It went on. Every night, they would go out adventuring in the night, her fame giving them instant access to every pleasure dome—straight, gay, rough, sleazy, elegant—that the vast city had to offer. Trotmeier no longer looked like the picture of health he had always been, not like the scion of one of New York’s oldest and richest banking families. He looked, frankly, like a haggard wreck, and he had never been happier.