4. THE FRATERNITY

Victories on the job which tended to elicit a small gesture of affirmation from my boss—typically a soft pat on the back and a “well done”—were a kind of manna that sustained me as I found my way those first months at H&Q. An investment report crafted the first time with no errors; a slide deck for a client presentation built with little guidance yet to his peculiar satisfaction; a call with the sales force in which I did not thumb helplessly through notes in an attempt to answer a simple question—these felt as victories because with each one I successfully passed the same mental hurdle: Do I belong? Gradually, as those long fruitful summer days wore on a faint path began to emerge bridging what once seemed to be an impassable chasm between he and I. I was on my way to becoming a genuine Wall Street analyst. Or so I thought.

I am now beginning to realize how much of this sense of belonging, this fitting in, was a product of privilege and not merely competency and grit. I was a young white male who looked the part of an analyst; one who, over the course of many years watching CNBC with a religious fervor, curated a self image to conform to the part. And I was protected by my boss, also a white male. Any mistake I made would not be seen as an inditement of my gender or race. I would simply have the opportunity to try again. I was free, therefore, of the heavy burden of having to be perfect for anyone and of fitting into a mold I did not cast for myself. I was free, as well, to act in a manner that would otherwise be considered inappropriate or rude—as a white male in a white male world it would be tolerated. 

Although I had been entirely blind to it, I carried this liberty with me into work every day. Until one morning, as I sat with my boss in his office flooded with the golden light of a rising sun, I came to see it for the first time and began to understand what it could do for me. Out of the squawk box, a small speaker resting on the corner of his desk, came the voice of a female analyst reporting the results of field research she had done on a few Starbucks stores in the Midwest. We had been listening to her for nearly half an hour when I finally blurted out, “This is useless. She’s just droning on and on.” 

I said this, in part, out of impatience as I had a full day’s work ahead, but also out of a desire to appear clever and draw a smile from my boss. Of the twenty or so analysts at H&Q at the time, only two were women. Among the male analysts and sales people, their work was generally regarded as something along the lines of “cute” or “harmless.” This understanding was not verbalized so much as it suffused the office atmosphere through childish grins, rolling eyes, and shrugging shoulders whenever women spoke. Intuitively, I had learned to play along and participated freely in these customs, although always with a twinge of guilt as if the very act of performing them cut against something essential in me. 

“But she’s trying at least,” I said.

There was a long pause as, curiously, my words didn’t seem to register with my boss at all. To that point we’d had a cordial relationship with lots of friendly banter and he’d freely describe any number of analysts on the floor as “useless.” But that morning he sat unamused, which gave me the sinking feeling that the direction of the conversation was about to take a grave turn. 

He leaned back in his chair, placing his feet upon the desk with a thud. From where I sat, he eclipsed the sun and now appeared as a silhouette. “And why do you think we’re listening to her?” he asked.

There was a strange, solemn tone to his voice. I thought I ought to respond, but felt I was missing something. All I could manage was to shrug and wipe at a piece of lint on my pants legs. 

“Sorry, am I wasting your time here?”

“Actually, I don’t think I know why we’re listening.”

“You don’t know?”

“No… Well, she’s a negative example I guess? Don’t do what she’s doing—the talking in circles. I think I get it.” 

My boss shifted his weight forward and leaned into his desk. Coming out of the sun, the light cast a shadow along his roundish faced which made it appear lean and severe. “Look, you’ve done well enough. But something is missing, Seth.” There was a terrible pause and then: “I need to see that ‘it’  from you. Do you know what I mean?” He tilted his head just so as if to examine me. There was a steely look in his eyes I had not yet seen. 

My mind raced back through all my supposed victories. Had I been wrong about everything? “Like do I have what it takes to be good? I mean, I think so. At one point you yourself told me that I was the best associate on the floor. I do remember that.”

There was another awful pause. Then his face softened a bit, as if he felt pity for me, knowing that what he was about to say might break me. “Yes, I did say that because you needed to hear it. You’re good—a bit delicate, honestly—but a good associate on the whole. Now I’m talking about what it takes for you to rise up and get into an office like this. To sit in this chair and not across from it like you are. And not just to sit here, but to succeed. To win. I want to know if you have it in you. I’m not sure you do.”

I sat there paralyzed and unblinking as the trembling grew. The room, which earlier swam in the liquid gold of morning sun, had become a sea of harsh white light. And the walls now seemed to bend and sway. I felt I might drown in it all. “The truth is that, like her,” he nodded towards the squawk box, “you often waffle and give weak opinions—on client calls, with the salesforce, with me…”

“No I don’t.” I interrupted—I couldn’t help it. Hot anger tore right through me. I wanted to leap across the desk and crush him. I knew in my marrow that I was better than her. 

My boss just sat there before me, silent, with staring eyes. His words felt like a cruel and unwarranted reproof, yet I feared there was some truth to them. Then something gave within me: “But I don’t want to come across as pushy. Do I? No one would like that. Besides, people have to make up their minds about what I’m saying. And what if I don’t know what I’m saying for sure? We’re giving our opinions and opinions can be wrong. It’s important to be upfront with that. I can work harder, I guess….” This all just came out in a mad rush, from where I didn’t exactly know.

“Wrong?” There was that awful pause again. “Seth, I’m telling you to believe in yourself. Do you believe in you?” 

I nodded, but it was one of shame and acquiesce, not of belief. Looking away for a moment, he peered into his computer screen and tapped at his keyboard. Satisfied, his eyes turned back to mine and narrowed as if it would help me to understand something I simply could not see—I was too dull and lost.

“This is not about working hard, ok? I’m looking for different from you.” 

“So you’re not happy with me?” I knew this was not what he meant, but wanted to numb the pain of what he was saying by fishing for a cheap compliment. Unable to bear his gaze any longer, I looked past him and into the sun’s blinding light. Again, there was a pause. It felt as if the room itself was about to swallow me whole with a heaviness it could no longer hold. 

Then I heard: “Be arrogant, Seth.” Those words, they came out so slow and strong; and the voice, it seemed to come from up high, out of the sun.

“Arrogant?” I said to the voice. 

There was silence, for how long I don’t entirely know. I kept trembling and wanted to cry. Then, at some point, my eyes met his again. “Yes. Arrogant. Not nice, as you often are. Nice will keep you in the bullpen but it won’t get you out of it. Not into an office like this. You need to be sharp. Confident. Attack. Be arrogant. Do you see?” 

“But…” I felt silly, like a child. I hated it. 

“Make people listen to you. Make people believe. Who cares if you’re wrong tomorrow? You’re right today because you believe what you say. In this business, you win by stating your opinions as facts and stating them like they’re the most important thing people will hear all day.”

He paused again and then pointed sharply at the squawk box. “Maybe she can’t get away with it. But you can. People will take you seriously. Use it to your advantage.” We gazed at each other and for a moment I felt a semblance of safety again. This suggestion, that I could do something that the female analyst could not, soothed that horrible rage swelling in me. The trembling gave a little. Then, his eyes lifted from mine and he looked out past the window behind me into the bullpen. “When you look out there, what do you see?”

I turned around to see my colleagues, many of whom were becoming my friends. Often, weary from another twelve-hour day, I would pause from my work and look around the floor to find inspiration. There was something in them, in their young faces, their bright eyes, that hinted at a beautiful world we were on our way to inhabiting. When I was weak, those faces, those eyes, would lift me up. There was something, too, about my female colleagues that dawned on me, but at the time I could not name. They seemed to posses an essence to their very being—a kind of depth and rootedness that held them together—which I sensed I lacked and therefore envied.  

“People working hard,” I said. “People trying to make it.” I meant people like me.

“Well, I see lots of people who won’t.” His voice was gentler now and sober. “You have to choose what path you want. I can only point out the way. I can’t take you there.”

I nodded. “All right.”

“It’s time you knew the truth, Seth. Do you see?”

“All right,” I said, still lost in that mad swirl of sadness and fury. “Yes, I see.”

For the remainder of the day, I could scarcely focus on the work at hand, my mind fixed instead on those haunting words from earlier. As the hours passed, I was filled with a sense that something irrevocable happened in that office. A mirror had been held up to me and what I saw was someone who I could not unsee, someone that I had avoided seeing through my hard work and diligence at H&Q. I was not the golden boy I imagined myself to be but was, in fact, a timid little boy. And now there I stood alone, surrounded by a dark shadow cast on that path which only hours before danced in the bright sun. 

I knew then, that if I was to move forward I could no longer do it under the protective wing of my boss. He had been coddling me and I was ashamed of it. Could I go out on my own? If I did, what would I lose of myself? What would it cost? As I pondered it all, a sea of doubt surged within me. I had heard this kind of “locker room talk” before in various forms—in movies and television, primarily. And I had seen it enacted in real life—on the playground and the football field and in the gym and in bars and at parties. It was the air I’d breathed my whole life. The cumulative effect had been to form a desired self, an alpha male, of which I had only been vaguely aware. But on that day I was confronted with it and it shook me to my bones. Arrogant? Me? I was surprised to find myself unsure I wanted to become that person and, in the end, I felt incapable of becoming it anyway. 

I stayed late that evening. I could not move. That sick feeling of lostness held me down in my chair. I knew that if I was to leave, first something within me was in need of release or of acknowledgment or of mending. Exactly what it was I did not know, but I felt it was inevitable and necessary. Once I was the last remaining person on the floor, I turned off the lights and sat back down at my desk. Closing my eyes, I breathed deep and long for a while. Underneath the heavy silence that settled in, I heard the gentle hum of computers and the soft buzz of squawk boxes surrounding me. There I sat in the dark for some time, alone and uneasy. Gradually, the quiet was broken by those words from earlier. They began to call from some place from deep inside me. Then they became more forceful and seemed to spill outside my body, echoing off the office walls as if I was lost in a deep, barren valley.

A terrible chill then flashed through me when I realized the substance of what I had seen in that brutal and unforgiving mirror. I was ugly, not entirely in a physical sense, but more so in my very being—twisted and wretched and vile, unredeemable. Productivity and jobs “well done” could no longer conceal it. I had been laid bare, unlike any time in my life before, and was found lacking. My boss had stared into my pitiful soul and seen the terrible truth. Now I had eyes to see and there was an awful familiarity to it. I had been running from this ugliness and it had caught up to me at last. I thought I might vanish from the earth right then, or that I should, and wondered if anyone would come to know or care. 

Soon the morning’s rage began to swirl again and my whole body became flush with anguish. I got up from my seat and walked down a lengthy hall to the corner office of the firm’s director of research. Stopping at the door, I could see through floor-to-celling windows along each wall of the office the deep darkness that had settled onto the city that night. Then I entered, only for a moment considering the risk of being caught by someone else on the floor working late who I might have not noticed, and walked directly up to one of the windows. 

From that high place, I looked down onto the city. Market Street, illuminated under a drab orange-yellow lamplight, was empty except for the occasional cab passing by, breaks squeaking as it turned a corner. And there was Beale Street not far up in the distance, on which I walked to and from work each day, it too was dark and empty and cold. And further still I could see the Bay Bridge, of monstrous steel and car lights, emerging from towering offices and apartment buildings. I stood there for a time transfixed by the terrible beauty before me—its vastness, its emptiness—that I knew tomorrow would be filled with the light of late summer sun and the songs of birds and the gruff rumbling of buses. It was all infused with some distant and undecipherable meaning. I felt powerless before the mystery of it all, naked and afraid. 

Then a wave of forgotten memories overtook me, memories from days long ago when I tasted my aloneness in the universe. There were days of grade school bullies and schoolyard fights; days of disapproving looks and condemnation from teachers—I was a “very sad boy,” said one; days ashamed of my sick, freckly skin; days of cruel shyness around girls and high school cliques; days of uneasy comparisons in bathrooms and locker rooms; days of loud arguments at home and walls kicked in; days longing for God to touch me yet unable to place myself in His angry hands—I was not a wretch, was I? Those were bleak days, filled with the wandering and uncertainty of a lost soul. Yet through it all, I somehow knew the strands of my fragile life had been held together by the hands of a parental love that was imperfect yet sustaining—a love I was desperately in need of but could not bear. 

The ache of those forgotten days burned and then hot, bitter tears came. I despised myself. I despised every frailty and shortcoming that was in me, every pitiful need. I despised my need to be loved because in its clutches I was only reminded of these very things. From then on, I vowed, I would no longer be a prisoner to myself anymore—to any weakness, to any need. Yes, I would be different. I would have an unyielding and unshakeable faith in my own importance and in my work, against that of everyone else around me. There was a power in the very ugliness I saw that morning—the cold force of despair needed to push away anything that stood in my way and anyone that would hold me back. I would kill the little boy inside to become a man. Arrogant. Me. Yes.

Then I felt a release, as if the shackles of timidity fell off and a prison door swung open. The city, with its labyrinth of dark and empty streets, its steel towers and bridges looming, suddenly seemed tame. And the feeling of empire and dominion arose. I walked out onto those streets and into that starless night with a new determination—to move through the dark valley on my own with that awful power as my sword and shield. On the other side, I knew, was warmness waiting for me—that office, that chair. As I walked down Market Street, my shoes pounding against the cold concrete, I looked up into the night’s great expanse and wondered if God’s eyes were on me up there from afar. I wanted nothing of love, His or any other. Love couldn’t carry me where I needed to go. I was to go at it alone now. And if God was indeed watching, He would see that I could, I could walk on my own. And if He were to touch me, He would when I made it to the other side. Or so I thought. 

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