The Fall of Princes

  The car dropped us at five forty-five. And we entered the restaurant’s giant room, all red, hung year-round with Christmas decorations. Tinsel swagged from every beam, crimson-faced waiters in scarlet hussar uniforms circled the

  room. When it came to venomous service and inflated prices, nothing beat the RTR, and I began to settle into that feeling of being in exactly the right place at the right time.

  An icy bottle of vodka was brought to the table, and caviar was heaped on plates with ice cream scoops. Dick ate and drank ravenously, the prices meaning nothing. He figured with $350 mil stashed at The Firm, it was only our duty to show him a good time, and, if the Russian Tea Room had offered lap dancers, he would have had several along with his caviar. That not being in the offing, Dick tucked in and settled down to a long evening of gastronomic pleasure with the awful food on the awful menu. The food was so bad it was kind of endearing. I was just glad to feel the first hit of vodka flooding my veins, making my heart sing.

  Dick was a funny guy, meaning he could, given enough liquor and sensual pleasure, actually be funny and likable in a polyester kind of way. Stories about his fat wife, Mamie, about his car collection, thirty-seven, and his moronic children were truly amusing, and I was suddenly glad to be in his company. A joie de vivre imbued the air, settled my stomach, and erased the day’s every number from my mind. He had the air of a man who was going to finish the evening asking for a really expensive hooker, with the certain knowledge that she would be provided for him. Anything he liked would be provided for him, the Laundromat king who maybe hadn’t had sex for six or eight weeks, certainly not with a smooth-skinned twenty-something girl in six-inch heels.

  Borscht was served, the one thing the RTR did well, and if they had had a board announcing, like McDonald’s, the number of portions served, the total would be impressive. Over a trillion sold, toyed with, and sent back to the kitchen largely untouched.

  Dick asked me to order a bottle of wine, and I did, at $400. It was brought to the table with great ceremony, and uncorked, and Dick was given a taste. He swirled it in his balloon glass. He sniffed, drank, then spat it on the floor. Let me say that again. He spat it on the floor, splattering the sommelier’s dusty shoes, and said, “This swill? I wouldn’t drink this swill on a bet. Give this bottle to my friend here, and bring me a real Bordeaux. Bring me your most expensive bottle of red wine right now.”

  Tiny Armenian teenagers frantically began to scrub the ancient carpeting as the egregiously expensive bottle of wine, decades old, dusty from waiting, was brought to the table, tasted, and met with glum approval by the laundry king. “I serve better wine at lunch,” he bellowed. “To people I don’t like.”

  Suddenly: “What’s your name? I’m calling you Louis.”

  “It’s Dimitri, sir.”

  Dick peeled a $100 bill off of a big roll in his pocket and gave it to Dmitri. “Well, Louis, life is just too short to drink bad wine. If I wanted bad wine, I’d get poor like you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tasted the wine that was poured. “Drinkable. Not great, but drinkable. Now get these damned kids away from me and bring some food.”

  He sent everything back at least once. The vodka had kicked in, and I began to like Dick and his $350 mil a lot. Underneath his baggy suit, he was a good guy. Fun-loving. Vulgar. Dumb as a dryer. And, with him drinking like a fish, he wouldn’t notice how much I was knocking back or how many times I went to the bathroom to freshen up.

  There was something uber-bizarre about being in the old Russian Tea Room. All those Christmas decorations. All those octogenarian waiters, all called Dimitri or Boris. Lost in time. Lost in an alcoholic haze that made forty bucks for a bowl of soup seem reasonable. Those were the days when expense accounts were endless, nobody really paid for anything, except some poor guy in Denver who was watching Monday-night football, unaware that $400 bottles of wine were being spit on the floor, staining the thousand-year-old raggedy carpeting. We had blini with the golfball caviar, several times, and we had borscht and we had shashlik and strogonoff, and a lot of other stuff I didn’t even know the name of. Waiters swirled around the table like bees at honey time, placing and replacing the enormous, heavy restaurant silver.

  Dick told me how his wife Mamie was in bed—not so hot—and how he was in bed when he was with women other than Mamie—fantastic—and how big his dick was—

  enormous, much bigger than mine and this I know for a fact because we went to the bathroom and compared. He was a stubby little man with a lot of washers and dryers and a big dick, and all of this was making Dick happier and happier as the night wore on, although my mood darkened when I realized, in the size department, both of portfolio and of member, I would never be where Dick was, that is, on top of the fucking world.

  Even the Dimitris and Boris’s started to like Dick, the more times he reached into his pocket and peeled off more bills. He would do it at odd moments, did it as though in passing, “Here, Louie,” he would say, to some sadsack waiter who just happened to be passing by. “Go wild. Bring me another bottle of that wine.” When all that was gone, he asked for some even more obscure, ridiculous vintage and of course they had it.

  The Christmas lights began to sparkle and whirl, and I could tell the moment was approaching when Dick stopped sending his food back and began to make subtle and then not so subtle hints about Russian girls and all that he had heard about their beauty and licentiousness.

  “You have to taste this fish,” he said.

  I declined, twice, but he insisted, and then he picked up a big gob of some sort of fish in a heavy cream sauce in his fork and deposited it on the tablecloth. “Eat that,” he said. “It’s heaven.” And, once scraped off the tablecloth, it kind of was.

  Dick and I were having fun. At least it seemed so at the time. The other patrons of the restaurant found it not so much fun, and began to call for their checks.

  A girl was mentioned by one of the Louies, and then a girl was found, she’d be here in half an hour, nineteen, and capable of tricks and pleasures unseen in any non-Asiatic country, anywhere. She would be in this very room in forty-five minutes. And, stomach churning from all the caviar and the steaming dishes that weren’t hot enough or too salty, and the expensive wine I had personally packed away, along with two grams of Peru’s finest Marching Powder, I decided that what the evening needed, to pass the time from brandy to Natasha, was some entertainment provided by me personally. So I jumped on the red banquette and hopped on the table and sang, at the top of my voice, “Hava Nagila,” which, thanks to thousands of duty bar and bat mitzvahs I had attended, I actually knew the words to, at least the “Hava Nagila” part. The room, almost empty, really cleared out fast, so we were the only customers left.

  The disaster that wrecks you can be a big thing, or a small thing. Sometimes, it’s hardly even remarked upon. The thread snaps, and the button falls to the ground. You don’t even notice. The blister that’s been bothering you for weeks suddenly pops. Sometimes you say the unsayable, the thing that, once said, cannot be unsaid. You say it not because it’s clever or apt or kind. You say it simply because it’s there, hanging in the air, waiting to be said. You drop the bomb. You fuck up at work and can’t find anybody else to blame it on. Me, I danced.

  In what even I, through the fog, knew to be a misguided adventure, I danced. I got up on the banquette, tearing the hundred-year-old leather, where every famous behind in New York had sat, at some time, along with thousands of wide-eyed tourists, and then I clambered onto the small round table, and I danced the Kazatsky, booming “Hava Nagila” in the full-throated cry of my youth and enthusiasm. How else could I express my joy at having spent the evening with Dick Morris, laundry king, and soon-to-be-laid Midwestern schlub extraordinaire. At that moment, I loved Dick Morris.

  Stemware and crockery flew everywhere, smashing into a thousand bits and sending the Algerian boys into fits of overtime. There was general alarm in the restaurant, alarm that in no way weakened my
enthusiasm for my melodious exertions. I was, at 185 pounds of solid-packed muscle, a challenge for the small round table, which suddenly gave way, landing me on my backside amidst the carnage, cutting a wide gash in my suit, not to mention my ass. My butt would need stitches; the boxers were beyond repair, a heartbreak, my favorite pair.

  Just as the table collapsed, Natasha arrived, a stunning girl with a wildly unnatural mane of blonde hair, wearing a micro-leather skirt, pink, with a purple chubby fur jacket

  and more eye makeup than is normally in stock at Bloomingdale’s. Dick Morris laughed uproariously, sobering up slightly at the sight of Natasha and her bodyguard, who was introduced as her uncle. The kind of burly man who could squash a Volkswagen with one hand, a man with hair growing out of both his ears and his nostrils, sprouting as well out of the sagging neckline of his heavy sweater. There may have been a gun in there. I’m pretty sure there was.

  It took two hussars and two Armenians to get me off the floor, still attempting the Kazatsky even in the ruination of blood and glassware. I had no wish to stop dancing, even as it became obvious that all Dick wanted was to get to the Marriott Times Square where he, ever thrifty, stayed, and be alone with the luscious Natasha. I waved my American Express card at them, and they brightened considerably and returned instantaneously. Everything was hilarious, but the figure at the bottom of the bill was especially hilarious, four thousand in wine alone, over five total for a quiet, barely edible and largely untouched dinner for two. I tipped in cash, as Ford Madox Ford advised.

  Uncle Hairy accepted the huge wad of bills Dick put in his hand, without counting it; even he had some politesse. Natasha spoke no English, but made it clear that she was ready to shed her chubby and get down to business with Dick, over whom she towered.

  It took an army to get us out the door, even after they saw the fabulous pile of cash I had left as expiation. I somehow had a strand of tinsel around my neck, and blood gushing from my rear end.

  On the street outside, the car still waited. The dinner had gone on for six hours, and the driver was asleep, but, once wakened, he could see he had a situation on his hands. “Great night,” said Dick, just as I threw up on his shoes.

  “Fuck, man,” he said. “That was truly uncalled for.” He took off his shoes and socks and, in a Herculean display of athleticism, threw them into the middle of Fifty-Seventh Street. “Not acceptable,” he said, as he got into the stretch barefoot with Natasha and crept off into the night, leaving me bleeding and broken on the curb. I waved a feeble good-bye, and something told me it really was good-bye.

  The emergency room removed the shards of glass from my behind, asking no explanation with none given, and sent me home with seven stitches at three in the morning. A long haul for a night of revelry that had started early that morning. It seemed, now, so far in the distant past.

  The sheets were silken and cool, Carmela slept peacefully, her hair, her skin, radiant in the glow of the streetlights, more beautiful than a thousand Natashas. Moonlight. Milk. The petals of white peonies. A woman of qualities. I imagined her in a short purple fur, and I wanted desperately to bathe my wounds in the sweetness of her waters, and tried to wake her, but she shrugged me off.

  “You’re drunk,” she said. “I was drunk but now I’m asleep. Leave a girl alone for once.” I tried to sleep, but there was no way, so at six thirty I got up and gingerly showered and appeared at work at seven thirty, except there was no way I could sit in an office chair, and one guy stopped by, took one look, and said, observing the various cuts, abrasions, and bruises on my face, “I want to see the other guy,” so I hadn’t quite gotten away with the night of revelry.

  At nine, there was a brief meeting at which I was told I had been asked off of Dick Morris’s account but, not to worry, there was lots of other room to grow and ply my satanic wares. I could make a rock make money, they said. I sent Dick Morris a gift certificate for a pair of John Lobb shoes and went on, standing, with my day, wielding complex financial instruments like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s sword of light.

  But it was over and I knew it. If you think you’re going to get fired, you are, in fact, going to get fired, and, as the days passed and I behaved myself with an absolute rigor, word began to get around and the myth grew, and within four months, slowly stripped of account after account, I was called into the office for the last time.

  So quick bright things come to confusion. So quick.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  What They Sing About, When They Sing in Heaven

  It is axiomatic that, just because you lose all your money, just because you are suddenly stripped of your place in the world, it doesn’t mean your friends lose everything, too. No siree, Bob. They do not.

  The morning after you get fired, you wake up back in Hovel Hall, where the rats and roaches, in your absence, have apparently done nothing but multiply and grow less timid. You know that, by 7:45 a.m., you are already past tense at The Firm. You have simply ceased to be, your office bare, your friends averting their eyes when they pass your door.

  Yesterday, when you were still in the present tense, in the land of the living, there was much collegial backslapping and high-fiving and dewy-eyed hugging with your colleagues. You were still a person, a friend.

  The looks began to grow more distant, the high-fiving nonexistent as they watched you return to your office, where the phone had already been shut off, the Rolodex confiscated, and an armed guard stood at the portal of what was once the seat of your power. The head of HR was there, trying to look sympathetic, but let’s face it, she, with her $42,000-a-year life—lived principally with cats and crosswords and Beaujolais—must get such glee out of watching the mighty with their tails between their legs.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, firm and confident, “You have to clear out your office. They want you out by noon.”

  Looking around at all that stuff made you want to throw up. “Belinda, love of my life. I’m not packing up anything. You know what belongs to The Firm. The rest is mine. Get some grunt to box it up and send it to me as soon as possible.” Not knowing that she would be sending the stuff to a loft where Carmela was already having the locks changed, having received a call from a friend and set her course of action—possess the loft, strip the bank accounts of cash, cut my face out of the wedding pictures, things that women know to do. She was on the phone every five minutes with Gloria, her mother, who’d been through it all twice, plotting it all out, where to transfer the money so I couldn’t get at it, stuff like that.

  I was to get nothing, except, of course, the bills for maintaining it all. She got the lap pool at eighty degrees in January.

  “Here’s what we do,” said Fanelli, who was one of the genuinely dewy-eyed ones. “You get four rolls of quarters and then we go to the nearest Irish bar and get shitfaced and you call every headhunter and trader you know. You got to move fast, bro’. Don’t let the Wookie win.”

  Seven martinis and a hundred quarters later, not one headhunter or trader—people I had known for years, the same people who were calling me a week ago to entice me to switch jobs—not one of these fine people had even deigned to take my call. To them as well, I had vanished. They knew there was no higher rung on the trading ladder to be thrown off of than The Firm, and that it was impossible to climb back up. Ever. Not even if I went to the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, where the Dalai Lama holes up when he’s in town and where they make the fruitcakes one gets relentlessly at Christmas, not even if I took a vow of chastity and silence, not even then would I ever get another job, not on The Street.

  The sun just beginning to slant, we went to Tenth Avenue and I bought the fancy car, which I couldn’t afford and which lost half its value the second the tires hit the asphalt, and we rolled through the streets and bars and clubs like kings until four.

  I woke up the next morning in the suit I had worn the day before, sprawled half on and half off the sofa in the Hovel. We, Fanelli and I, had traveled the length and breadth of the
city in the new car, which was probably parked somewhere near to where I lay; no matter how drunk you are, you don’t lose a car, at least you don’t lose it forever. There were many empty bottles of fancy liquor rolling around on the floor, indicating the presence of recent company, but who they were, or when they had arrived and done whatever they did, I couldn’t have told you. The apartment was in every way worse than it had ever been.

  There are some apartments that, once you’ve moved out of them, become so radioactive you could never live there again. Hovel Hall, by dawn’s light, had the greenish glow of nuclear fission.

  Things you learn when you’re unemployed: a watched pot will boil. It just takes a very, very long time, time being what you have a lot of. Second thing: a million dollars isn’t really very much money. Third thing: work may be heinous, but it gives you someplace to go in the morning, a reason to get up and shave and leave the apartment, not to mention that they pay you.

  These thoughts brought on the plan for revenge. I would show them, or so I thought. Get a better job. Have harder abs. Rent a house on the beach in East Hampton and allow them to come and sponge off me. I was so young, hardly begun. I was very, very good at the thing I did. It was unthinkable that life as I knew it was over. This was only a minor interruption on the road. A speed bump.

  After four days of self-pity and rats, I did the only sensible thing: I moved into the Pierre Hotel, a Four Seasons property at the time. Staggering flower arrangements. Staggering room rates. Staggeringly obsequious service. God bless the Platinum Card from American Express.

  I rented a suite, a big one, overlooking the zoo in Central Park. From the bathroom, you could see all the way to Harlem, and at night, the glow of the city lights lulled me to sleep as though in a mother’s arms, imagining all the festive parties the gang was going to have in my little slice of heaven on the 37th floor. A foyer, a big sitting room furnished with that kind of furniture so popular in English country houses, the same art on every wall in every room.