Occupy Waldbaum

At the turn of the century, I shared a tiny office with the world’s most uncomfortable Jew. We worked together as software engineers, building trading systems at a gigantic investment bank that is now extinct. So it goes.

During the long stretches of time we spent locked together in that cubicled, carpeted mine, I occasionally marveled at how neat and perfect my officemate’s appearance was. He was almost a racist caricature of a Jew and looked like he could’ve been created by Nazis in Photoshop. Mel Gibson himself wouldn’t have cast this man for fear of a PR nightmare. His nose alone could have leapt off the pages of Eichmann’s Racial Science charts.

His name was Mark Waldbaum, and he was a small man, hairy, with short stumpy fingers. He was whiny, nasal and obviously gay.

But why was he so uncomfortable?

You’d think that possessing not just one but ALL of these awkward qualities might motivate him to “own” his predicament, to shoot for the moon, leaping full force into the role of Hebrew-Little-Hobbit.

Instead, he was so insecure, so completely mortified by his terrible genetic luck, that he writhed in discomfort with every action I ever saw him take. Like someone who is buried alive, his primary anxiety wasn’t from his unfortunate condition, but from the never-ending awareness of his condition, the knowledge of how trapped he was.

Locked in the Hebrew-Hobbit’s body, he knew how he appeared to others and what others might say behind his back. As a result, he would fight tooth and nail trying to bring other people down in order to make himself feel bigger.

“You know,” he once said to some frightened rookie over coffee, “don’t be fooled by discount clothing sites. Look at your shirt; believe me, everyone in the office can tell it’s cheap. I know what you’re thinking: What difference does an extra $50 make, why should you have to pay $100 PER SHIRT? But you get what you pay for. Look at the sheen of what you’re wearing, see how it looks almost stiff? People can tell cheap clothing, they can smell it a mile away. Your dad should have told you this stuff before you came to work. Don’t you have a dad?”

And the 21-year-old rookie would chuckle, sweat and self-deprecate, explaining himself and promising to do better. The more the rookie would grovel, the more Mark Waldbaum would chuff, feel the adrenaline rush of putting someone down, and grow superior.

—

In case you don’t know anything about how the social scene on Wall Street works, it works like this: The traders and frat guys working at the Front Office, close to the actual market action, get all the props and all the money. They are the jocks and the Alpha Squad of Wall Street. They’re the ones you read about.

The computer nerds and geeks and Indians and hippies and Arabs all work in the Back Office, which pays them all enough money to make them happy and well off, but not sick, fucking-platinum-whores happy. No whores for the Back Office fags.

Now Mark Waldbaum, in his continued desire to artificially propel himself upward via smoke and mirror tricks so that he wouldn’t feel so genetically inferior, had his heart set on moving himself from our Back Office to the Front Office fraternity.

He would suck the dicks of everyone in the Front Office, polishing them up and getting the heads nice and shiny like a waxed golf-ball being speckled up by a washrag-toting helper mouse. He’d pick up the tab for sushi, drinks, Scores, cocaine, anything to work his way into the fraternity like a good little pledge. God bless him.

It didn’t even take that long; six months of thirsty work and he was in there like swimwear. It’s a truism of social leeching: When you’re persistent ENOUGH with gifts and affection (unless you have the personal repulsiveness of an actual burn victim), you’ll at WORST become the lovable mascot of your desired social clique. The mascot spot is all you need; when enough time passes, group dynamics shift, and the core members get too drunk and high to remember the structure and POOF — they’ve accidentally let you in, and you become one of them.

—

In another year, he had his Varsity Letter: His bonus was more than 20x mine at over a million dollars.

I was still sitting in the Back Office while he played Sonny to some douchebag’s Danny Zucko. I can’t say I envied him per se, but I sure as hell wanted his money. I had met a girl and we were now married and wanted to have kids, and you needed to be a fucking millionaire to do this comfortably in NYC. Before long, I sucked up my pride and gave Mark a call.

“Bro,” he said, “I’m gonna hook you up. You’re not a bad guy; you’re a little uptight, and you’ve got an ego that could choke a horse, but you’re not a faggot, you don’t have to be sitting back there with those fags. You could make it up here in Front, it’s nothin’. I’m gonna hook you up.”

So he arranges this big interview for me -– but he explains that it’s more like an audition. I obviously already know how to do the work since I wrote the fucking system they’re trading on. The part I do have to prove is that I can hang with these guys, be funny, confident and basically show them that I could cut it as a Pink Lady.

—

I went down to shared ground, the lobby of our office building, to meet Mark. He kept me waiting there for about 15 minutes, and, as this was before Americans had embraced text messaging, I stood around forever like a jerkoff.

Finally the gold elevator doors open, and there’s Mark Waldbaum, a year and a half after he had departed Back Office, looking like himself only more so. Fresher shirt, more cologne, closer shave — whatever. Take out your dick, Mark, I’m ready to blow you for a million bucks.

“Ben-nnyyy!” he growled, as he strode off the elevator with his tiny legs.

“Heyyyyy, what’s up man,” I said and reached out to give him the hand-clasp / pretend-we’re-both-heterosexual hug because I’m not afraid of embracing closeted gay people.

But when Mark took my hand, he backed away from my hug. What was I, gay? He grinned fakely, shaking my hand up and down fiercely, glaring into my eyes and sweating.

When he let go, something was wrong.

“Ew, dude, “ he said, sounding almost afraid. “Are you like, one of those guys with these really clammy hands?”

I was so taken aback I didn’t know how to answer. The guy had shared a tiny office with me for a year but was talking like I was a blind date. I chuckled nervously, but he wasn’t joking.

“Get the fuck outta here,” I said, “clammy hands, ya fuckin’ prick.”

He wasn’t laughing.

“No, you do, you really do. Trust me, I’m helping you. Believe me, better you should hear it from me.”

At that point he instructed me, serious as a heart attack, that I should not under ANY circumstances shake hands with any of the guys I was about to meet.

“Believe me, the second they feel your hands, you’re disqualified. Just follow my lead: You have a COLD, understand, and you can’t shake their hands because you have a cold and you don’t want them to get sick.”

Now I was starting to get nervous. Was this a fucking nightmare?

“Are you serious?” I asked, though he obviously was. “No, c’mon man, don’t shake hands with them???”

“Do NOT. Seriously Ben, if you shake one of these guys’ hands, you can forget it — you’re gonna get pegged as a sweaty, nervous, Back Office fag, and you’re gonna blow my cred.”

I had a moment of clarity: Now I was the one in the coffin. I saw clearly how fucked I was. Mark was staring me down on some weird trip, making my clammy hands the entire focus of his being. He gave me no other advice or clue what the audition might entail -– he was only maniacally concerned that I not shake anyone’s hand.

“Here he comes,” he blurted, turning away from me.

Walking from the elevator was a tall, beautiful Aryan bro in a pink Brooks Brothers shirt. It was Blaine from Pretty in Pink. He reached out his big comfy hand to me. I could see how smooth it was because he had never worked a day in his life. I wanted so badly to grasp it and to run with my normal Monday-night-football-guy game. Instead, I felt all the weight of Mark on top of me and held up my hands, like an enemy soldier surrendering.

“I’m so sorry, I have a cold. I’m actually really sick.”

Mark turned his stare to Blaine and started to nod.

“He has a cold,” Mark said.

Blaine looked at me, perplexed, then insulted, then in disbelief. All around us, it was a time-lapse scene: Businessmen rushed across the lobby in fast-motion, the sun set and rose, leaves fell off the trees, seasons passed and his hand stood in midair, left hanging, withering alone beside the sands of time.

He looked away disgusted, and his initial goodwill was replaced by the rote formalities of having to go through a shitty blind date.

I didn’t have a chance.

Mark Waldbaum went on to make $10 million off the housing bubble.

—

In our beautiful capitalist literature, Ayn Rand paints pictures of genius inventors and Jobsian heroes brought down by the lazy, looting, self-entitled masses.

In my experience on planet earth, especially on Wall Street, Steve Jobs geniuses are few and far between. Far more common are winners of a country club game that begins at birth and moves from the dodge ball court to high school athletic fields to fraternities and finally to the business world.

I’m jealous of the money they make. I don’t think I’m above them because we all play games to get where we are. But the notion that the Wall Street elite haven’t simply won several lotteries and instead have achieved great financial success merely by ability and hard work is very difficult to swallow.

We need these people, as a society. They stoke the fires of the economy, and they shouldhave hundreds of times more money than those who contribute nothing but crappy artwork that nobody wants to buy. But the notion that Wall Street is some kind of intellectual meritocracy is disingenuous. When someone wins the lottery, the government takes half of it. Half, Eddie.

We in a fix right now, gentlemen. Hey, look at me: You know what you did. Y’all niggas better pony up.

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