Shut your idiot trap for a minute and maybe you’ll learn something. I’m a broker at the top hedge fund in New York fucking City. I kick ass and I don’t even take names, because I could give a shit about other people’s identities. I made more money during my lunch hour than you’ll earn in a decade. Slothful national holidays observe me.
But, come the weekend, I turn into a goddam room-temperature-green-tea-sipping, crafts-show-watching, hard-core online-mah-jongg enthusiast.
When I’m in that office, boy, watch out: I will tear your new one its own new one. I’m not a shark; I’m a motherfucking orca. I crunch numbers like they’re granola and spit them out in your face, because I don’t eat anything except raw red meat. Sometimes I donate money to charity during the day, not out of altruism but just to challenge myself to earn it back twofold by sundown.
And after a hard day of work I love nothing more than winding down with some hatha yoga, “The Very Best of Enya” on low volume, and a tall, ice-cold O’Doul’s in a commemorative glass from a trip I took to a Barbie convention with my nieces.
Hey, Poindexter, feast your corrective-lens-adjusted eyes on this power suit: pinstripes, peak lapels, Italian silk imported from a seven-hundred-year-old family business in Como. I sewed it myself in eight months, in a Wednesday-night class at the community center. Edith’s a really patient teacher.
Yesterday, this Young Turk in the office comes up to me, boasting about a major deal he’s got cooking. Serious egg on his face two hours later when it falls through. He’s slumped over his desk, feeling sorry for himself. “Sack up, junior!” I boom. “When life hands you a lemon, you sink your fangs into that citric acid and smile, because lemonade is for children and humanities majors.”
I collect vintage night-lights that I buy on Etsy.
Hold on, I’m closing on something the size of an inferior country’s G.D.P., and the S.E.C.’s been on my ass like John Wayne on a stallion. . . . Stacy, be a doll and clear my evening and order up a couple pounds of steak, ’cause Daddy’s gonna be taking care of business and working overtime. And do me a favor: make sure you correctly set my DVR for the rerun marathon on Oxygen of “Grace Under Fire.”
My Delta brothers and I get together once a month—we can’t do it more than that, given how much time we spend molding the financial world in our images, and also most of them have newborns in Scarsdale, so the commute’s a bitch. We’ll hang in someone’s feng-shui-appointed salon, read third-wave-feminist blogs on Sheryl Sandberg, and discuss our insecurities stemming from childhood bullying. This is what real men do, and if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, ’cause Pete’s probably grilling up some of his famous rosemary-flecked tofu, except not for Jim, because of his soy allergy.
Don’t even think about crossing me. I can buy and sell you a thousand times over. And I’ll be laughing all the way to my daily cognitive-behavioral-therapist appointment, punk, where Dr. Tessler and I work on using laughter as a means of assuaging social anxiety.
You got a problem with what I’m saying? Well, you know what we do with little pissants like you where I come from? We sit down and have ourselves an old-fashioned conflict-mediation session in which we start every sentence with “I feel.” I come from Darien, Connecticut.
See that chick there, the one with the centerfold rack? Spent a week with her in Vegas, dominating investors at a conference. We were together every waking minute, working on PowerPoints and pitches, and then, the last night, you guessed it—went back to her hotel room, where we stayed up till the break of dawn, talking through her boyfriend issues. If her relationship status ever changes on Facebook, I might shoot her an e-mail to see if she wants to maybe grab coffee or something sometime after work or whatever. Decaf, obviously.
When you’re ready to learn how to be a master of the universe, call me. But if it’s a Friday night, after I close down the office, don’t bother. That’s my time for scrapbooking. ♦