karenika - books - monkey business

Monkey Business

One of the BAs, Hope, had been downing shots with increasing rapidity over the course of the evening. The combination of the shots, the heat, and the level of the music at Le Bar Bat had pushed her beyond her limits. As she stood at the bar waiting for her next drink to arrive, an uncontrollable urge to vomit overcame her. She ducked her head underneath the bar, and began spewing forth a fragrant mixture of barbecue chicken and Captain Morgan spiced rum. Ferramo, who at the time of the opening projectile was on the dance floor immediately adjacent to the bar, witnessed these initial throes of expulsion and interpreted Hope's temporary incapacity as an opportunity to initiate an impressive public display of vulgarity. He quickly positioned himself behind her, whipped out his hogan, and as she continued her litany of expurgation he straddled her backside, grabbed her hips, and began to grind her from behind in a simulation that would have made a dog in heat blush.

As we viewed this display from across the dance floor we were thoroughly befuddled. Was this guy really so desperate and so sexually depraved? What the hell was going on? Some of the people whom we knew in investment banking were good guys. Did the pressure just cause some of the others to snap? We didn't know. Maybe it was the sleepless nights. Maybe it was the lack of a social life. Maybe it was the opportunity to finally not be the one getting shit upon but to be the one doing the shitting.

Either way, we didn't realize that in the not-too-distant future we, too, would be full-time associates doing things we never thought we would stoop so low to do. It was uncanny what a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week nonstop-stress career choice would do to our judgement.

This book is about two investment bankers in DLJ who tell their story starting from a summer internship all the way till the moment they decided that selling their souls to the firm was no longer a good idea.

Today's excerpt comes from a wall street tale called Monkey Business : Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle. It's a scene where the two associates who wrote the book are out on their first group dinner, which is at a bar.