Triangulating Friendships
Last night Kim and I had drinks and dinner with an unusual kluge of friends. They themselves are not unusual, but the connections are a bit complicated. Tricia worked for me in 1981 in the early days of Bankers Trust. She was fresh out of school and both impressionable and eager to learn about the world. Her husband Sam, who came along years after Tricia and I had parted ways, came to work with me in 2005 at Bear Stearns. At an early meeting he revealed to me that Tricia was his wife (by then, of many years). Michelle was a colleague from Bankers Trust, but more from the era of the 1990’s and the “bad old days” of derivatives trading and market-making in weird and esoteric capital markets instruments. We never worked directly with each other but knew each other and can now agree that derivatives traders are made in a forge where their mothers never loved them. Michelle and Sam currently work at a large pension/investment company and had connected the dots back to the Bankers Trust connections of Tricia and myself. Kim is, of course, still a cabaret singer and educator, but she knows enough about Wall Street and derivatives to smile wanly and nod her head at whatever ridiculous stories are told about those days of Camelot. Michelle is a closet cabaret singer and Tricia is an avid cabaret listener (Sam tends more toward jazz at Birdland), and I just do what I’m told around cabaret.
We gathered at one of Sam’s old haunts at the Horseshoe Bar on 7th Street and Avenue B in the East Village. He told us that this was the scene of many a movie including The Godfather II and Crocodile Dundee, so I treated it with proper respect. It looked to me like the setting for St. Elmo’s fire. It was only 6pm so the joint was not exactly jumping and lively at that hour of the day. I imagine it’s a very different scene at midnight. That worked out well since it gave us the ability to reintroduce ourselves and tell a few innocent stories that helped set the context for this unusual web of relationships represented by this group. One thing I failed to mention was that Sam and Tricia became more familiar with Kim and I when we moved to Staten Island in 2015. Sam is a fifth generation Staten Islander who grew up with all the working class connections with the seafaring set on the Island. He and Tricia came out for a day to show us his favorite haunts, including Basilio’s Inn, the scene of Lucky Luciano’s famous last supper before he got lucky by not dying at the hands of the mobsters taking him out to the swamplands in New Jersey. To feed Sam’s historic hunger, I even set him up with the Noble Maritime Museum who I knew from working on my New York Wheel project. He became a board member and reconnected with his heritage while doing some good for the cultural life of the Island.
From there we went on to Lavagna’s Restaurant on 5th Street for a nice easy-going summertime dinner with the restaurant doors open to the street on a warm, but not oppressively hot evening. The thing about an eclectic group like this is that if you spend time talking about Bankers Trust you lose half your audience. If you talk about Bear Stearns you lose more than half your audience because I run out of the room screaming. If you talk about Sam and Michelle’s current monolithic employer they get circumspect due to their confidentiality arrangements, the wives stare at the ceiling and I want to shoot myself. Talking about derivatives is of interest to absolutely no one anymore due to over-excitement in the ‘80’s, over-exposure in the ‘90’s and over-regulation in the last twenty years. That leaves general storytelling which is always my favorite Jeopardy category and cabaret singing. 80% of the crowd is up for talking about singing and we can put up with Sam’s board looks by occasionally throwing in some jazz scatting to keep him amused.
When we walked out of the restaurant near 10pm we were greeted with a typical New York East Village scene. There was a crazy woman on Avenue B standing in the middle, blocking traffic and stoned out of her mind. She was not easily moved, so cars had to ease past her and then zoom away into the night. Michelle was staying uptown near the monolithic mother ship, so she was in the market for an Uber. Sam and Tricia were heading home in their car, parked nearby (they are such suburbanites!), something that must grate against the urban origins of their East Village roots. Kim and I are all about using Curb with yellow cabs, since Uber and Lyft have normalized their come-on pricing of their early “give us a try” marketing blitz a few years ago, and I rarely find I can improve on yellow cab pricing. There’s a message in that in that the locked and sealed meter on a yellow cab is pretty much tamper-proof (Michael Cohen’s medallion cab shenanigans notwithstanding). The Uber/Lyft pricing is not metered in a way that gives the TLC hard-wired control over what they charge. The TLC-lite approach to regulating car companies will come back to bite everyone in the ass sooner or later. I am keeping a revenue line item on my balance sheet for “Future Uber/Lyft Mandated Rebate Under Settlement #XYZ” since you just know there will someday be a class-action suit about overpricing and after a long drawn-out New York Times expose they will reach a settlement and ask us all to submit a claim. I, for one, will be ready. Meanwhile there are no yellow cabs on Avenue B, so I Uber it anyway and pay the premium.
On the ride home down the empty FDR Drive, we get passed by a Fast and Furious something or other going 100mph. Nevertheless we have a moment to reflect on the evening. I am always curious how Kim enjoys an evening with “my friends” versus all the kooky theatrical types she has us socializing with. I take her out on these adventures far less often than we go out with her cabaret pals. I was pleased that she enjoyed the evening as much as I did. In fact, given that Sam and I were outnumbered three to two, and given that they all too willingly agreed that I was likely the asshole to the outside world in this relationship (not a big risk in that assessment given my 40+ years on Wall Street), one might even suggest that they already like her more than they like me. What’s worse perhaps is that from what she tells me, she might even like them more than she likes me. I think next time we are going to have to talk more about exotic derivatives structures rather than the American Song Book.