The guy was obsessed with women’s underpants. And every morning on the Dulles Toll Road he blew past the unmanned toll booths – never paid the 50 cents. He said they’d never once given him a ticket, even though flashes went off and sirens blew. Walter sat on the other side of my cubicle wall, and this is no joke: He looked at soiled panties on the Internet all day long. I did not make that up. He had a favorite web site, and that web site showed him pictures of used women’s panties, and he visited the web site while at work. He cackled like a crazed animal. And that wasn’t even the worst part of the job.

This job was a stepping stone on my way to trading for a living, so it has a place in my life and I don’t regret it. I regret just two things in my life but we can talk about that another time.

I worked at a major internet service provider after law school, and after J.M. taught me more about sales in 4 months than I ever learned anywhere else, before or since. Easily the best boss I ever had. He fired me for revealing that women were paid less than men. Why wasn’t I practicing law during this time? Because I hated it. I hated the legal world. I’ve never met a happy attorney. Have you?

Walter used to call Chief Technology Officers at work and just say, “I want to sell you a T-3 line. It makes me a $3,000 commission. Let’s talk.” One day a woman IT director said, “Now is not a good time,” and hung up on him. He called her back immediately and said, “Hey Susan, is now a good time?” He ended up talking to her for 15 minutes. I don’t know if he sold her a T-3 but I do know he probably wanted to see her panties.

Three months before law school graduation my aunt sent me a clipping from the Wall Street Journal. It was a study that showed lawyers committed suicide far more frequently than any other professionals. At the time I was clerking for a law firm on the 44^th floor above Montgomery Street in San Francisco. I read the article and looked out the window. I realized that sooner or later I’d jump.

So I changed tracks. I applied to graduate school. I moved to Washington, D.C. And when I got there, and bought my books, and registered for my classes, talked to the dean. He told me four times that my acceptance letter would arrive tomorrow. They only accepted 20 people into the PhD program. He was happy to have me. I was the only one with a law degree.

Three days later I received a rejection letter from the school. I’d moved across the country for this. I had no job, I owed rent, and it was August 25, 1998. My 27^th birthday. I hadn’t published any books, I had been tricked into moving across the country, and I had no job prospects whatsoever. Damn it. Dead end.

At that moment I needed to find something stable to hold me up. Something to stand firmly on. Everywhere I went felt like the ground was moving under my feet. As if at any moment the rest of my life would collapse from under me and I’d be drifting in space. What the hell was I going to do?

So I visited a public library in Arlington famous for having collections of ship manifests from the late 19^th century. I looked up names from 1890-1895. Ships that arrived in New York from Italy. Looked for my great-grandmother’s name: Emilia Ferrara. And some other names too. I found her.

[Ellis Island]

She had come alone.

There weren’t any other names on the manifest along with her. No other Ferrara family members. She was 9 years old at the time. How does a 9 year old get on a ship from Napoli and get to America safely? What did she think along the way? Who paid her fare? Who would she meet when she arrived? Did she understand English?

So maybe my great grandmother had known what it was like to start from scratch. And be afraid. And so I walked out of the library and called an old friend from Bear, Stearns in San Francisco.

“Whatever you do, don’t get involved in currency trading,” he told me.

You can guess what I did next.

He was a slavedriver. He yelled constantly. Nothing was ever his fault and you never did anything right. If his pencils were out of order on his desk he yelled. If you got him the wrong dressing on his Greek salad he yelled. If you got him the right dressing on the salad he yelled. You get the idea. He also managed a half billion dollars 39 floors above 1 Sansome Street in San Francisco. And my wife was telling me she was going to work for him.

You’re the only one he’ll never yell at, I told her.

He offered her $40,000 at a time when she was making something like $25,000 toiling for Bear, Stearns –  a company helmed by an octogenarian who commanded employees to reuse paperclips to save money. The same guy, by the way, who gifted $80 million in year-end bonus to four members of the executive team. And then wrote a letter to thousands of back-office staff announcing his decision to generously grant their Christmas bonuses to charity. Not kidding. He also co-wrote a book with his imaginary friend Haimchinkel Malintz Anaynikal. I’m not making that up. Google the name “Haimchinkel Malintz Anaynikal.” It’s all there. I don’t lament the demise of that company.

Anyway, I told her that the hedge fund manager would never yell at her. You're the only person who he'd be afraid of, I said. I meant that in the best way.

That turned out to be true, but it didn’t make the job any better. She woke up at 4 and arrived at the office by 5. They reimbursed her taxi fare every day and often provided lunch for everyone. They had the latest equipment, laser-etched glass walls in every office, and a hot secretary named Lori who had two beautiful retrievers. I’m talking about her dogs, by the way, but her other retrievers were beautiful as well.

The job stunk because he yelled at Zack, at Dana, at Lori, at Irene, and at the folks from Bear, Stearns. My then-wife reconciled all the trades each morning from the previous day. Her job was to search for errors in the way that Bear, Stearns cleared the trades. She found very few, but when she did find them, as you can imagine – there was more yelling. She also distributed the paychecks, which never made any sense to me. So she knew what every employee there was taking home every two weeks. Let’s just say that all of them were overpaid in order to compensate for the yelling. One trader named Stu moved his office upstairs to the 41^st floor, at his own expense, just to get away. Still worked for the fund but moved his office to keep his head straight. It’s hard enough to trade when you’re listening to Handel’s Water Music, let alone a screaming madman.

Usually the trades were profitable but sometimes they were not. My wife told me that the fund had made more money when they had worked out of a room on the 36th floor, everyone sharing three hundred square feet. Less yelling then, too.

She said the firm had done better when it was brand new and hungry. But then a few Hollywood actors put a lot of money in the fund. They moved offices and spent a lot of cash on equipment and carpeting and that fancy laser-etched glass. By the way, everything I’m saying here is exactly how I remember it, even down to the names I’ve written. And I remember it well. It was the worst year of our marriage to that point. With all the yelling at the office it didn’t make for a very good home life. Add that to the fact that I was in law school, which sucked donkey. Anyway.

Remember, she was reconciling all the trades, so she saw the daily profit and loss. Eventually the trades got pretty bad. And then one day my wife came home worried. The fund had lost a ton of money.

How much? I asked.

She was loyal and wouldn’t say exactly. It became public knowledge later that the number was at least $100 million. A hundred million dollars! Holy Crap! She was making $40,000 at the time. We were both 24. That was pretty good money in 1996. Even in San Francisco. The next day, before she left for work (and before I started to wonder if I was going to get out of bed at all that day), I turned over and looked at her and said:

You should ask for a raise today.

That’s what I said. Really? She asked back.

Yes. At least ask for $50,000.

If you don’t understand why I told her to ask for a $10,000 raise, then no explanation will matter. And he gave her the raise on the spot. No questions asked. From this I began to form the opinion, developed over later years, that even the bad people might have a little bit of good inside. And they’re just upset because they’re stuck. And they value loyalty. What he did when he gave her that raise is say, “I value the back office staff.” That meant a lot. Still does.

Soon enough the fund went into the toilet. It was the beginning of my married years but really it was the beginning of the end. Struggling to make a living doing things you both don’t want to do isn’t easy and takes its toll and it’s harder to get back to break even in a relationship than it is on a trade. I hated every moment of law school and she hated every second of that job, no matter what it paid. At that point I started to realize that I’d never practice law. But I didn’t realize that instead of law I’d start and bankrupt a dot-com company, and find a currency trader who stole $750,000 in the process. But that’s a story for another time.

It was December 1997. I was in my third year of the Ninth Circle of Hell (read: Law School) and I was a lost soul on an unknown path without a map. My wife had reasonable worries about my ability to support the family. My parents wanted to know what law firm I’d choose to work at after graduation (answer: NONE, because none of them would hire me). Some mornings I didn’t even get out of bed. I just laid there, hiding from class. Most of all I was embarrassed because I had been offered a book contract to finish a novel but the book sat unfinished in the top drawer of my desk. I never finished it and lost all 100 pages.

One of those warm San Francisco December days I jumped on the N Judah and headed downtown. Not to class, of course, but to the financial district. On days I skipped class I did one of two things: in the Spring, I went to see the San Francisco Giants play baseball at Candlestick Park. In the Fall, I went to the financial district and bothered hedge fund managers while they skipped lunch.

[The N Judah. When it passed by it sounded like a jumbo jet landing.]

I knew the folks at Bear, Stearns because my then-wife worked there. These people at Bear were the ones who cleared trades for hedge funds: Prime Brokerage. It was big business, and in the late 90s. business was booming. R.S., the manager of the San Francisco office, suffered my endless questions only so long. When he got tired, he sent me down the hall. One day I met with G.H, a man who managed $100 million of other people’s money in a small 300 square foot office. His wife hovered around his office during the day. She spoke with a heavy New York accent, and was always mixing in Hebrew words with her every day conversation. Most days she wore purple skirts and gold-colored shoes, and winked at me seductively when I arrived. Not joking about that.

On that Friday when I stopped by to see G.H., he was sorting through some trade reconciliation reports. He never showed any sign of emotion, but then he wasn’t a stern person. He never talked to me for very long and I always left as soon as he seemed to tire of my presence. Most of the time he talked and I listened – I never asked any questions.

“You know what it’s like to have a great week of trading?” He asked. He then answered his own question: “Of course you don’t. Some day you will if you’re dumb enough to get into this business.”

I nodded. I was 24 years old but felt like a 12 year old when I talked to him.

“It goes like this: you’re down one week and then you get angry,” he started, and he put his pen in his mouth and started chewing on it like a cigar. I imagined he would smoke a cigar in the office if they’d let him. “And you take that anger and it focuses you for the next week.”

He continued:

“You got so and so from New York breathing down your neck about performance. It’s the end of the year and you don’t want to do anything to screw it up. There are guys down the hall – the two pharmaceutical managers – they haven’t traded in three weeks, because they had a great year and they don’t want to ruin it. Anyway, if you don’t trade your investors start calling. And if they start calling you start feeling pressure. You start doing things because you think you’re supposed to be doing something. When all you’re really supposed to be doing is making money.”

I nodded. I didn’t know where he was going with this. Usually around this time in his office my mind began to wander: How much was he going to make this year? Would he ever give me a job? What would I do for him?

“But you get angry, anyway, because you had a bad week the week before and you’re tired of needy investors calling you asking you for performance updates before the quarterly letter. And like I told you: You get focused. You throw out the bad stuff. You remember to just do what works. And when an opportunity comes along, you stalk it. You wait for it. I had a week like that this week.”

I never asked questions, but this time I did: “How much did you make this week?”

He raised his eyebrows. I think he liked that I was bold enough to ask. His wife wasn’t around and I think he felt more comfortable telling me. “$5 million.”

He didn’t elaborate. But it was a lot of money.

Later on I took the N-Judah line back home. I had caught the bug. I’d never be able to practice law when there were guys making $5 million a week sitting in offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay. But how was I going to get there? I wondered if getting angry had anything to do with it. So I decided I’d find the angriest hedge fund manager on the 39th floor that I could. And I would talk to him.

Little did I know that it would lead me to meet the man who lost 121 million dollars in a single day. But that’s a story for another time.

[The N Judah used to break down all the time. One time it caught fire while I was riding it. Above is a picture of the N Judah fail whale by a designer named Lauren Oliver]