For the Love of Money

A Memoir

Sam Polk

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781476786001
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

"Part coming-of-age story, part recovery memoir, and part exposé of a rotten, money-drenched Wall Street culture" ( Salon ), Sam Polk's unflinching account chronicles his fight to overcome the ghosts of his past—and the radical new way he now defines success. At just thirty years old, Sam Polk was a senior trader for one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street, on the verge of making it to the very top. When he was offered an annual bonus of $3.75 million, he grew angry because it was not enough. It was then he knew he had lost himself in his obsessive pursuit of money. And he had come to loathe the culture—the shallowness, the sexism, the crude machismo—and Wall Street's use of wealth as the sole measure of a person's worth. He decided to walk away from it all.For Polk, becoming a Wall Street trader was the fulfillment of his dreams. But in reality it was just the culmination of a life of addictive and self-destructive behaviors, from overeating, to bulimia, to alcohol and drug abuse. His obsessive pursuit of money papered over years of insecurity and emotional abuse. Making money was just the latest attempt to fill the void left by his narcissistic and emotionally unavailable father."Vivid, picaresque...riveting" (NewYorker.com), For the Love of Money brings you into the rarefied world of Wall Street trading floors, capturing the modern frustrations of young graduates drawn to Wall Street. Polk's "raw, honest and intimate take on one man's journey in and out of the business…really gives readers something to think about" (CNBC.com). It is "compellingly written...unflinchingly honest...about the inner journey Polk undertakes to redefine success" ( Forbes ).

CHAPTER 1

Unconscious Inheritance

¤

I grew up in the suburbs around Los Angeles, in a three-­bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac. There was a yard out front and rolling hills out back. From the outside, our house looked pretty normal. We’d moved to Los Angeles so Dad could become a screenwriter. He enrolled in film school; Mom supported the family on her nurse-practitioner salary.

They were constantly stressed about money, but Dad was always talking about how one day he’d score big. His face lit up when he talked about that future windfall, how in a single instant all our worries would disappear. I reveled in his fantasy. When a neighbor asked me that year what I wanted to be when I grew up, I smiled and answered, “Rich.” Dad beamed.

I shared a bedroom with my identical twin brother. Ben and I had been through everything together—birth, potty training, first day of school. We shared clothes, a dresser, a Nintendo. Sometimes we used each other’s toothbrushes. But when we were eight, I begged for a dog, and Ben seemed indifferent. So when my mom brought OJ home from a shelter and Dad, after arguing against it, finally allowed him to stay, OJ was mine.

“This dog is your responsibility,” said Dad. “Not mine.”

OJ was a fat little golden retriever, a Chicken McNugget with legs. His tail never stopped wagging, and his bark was warm. I petted him incessantly, took him for three or four walks a day. I’d snap on OJ’s red leash and get yanked proudly up and down our cul-de-sac.

At the end of our street sat an open lot, dusty and speckled with crabgrass. At the back of the lot a line of trees opened to a dirt path that led to the hills. The steep path wound through a thicket to a rocky clearing that looked like a moonscape, and ended in a cliff that overlooked our block. OJ and I spent hours up there.

I tried to train OJ.

“Sit,” I said, standing facing him. He looked up and wagged his tail.

“Sit,” I said again and pushed his bottom down. He licked my face. As soon as I let go, he was up again, rolling his head side to side and rubbing up against me. He seemed to be laughing, so I laughed. After awhile I gave up and threw the tennis ball I’d brought.

“Fetch,” I said, and he scrambled off across the craggy rocks. I was careful not to throw the ball too near the cliff.

We went up there every day. After we finished playing, I’d get as close to the edge as I could. OJ would sit with his head in my lap. We’d watch the cars coming home, the lights blinking on and off, and I’d thrill in bearing secret witness to people’s lives.

“Good dog,” I’d say. “You are such a good dog.”

I liked being out of the house, because things had recently become tense at home. Mom and Dad had started retreating into hushed conversations.

Mom had undergone a battery of tests for what she thought was a urinary tract infection. One day the hospital called with the results. They told her she had chlamydia.

“It must be a mistake,” Mom said. She was married. The nurse suggested she might speak to her husband about that. Mom was incensed. Dad, too, was appalled at that nurse but said Mom should take the medication just to be safe. He’d get tested as a precaution. A week later he told Mom that his results had come back clean. They wrote it off as a mix-up.

A few months later, Mom became pregnant with my younger brother, Daniel. Her pregnancy was a problem for my dad. Mom worked full-time, while Dad stayed home, smoked weed, and worked on a screenplay. She told him he would need to find an income-generating job.

But Dad had big aspirations for that screenplay, and was furious at Mom for getting in the way of his dreams. He started singing the Rolling Stones lyrics “I’ll never be your beast of burden” when Mom was around, and muttering “cunt” when she’d storm away.

Dad found a job selling kitchen cabinets. After Daniel was born, Mom returned to working full-time, so they hired a Guatemalan woman to care for the baby. She cleaned up some during the day, but by the time Dad and Mom got home from work, the house was a mess. And on the weekends, when the housekeeper-nanny was away, the house looked like a bomb had gone off. Clothes, toys, old newspapers, and empty bowls of cereal were strewn about. The carpet in front of the TV was threadbare and covered with stains, because Ben and I ate most of our meals there.

Dad started working most weekends, and on those days Mom would retreat to her room for an afternoon nap. When I’d shake her awake for dinner, next to her would be an empty bowl with a spoon stuck in the hardened residue of vanilla ice cream. When our cat, Mimi, birthed a litter of kittens in Ben’s and my bedroom closet, we asked Mom if we could keep them, and she absently said yes. Soon the kittens contracted some sort of illness, so when you’d pick something off the floor you’d sometimes find a dead kitten underneath. Plus I’d failed to properly crate train OJ, because I had no idea how to do that, and he wouldn’t stop relieving himself inside the house.

“Don’t let him do that again,” growled Dad, angry after stepping in a pile of shit next to his bed.

“But I don’t know how to get him to stop,” I said.

“You need to shove his nose in his crap, and hold him there,” Dad said.

One day, Ben and I were lying on the couch watching TV when Dad walked through the front door. He took a sweeping look around the slovenly living room. His brow furrowed and his head started to shake. It was like watching a kettle boil. My body tightened in anticipation.

“Banzai!” he suddenly screamed, the bizarre cry he used when the house had gotten too disgusting for even him to tolerate. Ben and I leapt to our feet like we’d been shocked with electricity, and began furiously cleaning. I felt the way a fish must feel, one moment swimming serenely, the next yanked into the air by a hook through its face. Dad stood there, fuming. I made sure to stay out of his reach.

I was relieved when he went into the bathroom, leaving the door to the hall open behind him. I could hear the splash of his stream. The toilet flushed and the door to his bedroom opened.

“GODDAMN IT!” he screamed.

When Dad kicked him in the ribs, OJ yelped, that sound that seems to come from the very soul of a dog. I broke for the bedroom.

“Dad, don’t hurt him!” I yelled.

I rushed toward the room and just as I got there OJ exploded out of it and past me. I stood there facing my father.

“Clean up the goddamned shit, Sam,” he snarled.

He towered above me, rage rippling off him like heat off sunbaked asphalt. My hands were shaking.

“You don’t have to hurt him like that, Dad,” I said.

“Next time it’ll be you,” he said. I knew he meant it.

I turned heel and ran for the paper towels. I mopped up the soupy puddle, averting my face. Tears streamed down my cheeks.

I found OJ in the backyard.

“It’s okay, boy,” I said, petting him until my heart stopped pounding.

A few days later, when I got home from school, I saw the single turd sitting innocently in the center of the living room carpet, as if OJ had left me a present.

“Goddamn it!” I yelled.

I rushed to the backyard in a fury and found OJ lying in the sun. He shrunk back from me. I grabbed his collar and yanked him toward the house, pulling him by the neck.

“Bad dog!” I shouted.

I stood over the shit. OJ was scrambling backwards. It felt like his collar might come off over his head, so I grabbed the folds of skin around his neck. I felt my fingernails dig into his flesh. I pushed his nose into the mess. His scrambling took on a new level of intensity. I could hear his nails scratching at the carpet.

“Bad dog!” I yelled.

He struggled, snorting and whining, but I held strong. I kept jamming his face into the mess, as if to say look what you did. Then I let him go. He rushed outside. I went to get paper towels and Formula 409. As I wiped up the mess, my anger cooled. I finished, then walked into the backyard and gathered OJ into my arms.

“Good dog,” I said, pressing my face into his fur. “That’s a good dog.”

• • •

A few weeks later, Dad herded Mom, Ben, and me into the gray Cadillac, leaving Daniel behind with a babysitter. At the last moment he called out to OJ to come along, and reached to pet him in the backseat. Mom sat in the front, and I sat in the back with Ben and OJ. We headed to Chinatown for dim sum, a weekend tradition.

We left OJ in the car. We sat around a circular table and I poured tons of sugar into my tea, stirring it with a spoon. Dad knew I was mad at him about our fight the night before—he’d spanked me after OJ shit next to his bed—so he kept looking at me with a silly grin on his face and doing this little dance with his head and shoulders to make me laugh. I fought to maintain an angry visage, but I loved having his full attention, and I couldn’t help but smile. Soon Dad started calling out the funny names he’d invented for the Chinese dishes. “We’ll have an order of fried paper towels,” he said, and Ben and I wriggled and giggled as if we were being tickled. When the food came, we ate fast and hard, and soon we were piling back into the car.

My stomach was bursting and I had to pee, but otherwise I was happy. I stared out the window watching the freeway signs thump by. OJ was over by Ben. Dad was singing to the radio, and everyone was laughing. When we pulled up to the house, I bolted inside so I wouldn’t have to wait for the bathroom.

A few hours late...