Travels: Investment Banker Walks Into A Coffee Shop [Day XV]

Wherein you all meet in a tavern.

[NB. This post is long because it is a reasonably exact transcript of a conversation I had with a man in a coffee shop this evening.  I had my laptop out, ready to write a post, and the only other person in the shop - a man who looks to be in his late fifties, salt and pepper hair, very fancy suit - is chatting to the barista about his radio choices.  Pandora - the Bob Dylan station.

They get going on Woodstock and he says something about Arlo Guthrie and the closing of the New York State Thruway.  I can't help mentioning the live recording of Coming Into Los Angeles, where he refers to the attended masses as 'a lotta freaks'.  Since I already have my laptop out, when he starts telling me his life story, I just type along.  It was a very strange thirty minutes.  I have no idea if this man's willingness to sit there in front of a total stranger as she typed away and nodded politely indicated a deep narcissism or if was just lonely, or what.  I don't even know if he knew I was writing down what he was saying, just that I was typing and I was looking at him, not the keyboard.


I have left the typing mistakes in for posterity.]


/begin transcript

My father is a flag-waving, you know, you would never accuse him of doing anything that was, um, un patriotic and the day before the draft came up he took me aside and he said.

This is a politician's war and I'm not going to have you die for some goddamned politician.  If your number comes up I have a car arranged and I will put you in it and take you across the border - there are people there waiting for you who will take you somewhere even I don't know where until the war is over.  And I said, really Dad?  And he said Really.

This man is wearing a silk shirt and a powder blue tie.

It wasn't so much freedom as the feeling that everyone there had that their life was going to be closed off and people felt they had no control over their lives.  They were trying to create a new society to escape from these -0 The people we've produced that have gone into politics that we've produced I can't believe.  They're a mess.

      This place has glass teapots.

What happened in that time too is that there were a llot of people in that time that were looking for answers is - a lot of those people went straight to drugs.  I did LSD three times and every time it was like -- I'm opeining the door to = -- another place.  And then the third time I tried LSD a being appeared in front of the door and said "you can't keep oepning and closing the door, you have to come into the room"  and when I finished with that trip, I finally said, I have to move into this next dimension of awareness, but I'm not going to seek it through LSD.  So then I had a spiritual epiphany and I lived with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his ashram for three, four years.  That got deeper because I started to have experiences and spent time there.

      So, if you don't mind my asking - how did you come to be an investment.

Through chinese medication like everyone else.

      I'm not familiar with that trope, no.

I have a doctorate in Chinese Medicine.  I was working in Chinese medicine for three years, then I burnt out.  I was in my twenties at the time, and I met a fellow named Bill Bane, who is Bane Vanderbilt, Oppehauss family - probably the wealthiest people in the world at least in this country.  But through those connections I had met Bill Bane (Bane Capital) Mitt Romney, and he said Hey if you want to change careers you've got the right attitude and ability to do 90% of what we do and since you've learned Chinese medicine you can learn what we do in an afternoon.

Well, it took more than an afternoon, but that was the beginning of my investment banking career.

     That's fascinating.  Do you ever regret it?

No.  I could have healed people, created clinics and things like that.  But moving capital around, in various places, it's very fulfilling.  We finance a lot of technology companies...

     Yeah, well, you have the power now.  You're the man.

We have a whole - something I started, I guess it's more philanthropic than investment - but we support local farming.  Not necessarily a popular position in my circles.  I mean in theory it's great, we can support that.  I think ultimately genetically modified organisms can have useful production... I mean, the way we're raping the land, it's not good.

     That's very admirable.

     He put his hand in his pocket.

Well, it's who we are you know.  Everyone goes through the process of this 'getting' thing.  But it's not a real thing.  It's a disease, it's a neurosis.  There's only so much that you need to get.

     So who decides where, where the line is?

Well I think people know, you know, I have a house, I'm okay, I can stop now.  But we can't stop because it's a mental sickness.  You look at young people these days, the bulimia and the - what's the word - the anorexia.

     Well yes.  They've been around for a while.

Yes, well my ex-wife was anorexic but it's worse.  I need to see me for who I really am and break that spell.  We live in a consumer society that blocks us at every turn.  It's an addiction, like alcoholism.  We're destroying ourselves.

-chatter-

     Where are you from?

I was born in Manhattan and I grew up in Montclair New Jersey.  I went to, spent two years up in Massachussets getting my, what they call your acupuncture license and then spent four years in Manchester England where they have the only English language chinese medicine school in the world and when I came back from Manchester where I went to Newport and set up a practice and met some of the most amazing people in the world.  I went to Northeastern University then and got a degree in finance.  Got married, had my son.

     How old is your son?

He's twenty five.  Getting his degree in finance at Vanderbildt University.  I can't remember when we were talking, but he just said Dad, I'm really interested in Finace!  He's a musician too, he arranged it the music is on the radio.  But then he just decided no, I'm not going to do any  more of that.  And then he got a 720 on his GMAT.

     What is GMAT?

When you want to take a degree in business you gotta take a GMAT.  It's a test that they do, and it scores from like 400-800.  A perfect score - 800 and he had 720.  At Vanderbilt, which is the number one school in the US for master's in finance and, well, he got one of the spots.  And they gave him ten, fifteen thousand dollars as well.  There you go.

I am - well, I just moved here, I got a place up in Hollywood Hills.  Beautiful view of the San Fernando valley.  It's a beautiful 3000 square foot home, beatfil home.

      I guess your son doesn't live with you anymore.

No, no.  He was yougner, playing hockey from the playing 7-13 before he went to play at a hockey prep school.  I was in a hockey rink every weekend, you know, Christmas, holidays, because that's when they play the tournaments.

    - chatter about my work -

Skype: it's the future.  You'll have a tv that you can also use as a computer, I mean they're starting to do that right now.  we finance two companies who are doing that right now.  I do have a need for a personal assistant in a number of areas so this could work out.

We 'exchange' business cards.  He is wearing the fanciest stit I've ever seen.  The cuffs are monogrammed.

/end transcript.

Los Angeles is weird, man.

Notes from a retro booth.


One thing I do like about the flora of Los Angeles is that the big grey trees here are planted so close to the sidewalk that the roots push underneath the concrete and crack the streets apart and nobody seems to mind.  They just amble up and down the little rocky hills in the pavement.