It's Not Always Sunny In Philadelphia- Wall Street Wednesday
This is Wall Street Wednesday again. Not going to do it every week, but for those reading for the first time, it is just a random story from my time spent on the street.
I didn’t have much to write about yesterday, so I didn’t force it. This one was fun to research and type though. It’s a little long, but what can I do?
I am doing Barstool Breakfast radio right now with Willie… We have Jerry Thornton coming in after 8AM to talk football, and then I am taping Podfathers with Chaps and Clem right after. I am going to spend the afternoon with Donnie trying out some weird foods for a video series he does, so should be away from a computer for the rest of the day. I say this not to toot my own busy horn (I’m not very busy), but only because at my age any absence makes people wonder whether or not I passed away.
This week’s story will end with a shameless plug and the theme is Trading Conferences… Specifically 1 conference I attended in the mid-90’s.
Before I start, just a couple things to mention.
– First off, my memories of this shit are very fuzzy and often un-Google-able. So if you do find an inconsistency in the timelines I provide, “Congrats!” to you, but keep it to yourself. This isn’t the fucking Smithsonian. It’s a middle aged guy at the end of a mediocre career, just telling stories on his virtual front porch. It won’t lend itself well to anonymous-forensic-blog-readers.
– Secondly, I wrote a WSW last week about some advice given to me from a $2 broker when I first started in the biz. Since then, multiple people have reached out saying they know that older gent and/or his son, who was also part of the story.
There has been no negative blowback by either of those guys and I hope to God the way that blog read was nothing short of adoration for both. Ronnie V and his son Auggie were/are fantastic people, and outstanding traders. Ronnie just happened to be a character who is infinitely quotable. If what I wrote seems disrespectful (and I don’t think it does), my apologies.
Going forward, I will probably just use first names or made-up names if the stories seem offensive. That is, unless I ask that person’s permission prior, he or she is dead, or if I didn’t like the person in the first place.
But back to the conferences.
I used to go to them all the time. All told, I have been to conferences in San Fran, Dallas, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philly… I think DC/MidAtlantic had a big one also, but I have never been.
In 1996 or maybe ’97 I transitioned from the specialist post to being a wire-clerk for a $2 broker on the floor of the American Stock Exchange… The company was called HYY, and it was filled with characters that I would probably be friends with to this day, if the majority weren’t tragically wiped out in 9/11.
Anyhoo, my booth was catty-corner to another booth filled with even bigger fucking characters than the ones in HYY. The main guy there, Tommy, threw me an invite to Philly Traders early that week. Hotels were all booked, but Tommy had a suite, and he said there would be plenty of room to crash.
A last minute invite to go to Philly today to possibly share a room with 3 other drunken guys is a disgusting thought. However, I was in my early 20’s at the time, I had a full head of hair, and I could see my toes without bending forward. That put me in a mindset where a young Large was able to make lemonade with any lemony offer thrown his way.
I think the main dinner was on a Thursday, so we left the floor early that day and grabbed the train down to Philadelphia. I continually date myself, but this might’ve been before the Acela option on Amtrak existed, so we slow-boated it down to Philly, getting oiled up in the bar car on the way down.
The plan was to attend the cocktail hour, main dinner, and concert. Then we would grab an early train the next morning and make it back to the floor before the opening bell.
The conference was held in a big hotel, and we dropped off our bags at the suite, which had 2 kings, 1 pull-out couch, and only 1 bathroom. One bathroom with 4 guys is always an issue for me… Even in my youth… But I soldiered on.
The dinner that night was forgettable, but the concert after wound up being KC and the Sunshine Band.
For the uninitiated, KCATSB (I couldn’t drag myself to type that name out again) are a 11 member disco-funk band from the 70’s that took its name from the lead singer’s last name (Casey) and the fact that they came from Florida, “The Sunshine State.”
If you have an older gay friend nearby, ask him/her about them. They still play well in gay bars that I mistakenly wander into twice a week.
I am not a KCATSB fan, and I wasn’t back in the 90’s, but their hits were/are like a raw oyster for me.
I’ll explain.
Raw oysters on their own aren’t a great experience for my palate. I like them, but I don’t LOVE them. However, if you add just a little bit of lemon juice to a raw oyster, the whole experience changes. I don’t need a ton of cocktail sauce or vinegar to enjoy it. I just need a little squeeze of lemon on each, and I will devour 3 dozen.
Similarly, KCATSB songs are raw oysters. If I hear one in the car, I might leave it on, but I won’t necessarily turn it up and sing myself hoarse like I would if, say, George Michael’s “Monkey” was on. However, if you just add a lot of beer and a little bit of cocaine, I will devour 3 dozen of their greatest hits.
Case in point (or I should say “KC in point”): That night at the conference, when KC started singing “I’m Your Boogie Man”, multiple people got up on their chairs and started dancing. There was a dance floor, but you know Wall Street assholes- Why use a dance floor, when you can make a drunken spectacle out of yourself and get up on your chair and dance uncomfortably? Total douchebags.
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So I stand up on my chair to dance, and ultimately my fierce gyrations caused a momentum that threw my body off the chair and onto the floor many inches away. I took down 2 women in the fall… But those bitches knew the risk, I assume. Thoughts and prayers, regardless.
I am not prepared to say the hour or so that I listened to KCATSB was surprisingly the best concert experience of my life. I will say that it is one of the few shows that started with my ass in a seat, progressed to me standing, led to me standing on that same seat, and then ended with me watching on my back.
I don’t know if you can sense this by the way it is written, but I cant type this shit fast enough. It really is fun to reminisce with a group of strangers who probably don’t care.
Moving forward, the official conference festivities ended sometime after midnight and we soon found ourselves in a martini bar. The leader of our gang, Tommy, was in pretty bad shape as was evidenced by the fact he broke 3 martini glasses in said bar, just by having them slip out of his hand. It was like drinking with Michael J Fox off his meds.
Say what you will about martini glasses (they spill a fair amount if they are filled to the top), but they are engineered to not slip from your grasp. Wide up top and narrow at the bottom, so they essentially wedge into your paw.
Tommy attempted to drink 3 of them, but all three were beyond his ability to handle. So the staff there made him switch over to a plastic sippy cup usually reserved for kids who frequent martini bars in Philadelphia.
By 3 in the morning, my friend Kev, another guy staying with us, and I were ready to head back to the suite because we had a 6 AM train to catch. Tommy, however, was just catching his stride… Especially with the new sippy cup technology that was placed before him. As a result, we left him at the bar with a ton of people he knew from the industry, who were also switching over to sippy cups.
We got back to the room and the third fellow we were with immediately took the couch. Kevin took the bed leaving me with the choice of taking Tommy’s bed until he got home, or bunking with another man. I went the Brokeback route and slept on top of the covers Kevin was under. Which I think was the least gay option I could muster.
Before I go on… And this next part might sound extremely gay, but if I did decide to use a drunken night in Philly as my opportunity to taste the forbidden fruit of another man, my buddy Kev is not the guy I would do it with. Sure, he’s handsome and all, but I played golf with him once and he was taking a leak just beyond a sandtrap, and I spied this thing hanging off his belt that I was convinced was a king snake. I grabbed a rake and tried to cut it in half to defend Kevin before he informed me that it wasn’t a snake at all… It was his giant dick.
My point is, when I do finally go gay, I am gonna need to start with an Irish guy who maybe also half-Asian.
Back to the story… So we fell asleep between 3 and 4AM. Sometime around 4:30, we hear a ruckus, but neither of us thought to get up and check because it was obviously drunken Tommy’s triumphant return.
Then, right before 5, I wake up to Kevin nudging me, asking me if I smelled something.
I said, “Yes… Did you fart?”
And then after 5 seconds of further retrospection (or maybe introspection?) we both blurted, “THAT’S NO FART!”, and jumped out of bed in a similar fashion to the “THOSE AREN’T PILLOWS!”-scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
RIP John Candy, but what an apropos last name for a guy who probably ate candy for breakfast.
Kevin and I lept out of bed and saw Tommy laying face down with a pair of shit covered boxers barely covering his ass and his pants around his ankles.
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At the foot of his bed were well defined shit footprints leading to the bathroom, and the bathroom itself looked like a German porno shoot.
The devil got into Tommy, and the exorcism wasn’t pretty. Shit happens, and it really did.
I have a hair-trigger gag reflex, so I threw up in a waste basket right away, as the 3 of us fumbled to throw clothes in our bags. Tommy was unresponsive to our attempts to wake him by prodding him with a curtain rod I snapped off, so we considered him collateral damage and left him for dead.
We ran out of the hotel like we robbed a fucking bank, hailed a cab to the train station, took the earliest train back to the floor of the AMEX, and we said nothing. Tommy was our host, so we agreed not to ‘out’ him while he wasn’t there. Instead, we waited for the 9:30 bell to ring and then planned on suffering through the trading day until the 4 o’clock close.
However… Sometime around noon, like the swallows of Capistrano, Tommy miraculously returned. He was wearing a dress shirt and tie, flip flops, and sweatpants that said 76’ers on them that he must’ve bought from the gift shop. The guy was a fucking warrior.
And he was 100% transparent. Tom told the fecal tale to anyone that would listen, and we had a fucking howl trying to piece together the details over 2PM black&white shakes and cheeseburgers from Moran’s.
A week later, Tommy gets the hotel bill… All of his business expenses were mailed to the floor. The suite cost him $450 for the night, but there was an extra expense tacked on for $700. Next to that line item it should’ve read “Haz-Mat Removal” or maybe “Shitstorm”, but instead all it said was “Wall Street Cleanup.”
Fast forward 25 years later, and whenever I, my dog, or perhaps one of my infant kids had an accident involving shit, my wife and I will forever refer to the remedy as a “Wall Street Cleanup.” Tommy paid 700 bucks for our right to do so, and now you’re welcome to do the same.
Take a report.
-Large
Shameless Plug
I just want to remind everyone I am keynote speaker at the Texas Traders Conference this year, Sept 6-8.
The staff at The Four Seasons at Las Colinas should not expect any “Wall Street Cleanups”, but it should be a good time nonetheless.
2018 Texas Traders Convention – Dallas Security Traders Association
TAR
-L