Martell’s Box
What are the odds of a backpacker from New Zealand passing through New York and finding himself working at the most famous hedge fund in the world? Not very likely. So remote that I started writing down notes and recording them for posterity. After interviewing people in the business for a while, my opening question eventually settled on “What was your favorite bar? How did you find yourself there… and now here?”
I want to interview Tarzan. He is the most absurd man I have ever met, yet one of the most successful in the game of life we find ourselves in. A walking catastrophe, yet gainfully employed. It’s difficult to wrap your head around. The moment you stop taking him seriously or begin to roll your eyes, he’ll pull a rabbit out of the hat perfectly or hit you with a punchline that’ll make you spit out your beer.
Tarzan used to do this thing called "5 before 5.” Meet him at a bar right after the closing bell, and you could watch him take down five martinis before 5 pm. Mind you, he didn't hold the stem; he just had it like a mug in his big hands. Sometimes, he'd pinch the rim of the glass and swill it like a bowl of soup. It’s an open invite, so I took him up on it.
Sure enough, at 4.05 pm, he strolls confidently through the hesitant New York crowd and sits opposite me. While he waves over the waitress, I take out some paper and my embassy pen. Tarzan raises an eyebrow at being on the record, and as he does so, I ask him the same question I’ve been asking every one recently – what was your favorite bar?
He says Martell’s.
Tarzan grew up poor, but even from an early age, by God, he knew he wouldn’t die poor. An acute problem with poverty is the lower margin of error. Things can quickly spin off the rails so badly that pulling yourself up from your bootstraps is impossible. This is something that conservatives don’t seem to understand well enough: There is a point where the odds are so stacked against you early in life that you can never get your head properly above water. This also ties into the concept of “thrownness.” To some extent, your future is determined for you - where you are born, your physical and mental characteristics, whether your parents stick around, who helps you, and who doesn’t. The question isn’t whether life is unfair - it is. The question is what to do about it.
Well, Tarzan was determined to get out of Bensonhurst. At an early age, he looked around to see where the money was. His uncle had some money, but he was a criminal. In and out of prison his whole life. That didn’t seem like an attractive path. Surely there was a middle way, a place to seek your fortune tiptoeing up to a bunch of lines while never quite crossing them.
Tarzan noted that people had money at bars, and they were all around his neighborhood. Getting a job at one of those was a near challenge. And people had money on Wall Street - getting a job there was a far challenge. Tarzan begins working at a wide variety of bars across New York. He asks every patron what they do for a living, and if they’re in finance, he pleads with them to sit down to give him advice. He figured every meeting was an interview anyway; the main thing was to get the meeting.
This sort of thing works surprisingly well. He soon has an internship at Salomon Smith Barney. This is a generation after Liar's Poker, but there was still plenty of untoward behavior to get in on. Sure enough, he was running mail past the trading desk and was invited to gamble on the 1997 Super Bowl. Fortuitously, the Packers beat the Patriots, and he won two thousand dollars. This is more money than he’s ever had in his life and incidentally leads to a lifelong passion for watching Boston choke.
He takes the money straight to Clet’s Gun Shop in Staten Island to buy a .38 Special, then goes to a bank to open a safe deposit box. He leaves the gun and the cash there but keeps enough in his pocket to take chances. Then he heads off to Smith & Wollensky to become a Friday night local. At the bar, he meets Billy Irish for the first time. Billy and Tarzan go on an absolute bender. Somehow, they find themselves up by Highbridge buying giant foam Yankees fingers and duct tape. Tarzan uses the tape to tie the finger to his arm, and then they steal a car and drive up to Boston. Late Friday night in Massachusetts with a giant foam Yankees finger is a story for another time.
The following day, they wake up in a Courtyard and decide to check out Fenway Park. They buy a couple of tickets from a bemused scalper outside and make their way up to the front. This is before corporates took down that sort of real estate and die-hard Bostonian families sat there. Generations of Red Sox fans had only known the Curse of the Bambino. Billy and Tarzan roll in there with the arrogance of youth, the only time in your life you’re allowed to do impossible things. The Red Sox fans tolerate Billy cheering for the other team and Tarzan’s Yankees paraphernalia for a while. Just out of sheer morbid curiosity, they allow the freakshow to continue until the Red Sox start losing badly. Then the mood turns. One punter decides to take it upon himself to clear them out. The Red Sox fan yells, “Hey, why don’t you sit down!”
Billy retorts, “Hey, why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
In a fury, the fan jumps out of his seat and makes his way down to Billy, knocking a kid’s ice cream out of his hand. Billy stands up to meet him. Takes out $20. He explains that he won this betting against the Patriots in the Super Bowl. The fan should use it to buy the kid another ice cream and a new haircut for himself. Everyone laughs at this, but a security guard is soon called, and then the police after that. The cops tell Billy he has to leave. Quite reasonably, Billy says no, and points out that he spent good money on these tickets; he’s not the one who left his seat to start shit. He’s just standing his ground, an American tradition. The police are insistent, but so is Billy. Eventually, he sees no way out but refuses to walk himself. He goes completely boneless, and it takes four of them to carry him up the stairs while Tarzan leads the crowd in a chant, insulting the cops and waving the giant Yankee finger around like a conductor.
When they return to New York, Tarzan goes to his safety deposit box, pushes the gun aside, and takes out enough money for two plane tickets to San Diego for the 1998 Super Bowl. The rest of the year is uneventful, but he takes it to Martell's a week before the next Super Bowl and puts in for their box pool.
A box pool consists of a grid of boxes with corresponding numbers - one matching the column and the other matching the row. One team is assigned the row numbers, and the other is designated the column numbers. If the last digit of each team's score matches those two digits, the person who bought that box wins. For example, if the final score is 31-24, the person who has 1 and 4 respectfully is the winner. Martell’s Box is $1,000 a square, with 100 squares, and the winner takes all.
Tarzan heads off to San Diego with another fixture in New York. Let’s call him Elvis. They hit the bars, the bars hit them back twice as hard, and by midnight, they had gathered a remarkable crew. A couple of correspondents from the New York Post and some of the biggest names in ice hockey, like Messier and Brian Leach, were there. Elvis points to another group at the bar and says they look like members of the Eagles. Tarzan is dismissive and says the Philadelphia Eagles suck. He’s already lining up bets they’ll have the worst record in franchise history in the coming NFL season. Elvis snorts at him, “Do those guys look like football players to you? No, that’s the rock band The Eagles. Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Timmy Schmit.”
Tarzan rolls over there, and it turns out that the Eagles are some of the nicest people in the music business. Totally without artifice or attitude, they live life in the fast lane. Back then, every bar in San Diego closed at 1 am, Super Bowl or not. Billy and his extensive entourage are ushered to the parking lot when a brilliant idea strikes Elvis. San Diego bars are shut, but Tijuana? Those are open. They pack themselves into cars, skip over the border to a bar with witchy women and all the windows blacked out. Every time a whistle goes off, you lean back, and tequila gets poured down your throat. Eventually, Tarzan wanders outside to find a payphone, with the sun blazing overhead. He stands there and thinks about this for a long time.
He wonders if he needs to be somewhere. If it’s midday in Mexico, what time is it in California? Then it dawns on him that everyone inside will miss the Super Bowl. There’s a comical scene that follows where they roar across the border while the Eagles drunkenly sing lurid songs and the Post correspondents piss their pants about getting fired. The details are lost to time, obscured by middle-aged memory and John Elway’s helicopter run. After the game and yet another night of drinking like a bunch of filthy animals, Tarzan and Elvis stumble into LAX for the redeye home. They’re sitting at the bar, resembling a couple of zombies, when Tarzan’s pager lights up. He barely notices it initially and ignores it until the tenth or eleventh alert. Finally, he walks over to a payphone and the Irish lass who worked the bar at Martell’s answers. She’s so excited, and her brogue is so thick that he barely understands her. She’s like, “Wahoo! Wahoo!! Tarzan yae did it, yae won the box, yae won the box!”
Jody’s underground Staten Island NCAA pool ran nearly a million dollars back then, but Martell’s Box was still a hundred grand. In a world without itemized receipts. What did Tarzan do with the money? That’s between me, him, and the rest of us who hate the IRS.
Martell’s Box is a chapter of my book Occupy a Job on Wall Street.
