“Yes, but for selfish reasons. I was already planning on starting my own company; it was only a question of when. I figured I'd buy my own truck, go down to the meat market, and make the wholesale markup too. It's what I had done at the beach all those years, and it'd worked like a charm.” I shrugged. “So I began to train the salesmen and quickly realized that I had a knack for it. In fact, I was so good at it that I could take virtually any kid off the street and turn him into a meat salesman.
“A few weeks after that, P.J. asked me if I would give a sales meeting to the office, to take the pump to the next level.” I paused, thinking back for a moment. “It's rather ironic that it would be a dimwit like P.J., with his dirty jeans and tan Members Only jacket, who would instigate one of the defining moments of my life. See, above all, it's my ability to speak before the crowd-giving sales meetings to the Strattonites—that was at the heart of my success. It's what kept the pump going all those years, despite all the regulatory problems we were having.”
“The meetings?” the Bastard asked open-endedly.
“Yes, the meetings. It's what separates—or, should I say, separated—Stratton from every other brokerage firm in America. Twice a day I would stand before the boardroom and preach to the brokers. No one on Wall Street had done that before. Occasionally a brokerage firm would bring in a guest speaker—someone like an Anthony Robbins type—but it was always a one-shot deal, not as part of a program. And that's a complete waste of time, to do it once. If you want results, you have to do it every day; and if you reallywant results, you have to do it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Then miracles can happen.
“But, of course, I wasn't aware of that back in my Great American days… although I willtell you that the first meeting I gave was a real eye-opener. It took place inside the warehouse, in Forest Hills, Queens. There were twenty salesmen there, most of them in their early thirties. They were all dressed in jeans and sneakers, trying to look like truck drivers. They were gathered around in a circle, and I was standing at the center. At first I started speaking slowly, talking about the quality of the food, how amazingit was, how there was nothing else like it, and how lucky our customers were to have access to it. In hindsight, I was laying the foundation for a cult, although back then I was doing it without even knowing it. And the fact that—”
OCD held up his hand. “What do you mean, ‘laying the foundation for a cult’?”
I looked at OCD and said, “Let me put it this way: At the heart of any cult—whether it's Stratton Oakmont or Great American or those crazy Branch Davidians from Waco, Texas—is the fundamental belief that, in spite of what the rest of the world might be saying about them, everyone else is crazy and they're sane. And, without exception, it always starts with a belief in the justness of their cause. With Muslim extremists it's a warped interpretation of the Koran; with the Branch Davidians it's a warped interpretation of the Bible; and at Stratton it was the boardroom itself, the great equalizer in an otherwise unfair world. In other words, it didn't matter what family you were born into or how limited your education was or how low your IQ was; once you stepped into the Stratton boardroom, all that was behind you. You became equalized; you could make as much money as the most powerful CEO in America.” I shrugged my shoulders, as if this were basic stuff.
“All cults draw their power by advancing a concept like that— that they have some sort of one-up on the world. With Great American it was having food you couldn't get in the supermarket, and with Stratton it was the promise of becoming rich, in spite of the fact that you were a high school dropout who deserved to be working the checkout line at Seven-Eleven.” I chuckled ironically. “That's why I said before, ‘Give them to me young and stupid, young and naive.’ Because they make much better cult members.
“Anyway—back to my first meeting—after a few minutes of selling the salesmen on how great the food was, the words began gushing out in torrents. Perfect strings of thoughts came pouring out of my mouth. Before I knew it, I was literally preaching, going on and on in intimate detail about things that had never even occurred to me before. Yet I still sounded like I was the world's foremost expert on them: things like the difference between winners and losers, and the power of positive thinking, and being the master of your own destiny.
“Then I started getting technical, and I plunged into the art of selling—explaining how to open and close a sale; how to modulate the speed and tone of your voice to keep people interested; and the importance of being relentless, of not taking no for an answer and knocking on doors until their knuckles bled. ‘You owe it to yourselves!’ I said to them. ‘You owe it to yourselves, you owe it to your families, and, most importantly, you owe it to the people whose doors you're knocking on, because the food is so amazing that every last person who buys from you will be eternally grateful!’
“I can't overstimate how baffled I was at my own ability to speak like this. It was completely effortless; and the gratification was instant.I could see it in the eyes of every salesman there. They loved it, and they loved me.And the longer I spoke, the more they loved me.
“Over time, I found that giving meetings filled a hole inside me. It was simply the most amazing feeling ever; you can't even begin to imagine.” I smiled sadly at the memory. “But, of course, like everything else, I became desensitized to it. Eventually, even at the height of Stratton, when I was giving meetings to a football field full of brokers, I no longer got the same rush from it. So the hole grew larger.” I paused, letting the implications of that sink in. Then I said, “So I turned to other things, like drugs and sex and living life on the edge. By the early nineties the word on Wall Street was that I had a death wish. But I never looked at it that way: I thought I was living life as it unfolded; putting one foot in front of the other and walking down a preordained path. But the path turned out to be the path to my own destruction, and it was being laid down by my own actions.”
No responses. The debriefing room was dead silent now. In fact, you could have heard a pin drop. I continued with my tale: “I still remember the looks on the salesmen's faces as if it were yesterday. But the face that sticks out most is Elliot's. He was totally mesmerized. He looked like he was getting ready to run out of the warehouse right that second and start knocking on doors. That's how much the meeting affected him, and that's how much it affected our relationship. You see, before that, we considered each other equals, but after the meeting we had a silent understanding that Iwould be the one calling the shots now.
“It was maybe two weeks later when I approached him with the idea of opening up our own meat-and-seafood company. ‘Why pay Great American twenty dollars a box,’ I said, ‘when we can go down to the meat market ourselves?’
“But the Penguin was sobrainwashed, he actually said, ‘But what about the food? Where are we gonna get food as good as Great American's?’”
I chuckled at the memory. “Can you imagine? I mean, this guy was so brainwashed that he'd actually convinced himself that Great American's food was so good that he couldn't go door to door without it. It was almost laughable. I mean, yeah, their food was good, but it was only good;it wasn't great!The steaks were choice, not prime, and the fish was frozen, not fresh. So I had to deprogram the Penguin from the Great American cult.
“I let him down easy—sort of. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you, Penguin? The food is just average, for Chrissake! So get a fucking grip.’ Then I smiled at him warmly and said, ‘Listen, we'll find even bettersteaks than Great American, and we'll find fresher fish too. Then we'll hire salesmen of our own—to go door to door for us—and then we'll get rich!’