The Road Ahead

I broke the news one night five years ago after making the long, dark drive up I-95 from Stamford back to Boston. Lodged in the corner of a restaurant, my mother sat across the table from me, eyes disbelieving, as the sounds of nearby silverware filled the silence between us. For the past twenty minutes, I’d been fidgeting with my own utensils like a child, as if somewhere in their alignment lay the courage or words to begin. Fresh out of college and finally on my own, I had just quit my job that day.

My parents were blindsided. I was scheduled to leave out of Logan the following morning on a training trip to London, so my arrival on their doorstep had been expected for months. When we got home from dinner and the time came to tell my father, I remember watching with surprise as he merely heaved a heavy sigh. Disappointment being nothing more than pride and hope deflated. It was so much worse than the tirade I’d envisioned. My parents were devastated, and understandably so.

In high school, they had a name for me: The Laziest Boy in America. While I’ve always preferred terms such as “laidback” or “easy-going,” I’ll be the first to admit that it was only through years of constant nagging that I ended up at Yale. And I couldn’t be more grateful. Bonds formed in college exposed me to a wide range of perspectives; to this day my friends remain one of my greatest sources of drive and inspiration. But on that cold September evening as I confessed to unemployment, my parents concluded that the decision had been made out of indolence and fear. My father, a white-collar man with a blue-collar spirit, called me thoughtless and immature. My mother saw it all as a reflection upon herself.

The truth was that I had gone into banking for all of the wrong reasons. Having graduated from one elite school after the next, I simply viewed Wall Street as the next rung on the ladder, undisputed home to the best and the brightest. But as I started to realize my total lack of interest, I soon came also to question inevitability. I had been lazy after all; I’d never stopped to think. In hindsight, it’s hard to determine exactly what I was trying to prove, or to whom I was trying to prove it: my friends, my family, perhaps no one save myself.

I returned to Stamford and got a job in a pub, scraping by on my rent and drinking away the nights. A struggling establishment, the pub was good for one thing and one thing only: providing me with time to catch up on my reading. Most of the regulars came in from the banks and hedge funds across the street, and, as we talked, the subject of my recent employment history invariably came up. Some were scornful, but others were quick to praise me (often after a round or two), for doing something they wished they had done decades earlier. I heard slurred accounts of marriages shattered and dreams abandoned. The consummate barkeep, I sympathized in turn.

I passed these encouragements along to my parents, but they didn’t seem to help much. My mother would later inform me that during this period she suffered many sleepless nights, often awakening into darkness from the same phosphene-riddled vision of a son pouring Mai Tai’s at forty. When I told her and my father, therefore, that I was going to volunteer abroad, they were supportive and relieved, if not entirely understanding.

So I picked up and moved to China. The ambition of being a writer. I spent the year teaching, maintaining a blog, and reading as much as possible. The experience gave me the time and isolation necessary to focus my objectives. It was one of those rare instances in which expectation lives up to hope, as if to signify the intervention of some benign and caring force. As if to recognize the vagabond, as if to confirm the existence of Fate.

Two years later, I returned to America and enrolled in an M.F.A. program in Boston, beginning work on a novel while teaching Chinese part-time. Assured by my commitment to writing, my parents started sending me e-mails detailing the latest round of job cuts or President Obama’s push for service, prefacing each link with a short, congratulatory note. It almost made me feel smart. This isn’t to say the world can do without smart and responsible bankers – the events of the past five years have shown undoubtedly that it can’t; it’s simply to say that line of work was never meant for me.

The Financial Crisis has ravaged the banking industry, and the bar which so haunted my mother’s dreams likewise fell victim to the times. In honor of my destructive wake, my parents have since renamed me - this time by an epithet I have thoroughly come to embrace. To potential employers back home, I’m the Most Dangerous Man in America.