Shaman in the city

This is the first few chapters of a story based on events that happened to me while I juggled a job at one of the worlds largest banks while trying to enjoy my 20s as much as possible.

Chapter 1

Its 10:30 on a Wednesday morning and they have started again. The heat on my back is growing to that familiar level when my Hong Kong-tailored double cuff shirt starts sticking to my back.

Thankfully the air-conditioning in a modern London financial district building's toilet block is powerful enough to keep the sweat from my brow.

You see, this is my place of comfort. My place to go when the voices start again. The toilets of the trade support office of one the world's largest investment banks are where I go to count in my head. But normal counting doesn't help, it has to be in German and backwards, normal counting is just not difficult enough to block them out.

Hi, my name is Paul Leppard and I am living the worst paranoid drug trip you could ever imagine, It is going to last for the next 3 years as I rampage through the fast paced world of London's financial sector and the city's hedonistic life-life. It will 3 years from this point until I get some clarity on getting myself out of this madness, but until then I must continue the counting....

Ein Hundert, Neunundneunzig, Achtundneunzig, .....


Chapter 2

So what is going on? How can I explain this predicament and how the hell did I manage to get myself in this mess... To fully explain that I am having to go back to my school careers advisor...

"So then... Erm... Paul. Have you put much thought into what you want to do when you leave school?"

It was a stuffy June afternoon and I was back in school just a week after my final G.C.S.E exam, sitting in a bizarrely small room, which could have been a broom cupboard. Maybe it once was, after all my school was in an old manor house rumoured to be where Charles Dickens once attended and also rumoured to have been the inspiration for the Dingly Dell in the Pickwick Papers. I wondered how far the pupils in this school had progressed since his time here.

He looked bored. I got the impression that he was simply enduring his job, slowly working his way through the pool of 16 year old grammar school boys that had been handed to him.

It was hardly an inspirational moment that could have shaped my life path onto a world of adventure and romance.
But still I needed guidance. Guidance of any description, and this is the best I have been offered up till now.

You see I'm the naughty kid, I hate authority. Well not really authority as such just inept people being handed an important role in my development and not fully being up to it. Yet another figure in authority, collecting a pay cheque, staring out from behind dead eyes, no passion, excitement, not realising the potential he could have on people's lives.

"A Rally Driver" I said with the sparkle of a small excited child, an act I often like to play in these situations. Pretending to be a bit of an airhead was one of my favourite ways of playing people. It had become a habit. Forged on the playground of primary school, the stomping ground of the school bully, this chameleon like ability would serve me well for the rest of my life.

What I really loved was playing people around me. I seemed to have an innate ability to feel people's minds, to intuitively know what they were thinking. I had been like this since a small boy with my parents often telling me of weird, psychic like abilities. Those uninspired, worn down and dead behind the eyes yet with strong egos and self importance were my favourite challenges for a bit of energetic banter. It was too much of this that would lead to all my troubles.

Here I was again about to have my imagination squashed down into a box by a soul clearly un-alive, worn down by the system by peddling the same old crap so that one day I could be just like them uninspired and dead behind the eyes.

F**k that! I knew there was something more out there. What I needed now more than anything at that moment was somebody who I could finally admire and relate to. Somebody to tell me to follow my heart and my dreams, to ignore the system and live how the universe intended me to be..

But alas, this was 1990's working class Britain, and I was a child of the Thatcher era. Her national wealth redistribution program was in full swing and the illuminati brainwashing campaign had infected all those around me.. The only option was to be a good rat and join the rat race like everybody else.

I checked myself and made myself more present. I tried to be a grown-up and take things seriously and as I sat there trying to think of something constructive my mind started to whirl... Or at least the programs of 16 years on this planet that have been imprinted into my brain started to fire. Imprints from the news, from the media, kids TV shows (fronted by men, which we now know mostly to have an affinity for the unsavoury), from my parents, from the entire global matrix from which I had yet to wake up from were starting to fill my mind.

"No Seriously," my chosen vocational visionary said, "what is it you want to do with your life?"

Still bombarded by the images of the imprints I thought about fast cars, big houses, glamour, excitement, fun, hedonism and pretty girls hanging off my arm. As a kid I wanted to be a pro footballer, now at the age of 16 that idea had gone and passed but I still thought the glamorous life there for me. And you know what is required if you want that lifestyle? MONEY!!

I looked at the desk in front of me and in particular at the thick catalogue style book that sat on it. I picked it up and started flicking through the alphabetical career menu, my gateway to the 'real' world, on every page the entrance to which ever rat run I wanted.

The winner of the rat race is still a rat. If only I had known the gurus I had known now back then, then perhaps... well it wouldn't be quite the same story would it...?

We spoke a bit more, he asked me what I was good at and I vaguely mentioned computers and my imagination and creativity. The imagination and creativity part seemed to go unregistered but he seemed to perk up when I mentioned computers, we talked a bit about programming but it all seemed a bit boring to me. I wanted epic, rock and roll star stuff.. But it was not to be. I left the meeting and went back to my uninspired adolescent life, taking the capitalist dream bible with me.

This was the last time I might ever be at this school. My exams were over and I could look forward to the summer. I was pretty confident I would do alright. My semi-photographic memory which allowed me to mess around all the time but still get good grades(a great source of my adolescent arrogance) hadn't failed me up till now and besides I was a grammar school boy, good grades is what we do best.

Back home I scanned the book, quickly noticing that each career had an average salary indication. It turns out that Doctor, Barrister and Stock Broker were the highest paid professions. That was easy. It also became a revaluation that you did not need to go to university to become a Stock Broker. And there we had it, my 16 year old mind, completely naive to most of the world around him had crystallised the path my soul would take over the next 12 years...

The start of a journey which would quite literally..... blow my mind.

Chapter 3

The voices had subsided a bit and I could breathe again. If I can just make it till lunchtime then I can go out for a nice long run along the river to collect my thoughts.

I unlock the cubicle door and check myself in the mirror. My eyes look drained and I generally look like s**t.

I perk myself up by admiring my hand made bespoke suit I had had made when I was in Hong Kong, adjusting my cuffs to ensure my Paul Smith cuff links and my Omega Chrono watch were fully visable to everybody in the office.

I fish around in my pocket for my emergecy Effellxor Venaflaxine 250mg serotonin re-uptake inhibitator capsule that my girlfriend had told me to take with me in case of emergencies.

This was an emergency I guess, I mean the day has only just started. The voices which I thought I had overcome and shaken from my system had returned.

It was the midweek blues, comedown Wednesday. 4 days ago Sasha had been playing an 8hr set at Fabric, I had stayed up all weekend. My girlfriend and I had blagged our way into the VIP room, the room we were usually allowed into on a normal weekend being members but this night was different, Sasha was in town and the VIP room had been super-charged. Lenny Kravits was in there, he looked hugely out of place with his leather jacket and sunglasses on but still he oozed coolness. I had scored some of the best ecstacy I had ever had and I ended up doing about 6 pills over the weekend.

Still standing in the toilets I cup some water from the tap and wash down my emergency perscription med. My brain was comepletely drained of serotonin, the naturally occurring neuro-transmitter which regulates your mood. I was dropping anti-depressants to deal with the come down. I thought I had it under control, I carefully selected my diet and had a post clubbing regime which would allow me to hold it together. I had been doing this for about 4 years and so far I was doing OK. The fun at the weekends was so worth it and the fact that I was getting away with it gave me even more of a buzz.

I had researched all the brain chemicals affected by weekends of serious partying and had developed a strategy to rebalance them.

I had a post clubbing kit, Orange juice to replace the vitamin C, salt tablets to balance the sodium levels, 5 HTP Hydroxytryptophan, which I bought on the internet, is the amino-acid precursor to serotonin. And of course the perscription SSRIs to stop the Serotonin from being absorbed too quickly.

Then everyday I would run at least 3 miles listening to Techno ( or sometimes even Mozart as the brainwaves created what was known as the Mozart Effect) the resulting endorphin release acted as a catalyst to get all of these chemicals to operate in sync, bringing levels of pure bliss which were almost indesribeable.

Back at my desk it was now 11am. F**k! , I'd been in the toilet for half an hour. Thankfully everybody around me was busy on the phones. They were used to me being not at my desk. I worked a different shift to them. I covered the US and Canadian markets so I would get in late but leave after everybody else. That suited me fine, I liked being in the office in the evening when nobody else was there.

It was pre-market opening in the US so I just had to get my preparation done for the day ahead. This was made even easier by the fact that most of it had already been done before I even stepped foot in the office.

About a year prior to this point I had figured out a way to automate the bulk of my work.

My rise through the back and middle office to the brink of the front-office had been on the back of my ability to program systems which would automate my work.

My previous middle managers at other companies would often reach some kind of corporate orgasm when they found out that some junior member of staff had automated the procedures allowing for increased productivity, decreased head count and the holy grail of the middle managers wank bank, an exponential increase across all Six Sigma metrics.

They loved it. Sad but true. I just did it so that I did not need to be fully compos mentis while at work. So I could browse the internet looking for whatever GQ magazines must have gadget of the month. Or so I could covertly run my 300 pound Bang and Olfsen noise cancelling head-phones up my sleeve and listen to the latest Beatport Techno Top 10.

A 10 hour day could be condensed into about 2 hours of actual work. The rest of the time I just had to be at my desk at the right time to click a button to run a Macro. Simples.

The great thing about the company I was now working for is that they had an awesome technology budget. Everybody had the option to take their work home for business continuity planning reasons. You could patch your work PC into your home PC and your work phone into your home phone (I never had a home phone bill the whole time I worked there).

I had used this system to run the program from my macbook in my bedroom every morning when I woke up. While I was in the shower and getting ready my macbook patched into my work PC was booking thousands of pending trades in the US and Canadian Markets. Cleaning up my book so that my day was not as stressful as those around me.

This however was not the best use of the technology.

In the early days of courting My then girlfriend I used it to patch my work phone to her landline in her beautiful, Thame-side 14th floor apartment. I knew that in 30mins I would be getting a call from my counterpart in New York. I left the office and made my way to one of the many underground car-parks in Canary Wharf. I brought a bouquet of flowers as I passed the flower seller outside the DLR station and jumped on my little 125cc red Vespa to make the less than 10 minute journey to Silvertown on the outskirts of the Docklands.

Once up in her flat I set up my laptop and patched into my desk at work.

With almost perfect timing, while I was out on the balcony having a cigarette, her home phone rang. She was suprised to here my buddy Bobby in Manhattan asking to speak to me. She handed me the phone with a quizzical look and in my best Gordan Gecko immitation I spoke to Bobby about a 10 million dollar DTC settlement like I was brokering a billion dollar multinational take-over bid. Standing on the balcony looking over the skyline of Canary Wharf while on the phone to New York I felt like a king.

The converstaion ended and I handed the phone back to her. Do you want to help me make some money I asked her with a glint in my eye. She smiled and I took her to the laptop where I was logged into the Depository Trust Company settlement system.

I guided her through releasing the funds from one account to another and when she hit enter I kissed her on the cheek and said that she just helped me with my Christmas Bonus.

I felt like a 24 year old big shot banker. In reality releasing funds like this was done thousands of times a day. It made no real money as it was a housekeeping middle office function but she didn't know that. To this day I'm not sure if she thought I was a prat or pretty cool. I didn't care, my attempt to impress my beautiful new girlfriend was a success in my eyes.

Chapter to be continued....

Author's Note

This is my first attempt at writing about my experiences and it is proving a cathartic experience, I would greatly appreciate feedback in any flavour, thank you for taking the time to read this. Paul

Reviews

[The Chosen]

I really liked this because it isn't some huge fantasy novel or anything. Nowadays, alot of people try to write fantasy, or crazy stuff like that, (I'm no exception), but this one is unique, and pretty cool. I also like the point of view you are using. I can't wait to read more of this.

[Paul Leppard]

Thank you The Chosen, this kind of positive feedback is just what I need to keep me motivated. Thx

[TrimarcoRansome]

Welcome to WC! A good start to your novel! You have a good flow of words and a way to make the reader want to know more. Drug induced psychosis is a great time to begin writing, your head is full of thoughts and ideas and the bonus is, that it is good therapy too!
Brilliant start to a good write, Paul. I liked that it was not overkill on the length no here as people including myself, shy away from reviewing long winded pieces. Well done, keep writing!

[Paul Leppard]

Thank you TR, I am very grateful for your feedback :-)

[isus]

very nice, keep that way.