That party's over, of course. A dot-com collapse, a reeling stock market and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have traumatized the city's economy, and formerly hyper-confident legions of men and women in their 20's and early 30's suddenly find themselves, for the first time, confronting their own occupational vulnerability. Such worry has been brewing for a year now, but the panic is officially here. These days, it's hard to find any employee under 35 in New York who is not freaking out.

Amid this destabilization, employees and employers say, a strange new work ethic has arisen. After a long reprieve, gray-flanneled gratitude is back. Cherubs who six months ago thought nothing of two-hour lunches or four-day mountain-bike weekends in Moab now lash themselves to their desks like neo-Dilberts. Slovenliness is out. Dressing up is big. So is kissing a little ass.

"People have been generally willing and offering to do more work," said David Granger, editor of Esquire magazine. "I don't know that people are happier, but they're working harder. Maybe that's sucking up or it might be a fear factor, but it might be reality."

It's reality. Bosses can blather on all they want about the sanctity of "product" and "mission," but there's nothing like a recession and mass layoffs-to say nothing of the disaster downtown-to induce fear and inject some perspective into the formerly spoiled employee. On Oct. 29, MTV Networks-the once-invincible Oz of Gens X, Y and Z-announced that it would lay off 450 employees. Everyone outside of Carson Daly shuddered. A few weeks earlier, Mademoiselle folded its Capri pants and closed for good. The dot-com corpses are too numerous to count. If that doesn't make you reconsider "optional Fridays" and your weekly midday batting-practice break at Chelsea Piers ….

"Our generation used to feel like we were so cool and everything was so groovy-we felt secure," said Dania Ahmad, 24, an account executive at Veeder & Perman, a public-relations firm. "Well, now we're not so secure. It's almost weird to have a secure job right now. I think, 'Oh God, my friend just got laid off, but thank God I'm O.K.'"

This dose of humility is new for lots of young workers, many of whom were sitting in their jammies riveted to Saved by the Bell the last time the country rollicked through a recession. They came of age during the go-go expansion years of a slap-happy economy, when company stock was considered a birthright even for rookies, and 55-year-old middle managers looked about as relevant as a flock of Stegosauruses. "Who remembers 1987?" asked one securities manager in his late 20's. "Nobody."

But now there's a wake-up call, a little Studs Terkel for the young 'uns. Me-first ambition has morphed into butt-saving maintenance. Once, 25-year-olds wanted six figs plus options; now they'll settle for a health plan and free Cabernet at the Christmas party. With so many people out on the street, there's no shame in being a cog of capitalism; it's a lot better than being unemployed.

"It's sort of like, hunker down, hold your ground, do your job," said one 27-year-old magazine journalist. "There's no more constantly looking around the corner."

"There's definitely been a shift," said another 27-year-old, this one a banker. "A lot of the kids coming out of school in the past few years have had a sense of entitlement-'I deserve $100,000, I'm only going to work this many hours, I've got eight other offers, what else are you going to do for me?' Now nothing is taken for granted. People don't argue as much if they're asked to work over a weekend or stay late. There's not as much push-back on that stuff anymore. Before, people would whine or complain … now they're just happy to have work."

This is not to say that young people didn't work hard before the economy started chugging downward. There were plenty of sleepless nights and 80-hour weeks; we've got the breathy Fast Company and Red Herring articles as evidence. But that youthful workplace revolution was accomplished on young people's terms-with so much expansion, it was a buyer's market. And because the competition for talent was so brisk, companies indulged the wacky, irreverent and borderline obnoxious.

But that jig is up. Already, the dot-com world's breezy work-hard-play-hard philosophy-with its emphasis on freedom, creativity and in-office masseuses-feels extravagant, dated. The old bottom-line, starched-shirt paradigms are returning. "I would say there is definitely a sense that you need to be more profitable and productive, and the whole let's-put-them-in-a-room-with-basketball-hoops-and-tell-them-to-be-brilliant thing without any kind of process and accountability is over," said an executive in publishing. "People are getting back to accountability."

For young employees, the change is more personal than that. In a perilous job market, they must now do everything they can to avoid getting canned. They compare the atmosphere inside their offices to that of a pet shop: dozens of well-scrubbed professionals doing their best to win love, even if it means-crikes!-putting on a coat and tie for the first time since college graduation.

"People are starting to wear suits and ties more often," said the 27-year-old in the securities industry. "Typically you wear a suit if you have a client meeting, so if people see you wearing a suit, it means you are doing business. Some people are wearing suits all the time now."

A 24-year-old woman at an online company said she began wearing what she referred to as her "layoff outfit"-a tweed J. Crew skirt and boots-when she sensed that her office might be cutting back staff. "I didn't want to be too obvious, but I'll be damned if I was going to walk out of there in jeans," she said.

Conversely, other employees are taking a stealth approach, saying they are doing everything possible to avoid detection. One false move, they fear, could give a boss motivation to let them go.

"Instead of doing a business lunch, now I'll try to do what I have to do over coffee, because I don't want to set off any alarms with my expense reports," said one journalist in his 20's. Another worker at a cable-television network, this one in his early 30's, bemoaned the end of carefree office video-gaming: "You know the whole freak scene, the unsaid kind of grimness that happens in any place where there's a computer network and freaks? That's off the table. That's uncool now."

Naturally, this proletarian and generally depressing recommitment has made some bosses giddy. It's all about power: Once squarely in the hands of employees, the juice has shifted back to the bosses. And after watching people in their 20's blow them off for several years or float easily from company to company, they're feeling a bit of execu- schadenfreude.

"In publishing, you couldn't hire young people-they were all doing dot-coms," said the publishing executive. "The smart Brown lit major went to work for Ask Jeeves. What a fucking sham. Now they're calling us back."

Mr. Granger took no solace in this change of circumstances, however, calling his past year the "toughest year ever." A sizable portion of his time at Esquire, he said, is spent reassuring staffers that their work is still vital and valuable, even as the economy roils. "The smallest things can get people in a funk," Mr. Granger said. "In meetings, you are forced into praising the work people do just to say, 'It's not all bad.'"

And others caution not to place too much faith in this sudden workplace camaraderie; it might be just a temporary, brown-nosing reaction to tumult in the economy. Said Ken Ruge, a psychotherapist and motivational speaker who's an adjunct minister at Norman Vincent Peale's Marble Collegiate Church: "Putting in more face time, having to stay as late as your boss, even if it's 7 or 8 o'clock-I don't think I could dignify it as work ethic. I think those are fear-based behaviors; people are doing it out of their own anxiety."

If anything, Mr. Ruge believes that many workers are reconsidering their working lives altogether, especially since Sept. 11. While the economy may have spawned some humility in today's young workers, he said, the loss of life emphasized the need to do what one wants.

"A lot of these people have given up a dream for money, or to make money for other people," Mr. Ruge said. "It's funny, because there is more anxiety in the workplace, but there's also more of a sense that time is precious. As one of my clients said, 'Why am I spending 80 hours a week trying to make money for some asshole?'"

-with reporting by Gabriel Snyder

A year later, the business had picked up enough speed for him to move into a pleasant office within minutes of the local train station and the first tee at the country club. Soon Mr. Shogren bought out his partner. He moved two large sofas into the office, hired a dozen staff members, hung a picture of Jerry Garcia on the wall and set about trying to take over the hedge fund world.

Now Mr. Shogren, 31, finds himself besieged by what he calls "slimeballs." The battleground, as usual, is an obscure stock of quirky provenance and uncertain prospects. The stakes, as usual, are credibility and money. But the combatants are unusual-a Gold Coast golfer versus a shadowy, nameless posse of short-sellers. When the discreet and clubby world of hedge funds clashes with the rogues and pirates who populate the message boards, stocks swing and slime flies. Such battles can be extremely hazardous to a man who wishes, as Mr. Shogren clearly does, to be taken seriously.

Mr. Shogren's company, Tuna Capital, is a partner in another family of hedge funds called Blue Water Partners, which he helped start. Blue Water, in turn, invested a major portion of its capital in NetSol International, a financial software manufacturer whose programmers are based in Pakistan. When Blue Water started buying NetSol last year, its shares were trading at around $4 a share. Beginning in November 1999, they shot up-reaching 80 at one point-and Blue Water was up about 140 percent in the first quarter of this year. Things were good.

Fast-forward to May 15. Barron's , the Dow Jones financial journal, ran a column by Alan Abelson that trashed NetSol as a grossly overvalued company. Mr. Abelson singled out Blue Water and Mr. Shogren for ridicule for their outsize position in NetSol. In the wake of the story, NetSol stock plummeted to just over 32. On Monday, May 22, it closed at just above 20. Blue Water's core holding, the basis for its recent success, was in free fall.

On May 15, the stock-watchers who frequent online message boards plastered Mr. Abelson's story all over the Internet. Blue Water quickly issued an unorthodox press release declaring that its partners felt "compelled to address some recent negative press concerning its concentrated position in a company called NetSol International." The release did not have a byline, but Mr. Shogren was listed as the only contact.

The message boards-sponsored by Web sites like Raging Bull and Go2Net's Silicon Investor-are cultish but influential. Legions of investors scan the boards daily, posting messages about stocks and about each other, using names like Bugger6, BIGMACK, CaptWallSt2 and Greenface. While their banter and bickering can be amusing, there are many participants who follow the advice of fellow message-posters religiously-which can create a snowball effect that makes or breaks a particular stock. Knowing this, there are people who use the message boards to manipulate stocks, on the upside and the downside.

After justifying its unusually large investment in NetSol-which began as a Pakistani designer clothing company before going into the financial software business-Mr. Shogren's press release posited that the bad press was "most likely the result of manipulation from those who short NetSol."

Mr. Shogren also runs Hedgefund.net, an online information source for more than 1,400 hedge funds with an average value of $93 million each. It is with Hedgefund.net that Mr. Shogren hopes to transform the world of hedge funds from a scattering of isolated loners into an interconnected community. Mr. Shogren, of course, would be the conduit for all the valuable information passing between investors and fund managers. Hedgefund.net was the first, for example, to report problems at the Manhattan Investment Fund, which, earlier this year, got caught issuing phony account statements while losing over $300 million of its investors' money.

On Friday, May 19, Mr. Shogren sat with his feet up on his desk in Locust Valley. He wore faded blue jeans, a faded black Hedgefund.net baseball cap, a green long-sleeve polo shirt and black, wood-soled clogs. Maggie, a field spaniel, wandered the office. A photo of Jerry Garcia smiled down on him from the wall, but Mr. Shogren was not smiling as he reflected on the collapse of Blue Water's prize stock.

"It's upsetting when something bad happens," he said. "We pride ourselves on being good, honest people, and we've left a lot of money on the table for it. These are bad people. They're slimeballs."

He said he was not sure exactly who the bad people were, but they were the ones responsible for NetSol's downfall. Mr. Shogren also contended in his press release that people who held short positions in NetSol fed the press negative information about the company. But in his office, he refused to speculate as to who they might be.

According to Mr. Shogren, his office received a call from a Barron's reporter late in the afternoon on Friday, May 12. The story reached newsstands the following day.

In his story, Mr. Abelson cites the reporting of Jaye Scholl, a Los Angeles-based reporter for Barron's, whom Mr. Abelson in his story called " Barron's expert eye on the wonderful world of hedge funds." Ms. Scholl declined to comment for this story, deferring to Mr. Abelson, who could not be reached by press time.

In any case, the column said that Mr. Shogren's "modest ambition [was] to take over the hedge fund world."

"I wouldn't mind taking over the hedge fund world," Mr. Shogren admitted in his office the other day. "It's a totally fragmented, entrepreneurial world, and those are the reasons it almost needs someone to step in."

Mr. Shogren was raised on the North Shore. Despite his sub-par record at prep school, Mr. Shogren eventually got his General Equivalency Diploma, and he was accepted to East Stroudsburg University in East Stroudsburg, Pa.

"I knew the dean of admission and he gave me a chance," Mr. Shogren said.

After his first year, he transferred to Georgetown, where he got a degree in marketing. For a few years he followed the Grateful Dead. He spent time living in California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. But eventually, he returned to Locust Valley. After Jerry Garcia died, he focused on golf. "I substitute golf for Jerry," he said. "I got my handicap way down after he died."

Contrast him with one of the people who have been shorting NetSol: Anthony Elgindy, a minor celebrity in the world of stock message boards. A self-proclaimed cyber vigilante, Mr. Elgindy, a 32-year-old native of Cairo, seeks out questionable stocks and attacks them zestfully on the boards. He also moderates a stock-advice Web site with some 350 subscribers who pay $600 a month to follow his trades. When he shorts stocks, his acolytes short with him.

Mr. Elgindy, himself a bucket-shop refugee, has had some run-ins with the authorities over the years. Most recently, on May 15, he was sentenced to four months in federal prison after being convicted of felony mail fraud. But he has claimed repeatedly in press reports that he has cleaned up his act and that his methods and his intentions are pure.

Reached in his office in Del Mar, Calif. (he begins serving his sentence June 11), Mr. Elgindy dismissed Mr. Shogren's suspicions of media manipulation.

"The guy probably hallucinates all the time," he said. "You know, for the most part, the evil short-sellers are to blame for every stock going down. All we do is short stinky stuff that goes up that doesn't have any fundamental basis for going up. In this particular case, I certainly didn't know the press [story] was coming out. Was I short? Absolutely. Do we make money when stocks go down? Yeah. But we also carry a very real risk in that when we are wrong, we have a price to pay."

The mail fraud charges against Mr. Elgindy, to which he pleaded guilty on Feb. 24, stemmed from payments he received from the Bear Stearns Companies and Barron Chase Securities Inc. while he was simultaneously receiving disability benefits from the MassMutual Life Insurance company.

Mr. Elgindy maintains simply that NetSol, like many others in the recent tech-stock sell-off, was overvalued and has been lowered to a more reasonable price-through no doing of his.

"What brought the stock down is the fact that the company has no sales, no earnings, no nothing," Mr. Elgindy said.

A spokesman for NetSol declined to comment for this story. Mr. Shogren conceded that NetSol has negative earnings, but he argued that Blue Water believes the stock is promising and is not changing its position.

"We're a hedge fund, and hedge funds are for big boys," Mr. Shogren said. "If you go up huge, you can go down huge just as easily."

Of course, the young businessman was laughed out of every venture capital office in town. So, like many others who were determined to stake a claim in the great dot-com gold rush, he turned to his own address book and hit up college buddies, childhood friends and family. He found 50 investors, got the money together and launched the Web site.

Now it is dying. He is running out of cash, and none is forthcoming. Today, he is hoping to sell what's left of the business to whomever will buy it. For any amount of money.

"At this point, I'll take just about any price," said the founder, now 30, who has remained the company's chief executive and driving force. "It's just been beating me up for so long. I'm not giving up, but I'm not too confident. It's a strange moment when you spend four years building a company, only to realize it might be worth zero dollars. It's either worth $15 million or zero, and there's a fine line between the two."

But if he does find a buyer, he will face an even larger question than how much his company is worth: How much is he worth?

"What do you do if you're the C.E.O. of a failed Internet company?" he said ruefully. "Where do you go?"

To another Internet start-up! That, at least, has been the answer in recent years, as entrepreneurs who have failed have routinely been rewarded with better jobs. It's a twist on the infamous "Peter Principle," by which people in an organization rise to their level of incompetence. Here, you shed incompetence by demonstrating it repeatedly.

From Wall Street to Silicon Alley, the consensus seems to be that as the dot-com shakeout continues, old economy employers will be deluged by packs of prodigal ex-entrepreneurs. A year ago the chief executive of a bombed-out dot-com may have had little trouble landing a better job, but now, as venture capitalists and the capital markets grow more discerning, the newly jobless hordes may soon overwhelm the market, making it difficult to continue failing upward. The masses will have to get back to failing sideways.

According to the Web site IPO.com, which tracks Internet start-ups, 70 companies have either postponed or withdrawn their applications to go public so far this year. While eight of those companies have already rescheduled, 62 (with a total of 30,580 employees) are still holding off. Without new cash to feed on, these companies won't survive long. People who have cleared their wallets of all their obsolete business cards may have more trouble than in the past replacing them with new ones.

In the heady days of a 5,000-point Nasdaq, having a few failed Internet companies under your belt virtually guaranteed a higher-paying job with a souped-up title.

"It was like a badge of honor," said New York high-tech headhunter Bonnie Halper. "It baffles me and I don't understand it, but it's true."

Take, for example, Seth Goldstein. After launching SiteSpecific, one of the first on-line marketing companies, in 1995, the business was soon struggling. It was bought by CKS Group, and Mr. Goldstein went to start Root.net, a site serving mobile executives. That, too, failed. Mr. Goldstein moved on to Flatiron Partners, one of the most prestigious venture capital firms in New York, where he took up the mantle of Entrepreneur in Residence. Suddenly, he was near the top of the food chain. (Mr. Goldstein declined to comment on his career path.)

Or Justin Anderson, 25, who a year ago launched iCelebrate.com, an online purveyor of holiday gifts. He ran through $7 million ($5 million of it on advertising) in a matter of months, but couldn't make it work. Just before iCelebrate.com's crash, however, he landed a job as director of product development for another start-up. Now he's making much more money than before. And the old-school companies are after him, too. "All the consulting companies won't stop calling," he said. "It gets annoying after awhile."

Dara Khosrowshahi, president of U.S.A. Networks Interactive, has been surveying the wreckage from the dot-com shakeout, watching failed executives land plumb new jobs.

"People are having absolutely no trouble getting jobs out there," Mr. Khosrowshahi said. "Tons of businesses are getting funded, and they have to hire people. People are finding the next thing. It's like a big party. You know, from 7 to 9, people go to one party, and once the beer's finished at that one, it's time for the next one. It may be 1 a.m. right now, but it's still going strong. And there's plenty of alcohol left. It's dried up at the B-to-C party, and the B-to-B party's running low, but at wireless and broadband there's plenty to go around."

The phenomenon of failing one's way to a better job may simply be a self-fulfilling prophecy, according to one manager at a high-tech recruiting firm in New York.

"Whether or not it was true that these people were valuable, it was the general belief that people were being driven by," the manager said. "It's bizarre, but it's very true. And these days, what's true usually doesn't carry as much weight as the illusion of what's true. If enough people believe the illusion, the illusion becomes reality."

For a time, investors believed in the Internet community site Theglobe.com in a big way. The company's co-chief executives, Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot, both 26, built up their content site for three years before staging a mind-boggling I.P.O.: The stock soared from $9 to $63.50 on its opening day, a 606 percent gain. At that point it was the biggest opening in market history. And so Theglobe.com guys became the poster boys for vast, instantaneous wealth, as well as the target for all the rotten envy hurled at them by their mere salaried peers.

But that was another era. Theglobe.com is a dying company. On May 15, its stock closed at just under $3. And Messrs. Krizelman and Paternot are failed leaders, having gobbled up cash in a doomed quest to build a business.

Mr. Krizelman and Mr. Paternot are still hanging around the company, although they will be stepping down as co-chief executives and are in search of their own replacement. Market analysts are speculating that the company is ripe to be sold. The founders' fate is unclear. But they aren't going to be canning salmon.

"In much the same way, if you create a really bad TV show, you're probably set for life, because they're going to let you create 20 more really bad TV shows, for whatever reason," said Richard Patrick Sternin, president of the Greenwich Village high-tech headhunter Seven Staffing.

Eric Tenety, another recruiter, said that in today's easy-come, easy-go market, a failed dot-com is no hindrance at all. "The truth is, it's a pretty small world, and most industries are pretty intimate," Mr. Tenety said. "If Billy Bob goes out to start Grapefruit.com and falls flat on his face, most of his colleagues in his industry probably know, and they might even say, 'Wow! He made it six months! We thought he would only make it for two!'"

Hi, Sam!

On May 8, Nick Hall, a veteran of several failed start-ups who lives in San Francisco, launched a Web site for the losers, called Startupfailures.com. It is, among other things, a place for failed entrepreneurs to bond over their misfortune. "My name is Sam," read a May 15 post, "and I see your failure as an asset that is just as good as some superstar's latest success."

"So to each of you who have failed," read another, "I say with my hand stretched out to shake yours, congradulations [sic], you in a cool club [sic]. You are now a member of the new elite, those that have had the power and authority to destroy your own company."

Meanwhile, those that do not have the fortitude to continue failing upward, or downward, are scurrying back to the old economy jobs they gave up to strike out on their own.

"Three months ago, every twentysomething banker or consultant had a unique Series A business plan worth $15 million," said Jonathan Lipton, 30, managing partner of Metropolis Capital Management, a venture capital firm. "Now that they're begging for their old jobs back. I wouldn't be surprised if their former employers require them to wear three-piece suits to work just to make a point."

But success at reentering the job market, healthy as it is, may depend on exactly how much of a failure you are. As for the anonymous, 26-year-old entrepreneur who is looking for a buyer for his company, he is banking on the hope that his struggles will be valuable to another start-up. Someone who has made mistakes may have learned how not to make them again.

"You learn a tremendous amount because you kind of have to do everything," he said. "You are exposed to so much pain and misery that I think it does make you stronger. And supposedly investors do respect the guys who have failed for that reason. But I think there are limits to that-especially if you've burned through a lot of someone else's money."

A reporter approached him to ask a question, but Mr. Bell put his hand up and said, very politely, "I'll be with you all in a minute. I got to get my coordination right."

There, lined up before him, were five pairs of Mauri alligator-skin shoes:tan-and-olive, lime-olive-white, yellow-brown, gray-slate and light-blue, and solid dark blue. Nearby were five matching alligator-skin belts. Five suits hung in his locker next to five shirts. He stood before it all, deciding which shoes went with which suits. His suits are custom-made; he wears them only once, before giving them away to friends. So it was very important that he get his coordination right.

"Yo Vinny!" he called out suddenly to Vinny Greco, the assistant equipment manager. "I need some hanging bags!"

The clubhouse guys are not yet quite accustomed to Mr. Bell. In fact, he has taken everyone by surprise. He came to the Mets as a throw-in in its December trade with the Houston Astros, when they got pitcher Mike Hampton. The Astros basically forced the Mets to take Mr. Bell and his bloated$5-million-per-year contract. At 31, he wasn't supposed to be all that good. Plagued by rib cage and groin injuries, he batted a dismal .236 last season, and bottomed out with the Houston media and the Astros fans after he slammed manager Larry Dierker in the press the day Mr. Dierker returned from brain surgery. Mr. Dierker had merely moved him down in the batting order.

But in his first month with the Mets, Mr. Bell has thrived. His .370 average is seventh in the National League, and he leads the league in hits. On April 24, he was named National League Player of the Week. In a six-game stretch he batted over .600.

What's more, he has added a little life to a clubhouse that's more mature than those in Shea's past, what with a brooding Mike Piazza, a moody Rickey Henderson and an Edgardo Alfonzo so focused he could almost make it as a Yankee. Into that hushed atmosphere comes Mr. Bell, the sad-eyed, hyperactive clown of New York baseball, with the soul of a 13-year-old and the old-man face of Mr. Magoo.

"He's a breath of fresh air," said Keith Hernandez, who played at Shea back in the free-wheeling days of Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra. "There are a lot of serious guys on that team. There's too much seriousness. He's just a character, and there should be more personalities like him in baseball."

"He's got a big, ol' heart," said Gene Pemberton, the Astros' team chaplain, who developed a close friendship with Mr. Bell when he was in Houston. "But when people start getting on him, it can get to him. You all can really rattle people's cages up there, can't you? He says it doesn't bother him, but wait 'til he gets in a little slump."

Something About Derek

"Titties!" Mr. Bell called out. He has a habit of calling out random lyrics to whatever hip-hop or rap song happens to be playing on the clubhouse stereo. Then he launched into a little rap of his own.

"I'm just Derek Bell," Mr. Bell said. "I come to the ballpark every day, I go home, I walk the streets with all the crowds in New York. And in New York, if you have good rapport with the media, you talk to 'em when they wanna talk to you, you know what I'm saying? There ain't no problem. You gotta do your job, I gotta do mine. If I fuck up, you gotta do your job. You know, you read the paper, and it says, 'Derek Bell made an error, cost them the game.' They read it while they're eating breakfast, or while they're drinking their coffee, or while they're, you know, on the toilet taking a shit. And guess what? Next paper comes out the next day, and you did something good, you know what I'm saying, they're gonna get the next paper the next day, and they're gonna read that. If some guy's an asshole to reporters, and he don't relate to them, that's when you're gonna get on their bad side. You might write something bad, but that ain't gonna stop you from being my friend, you know what I'm saying? Why should I be an asshole to you guys when you write about how I did something wrong, if I did something wrong, and I admit it, you know? It doesn't bother me."

Much of the time, Mr. Bell lives on his 63-foot yacht, the Bell 14, which is docked between piers 59 and 60 at Chelsea Piers. It's a sleek, white Sea Ray with a Yamaha XL1200 jet ski strapped to the stern. As for other accessories: he wears a gold necklace with a giant gold pendant, studded with diamonds, shaped like home plate with a big, gold baseball jutting out from it.

He grew up in the tough Belmont Heights section of Tampa, Fla. He and Little League teammate Gary Sheffield-now a star for the Los Angeles Dodgers-worshipped Mr. Sheffield's uncle, ex-Mets pitching ace Dwight Gooden, who wore No. 16. Today, it's Mr. Bell's number. He came up with the Toronto Blue Jays, then played in San Diego before moving to Houston.

There are times, he said, when he finds himself walking around Manhattan, near the Doubletree hotel in Times Square where he lives when he's not on the Bell 14, when he forgets he's famous. He's tough to miss, with his baggy eyes and shaved head. When people turn to look at him, he turns, too, to see what everyone is looking at.

"You know, I step outside to go to McDonald's or something, go to Wendy's, and people look and say, 'Oh!'" he said, imitating someone doing a double take. "And then I turn around and look, and then I remember, 'Oh, damn!' Because, you know, I'm out there walking around right there with everyone, waiting for the light to change."

Back in the clubhouse, before the game, his teammates were trickling in. They saw him getting his coordination right and started getting in on the act. Pitcher Pat Mahomes grabbed one of Mr. Bell's suit jackets and tried it on over his T-shirt, and did a little dance. Outfielder Jon Nunnally joined in. Clutching a can of Mountain Dew, Mr. Bell danced across the clubhouse to pitcher John Franco's locker, where a knob on the wall controls the volume of the clubhouse music. He cranked it up and danced away. Mr. Franco turned it back down.

At his locker, Mr. Bell assembled his road-trip entertainment. Dressed in his uniform pants, spikes and no shirt, he sorted through his stack of electronic equipment: portable CD player, video game machines, battery recharger, headphones and dozens of double-A batteries.

"Don't fuck with me!" he sang out, in unison with the music.

He grabbed a stack of about two-dozen DVD movies, including There's Something About Mary , Bowfinger and The Thirteenth Floor . He shoved in a book of 200 CD's, about 150 Sony PlayStation video games and a stack of brand-new discs from the likes of R&B crooners Carl Thomas and Gerald Levert.

"This is just for the plane," he said, not looking up as he focused on fitting everything neatly into his suitcases.

Then it was time to get ready to play. In the game, a 12-inning heartbreaker that the Mets lost, 2-1, Mr. Bell walked four times, struck out once and grounded out to the shortstop. The clubhouse afterward was sober, but not glum. Mr. Bell sat in front of his locker massaging the alligator-skin shoes he had decided to wear on the plane.

"Everybody's upbeat," he said. "We're not disappointed at all, by no means. We couldn't have won all these games."

Then Mr. Bell stood up and prepared to hit the showers. "I gotta shave my head," he said.

"You guys just saw American Psycho ?" he asked, sliding a coaster under their pints of Miller Genuine Draft.

"Yeah," they both said.

"Did you read the book?" asked the bartender, who was in his late twenties.

"Nope."

"Well I don't know if you've ever read any Kafka...." He paused for a second to wait for a response but, getting only blank stares and a weak "yeah," continued: "He writes about that sort of detachment from society, like that one part of the film where the main character says he just wants to stay in the investment banking job so he can fit in. Kafka's characters, some of them, especially in The Castle , desperately want to fit in, but at the same time feel that separation..."

As the young bartender went on, the two patrons sipped their pints, listening politely but adding nothing. The barkeep had no idea, of course, that he was lecturing Peter Troob and John Rolfe, the authors of Monkey Business , a recently published 273-page memoir of their brief stints as young investment banking associates at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, one of the biggest firms on Wall Street.

Their book chronicles the wild, weird, dreary and banal goings-on at D.L.J. The two authors take turns in the narrative describing their encounters with abusive executives, various strippers and their own mindless work. A drunken Mr. Rolfe urinates on a managing director's shoes. Colleagues break phones, ogle web porn, walk into (but not through) walls. In the right hands, their account might indeed have been a bit Kafkaesque, but in theirs, it is merely a recitation of the petty indignities and even pettier excesses that comprise the Wall Street life. The authors were the bartender's perfect audience, and they didn't even know it.

After the bartender left them alone, the two men went back to giggling about a scene in American Psycho where the investment banker has sex with two women while blasting Phil Collins' "Sussudio," then beats them up.

"Man, we thought our book had some bad stuff in it," said Mr. Troob, 30. "We should be on Oprah compared to that movie! Our shit looks tame compared to that!"

True. Their shit, however, actually happened-or so they say. The authors took great pains to disguise names, to protect themselves and their former colleagues from the consequences of their tales. Like the one about the banker who, upon noticing an attractive female co-worker doubled over at the bar vomiting during a company night out at Le Bar Bat, removed his penis from his pants and began rubbing it on the woman's backside.

Mr. Troob, 30, sucked in a deep breath at the mention of this episode.

"We basically included that story to show something shocking, and then bring the reader through the rest of the book and show them that we were becoming something we didn't want to become," Mr. Troob said. What they were becoming was, in a way, the main character in American Psycho, a banker-serial killer who says in a voice-over as he gets a manicure, "I have all the characteristics of a human being, skin, hair...but not one identifiable emotion. Except greed and disgust." They were afraid they were becoming the frotteur at Le Bar Bat, (who, according to someone familiar with the incident, recently had to take his wife on a trip to Europe to explain himself to her. Call it an explanation vacation.)

Before the book came out, someone at D.L.J. got hold of the galleys and made hundreds of copies (this being what young bankers are good at-making copies). The galleys circulated around the firm. "All the bankers were reading it and writing in the margins who they thought the different characters were," said Mr. Rolfe, who is 31. "It was a big guessing game."

People at the firm, according to several present and former employees contacted by The Observer , reacted with a mixture of relief and disappointment-relief that no one was slandered, but disappointment that, well, no one was slandered. They said that the authors missed a golden opportunity to tell some great sordid stories. Over the years at these firms, the legends accumulate. Everyone always fantasizes about writing a book, but they never actually do it. Now they had a book, but it was tame. Former employees snickered when they recalled the kind of stuff that they wished had been in the book-like that one about the guy who had sex with two women on a conference-room table, just next door to the office of the firm's chief executive, Joe Roby.

"Yeah, we've definitely heard from some former D.L.J.-ers who were hoping for a more stick-it-to-'em kind of book," Mr. Rolfe said. "But me and Troob had to ask ourselves: Do we want to burn every bridge we have? I mean, our interest was not to hang people out to dry. Our interest was in writing something that people would think was funny. That's all. Plus, we're both still working in this industry."

They left other stuff out, reluctantly. Fart stories, for instance.

"When you're sitting inside a room, doing drafting, and someone farts, it really stinks because, you know, you're enclosed," Mr. Troob said. "And you sort of get used to the smell, because you never leave the room. We had eaten lots of chili, and everyone was farting. It was freaking gross. And then what happens is the lawyers come in to get the documents, and-"

"It was like a hot box," Mr. Rolfe said.

The two men were snickering like school boys. "The lawyers were like, Oh, man!" Mr. Troob recalled. "Anyway, I told [Warner Books, their publisher] that doody sells, but we ended up taking out that stuff."

Both men left D.L.J. (and investment banking), Mr. Troob in 1996 and Mr. Rolfe in 1997. Mr. Troob, who lives on East 86th Street, is a partner at a small hedge fund. Mr. Rolfe, who lives on East Fourth Street, manages money privately.

The authors insist that the book is not meant as an attack on D.L.J., that they didn't have an ax to grind and were not out for revenge. They say they did it for yucks, mostly, and also to counteract the widespread belief that investment banking is somehow glamorous.

"I think there was definitely something to wanting to show everybody that the emperor had no clothes," said Mr. Rolfe, the duo's cerebral half, who looks a little like Bill Maher. "You know, showing people that it's not Charlie Sheen in Wall Street ."

"Yeah, that's what's pissing people off most about the book, in my view," Mr. Troob piped in. Of the two, he's the big talker. He has connections in the diamond business, and he used to set up his colleagues at the firm. "It's not that we're exposing things that people in the industry don't know. It's all the other people, who think it's so glamorous. This book hurts the bankers' egos, because they want everyone to think they're the masters of the universe, and they don't need a couple of jerk-offs like us telling them that what they've done is bullshit."

D.L.J., for its part, had little to say about the book. "We do not comment on former employees," said Catherine Conroy, a company spokesman. "But I will say that investment banking has never been an easy profession to learn. The rewards are great, but so are the demands."

"People around here are saying these guys are a couple of crybabies," said one Wall Street associate. "The first few years at a bank are a weeding-out process for people who can't hack it. They don't want guys like that around, so that's why they beat you up. A few years later, when you're making seven-million-plus a year and working a normal day, then ask them if it was worth it. Those guys will never get to see the pot of gold."

Back at Ryan's Daughter, Mr. Troob and Mr. Rolfe were still thinking about American Psycho . They laughed about the film's nightclub scenes, which show hoards of young investment bankers dancing awkwardly to thumping music, taking periodic breaks to do coke in the bathroom.

"The most realistic part of the movie was the way they danced," said Mr. Troob. "We used to do that. We had absolutely no rhythm."

Two-thirty Park is one of those buildings that swarm with hedge fund managers-a latter-day version of the old writers' bungalows on the studio lot. In the hallway that day, as the major indices plummeted, money managers milled about, looking stunned. They were getting shellacked. And seeing Mr. Rogers away from his turret, they assumed he was, too.

But he was having one of the best days of his life.

"They want a shoulder to cry on, and I really don't know what to say," Mr. Rogers said.

Mr. Rogers manages the Short Alpha Bear fund, a pool of more than $10 million with which he places bets against stocks he thinks are going down. Mr. Rogers is a short-seller. He borrows stock he thinks is headed for a fall, then sells the stock and waits for the decline. Then he buys back the stock at a lower price, repays the loan and profits from the difference.

Last year, this approach did not serve Mr. Rogers very well. As the Nasdaq skyrocketed and seemingly silly stocks turned into big winners, his skeptical approach to the market failed him, as it did so many others. Last year, his fund lost 38 percent of its value.

But in recent weeks, and especially on Friday, he has cleaned up. As of the evening of April 14, his fund was up 52 percent on the month, he said-this after reporting a first-quarter gain of 25 percent.

Mr. Rogers is not alone, but he is pretty close. The stunning gains in the Nasdaq in 1999 and the first two months of this year weeded out all but the most nimble and well-capitalized market skeptics.

"There aren't very many short-sellers left," said Barry Colvin, a director of research at Tremont Advisers, a hedge fund consultant. They either went out of business or changed their strategy to get with the times. By the time Black Friday capped weeks of mayhem on the Nasdaq, there were few left who could really enjoy it.

But there were a few, and what fun they had, savoring that rare chance to snicker at the New Economy evangelists. The annoying cocktail-party gloaters suddenly found themselves deluged with margin calls and tax bills. Pain, shmain. For the bears, it was sweet! Even if the short-sellers' moment of vindication was fleeting-the markets rebounded sharply on April 17 and on the morning of April 18-it gave them a taste of what life could be like if the market were to revert to its pre-Internet ways-rational, plodding and rewarding to those with an intellectual cast of mind.

"I have a friend on the West Coast," said one hedge fund manager who has been punished in the last year and a half for his skeptical outlook. "He has blown himself up. He has his own account. He's playing all these hot stocks. He doesn't have a clue. He personifies a lot of the hubris and strutting. He made a mint. He's a good-looking guy, a good tennis player, good at chasing pussy, but not a guy I'd give my money to. He's been goading me for a year and a half. Now I hear he's been closed out." This made the manager happy.

Misery, Meet Misery

In the hallway on Friday, Mr. Rogers had to resist the urge to gloat.

"I don't enjoy watching other people suffer," Mr. Rogers said after the close of the market on April 17. He was sitting with Mr. Weiss in their small office, under a horizontal poster of the Manhattan skyline at twilight. He was wearing khakis and a blue button-down shirt. He had a goatee. "But at the same time, I've always thought it was important to follow my own logic with the market, the way I see it. Granted, if we do well, it might be at the expense of others, but it works both ways. It's not like I can control it."

A little smirk crept across his lips.

"When we do well, it usually means about 95 percent of the guys out there are doing really poorly," Mr. Weiss said. "So we're always in the minority, whether we're doing well or not. When other hedge fund managers are getting their butts kicked, like they did last week, they want some company. Misery loves company. So we just have to keep our smiles to ourselves."

"Of course, some people are saying, 'Wait! The market's going back up!'" Mr. Rogers said. "But I think by the end of the week it will be clear that the thing has changed. In my opinion, we're no longer in a bull market. A 20-year event just changed. Wall Street is trying to show confidence in the face of a difficult battle. But I don't think anyone's going to believe it."

Short Alpha is a rare breed: 100 percent short. Mr. Rogers has been investing using the Short Alpha model since 1997. His first year, he returned 43 percent. In 1998 he soared to 118 percent, but last year he was down 38 percent. Rich people won't let you lose their money for too long before they take it away. Just look at what happened to Julian Robertson, the hedge fund master whose adherence to the recently outmoded principles of value investing caused him to lag way behind the market. He closed his Tiger funds in March. His timing was unfortunate. For the first time in years, the market looks like it may begin acting like the market Mr. Robertson grew up with.

"The bulls in this market did not believe that we would get to the type of sell-off period that happened on Friday and that's happening right now," Mr. Rogers said. "The volatility was an unexpected event, something they said couldn't happen. Some of these stocks are down 50 and 70 percent, and that wasn't the plan. At every opportunity, I had been telling people that I disagree, that there would be a big sell-off. So, yeah, I think there's some vindication here."

The sound of that vindication was the chorus of short-sellers singing out all over the Street.

"I don't hope the market goes down," said Christopher Norwood, president of Thunderbird Management Inc. His fund is up almost 20 percent to date this year and over 13.5 percent in March. "But I have found myself putting on shorts, and I hope I'm right. I hope this part of the market does struggle, because you've made a decision, you've made a bet, and you can't help but root for it."

"Shorting sometimes gets a bad name," said David Tice, the manager of the Prudent Bear Fund, which is up 17 percent for the year. "But the bad guys are the guys who have been touting these stocks at such ridiculous values over the past few years."

One money manager said, "The only change that occurred last week was a change in perception, because the people who manage money in this country, and the people who invest, are by and large sheep. The question is not, Why did the market go down; it's, Why was everyone buying things they knew were overvalued? It's like seeing a suit on sale at Saks and waiting until it's back at full price before you buy it. That's momentum investing. Momentum investing has nothing to fucking do with investing."

"I guess there's a tiny bit of vindication," Mr. Tice said. "We think we've only just begun. The Nasdaq is only around November levels, so it hasn't even moved very far yet. I'm trying to caution investors against getting burned. I have a calm, caring attitude-I'm not really looking forward to a continued downturn.

"If there's a bear market, we think we'll do very well," Mr. Tice continued. "I hate to see people get hurt, but the fact is this mania is destructive to the country. You've got to pay the piper sooner or later. So I think we need to get this over with. It's like giving a 15-year-old kid two hookers, some cocaine and a couple bottles of tequila. He'll have a great time for a while, but he'll be a basket case by the time he's 18."

The question is, are we 18 yet? "There was that rehearsal, April 4: The market was down big," said one long-suffering bear. "Guys were buying the dip. Hey, guess what? For the first time, the guys that did that got their asses handed to them. It was the first time in a long time that buying the dip wasn't rewarded a few weeks later."

As the bear said this, though, the Nasdaq and, in particular, the Internet sector, were in the midst of rebounding strongly for the second straight day. It was beginning to look like he might be wrong. Again.