I desperately need to get in touch with the rabbi so that he can help me properly fill in the form needed for our ketubah (a jewish marriage license). I'm hoping he can write out "Palm Desert, CA" in Hebrew and vouch that I didn't screw anything else up too royally. The helpful woman at the shop where my mother-in-law and I purchased our ketubah happily shared a story of another bride who did not have her form checked out properly ahead of time and wound up with an invalid marriage license and a rabbi who was reluctant to perform the ceremony. Thanks for sharing, Lady.

I think I need to take some deep breaths. Does Xanax count as dinner?

In September's Tatler, we learn of London and her people:

"The Brazilian is over and the bush is back," says Saffron Aldridge. The history of the sugar momma goes back to Clytemnestra! LOMBARD is apparently, allegedly, acronymical slang for Loads Of Money But A Real Dickhead. A psychic—named Amaryllis MacIntyre—has much to say about her skin care secrets! What's Jade Jagger's travel secret? "Xanax and Goyard." And then? A Seamus Heaney poem!

Of course, there is real magic: The New Social Rich. "Flamboyance is their creed, Cipriani their playground. They love private planes, but love bikini waxers even more..." Sidebar! "Is it just us, or is everyone who works at a hedge fund boring? Does anyone know what a hedge fund is? Who cares?" Hooray!

What marvelous dimension is this? What heavenly place does this magazine depict? How are we not there?

Just because you're attempting to turn your apartment into a fallout shelter doesn't mean it has to look like one. However, if you're going to divert attention successfully from your unsightly Poland Spring drinking water supply ($2.18 for a one-gallon flagon at D'Agostino) and duct-tape festoonery (a fourpack costs $5.85 at Staples.com), you will need to make a bold aesthetic statement.

My new fave source of radical interior-design inspiration is contemporary synagogue architecture, a style I have dubbed "Syn-à-go-go." Bored with biomorphic Danish Mod and other standard mid-20th-century fare? You too may just be ready to embrace this otherworldly Antonio-Gaudí-meets-the-Raelians wacky aesthetic.

Contemporary synagogue style resulted, like so many things, from the enthusiastic patronage of Jews. It all started in the 1950's, when suburban arts-and-crafts-lovin' divorcées with time on their hands lobbied their rabbis to commission the services of the groovy architects and artists du jour . I recently asked Manhattan furniture maven Dennis Miller, a self-described nice Jewish boy from Great Neck, Long Island, who is nothing like the comedian, to recall that tingly moment when his neighborhood temple got groovified. "The bimah [altar] was an amazing 50-foot white Louise Nevelson sculpture," recalled the baby boomerish Mr. Miller, whose religious foot-dragging was cured by La Nevelson's futuristic installation. "It was amazing-the whole thing slid open to reveal the ark, and there was also a fabulous Trova sculpture. I just couldn't wait to get to temple every week." On your next trip out to the Hamptons, take a detour and visit Dennis' childhood temple. Take exit 33 off the L.I.E.: Temple Beth El is located at 5 Old Mill Road. No reservations are necessary.

My own personal fave is located in Florida. I'm talking about the Sophie and Nathan Gumenick Chapel of Temple Israel at 137 N.E. 19th Street in Miami. Completed in 1969 by Kenneth F. Triester, this demented meringue of a building will have you gasping for mercy on the sidewalk. Once inside, prepare to have your mind blown by Michael Angelo Alocca copper flower stands, sensuous candleholders and gooey Paul Evans chairs.

A dab of this Reform-synagogue aesthetic can be yours if you pop into the showroom of the aforementioned Mr. Miller in the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Avenue (212-684-0070). For an extra Syn-à-go-go frisson , check out the 1960 Unicorn curved sofa designed by Vladimir Kagan: $12,500 plus fabric. Mr. Miller recommends covering this kooky brutalist couch in a 70's Art Nouveau–ish printed velvet from Jack Larson.

Re Louise Nevelson: The Russian-born artist and cigar smoker benefited enormously from her ability to spiff up not just synagogues, but also her regal self. With her turbans and amateurishly applied, oversized spidery false eyelashes (top and bottom), she created an iconic look that may well be on the verge of a revival. Marc Jacobs' recent retro-futurism fall collection-Courrèges-ish minis and turtles and graphic Gernreich-y A-line micro-frocks-simply screams out for eye fringe à la Nevelson. Buy loads of pairs at the bargain price of about $2 per from www.pizazz5thAve.com and practice, practice, practice. You only have six months to learn how to apply them skillfully and avoid looking loony like Louise.

Shalom!

inside the Hampton Jitney, idling on 40th Street and Third Avenue at 9 p.m. on

a recent Friday. I'm reading and the type is fuzzy. What is it? Am I on drugs?

I am. My wallet's bulging with a new bag of Thai stick, which I've just

sampled. Now I'm having an attack of paranoia. I got the fear, man. Raining

outside. The last time I traveled with the green stuff I ended up spending the

night in jail. In Chicago. I don't want to think about that except to note,

always keep it on your person. Aaron Sorkin from The West Wing deserves ridicule for stashing it all in his carry-on

bag. Anyway, pot and mushrooms, what's the big deal? The Jitney starts moving.

I haven't been out of Manhattan in five months. I am on my

way to East Hampton, where I will stay by myself in a house, barricaded in my

room. Even with a dresser against the door, I know I won't be able to sleep

facing away from it. To feel safe, I will need a golf club in my bed.

The iced coffee from this afternoon hasn't worn off. Mind

slushy, heart racing. Gobbling corn chips. In panic mode. This is no way to

live. Or die, all alone in a big house. The guy in front of me is eating

pretzels. Reading a Times editorial

on George W. Can't be good news. I must see my doctor for Xanax or Soma.

We pass a billboard that reads, Watch Dragons Flying at Nassau Coliseum. Nervousness increases. I

do not want to watch dragons. Forces conspiring. Let us think about M---, 25.

I'd left her a pleading message about how scared I was sleeping in that house.

Are chicks into that? Maybe 25-year-old chicks are. She's staying in a share in

Bridgehampton. I just want to make it through the weekend. She probably thinks

I'm joking, that I'm using a line to pick her up. I wish it were that simple, I

really do.

The Jitney smells like a sewer. Why did I sit in the back?

New wave of fear. My building is trying to evict me, and my evil thug of a

super has refused for three months to fix my dishwasher despite generous

bribes. I'm convinced he will enter my apartment and kill my cat this weekend.

I will return Sunday night to find her hanged. It makes perfect, horrible

sense. Why did I leave the city?

Cell phone. A message from M---. Her friend J--- doesn't

want to come to East Hampton to help comfort me. I have to come to their share.

Worth it? It's dawning on me I'll be spending the night alone.

Let's read more of the Mafia book. If I had my own personal

thug, I could just have him whack the super on the head with a baseball bat.

But I'm powerless. Surely this is the main reason for The Sopranos ' success. 

Pot, I remember, can make a bad situation much worse. I'm

being hurtled to the end of the earth, the abyss-not the metaphorical but the

real one, capital A, Abyss. Maybe I should stay at Martha Stewart's daughter's

motel. Right now my super is probably chasing my cat around, flushing her out

from under the bed. Run, Baba, run! Head for the elevator! The stairs!

I will make it. Let's calm down, read National Review. There. Listen to some Black Flag on my Walkman.

Rise above, we're gonna rise above. Feeling better. Look at the cool headlights

racing by to the left. Blackness out my window. In eight hours it will be light

again, I will have made it. Tomorrow night I'll be at Shoshanna Lonstein's

birthday party at Conscience Point. My friends, my dudes, will be with me, a

steadying force. There will be free booze.

Maybe Paris and Nicky will be there. This is how I think

these days. How wonderful is it that these two girls have done nothing,

absolutely nothing, unlike someone

like Madonna or J. Lo, who have worked and tried hard for many years. The

Hilton sisters just appeared . I hope

they don't go overboard. This new fragrance is a bad sign, as are these movies

Paris is appearing in. Girls, just be. Do nothing but party, drink champagne,

have more fun than anyone, and you will be loved. I wish I was up in the Hilton

family pad at the Waldorf right now, ordering up some serious room service.

Getting a massage maybe.

In my work as a

journalist, I have spent a week sleeping on the streets in Aspen. I have

interviewed very sketchy people and been yelled at in Central Park at 4 a.m. I

have shown grace under pressure, like when I kicked that rabid dog and it ran

away. I have written about mobster-wannabe types. I have survived scary plane

flights, with the help of whisky and tranquilizers. I have spent the night

alone in this same house before, with a 7-iron in my bed.

I am terrified.

Maybe I will program the police into my cell phone. Must

hide all those knives in the kitchen. I will place a ladder right under my

window. That way, I can climb down if any intruders break in. If they try to

climb up, I can tip it over and scream for the neighbors. But will the

neighbors hear me? Will there even be any neighbors out here this weekend? The

forecast is more rain. Not a good sign.

We're almost there; the Jitney is leaving Bridgehampton. A

message from M---: "Georgie, I miss you so much. My friend is being so bitchy.

If you come pick me up I'll go home with you. Bye, baby."

Mood way up. Later, I pick her up in Bridgehampton in a cab.

She's drunk, horny, squirming in the back of the cab, bare feet up in the air,

dangerously close to the driver's head. Then she's on my lap, facing me.

"So what do you really

want to do tonight?" she asks. "Do you have any toys for me?"

I start to worry that the cab driver is going to get jealous

and angry, that he will come back to the house later to kill us. So I pretend

to call a friend on my cell phone and say, "We're almost there. We'll leave the

back door open; see you in a little bit."

Inside the house in East Hampton, M--- on the couch, naked

under a blanket, drunk, still kicking, TV on. Must calm her down. I give her

some pot, and then I go to make bacon and hard-boiled eggs.

She walks into the kitchen, blanket wrapped around her. "I

need food," she says. "And I need something else, Georgie."

"Look around. We need

some food!"

"I need something else."

"Have some of that Indonesian hot sauce."

"I want something else!"

"What about some mustard?"

"No!"

"How about some parsley? What's this, soup?"

"You know what I want." She grabs me down below. I yelp in

pain.

"Butter, we got all kinds of frozen butter. We got chips …

let's see what we got in the pantry here."

"No, you know what I want."

All my fears come to nothing. As it turns out, after I slip

the super another $100, I get a brand-new dishwasher.

Dr. Sulkowicz specializes in issues of money and power, and counts among his patients many of Wall Street's deal-makers and market players. And these bankers and traders-members of a species not exactly known for introspection or self-flagellation-may find themselves spending some extra time on the couch during these cold winter months.

It is, after all, bonus season.

This is the time of year when those whose moods rise and fall with every tick of the Nasdaq will receive the number that determines both their net worth and their self-worth. It's the time of year when those who want to be Big Swinging Dicks on the Street will either receive the validation they've been waiting for or find themselves cut down to size.

"Bonuses are not just money," said Dr. Sulkowicz. "For some whose self-esteem isn't all that sturdy to begin with, a bonus is a means of measuring self-esteem through an external set of factors."

The competitive instinct that drove these people to Wall Street in the first place becomes even stronger as bonus day approaches. According to Dr. Sulkowicz, what's at stake for the men is nothing less than their masculinity. "It's a variation of the locker-room conversation-you know, 'Mine is bigger than yours,'" he said.

Size does matter for women too, Dr. Sulkowicz adds. "I can assure you, they are just as concerned as the men are."

Of course, that is how bonus season plays out in a normal year. This year-the start of a strange new millennium that saw the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq reaching unforeseen new heights in the first quarter, then sliding into an autumnal fall that hasn't yet ended (even with the election of a Republican President)-is not a normal year. Bonus anxieties are reaching new highs.

According to data from Johnson Associates Inc., a compensation consultant, corporate vice presidents this year can still expect bonuses of about $1.1 million, directors about $1.5 million, research directors about $2.75 million and managing directors around $3.8 million-and those are just the median statistics.

But this year, the bonus picture is much more complicated than that. Industry consolidation, the decimation of the high-yield markets, weaker M. & A. performance and, especially, the bursting of the Internet bubble-all make it harder than ever for Joe or Jane Wall Street to figure out how he or she measures up. Add in stay-put bonuses and a near insurrection by junior bankers and brokers, and the confusion evolves into self-loathing at ranges the Nasdaq can't touch.

"I think that before the crash last year in the Nasdaq, there was a fantasy for a few years of invincibility, a fantasy of omnipotence," Dr. Sulkowicz said. "The bubble burst-and whenever there's a lost powerful fantasy, there's a feeling of being vulnerable.

"These people don't have control over how big their bonus is," he went on, "but they feel that they should. A lot of the pressure they put on themselves takes on a self-punitive quality. People say things like, 'I'm gonna hate myself if I don't get a big bonus.'"

Dr. Sulkowicz said the attitude out there is best understood by studying toddlers. "If you look at little kids, say ages 2 or 3, they have a feeling of omnipotence, "he observed. "They are the center of their world and they can control their world. They don't have to deal with that much frustration. Then, through the normal process of development, they have to face inevitable disappointments. That's kind of what's happening in our economy."

In other words, this may be the year the bonus babies grow up.

Rabble Rousers

Until that happens, there's going to be a lot of skirmishes in the playground. Blame the firms for that.

To keep their top performers from defecting to other banks or to Silicon Valley, companies have been offering unprecedented compensation to a select few. These top performers will make more money than ever this year.

Everyone else? According to compensation experts, the gap between the elite and the rabble will grow even wider. "You pay your top performers, and then you pay what you promised everybody else," says Andrea de Cholnoky of the headhunting firm Spencer Stuart. "Do you have enough for everybody? Maybe not. Long-time employees and average performers will get squeezed."

Consolidation within the securities industry, coinciding with the re-emergence of the lone-wolf banker, have made the whole idea of firm loyalty seem positively quaint.

"In this consolidating business, having top performers and having enough of them is everything," said Ms. de Cholnoky. So in the mid- to late 90's, firms began to offer more and larger incentives to keep the stars in their seats.

One big perk, once rare but now quite common, has been the practice of awarding years-long contracts and guarantees of future bonuses-"stay-put" bonuses, Ms. de Cholnoky calls them. The few hundred best-compensated directors and managing directors on Wall Street can now expect a two-to-five-year contract that includes minimum guaranteed cash, stock-option bonuses and additional performance-based bonuses-packages that add up to tens of millions of dollars.

But counterbalancing that trend are the youngsters, who also are being wooed to stay put. Contracts, bonus guarantees and the raising of base salaries-by up to 20 percent at some firms, to as much as $125,000 (or more) a year for young analysts and associates-are part of the New Economy.

But word on the Street this year is that the Wall Street babies are starting to fuss. According to one Wall Street source, associates who learned their bonuses in early December "experienced 30 to 40 percent less than expectations."

Maybe they just expected too much. Blame Paul Leung for that. In April, the Salomon Smith Barney Inc. analyst presented senior management with a laundry list of compensation and quality-of-life demands-and shocked Wall Street when they were granted. The result has been a sense of entitlement on the part of junior bankers.

"It's been 10 years since we've seen a major down cycle," observed one veteran senior banker. His junior colleagues, he said, "have only seen things go up. As a result, they have more attitude and more expectations of getting paid a lot.

"I don't think they have the right to make all these demands about what they should get or how they get paid," he went on, "or what kind of work they do, or how hard they work. It reminds me of the attitude analysts had in the late 80's."

Or, as Dr. Sulkowicz said, of toddlers.

Mind Games

But the bonus recipients say they're the products of dysfunctional families: The firms they work for play such mind games that even the most self-confident employee can't help reaching for the Xanax.

"Of course, you're always nervous before bonus time," said a senior banker at a second-tier firm. "You have a sense of a range, more or less, but you just never know . It's so tense because you don't really know exactly how it works and what the big arbiters are."

One bonus baby complained: "People who are vastly inferior to me get paid more because they're better at dealing with the process."

The Process … the "Year-End Process," is what they call it at Merrill Lynch & Company, reducing the tension-filled period to benign B-school doublespeak.

"There's a kind of passive agreement for bosses and employees to be in denial of all the behind-the-scenes action at this time," said Dr. Sulkowicz. "Employees are job-hunting, calling headhunters, grumbling about work and planning to quit, which is denied by the employers. At the same time, the employers spend a great deal of time not talking about business, but about the people who work for them and divvying up the pool. In some companies, this can lead to paranoid-like atmosphere."

The bosses do their best to lower expectations.

"Let's put it this way," said the banker. "They're definitely not coming in and saying 'Hey, we found an extra couple hundred million dollars in the bonus pool, look at this!'"

"They're amazingly good at finding excuses not to pay you," echoed a trader at a bulge-bracket firm.

Management, however, is not above trying to convince each employee that they're loved just a little bit more than the next.

"The Human Resources theory is that people care about absolute number, but care even more about relative number," one trader observed. "They always try to make you feel better by comparing you to other people.

"They'll try to say, 'You're up 20 percent from last year, other people are down 50 percent,'" the trader went on. "But … they'll compare you to some guy that's been paid a million bucks a year; for the last five years and is now getting paid $500,000. Well, that's kind of like the wrong comparison-like you screwed me in a year where I should have doubled or tripled my comp as part of the early acceleration of my career, and you're trying to compare me to some guy whose been getting paid through the roof for several years. That's ridiculous.

"The attempt to manipulate you is always so obvious they usually end up insulting your intelligence," he concluded.

And when the comparison strategy fails, there's always obfuscation. In bonus sessions at one bulge-bracket firm, bankers receive a piece of paper with a number on it that includes not only stock but the value of whatever private equity funds the bankers might have invested in throughout the year. So it's an inflated number, explained one director, "meant for sticker-shock, so they can give it to you and say, 'Look how much fucking money we're paying you!'" The bankers then need to put their number-crunching skills to work to find out how much their bonuses are really worth.

According to the bitter trader, managers also try to delude their employees with so-called talking points.

"You'll be expecting X, and they [want to] pay you 0.9X, and you've told them: 'Look, I'm expecting X, and if you pay me 0.9X, I'll feel like you're being cheap and stupid and gypping me. And if you pay me 1.1X, I'll feel like you're going out of your way to make me happy because you appreciate me.'

"And then they'll go and pay you 0.9X and say, 'This is a really positive message.' And you're like, 'No, it's not! I told you what message 0.9X is. You know it, I know it, fuck you.'"

Of course, the luxury of speaking so candidly is limited to those who are willing to walk out on the firms they feel don't appreciate them enough. That might have been easy to do even a year ago. But in this uncertain market, many are thankful enough just to have a job.

And so, for those on the receiving end of the bonus game, more subtle bargaining tactics are required. "When you sit there with your manager, you are advised to look somewhat disgruntled," said another trader. "If you sound overly gleeful, your manager will be like, 'Oh, well, maybe next year we can get away with less.' But you don't want to seem too disgruntled, or people will be like, 'Jesus Christ, no matter how much we pay him, the guy's not happy-maybe next year we won't pay him anything.'"

And adding to the tension, of course, is the mine-is-bigger-than-yours syndrome. "There's a lot of misinformation," said one banker. Like A students at the top of the class, those who get the most tend to keep it to themselves.

There's also the spouse factor.

"Most people don't tell their wives," the director said. "One, because they'd blow it all at Prada. Two, when you get divorced, they'll know how much money you've got." Others have girlfriends and don't want the wife to wonder where the money's gone.

This banker is not married, but he still keeps his number to himself: "I don't want my brother calling and asking me to pay for his kids' education or something like that." Another saves the information for his shrink: "I want to tell someone, and I know he has to keep quiet about it."

But for every quiet banker there's a bragging jerk. Or a faker. "I've seen people I knew were not getting paid as much as they said then go on to other jobs at other firms and get paid very well," another banker lamented.

New Reality

But in the office, as in the stock market, it's getting tougher and tougher to inflate valuation. Chase Manhattan Corporation, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Bank of America have all warned that earnings will be well below expectations. Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown has been downgraded by many analysts. After a stellar first quarter and a respectable second quarter, revenues at most bulge-bracket and second-tier Wall Street firms have been on the slide.

Research from Goldman Sachs estimates that the value of deals done by mergers and acquisitions groups-the darlings of many investment banks-has decreased by more than 56 percent industry-wide since the summer. Capital raised through the bond market has shrunk by 23 percent. "It would be naïve to think that the lack of investment banking revenues [in the last two quarters] would not affect entire institutions," said Drew Mandler of Smith Handley Associates, a headhunting firm.

With bank stock prices falling, those with bonus contracts see the value of their stock options dropping as well. Richard V. Smith, a senior compensation consultant at the Hay Group, estimated that the average banker's year-end bonus will be down by 5 to 6 percent this year. "And you'll see even a bigger drop next year," he added.

Those in the low figures on the compensation ledger might see this as a sign of even worse things to come.

"Firms are going to have to pare down certain costs," said Eric Stieglitz of the headhunting firm Conspectus Inc. "We've had real over-capacity in the industry …. There will be individuals who are viewed as nonproductive, and they will either lose a lot of their bonus or they'll be asked to leave-or they'll just drift out."

With such a dismal scenario, is it any wonder that Dr. Sulkowicz is busy? And who can ignore the symbolism of the Dec. 14 Christie's auction, when more than $2 million worth of gold recovered off the Carolina coast was put up for sale.

That gold went down in 1857, when the S.S. Central America sunk off the Carolinas, taking with it 425 lives. The non-human cargo actually comprised one-fifth of the gold then held in Wall Street's banks, worth $1.65 million in those days. Losing it set off the Panic of 1857.

Memo to the bonus babies: It's not time to panic. Yet.

Dr. Sulkowicz specializes in issues of money and power, and counts among his patients many of Wall Street's deal-makers and market players. And these bankers and traders-members of a species not exactly known for introspection or self-flagellation-may find themselves spending some extra time on the couch during these cold winter months.

It is, after all, bonus season.

This is the time of year when those whose moods rise and fall with every tick of the Nasdaq will receive the number that determines both their net worth and their self-worth. It's the time of year when those who want to be Big Swinging Dicks on the Street will either receive the validation they've been waiting for or find themselves cut down to size.

"Bonuses are not just money," said Dr. Sulkowicz. "For some whose self-esteem isn't all that sturdy to begin with, a bonus is a means of measuring self-esteem through an external set of factors."

The competitive instinct that drove these people to Wall Street in the first place becomes even stronger as bonus day approaches. According to Dr. Sulkowicz, what's at stake for the men is nothing less than their masculinity. "It's a variation of the locker-room conversation-you know, 'Mine is bigger than yours,'" he said.

Size does matter for women too, Dr. Sulkowicz adds. "I can assure you, they are just as concerned as the men are."

Of course, that is how bonus season plays out in a normal year. This year-the start of a strange new millennium that saw the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq reaching unforeseen new heights in the first quarter, then sliding into an autumnal fall that hasn't yet ended (even with the election of a Republican President)-is not a normal year. Bonus anxieties are reaching new highs.

According to data from Johnson Associates Inc., a compensation consultant, corporate vice presidents this year can still expect bonuses of about $1.1 million, directors about $1.5 million, research directors about $2.75 million and managing directors around $3.8 million-and those are just the median statistics.

But this year, the bonus picture is much more complicated than that. Industry consolidation, the decimation of the high-yield markets, weaker M. & A. performance and, especially, the bursting of the Internet bubble-all make it harder than ever for Joe or Jane Wall Street to figure out how he or she measures up. Add in stay-put bonuses and a near insurrection by junior bankers and brokers, and the confusion evolves into self-loathing at ranges the Nasdaq can't touch.

"I think that before the crash last year in the Nasdaq, there was a fantasy for a few years of invincibility, a fantasy of omnipotence," Dr. Sulkowicz said. "The bubble burst-and whenever there's a lost powerful fantasy, there's a feeling of being vulnerable.

"These people don't have control over how big their bonus is," he went on, "but they feel that they should. A lot of the pressure they put on themselves takes on a self-punitive quality. People say things like, 'I'm gonna hate myself if I don't get a big bonus.'"

Dr. Sulkowicz said the attitude out there is best understood by studying toddlers. "If you look at little kids, say ages 2 or 3, they have a feeling of omnipotence, "he observed. "They are the center of their world and they can control their world. They don't have to deal with that much frustration. Then, through the normal process of development, they have to face inevitable disappointments. That's kind of what's happening in our economy."

In other words, this may be the year the bonus babies grow up.

Rabble Rousers

Until that happens, there's going to be a lot of skirmishes in the playground. Blame the firms for that.

To keep their top performers from defecting to other banks or to Silicon Valley, companies have been offering unprecedented compensation to a select few. These top performers will make more money than ever this year.

Everyone else? According to compensation experts, the gap between the elite and the rabble will grow even wider. "You pay your top performers, and then you pay what you promised everybody else," says Andrea de Cholnoky of the headhunting firm Spencer Stuart. "Do you have enough for everybody? Maybe not. Long-time employees and average performers will get squeezed."

Consolidation within the securities industry, coinciding with the re-emergence of the lone-wolf banker, have made the whole idea of firm loyalty seem positively quaint.

"In this consolidating business, having top performers and having enough of them is everything," said Ms. de Cholnoky. So in the mid- to late 90's, firms began to offer more and larger incentives to keep the stars in their seats.

One big perk, once rare but now quite common, has been the practice of awarding years-long contracts and guarantees of future bonuses-"stay-put" bonuses, Ms. de Cholnoky calls them. The few hundred best-compensated directors and managing directors on Wall Street can now expect a two-to-five-year contract that includes minimum guaranteed cash, stock-option bonuses and additional performance-based bonuses-packages that add up to tens of millions of dollars.

But counterbalancing that trend are the youngsters, who also are being wooed to stay put. Contracts, bonus guarantees and the raising of base salaries-by up to 20 percent at some firms, to as much as $125,000 (or more) a year for young analysts and associates-are part of the New Economy.

But word on the Street this year is that the Wall Street babies are starting to fuss. According to one Wall Street source, associates who learned their bonuses in early December "experienced 30 to 40 percent less than expectations."

Maybe they just expected too much. Blame Paul Leung for that. In April, the Salomon Smith Barney Inc. analyst presented senior management with a laundry list of compensation and quality-of-life demands-and shocked Wall Street when they were granted. The result has been a sense of entitlement on the part of junior bankers.

"It's been 10 years since we've seen a major down cycle," observed one veteran senior banker. His junior colleagues, he said, "have only seen things go up. As a result, they have more attitude and more expectations of getting paid a lot.

"I don't think they have the right to make all these demands about what they should get or how they get paid," he went on, "or what kind of work they do, or how hard they work. It reminds me of the attitude analysts had in the late 80's."

Or, as Dr. Sulkowicz said, of toddlers.

Mind Games

But the bonus recipients say they're the products of dysfunctional families: The firms they work for play such mind games that even the most self-confident employee can't help reaching for the Xanax.

"Of course, you're always nervous before bonus time," said a senior banker at a second-tier firm. "You have a sense of a range, more or less, but you just never know . It's so tense because you don't really know exactly how it works and what the big arbiters are."

One bonus baby complained: "People who are vastly inferior to me get paid more because they're better at dealing with the process."

The Process … the "Year-End Process," is what they call it at Merrill Lynch & Company, reducing the tension-filled period to benign B-school doublespeak.

"There's a kind of passive agreement for bosses and employees to be in denial of all the behind-the-scenes action at this time," said Dr. Sulkowicz. "Employees are job-hunting, calling headhunters, grumbling about work and planning to quit, which is denied by the employers. At the same time, the employers spend a great deal of time not talking about business, but about the people who work for them and divvying up the pool. In some companies, this can lead to paranoid-like atmosphere."

The bosses do their best to lower expectations.

"Let's put it this way," said the banker. "They're definitely not coming in and saying 'Hey, we found an extra couple hundred million dollars in the bonus pool, look at this!'"

"They're amazingly good at finding excuses not to pay you," echoed a trader at a bulge-bracket firm.

Management, however, is not above trying to convince each employee that they're loved just a little bit more than the next.

"The Human Resources theory is that people care about absolute number, but care even more about relative number," one trader observed. "They always try to make you feel better by comparing you to other people.

"They'll try to say, 'You're up 20 percent from last year, other people are down 50 percent,'" the trader went on. "But … they'll compare you to some guy that's been paid a million bucks a year; for the last five years and is now getting paid $500,000. Well, that's kind of like the wrong comparison-like you screwed me in a year where I should have doubled or tripled my comp as part of the early acceleration of my career, and you're trying to compare me to some guy whose been getting paid through the roof for several years. That's ridiculous.

"The attempt to manipulate you is always so obvious they usually end up insulting your intelligence," he concluded.

And when the comparison strategy fails, there's always obfuscation. In bonus sessions at one bulge-bracket firm, bankers receive a piece of paper with a number on it that includes not only stock but the value of whatever private equity funds the bankers might have invested in throughout the year. So it's an inflated number, explained one director, "meant for sticker-shock, so they can give it to you and say, 'Look how much fucking money we're paying you!'" The bankers then need to put their number-crunching skills to work to find out how much their bonuses are really worth.

According to the bitter trader, managers also try to delude their employees with so-called talking points.

"You'll be expecting X, and they [want to] pay you 0.9X, and you've told them: 'Look, I'm expecting X, and if you pay me 0.9X, I'll feel like you're being cheap and stupid and gypping me. And if you pay me 1.1X, I'll feel like you're going out of your way to make me happy because you appreciate me.'

"And then they'll go and pay you 0.9X and say, 'This is a really positive message.' And you're like, 'No, it's not! I told you what message 0.9X is. You know it, I know it, fuck you.'"

Of course, the luxury of speaking so candidly is limited to those who are willing to walk out on the firms they feel don't appreciate them enough. That might have been easy to do even a year ago. But in this uncertain market, many are thankful enough just to have a job.

And so, for those on the receiving end of the bonus game, more subtle bargaining tactics are required. "When you sit there with your manager, you are advised to look somewhat disgruntled," said another trader. "If you sound overly gleeful, your manager will be like, 'Oh, well, maybe next year we can get away with less.' But you don't want to seem too disgruntled, or people will be like, 'Jesus Christ, no matter how much we pay him, the guy's not happy-maybe next year we won't pay him anything.'"

And adding to the tension, of course, is the mine-is-bigger-than-yours syndrome. "There's a lot of misinformation," said one banker. Like A students at the top of the class, those who get the most tend to keep it to themselves.

There's also the spouse factor.

"Most people don't tell their wives," the director said. "One, because they'd blow it all at Prada. Two, when you get divorced, they'll know how much money you've got." Others have girlfriends and don't want the wife to wonder where the money's gone.

This banker is not married, but he still keeps his number to himself: "I don't want my brother calling and asking me to pay for his kids' education or something like that." Another saves the information for his shrink: "I want to tell someone, and I know he has to keep quiet about it."

But for every quiet banker there's a bragging jerk. Or a faker. "I've seen people I knew were not getting paid as much as they said then go on to other jobs at other firms and get paid very well," another banker lamented.

New Reality

But in the office, as in the stock market, it's getting tougher and tougher to inflate valuation. Chase Manhattan Corporation, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Bank of America have all warned that earnings will be well below expectations. Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown has been downgraded by many analysts. After a stellar first quarter and a respectable second quarter, revenues at most bulge-bracket and second-tier Wall Street firms have been on the slide.

Research from Goldman Sachs estimates that the value of deals done by mergers and acquisitions groups-the darlings of many investment banks-has decreased by more than 56 percent industry-wide since the summer. Capital raised through the bond market has shrunk by 23 percent. "It would be naïve to think that the lack of investment banking revenues [in the last two quarters] would not affect entire institutions," said Drew Mandler of Smith Handley Associates, a headhunting firm.

With bank stock prices falling, those with bonus contracts see the value of their stock options dropping as well. Richard V. Smith, a senior compensation consultant at the Hay Group, estimated that the average banker's year-end bonus will be down by 5 to 6 percent this year. "And you'll see even a bigger drop next year," he added.

Those in the low figures on the compensation ledger might see this as a sign of even worse things to come.

"Firms are going to have to pare down certain costs," said Eric Stieglitz of the headhunting firm Conspectus Inc. "We've had real over-capacity in the industry …. There will be individuals who are viewed as nonproductive, and they will either lose a lot of their bonus or they'll be asked to leave-or they'll just drift out."

With such a dismal scenario, is it any wonder that Dr. Sulkowicz is busy? And who can ignore the symbolism of the Dec. 14 Christie's auction, when more than $2 million worth of gold recovered off the Carolina coast was put up for sale.

That gold went down in 1857, when the S.S. Central America sunk off the Carolinas, taking with it 425 lives. The non-human cargo actually comprised one-fifth of the gold then held in Wall Street's banks, worth $1.65 million in those days. Losing it set off the Panic of 1857.

Memo to the bonus babies: It's not time to panic. Yet.

Tough, edgy, messy, sexy Asher, the hero of Lightning on the Sun , might have been mine, too, if I were younger, hipper. But he belongs to Robert Bingham, who died of an overdose last November at the age of 33, five months before the publication of this, his first novel.

Asher does drugs, drinks vodka for breakfast and frequents prostitutes, but he is also kind to the kids begging in the streets of Phnom Penh and to the "moto" driver who waits patiently all night for him, and he appreciates a beautiful sunset behind Angkor Thom. Also, Asher is brave. He chases a very bad guy who has thrown a hand grenade into the crowd, almost getting killed in the process (Asher is pistol-whipped), then rips up his The Young and the Restless T-shirt to make tourniquets for the wounded: "The sugarcane lady's stall had been blown to bits. She was lying inside her cart with her lower intestines, big bubbling worms, crawling out of her stomach."

Bingham is adept at evoking both the city of Phnom Penh and the post-Vietnam War era in Cambodia: the political chaos, the greedy Chinese businessmen, the kinky massage parlors, the weird and desultory lives of the expats, the capricious ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers or bandits (often one and the same) who arbitrarily set up roadblocks. Also, the stultifying heat as well as the heart-wrenching beauty of the country: "Boat lights cast dim jewels onto the Tonle Sap River, and the air smelled faintly of diesel. Across the way was a small abandoned island where Buddhists had taken to celebrating an obscure holiday. There was one light on the island and a series of saffron-colored flags could be seen flapping gently in the wind. Directly below on the street the cyclo and moto drivers waited and churned." Or again, "The horizon was a pencil-thin line of diluted red, barely illuminating the green of the distant rice paddies. Weak blood, thought Asher, a late-innings sundown." The corruption and lawlessness of the country are well rendered by a wonderful scene in which a sleazy Cambodian tycoon shoots out a plane's wheels in a fit of pique because the airline has lost his luggage; the war-torn land is brought into focus by the image of an untended cow heedlessly grazing in a minefield.

The plot of Lightning on the Sun revolves around a drug heist that goes wrong for the wrong reasons, then turns into a nasty hostage situation. Asher, who has spent time in Cambodia doing various jobs, is now broke and ready to come home, so he contacts his old girlfriend, Julie G-Spot (bad name), a waitress in a New York nightclub, and together they devise a get-rich-quick deal. Part of the success of the deal hinges on Reese, a journalist in Cambodia with whom Asher plays tennis and who also plays the straight man to Asher's craziness–Reese is the one who has to get the heroin safely into the States.

When the action follows Reese, everything seems predictable or slightly silly, or both: He goes back to his old prep school in New England and gives a drunken speech about being a correspondent; he visits the Racquet Club in Manhattan, where he rows the new Concept II ergometer side by side with a fit George Plimpton, then plays a quick game of court tennis, then backgammon; he gets chased through the city by a midget called Glen. Julie G-Spot (not just a bad, an awful name), who joins in the fun, also lacks Asher's charisma.

Julie's good-looking but has "some miles under the hood for her age." She, too, is brave. She double-crosses the midget, Glen, and pulls off the drug deal herself. She drives to Harlem with the stash between her legs (it now weighs two kilos more, resourceful Julie having added cornstarch) while quoting William Blake to herself ("marks of weariness, marks of woe"). When Julie confronts some Harlem drug lords–she compares them to the Assassini–Bingham sounds the right note of murderous authenticity, but the scene does not have the same menace or sense of randomness as the scenes of confrontation set in Cambodia.

Bingham displays a flair for mildly Hemingwayesque generalities that sound insightful and probably are not. Take, for example: "None of the Cambodians he had played [tennis] with came to net. It wasn't in their game. As the balls flew by Asher wondered why. It had something to do with trauma." Or: "She'd admired his oscillations between maudlin introspection and brutal passion. Haitians, they turned on a dime." And again: " 'A lake,' whispered Julie. 'Not a loud lake but a quiet one; oh, honey, that would be great. I need a lake right now.'" And, finally, there are several instances when Mr. Bingham–to use his word– blows a nice description such as this: "Moonlight was coming in off a side terrace and the trees outside blew in the wind, splashing strange silver onto her dark hair and heavenly breasts." Heavenly? Laziness or, one suspects, too much of a rush.

The second half of the novel is the best. The action speeds up and the suspense kicks in. Reese comes to life at last and stirs things up with the help of a resourceful aide who knows just when to hand him a Xanax. Better still, one suddenly cares a lot about Asher. Held hostage and faced with the worst-case scenario, Asher, true to form, remains irreverent and rebellious. He keeps up the jokes, shares cigarettes with his captors.

The novel's end is both shocking and moving, and one cannot help but grieve at the cruelty and randomness of it all and mourn Asher's failure. Despite all the cockiness, all the jokes, all the macho stuff, Lightning on the Sun is about desperation, cruelty and failure, the dark, bad side of the American dream. Asher is preoccupied with death; he has a conscious or not-so-conscious death wish: "'Go ahead,' said Asher. 'Do it. Off me, baby. Off me.'" How many times in these pages is a gun put to his head? Twice, three times? Julie tells him: "You always think you are going to die, but the only person who's going to kill you is yourself." Sad but true. And one cannot help but be reminded of Robert Bingham, the author, and mourn him, too.