14. Money is the New Rock ’n’ Roll

Money is the new Rock ’n’ Roll

It was astonishing. In quite a short time Jimmy had gone from being undeniably the poorest member of his little uni gang to being the richest.

Richer even than Rupert. Which was, as Rupert himself pointed out, seriously insane.

David was stil studying to be an architect. Lizzie (with Robson tagging along) was offering haircuts plus ‘American-style’ muffins from a stal on the Portobel o Road, and Henry was going crazy reading unsolicited manuscripts for a publishing house while trying to get a local party to select him as a candidate at a forthcoming by-election.

And Jimmy, Jimmy Corby, the gang’s good-natured Jack the lad who had scrounged bacon and eggs off every one of them back in Sussex, had lapped them al .

‘Quite incredible,’ they said to each other in amazement. ‘Jimmy’s rich.’

He didn’t look very rich in those early years. He stil slept among pizza boxes and empty beer cans. It was true that he now owned the pit in which he festered rather than passing out on other people’s oors, but apart from that nobody would have known that by ’95, after two years at Mason Jervis, at the age of twenty-three Jimmy was making a hundred and fty K a year with half that again as a Christmas bonus.

His only real luxury was clothes. Not designer clothes, just new clothes.

New clothes every single day. He was now working so hard at Mason Jervis that he had no time for laundry, no time even to make regular trips back to Sussex to get his mother to do it. Time spent worrying about your sweaty jocks was time spent away from the phones. Time spent away from al those hypnotic numbers on al those screens. Numbers that continued to climb and climb and he needed to be there to hitch a ride. While he was wasting real time doing a wash, a bundle of coffee beans years away in virtual time might have dipped and ral ied. He needed to be there, otherwise how would he buy in the dip and sel in the ral y? Fuck laundry. He needed to trade.

For a while, despite his wealth Jimmy had not been averse to turning yesterday’s pants inside out and cal ing them clean (even if he’d done the same

trick the day before). Eventual y, however, it was possible for Jimmy to do the sniff test at ve metres and Piers took him gently aside and whispered a word or two about hygiene. After that Jim developed the habit of paying one of the girls to go out and grab him a new shirt, socks and underwear every day during her coffee break.

It became part of his morning routine, like his coffee and bar of chocolate.

He would arrive at work in his previous day’s clothes, do three hours’ trading and then at about ten thirty pop into the toilet and bung on the new threads that the girl had brought him. He’d slip her a ver for her trouble and bin the previous day’s clothes on his way back to his desk.

A quick chew on a bit of toothpaste chewing gum and he was fresh and ready to spend another long day in the future.

It was obvious to his friends that Jimmy had become addicted to his work.

Lizzie and Robson were particularly worried and tried to interest him in other things, like the theatre, which Jimmy thought was complete shit.

‘Why go to the theatre when you can see a movie?’

‘Because the theatre is offering the latest David Hare and the cinema is offering Batman Forever.’

‘Exactly.’

But in fact Jimmy didn’t even go to the movies any more. Like many a gambler before him, he lived only to play the game. e difference between him and the traditional sad obsessive was that his was a game at which it was very difficult to lose and, unlike the poker players regularly testifying at the Canary Wharf branch of Gamblers Anonymous, Jimmy’s il ness was making him richer.

Richer. But no less screwed up.

It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that there was a downside awaiting Jimmy and his highly overexcited col eagues. Physical and mental exhaustion or, as the Americans put it more succinctly, burnout.

e human nervous system was not built to spend fourteen hours a day in a state of high tension and the other ten drunk, wired, having sex or unconscious. e vast majority of the guys on Jimmy’s oor were destined to push it too far, lose their edge and be replaced by younger players.

Jimmy was heading that way faster than most.

‘You’l be useless in ve years and your rm wil dump you,’ Rupert assured him cheerful y when the old gang met at Khan’s in Kensington for their regular

curry and beer. ‘But what a ve years, Jim boy! People go their whole lives without having a single day on the sort of rol you’re on. In the future people wil look back and not be able to believe how much money you guys made.’

‘at’s right,’ Jimmy, hol ow-eyed and pasty-faced, always agreed. ‘You know my motto. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, eh?’

Henry, who had spent al day searching for a decent typescript among the great mound of hopefuls that was his publishers’ slush pile (while trying to summon up the courage to recommend his own under a different name), was having none of this. He earned less in a week than Jimmy was about to spend on a bottle of vintage champagne and he found Jimmy’s attempts to pass off his sweaty-faced, coke-fuel ed gluttony as boho chic deeply irritating.

‘James,’ he said sternly, icking his blond locks aside, ‘the phrase “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse” was coined to describe life in the real fast lane. Not the bloody City of London but down on the mean streets and out on the edge. It describes true originals who tested the boundaries of the culture and rewrote the rule book of youth. Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain. Not always pretty but always original, guys who real y did take it al the way, not by getting rich and drunk but by rejecting society’s values in pursuit of the true punk ethic. Doing it, my pampered friend, for Rock ’n’

Rol .’

‘Henry,’ Jimmy replied equal y sternly but stil with that disarming twinkle in his bloodshot eyes, ‘Bowie just oated his back catalogue on the London Stock Exchange. Mick’s in a tax haven. ese days City traders are Rock ’n’

Rol .’

In a way Jimmy was right. In some ways he was ying the ag for the Rock

’n’ Rol ideal. While an increasing number of musicians were turning vegan and going to the gym, while Sting was informing the world about the rainforests and tantric sex, Jimmy was larging it. In a different club every night, heading for self-destruction with the same relentless tunnel vision that had led the likes of Sid Vicious to their doom. Living on his nerves and his wits and feeding them only with booze, convenience food and endless columns of digits. When he added cocaine to the mix he was clearly setting himself up for a major car crash. A crash which, while it might not kil him, would certainly leave him with severe depression and therefore of no further use to Mason Jervis, a company that lived or died on reckless optimism, not drug-induced paranoid introspection.

is would almost certainly have been Jimmy’s fate had he not met Monica.

Monica saved Jimmy because in her he nal y found something more fascinating than gambling on the fantasy future of foreign agricultural products.

To Jimmy she was that beautiful. at much fun. at much more Rock ’n’

Rol .

‘Christ in a bucket,’ Rupert observed when Jimmy explained this point to him, ‘she must be one cracking bit of totty.’

‘She is, Roop,’ Jimmy replied, the love light glinting in his suddenly once more bright and shining eyes, ‘she is one cracking bit of totty.’

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