Sex, come boom or crash

"The Street" is also accurate about the sexiness of the money game. Though you might quibble with the way an IPO is depicted in the first episode -- and with the business model of an Ivy League sperm-and-egg bank -- I for one felt a stirring in my loins when the opening stock price began to rise. The pace, the panic, the fear of losing are, indeed, sexy -- and much of this rubs off on the men and women who can handle it, who make their living on Wall Street.

"The Street" has been described as recession-proof -- a fascinating topic as long as the boom continues, and a curiously compelling one in the event of a crash.

Maybe.

Wall Street guys have long been important to those who make their living at sex. Before there were silicone theme parks (sports bars with topless dancers), there were private call girls -- and, of course, there still are. The older generation on Wall Street has always indulged itself behind closed doors -- rather than the communal playground of the vulgar "titty club." And it's pretty clear to me that older Wall Streeters have more fun.

New York call girls who are now in their early 20s -- the newest girls in the business -- have never really experienced a crash. As a beginner call girl, I enjoyed the notorious '80s boom -- it was a great time to be a working girl. I also experienced the subsequent crash. Having lived through two boom cycles, I've concluded that a boom economy doesn't really test your sex appeal. Almost everybody looks -- and feels -- sexy during a boom. The guys are feeling generous and they're less concerned about how their sex dollar is being spent.

A madam I know was a 30-ish call girl at the top of her game in 1984: "Things were cooking -- I had clients who paid by the hour. They spent five and six hours with me, they were doing cocaine all night and getting up the next day on an hour of sleep to go to work. I knew a girl who had a nitrous tank in her bedroom. She charged, on top of her hourly rate, $50 for a nitrous hit and often made an extra thousand that way. I never put a dime of my money in the market because of what I saw -- these guys were generous but they were incredibly reckless."

After a crash, wild-spending guys in their 30s can morph into middle-aged conservatives. They stop living for the moment and start trying to figure out how they will continue to get laid on a regular basis for the next decade. Some develop enough foresight to think about the next four decades.

During the last big crash, underemployed female yuppies flooded the sex market and began running ads in New York magazine, the Village Voice and other local weeklies. Only the genuinely sexy can survive in the aftermath of a crash.

My friend the madam recalls: "Suddenly, those Wall Street guys lost a lot of their appeal and Garment Center guys started looking almost sexy. Especially if they were dealing with the lowest end of the clothing market -- like K-mart. That's where the money was! My best client was a guy who bought and sold foreclosure apartments after the crash. Co-op boards hated and feared him but my girls loved him. He was in and out fast because he was so busy -- there were a lot of real estate disasters and his business came first."

Booms and busts have much in common. But Wall Street in 2000 is unlike the 1980s -- described by some as "the Gekko era" (referring to Gordon Gekko, a character in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street") -- in many ways. In days gone by, when a call girl or madam bought a client list, she was not afraid to pick up the phone. An ambitious girl in the sex business would call every man on her newly acquired list and (politely) solicit him: "It was like cold calling," my friend the madam explains. "But you used your girlfriend's name as a reference. Today, you have to think twice about calling a number. A lot of the desk phones on Wall Street are monitored to protect the firms from lawsuits. But half of 'Wall Street' has moved to Midtown, so now they're closer to where the girls are -- on the East Side."

Today's Wall Street smart aleck is always on call -- thanks to cellphones, e-mail and paging technology -- so disappearing for hours at a time is no longer an option, unless you're at the top of the hierarchy. Nostalgia for the '80s punctuates the present-day boom because young guys on the Street wonder: What was it like to have privacy?

A Wharton B-school graduate recently explained: "They didn't work as hard during the '80s. Today, if you're on the Street, you're available 24-7. I can afford to spend a few hours with a call girl -- financially -- but I don't have time for more than a quickie. You can't hide your time or pretend you missed a call from your boss. It's frustrating, you know? We've got bucks and virility but nobody has the time. Hanging out with a hooker and doing cocaine? You must be kidding! Of course, you get drug-tested when you interview -- and there's always the threat of a random test."

The millennial boom has created yet another hierarchy among the johns of Wall Street. Sexual leisure time, the multihour session, has ended up in the hands of a privileged few. Call it the revenge of the senior guys.

Speaking of which, senior guys are somewhat invisible in the first episode of "The Street." Most of the characters, even the big shots, were hungry junior guys all too recently -- and it shows. Especially when they have to deal with women. I guess we'll have to tune in next week to see whether Jack will be man enough to forgive his fiancée -- or whether Evan will catch his dancer sweetheart socializing with another customer.

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