Three Bankers: Luke

Banker 1: Luke

Luke was insane. Like, absolutely, certifiably whackadoo.

There was the clinical mental illness part—talking with his therapist on the phone at all hours, receiving pills in the mail, and shuffling his hulking mass along the hallways of campus as he muttered about The Strokes. I have no idea whether this contributed to his insanity when he was lucid, but when he was, he ended up being…shall we say…arrogant?

Sometimes I’d catch him in the student center, thumbing madly through a copy of The Economist, in that “Look at me, I read The Economist, please suck my dick and tell me I’m smart” sort of way.

Sometimes I’d get in heated arguments with him over economic deregulation and he’d wildly make up sources for his arguments. If I called him out on his bullshit, he’d counter with “Well, you’re a REPUBLICAN.”

And sometimes, he’d tell me his crazy ideas for his eventual, guaranteed success.

“You’re not going to work for Lehman Brothers,” I said.

“Yes, I am,” he insisted. It was still early 2008, so he could have technically still worked for Lehman Brothers. But the rest of the exchange ruled that out.

“You have a 2.8 GPA.”

“I can change that. I’ll get all A’s next semester.”

“That’s not going to help,” I pointed out, scooting away inch by awkward inch.

“What do you know?!” he suddenly erupted. “Stop being such a bitch! I took all this time out of my day so I could talk to you, and, and, and—” With one angry, fluid, rugby-honed motion, he flipped the table next to me over. “YOU’RE SUCH A BITCH.”

Luke eventually transferred out of my college.

He took five years to graduate from some place in the South. Last I heard, he was working for one of those door-to-door companies selling knives or foreclosed houses or something. And yet here I am, jobless. Life is funny that way.