On December 31 2003, a hedge fund trader named Turney Duff received a check for $1,864,999.00. He didn't win the lottery, nor was he a grifter, although some might say he was a little bit of both. He was a Wall Street trader, and a good one at that. It was a lot of money, but the way Duff had risen though the high finance ranks, there would be plenty more to come, even if it wasn't his first career choice. In 1994, Duff had come to New York City, not to make a fortune, but to be a writer. He didn't find a job right away, so a family member hooked him up.

In less than decade, he would go from a Morgan Stanley whipping boy to a hedge fund king, moving tens of millions of dollars, and getting the royal treatment wherever he went. (One of his former employers was Galleon Group, recent home to one of the biggest insider trading scandals of all time.) For obvious reasons, Duff thought himself invincible, from market fluctuations, bad trades, mountains of cocaine, the rivers of booze with which he washed it down, and from the 24/7 debauchery at their crash pad, The White House. (Get it? Clever, those Masters of the Universe.)

For the better part of the 2000's, Duff was even more out-of-control than you'd think a Wall St. player can be. He lays it all out there in The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess. What makes this memoir more than a stereotypical "Greed is Good" rise-and-fall story is that Duff isn't Gordon Gekko. Hell, he's not even Bud Fox. He's a small-town Maine kid who shot to the top by being a fun-loving regular-Joe who could talk to pretty women without breaking out in hives, and who threw soirees with aging rap acts. Duff wasn't a cut-throat, he was much more of Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success meets Michael J. Fox in Bright Lights, Big City.

The money vanished up his nose, the mansion's an empty reminder of his come-to-Jesus nights, and his original Wall St. dreams have been requiem'ed. Today, Duff, 43, has been sober for 3.5 years, he's a couple of miles from his seven-year-old-daughter, and says he's never been in a better place. He spoke with Biographile about being the life of the party, and how low a person can sink when the party takes over their life.

Biographile: Let’s start with an easy one, what the hell is the matter with people on Wall St.?

Turney Duff: That’s hard to say. The Buy Side is about my issues and my failings. To generalize Wall St. by my behavior isn’t fair, but I did find myself in a subculture. The industry attracts very hungry individuals, many of them don’t always make the best decisions. Wall St. has a lot of discontent people, always wanting more. If you have X, you want 2X. The problem with that, for me at least, is that it’s hard to be grateful because I was never content.

BIOG: Is the reckless hard-partying subculture a large chunk of Wall St.?

TD: Maintaining relationships, primarily through wining and dining, is a huge part of it. The level I took it to is a small percentage. In my own offices, I definitely had to keep my cocaine usage secret. You hear these stories from the 1980s that are insane, but for me, it was never out in the open. I wasn’t doing blow at my desk.

BIOG: Let’s step back a little bit, you grew up in--

TD: Kennebunk, Maine. We were famous for the Bush family, lately it’s been for the Zumba prostitute ring. For the record, I’ve never done Zumba back home.

BIOG: It seems like you had it in you to be a writer, performer, or entertainer of some kind, but I wonder if you felt, like I did growing up in Billings Mont., that the creative world was something that only other people from big cities did--

TD: I’m so glad you said that, those exact words have come out of my mouth. I never thought it was a possibility. Moving to Los Angeles to become a television writer wasn’t something I saw as a realistic option. I guess it was a combination of Maine, and my parents, who always supported me, but had no way of showing me the path to take.

BIOG: When you did land in New York City, you tried to get a job in journalism, but you didn’t go for broke...

TD: No, I didn’t push that hard. In The Buy Side, I describe just showing up at Sports Illustrated thinking I could bring in my resume and start talking to an editor or Rick Reilly or something. It’s ridiculous to think about now.

BIOG: So is that how you ended up on Wall St.?

TD: Yes, it’s Sports Illustrated’s fault. (Laughs) I called my Mom and she suggested I get in touch with my Uncle Tucker, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. When I dialed, I meant to ask for help getting a job in journalism, PR, or something related to my major. I got shy, tensed up, and the only words that came out were ‘I need a job.’ He called back and said, ‘You have ten interviews next week.’ He told me to say I was interested in sales. I went into Lehman Brothers and something happened in the first interview, the intensity and energy in the room, seeing all these confident successful men and women in their late twenties... I said, ‘Wow, I want to be one of them.’ So, I went to work on Wall St.

BIOG: It seems like when you started in 1994, Wall St. was a much different place than today’s tech-driven behemoth...

TD: The mid-to-late 90s was an interesting period, trades started being completed quicker through email, and then the internet was on everyone’s desk, it sped everything up and changed the landscape. I felt like it leveled the playing field, guys who had ten years experience on me didn’t have a decade on me in technology and the new style of communication. It’s funny, The Buy Side has been referred to as both a Wall St. memoir and an addiction memoir. But I believe it’s a coming-of-age story set in New York City during the most dramatic time in the history of finance. As a child of the 80s, I was taught that life was limitless. The only time I heard ‘No!’ was from Nancy Reagan. I didn’t listen to her.

BIOG: It sounds like your greatest asset was your personality, simply by not being an asshole at work, you made a name for yourself...

TD: It was very easy for me to play good cop. Often, I was surrounded by primarily bad cops. On the Galleon trading desk, I was the only one who played it that way. It was a combination of being low on the totem pole and just not being that type of guy, but it was amazing the sort of response I would get by saying please and thank you, or calling people back when I said I would. It worked for me.

BIOG: Did it make your job too easy in some respects? You barely had a bump in the road on the way to the top...

TD: Someone suggested to me a while ago that I was the “Einstein of networking.” I definitely was not. Maybe the Paris Hilton... Whatever I was doing was working, but while I was going through it, I couldn’t have pointed to this, this, or this. I was being myself within the Wall St. environment and getting a good response, so I kept going and adding to it. It started out natural and normal, but as the money and lifestyle increased, it was like I was taking steroids. I built up the persona of “Turney,” a lot of people didn't know my last name. I started throwing parties, and they went great, so I’d throw a bigger one. Let’s keep raising the stakes.

BIOG: And obviously, at some point, it exacerbated beyond any reasonable way to live?

TD: There was an excerpt of the book in the New York Post a couple of weeks ago, a section where I show up to work all hungover, hit the White House, run around the city all night, and end up at a mature escort’s apartment at 5 a.m., a couple of hours before I gotta go back to work. What’s interesting, is that was the first thing I wrote, and thought it would be Chapter One as an initial jolt for the reader. When I started working with my editor, Rick Horgan, rearranging things to make the book stronger, we added a lot more about me growing up, coming to New York, my first job at Morgan Stanley, etc. While writing The Buy Side, I tried to always stay in the moment. At that exact time, how was I feeling, what was I thinking, and not looking back after sobriety and knowing how it ends. That chapter landed in the middle and it was only then that I realized how in-over-my-head I was. It was much sadder when I looked at how I’d gotten there step-by-step. It was one of those times I felt invincible and figured everything would work out for old Turney, because they always had in the past.

BIOG: Was it hard to recreate those long lost nights and weekends? Did you talk to your old mates for verification?

TD: I have a good memory, so I had the building blocks. I was able to piece things together and then I called or had coffee with people I used to run around with to get more detail. I made it as exact as I could. Some things I’m never going to forget, like going to Pastis and leaving the Bank of America brokers at the table by themselves. No matter how drunk or coked up I was, I’ll remember that because it was such a douche move. I focused on moments that are etched in my brain, but since the book came out I've gotten calls from guys saying, like, ‘How come you didn't put the U2 concert in there? That was an epic night, you did this-and-this.’ Yeaahhhh, I don’t really remember it. A few people have said I exaggerated, but The Buy Side has just a few examples of what I was like back then. I was staying out all night 2-3 times a week, and at my worst, I was using 5-6 nights a week. I didn’t litter the book with the these crazy stories, but I want readers to understand how this was my life all the time.

BIOG: Was it hard not to beat those stories to death?

TD: My editor said something profound, “People like stories about excess, not excess.” It resonated with me. People don’t want an unending barrage of lampshade moments.

BIOG: Most of us have gone to the office with a hangover, but I’ve always been curious about this: When you were in the throws of addiction, how did you get through the workday on a regular basis?

TD: Not well, and I’m not proud of it. I’d try to not get caught, not to be seen or heard, by hiding behind my computer screens. In my brain, I’d say just make it to noon, then make it to the closing bell, then I'm not going to do it again like last night where I feel like I’m in hell and going to die. Sure enough, that night or the next day, I’d rationalize doing it again, but controlling it this time. So ridiculous, but there were years when I would put Post-It notes on my walls at home or a hotel, telling me, “Shut down at midnight, you have work in the morning!” I’d put them up before the first line of coke, the first cigarette, and the first swig of whiskey when everything was perfect. Few hours later, I’m running around crumpling up all the Post-Its because, of course, I’m not going to stop.

BIOG: Why is the buy side so much sexier than the sell side?

TD: If you’re on the buy side, you are the client. If I have an order to buy a million shares of Apple, I have 50-100 people to call and it’s their job to get the order. Everyone is trying to offer their best, so information flow, order flow, and the ubiquitous wining and dining are the tools to get your orders. The sell side pursues you, so not only do you get paid by your hedge fund through salary and bonus, there’s 50-100 people wanting to take you out to dinner, a game, a concert, anything to improve their relationship with you.

BIOG: When you reached the upper levels of the financial world, you were treated not quite like an NBA or a movie star, but closer to that than the way regular folks are treated out on the town...

TD: A hundred percent. Within Manhattan, it’s a step below celebrity status, but within the finance community, it’s how you get treated if you have huge order flow. There were years where I was paying out $30-50-million in commissions. That’s a lot of money. As a 30-year-old kid, you can call 50-year-old veterans and talk to them as equals and tell them what you want. More often than not, they obliged.

BIOG: You come across as someone with a level of self-awareness, but was that common on Wall St.? Did people recognize the greed and inequality or is it that once you’re inside the bubble...

TD: Like any industry, there are people who are more self-aware than others. A lot of people think it’s too good to be true, but until you get taken down to your knees, you have no idea how good you have it. I talk to finance people all the time who can’t believe how much better it was ten years ago, but they still know that making half-a-million-dollars a year on Wall St. is better than anything else they could be doing. Financially, anyway.

BIOG: I realize this is not everyone, maybe it’s just a few guys at the top, but as a lay person the sense of entitlement the uber-rich have is both hard to fathom and take. Do the super-rich really believe they don’t get a fair shake?

TD: I can only speak for myself, but if someone had called me entitled while I was going through it, I would have been offended. Sure, now, I am embarrassed by a lot of my behavior and persona. But sometimes, and I’m not making an excuse for the super-wealthy, it’s hard because you don’t know what you don’t know. At the end of the day, if you’re uber-rich, people treat you different. You start to believe that’s the person you are. My parents brought me up a certain way and taught me values, but I got off-course and lost myself. I don’t blame Wall St., the money, or the drugs and alcohol. These are mistakes I made that I'm responsible for.