“Opium,” I say. He’d used the same line on me.
“Correct,” Lucas says. “He said opium is the opiate of the masses.”
“A searing insight.”
“We were stoned off our gourds. I’m not usually a weed guy, but the shit he had, Jesus. Maybe that’s why we were laughing so hard.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“But it wasn’t until later that I got what he meant. See, Marx thought that people want answers to the big, old questions, like what we’re doing on this earth, where we go when we die, and why anyone would choose to watch golf on TV. But Cortes, I realized, knew better. People don’t want answers. They just want to buy shit. Opium you can hold. You can hold it, and smoke it, and pay a hooker to blow it up your anus with a straw. Opium’s retail, that’s what Cortes meant.”
His phone buzzes and he looks at his screen. “Okay,” Lucas says. “The limo’s downstairs. We can finish this talk on the way.”
“I have a ride,” I reply.
“Suit yourself,” he says, and leaves.
I shut the windows and turn off the lights. Before locking up, I look into Wendy’s bedroom. I know she’s been staying here, but the evidence is scant: contact case on the nightstand, an empty water glass. The bed’s nicely made and her suitcase is closed in a corner on the floor.
Greg moves across the dais in wood-heeled chukka boots he occasionally stomps for effect. He’s got more hair than I remember, a thick top-mop that covers what I’m pretty sure was recently a bald spot. He reminisces on his days as a point guard, describing the naysayers who said that a five-six white kid from the Maryland suburbs would never play college ball. He tells of his diverse array of teammates, their strong sense of brotherhood, how sports prepares one for business through the acquisition of discipline and leadership qualities.
His anecdote culminates in the revelation that, during Greg’s senior year, alum and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar subsidized the team’s uniforms. Greg stamps out each syllable of the mogul’s name with his heel as if it’s a war chant, as if the audience knows to join in celebrating not only the entrepreneur, but the system that rewards a PEZ collector with a billion-dollar IPO.
Greg manages to segue from basketball to politics by alluding to Omidyar’s humanitarian ventures, including his micro-funding efforts in Zimbabwe. He explains Omidyar’s stand against WikiLeaks, which leads to a discussion of the political responsibilities of business leaders, which further leads to a biased reading of the current economic crisis, and the way that the extreme left as well as the extreme right have co-opted social media, and how Greg’s working to bring voice back to the reasonable mainstream. The phrase Reasonable Mainstream appears on the wall, and I imagine this isn’t the last time I’ll hear or see it, that a young senator, somewhere, is taking notes, preparing to dazzle the next RNC with a unifying sermon.
Greg moves on to the concept of work. He talks about being raised by a single mom who hustled two jobs to put food on the table and save for Greg’s college fund. She cleaned houses in the mornings, bagged groceries at night. He says he used to feel embarrassed by the demeaning nature of his mother’s work, afraid that peers would see her in their homes or at Safeway, in her sweat-blotched bandannas, with her varicose veins. He used to feel embarrassed, but his mother did not. She was proud of her work and the things it allowed her to provide; proud of her reputation as a cleaner, never stealing like certain other practitioners in her trade—and here I sense a racial element to Greg’s insinuation, though no one else in the crowd appears to notice—proud of the trust these wealthy families placed in her hands, allowing access to their costliest possessions. Looking back, Greg is no longer ashamed. He’s grateful for the sacrifice his mother made, a sacrifice which, he now realizes, she made for his benefit. Still, at the time, things were tough. Working so hard meant his mother rarely had time to spend with her son, and the time they did have was spent before the TV in fatigued silence.
“There were no homemade dinners, only instant noodles and frozen pizza,” Greg explains to knowing nods from the crowd, a multi-ethnic survey of techies, ad guys, and Ivy League MBAs, some of whom, I imagine, come from similar backgrounds, watched their parents do slave work at menial jobs so their children could eat açai bowls in the Stanford dining halls, and spend semesters in Goa studying contact improv, and settle down, after college, to six-figure salaries at places like Google and American Express. People, in other words, not so different from me.
“My mother rarely made it to any of my games,” Greg adds, presumably for the parents in the room, Park Slope freelancers who set their own hours around their kids’ schedules, and who wouldn’t dream of missing the lute and drum performance that concludes little Madison’s Ancient Instruments class. Greg looks wistful as he stares past the crowd to the room’s back wall and wipes what may well be a tear from his cheek, though the lighting and distance make it difficult to tell.
The phrase #WorkWillSetYouFree replaces Reasonable Mainstream on the wall. A photo appears beneath the hashtag: young Greg, maybe ten years old. A mesh jersey drapes like a gown on his undeveloped frame. His mother stands behind him, smiling with pride, the implication being that this rare opportunity to see her son play has imbued this worn-out woman with uncommon joie de vivre.
“But what if,” Greg says. “What if there were a way for my mom to be at my games
