Devor rubbed the ointment into his cheeks in mechanical circles like he’d practiced in a mirror after watching a YouTube seminar on the subject. In another life, he might have been me, and I him. We were like the dual Lindsay Lohans in the remake of The Parent Trap, identical in nature, but nurtured to form separate systems of belief. I, with my working-class upbringing, had come to value personal prosperity over fiscal equality, while Devor, descendent of Day-Glo kibbutzniks, had learned that sharing led to caring led to casual threesomes.
My phone buzzed, but I ignored it and looked at what I’d been handed, an invitation to a Funeral for Capitalism at 8 p.m. in Union Square. Letterpress printed on crème card stock, it was the second printed invite I’d received for an event that night. The other had come from a junior colleague, a cocky young trader raised in the crotch of Greenwich luxury, complete with a home bowling alley and servants cruelly uniformed in oversized bow ties. This colleague’s life had been a procession of silver-spoon achievement—prep school grade inflation, Harvard gut curriculum and golf team heroics, genetically blessed Anglo-aquiline bone structure—and now, at the first blush of failure, he was throwing a, no-joke, Great Gatsby theme party in the penthouse suite of SoHo’s Zone Hotel. The invitation, which sat in my briefcase, was similar to Devor’s, except it was printed on cheaper card stock, and in pedestrian Geneva font.
Ricky had convinced me to make an appearance at the Gatsby party, promising top-shelf bourbon and behavior that might provide anecdotal evidence for my theoretical excerpt, a think piece on the way white investment bankers misappropriated rap lyrics as justification for fiscal Darwinism. I no longer wasted brain space wondering if I attended these events sincerely or ironically, the line between the two having been irreparably blurred sometime in the early aughts.
My father once told me that everyone who lived through the sixties had his own personal Altamont—the day the idealism died—and I think one could claim an analogous moment for nineties kids, when each of us realized that Kurt Cobain was gone, complaints about selling out were nostalgic, and those adorable indie shops from Seattle were now the giants come to destroy. For many, this moment arrived with the posthaste corporatization of Cobain himself, his face become logo on T-shirts sold at Target so teens who’d never heard him could flash the style markers of disaffected rebellion while listening to the disco-soul cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from last week’s The Voice.
I liked hip-hop, a genre stridently open about its impure relationship with commerce, and thought I was exempt from this kind of disillusion. I was wrong. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a photo of Vampire Weekend—Columbia kids who dressed in Brooks Brothers beach duds and played a preppified genus of Paul Simon worldbeat—and feeling surprised and disappointed that the boat-shoe class had developed a claim on youth culture. It felt like a rigged game to bring more power to the powerful, to deprive the less privileged of their monopoly on cool.
Still, I looked forward to the party. Maybe I could pre-game at Devor’s protest and pitch my book. There were sure to be plenty of editorial types on hand. My being a banker was of fetishistic interest, the protectors of the literary realm turning polite and deferential to anyone wearing a suit in a performance of open-mindedness that masked a deeper lust for proximity to dollars.
What I couldn’t do was go home. I’d been ignoring calls from Wendy since leaving the house, and it was only 9 a.m. I worried that she’d tried to use our Visa and it had been declined. A single login to E*Trade and she could suss out the breadth of our financial situation. I didn’t want to imagine her reaction. We were in bad shape already: scratching bug bites, staring at cellphones instead of each other. A heartfelt apology wouldn’t cut it. I needed to offer, alongside my confession, a recovery plan.
Not that I was so deluded as to think that a book deal might save me. AR gaming, VR porn, and the era of addictive, B/B+ quality TV had all but abolished the market for the kind of intellectually rigorous project I had in mind; there would be no angel at the Funeral for Capitalism handing out six-figure advances for hybrid works of cultural criticism and memoir. Still, if I could find a publisher, Wendy would understand how serious I was about this new vocation. And sure, we’d have to deal with our debt—I was working on that—but the important thing, I would stress to Wendy, was that I’d found a passion, a calling, and that this new pursuit would sustain my soul, and would maybe, eventually, lead to my procuring a tenure-track gig at Pratt or The New School.
“Sounds like a good funeral,” I said. “Open bar?”
“BYO,” said Devor. “We may have power in numbers, but we’re not particularly flush.”
He pointed at the donations bucket, which contained some coins, a two-dollar bill, and the butt of a sesame bagel. I wanted to prove my traitorous disregard for my industry, but not so badly that I was willing to part with the little cash I had. As a show of my sorry financial state, I flipped open my flap pockets. Out came a fistful of burrito scraps: pork nibs, green peppers, a wadded ball of aluminum foil.
“Calexico?”
“La Esquina.”
“Ah,” he said. “Delicious.”
“I’m glad we’re agreed. It’s like that joke about Israelis and Palestinians, and how they only agree on hummus. Maybe bankers and #Occupiers can be unified over burritos.”
Devor produced a heartier laugh than my remark warranted.
“Did you get my email?” I asked.
“I get a lot of emails.”
“Did you get mine?”
“Write the article,” he said. “We’ll see if it’s any good.”
Wendy
Michael and I deal with anxiety differently. Michael is an extrovert. He had a hip-hop group at Columbia; he was MC WebMD
