Go downtown and look. These people have nothing to say to you. They’re too busy saying it to themselves. But go at lunchtime and sit in the square. Talking won’t be necessary. You’ll hear the little mewling sounds that come with broadcloth and pearls in 92-degree afternoon heat with 74% humidity. You’ll see the superiority, the office fear-porn colliding with competitiveness colliding with whatever they plan on saying at the next high school reunion.
You’ll see the anxiety about sweat rings and runny makeup, the self-loathing when they turn toward Burger King, checking their plate-glass reflections all the way down. These are the adepti of the high rise financial institutions situated around the square, the high-class middle-aged folks who didn’t hang themselves and the beady-eyed 20-year-olds who hope to become like them. This is the smart set, but it isn’t smart for long.
In college, I lived for a short time with an aerobics instructor, who once told me she’d made the choice to only be with women because all the guys at her fitness level were gay, stupid, or on roids.
“What about the all straight, smart, non-roided guys?”
“Fat.”
She didn’t blink. That was her truth. I slowly, gently placed my beer on the coffee table. I didn’t consider myself fat, but in her world there were two kinds of people and beer was an indicator.
I remember her looking at the condensation on the can already making a ring on the wood and going to the kitchen for a coaster. And I recall thinking to myself, this is why you’ll never find love. But that was uncharitable of me.
The truth was that she’d never find love because she was only attracted to herself or to someone as similar to her as possible. Variety, diversity may be the spice of life, but she was on a special diet of bland self-obsession.
I think of her at lunch sometimes, watching the financial district all-stars broadcast their assorted miseries as they choose intestinal depredation over the bean sprout tofu bowl and wheat grass smoothie they’d planned three hours earlier. The best laid plans of mice and men have often gone to the carbs or the fats or the spiritus frumenti of sadness. Little sobs hiccuped in dark rooms. Where did it all go wrong? Sip. Why are all the good ones taken? Sip. Why did this have to happen to me?
Well, at least they have the sips. A friend of mine used to say that the gods gave man beer to apologize. But for those of us who haven’t touched a drop in years, the apology is not accepted.The few of us who happen to be non-roided and alcohol-free are condemned instead to bear witness to what the gods hath wrought.
There goes a guy who looks like a walking hatchet. Even his tie wants to kill you.
There goes an assistant VP of marketing with an expression that suggests she hasn’t defecated in three weeks. I hope that’s not true.
There goes the lunatic who pushed down the nice Filipina auntie who works at 7-11 and ran out with a chicken sandwich in front of me a few weeks ago. Now I notice him everywhere, wandering, having discussions with invisible friends, maybe with people from his past. He doesn’t seem like he has the slightest idea of where he is or who he is. He fits right in with the smart set. They might smell a little better. Then again, they might not.
The smart set exists in every big city on the planet. They do all the same things, have all the same hatreds, all the same lusts, all the same hallucinations, all the same terror up their spines.
They want to be rich. They take pills. They’d stab certain coworkers if they thought they could get away with it. They have nice hair and a certain animal wariness. The world turns and they turn with it, talking to invisible friends, checking their reflections in plate glass windows, fantasizing about stealing a chicken sandwich and running to a dark place where they could eat it greedily and not choke.