A Stoolie Among the Beautiful People
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Yes, they have more money.”
- Ernest Hemingway
4th of July weekend has just come and gone which for me means I’ve just gotten back from my annual trek to the Cape where, for one day out of every year, I live among the most elusive, mysterious and fascinating creatures in all of nature: the wealthy. Allow me to explain.
Since long before I met My Sweet Irish Rose, her parents have belonged to one of the most exclusive country clubs in all of New England. Since this article is appearing in the world’s fastest growing influential media giant I should probably not mention the club by name, so I’ll just err on the side of caution and say it rhymes with “Moister Harbors.” Now my in laws are not wealthy people, except in the sense that they have all the riches that come with having the Apple of Their Eye marry a drunken, cigar-smoking slob who adores her. They joined this club 40-something years ago when it was somewhat affordable and stayed on as it became more expensive and more and more a playground for the idle rich.
Anyway, my only venture onto the grounds of the place comes once a year for their private 4th of July fireworks display and cookout. That’s the one day of the year I, like Diane Fosse living in the wild among mountain gorillas, get to study up close the lives and habits of the true Beautiful People.
I’m going to confess right off the bat that on a lot of levels, being surrounded by rich people is terrifying for me. Which is odd because I usually like socially awkward moments. I thrive on them. First dates, job interviews, meeting your girlfriend’s parents, parties where you don’t know anybody... I’ve always managed to feed off the nervous tension and use it to my advantage for some strange reason. Not so my annual safari among the Beautiful People. Because like Fosse’s mountain gorillas, the wealthy are unpredictable. You never have any way of knowing when a rich guy will attack. And by “attack” I mean approach you, bare his teeth and unleash the most potent weapon nature has provided him: The words “So what line of work are you in?”
Petrifying. No matter how prepared you might be for that assault, there’s no defense against it. Certainly the truth is no good. “Oh, I have a spirit-crushing, dead end day job, work comedy clubs at night and write for a smutty sports paper” won’t work. The wealthy smell fear. You might as well just expose your jugular.
True story: My co-worker/friend Eddie has a rich cousin who was flying him in a small charter plane over to Nantucket. He was talking to a girl onboard who asked him what he does for work. So, unprepared for the attack, Eddie told her honestly what he (and therefore I) do. And she burst out laughing. “HA! Good one!” she said. “Seriously, what do you do?” So Eddie said he wasn’t kidding and the girl immediately made a face, turned her back and started talking to someone else. She might as well have beat her chest and flung poop at him.
But in a situation where you find yourself among the rich, you can’t lie either. In the past I’ve been tempted to make something up, invent some vague but plausible line of work like “I’m do import/export” or “I’m in venture capital” or “Government work I can’t really discuss,” but there’s no way I can keep up that deceit. The first follow up question and I’d be lowering my head like a lesser member of the gorilla herd caving in to the Alpha Male. I might be able to BS my way through a job interview or a bad cocktail party, but trying to hide who I am at a snobatorium cookout is like sitting in the Yankee Stadium bleachers trying to pass myself off as a Yankee fan. I simply can’t pull it off.
This past weekend at Moister Harbors, I was standing a line to get my kid’s face painted or a balloon sword or something. In front of me were two guys holding their kids and I heard one of them say the following words: “We were up 23% last year shorting commercial properties. That entire return was built on PMI grunt market factors snort scratch yields whistle chest thump hedge fund yawn investment growl...” Obviously I missed the last part since I was furiously writing down the first part into the notepad on my phone, but that’s pretty much what it sounded like to me. And I couldn’t tell if he was happy about it or not. I just know that in my lifetime I’ve never had a conversation that included a sentence like that. Neither probably has anyone in my family nor anyone I consider a friend.
Although maybe I’m wrong. To be honest, I have plenty of childhood friends whose jobs are a mystery to me. I could tell you who their QB/WR combos were from Fantasy Football 12 years ago or how much they owe me from card games we had in the 90s but I have no idea what they do from 9-5 Monday through Friday. Maybe they talk about shorting commercial properties every day, but I doubt it. My guess is their talks with their wives about their financial situations sound very much like mine with My Darling Lass: “If we had five apples and five oranges and used one apple to take a vacation this year...”
One of the amazing things you quickly learn from studying the rich in the wild is how they alll seem to know one another. Get any two Beautiful People together and in minutes they’ll discover they’ve either shorted the same commercial property or went to the same school or both did a summer internship at the firm of Howie, Fuckem & Goode. It’s astonishing. They just seem to instinctually find one another. To use a different animal analogy, the rich are like the critters from “March of the Penguins” who can cross thousands of miles of tundra and then find their mate in the middle of an acre-sized flock of identical looking birds. Only rich guys don’t use sound or smell, they distinguish one another through visual cues like sweaters tied around their necks and plaid quilted shorts.
The next thing you notice is something you suspected all along. Rich women are attractive. And not just because first I look at the purse. Or the boob jobs. There’s an anthropological reason, which a friend of mine figured out in college. He did his undergrad at a regular college. Then he went to grad school at Brown. And according to him the upgrade in women from regular college to the Ivy League was startling, which he attributes to the simple fact that rich guys like to marry hot women. (Since I went to state college I’ll add “Duh.”) Hot women like to be rich so they go along. They then have hot daughters who grow up to marry other rich guys and it becomes a closed ecosystem of richness/hotness which perpetuates itself. At least until one of the hot daughters breaks the cycle by marrying some middle class comic/smutty sportswriter who does his finances with apples and oranges.
Somehow though generations of wealth and higher education don’t seem to make people smarter. As certified rich guy Malcolm Forbes once said “I never met a rich man’s son who was worth a damn.” And he should know since his own kid ran for president a bunch of times. I’m not putting down rich kids out of jealousy. I AM jealous of them, make no mistake. But for their purchasing power, not for their towering intellect. Especially in this part of the country. By and large you find that the wealthiest families around here are the ones with the oldest money, not the smartest. The first Europeans to settle here made their wealth the old fashioned way: by acquiring land. Either by purchasing it from the Indians on the cheap, driving Indians off it, or failing that, doing the old Smallpox Blanket Gag and moving in once the Indians were dead. The fact that my ancestors were sleeping off their hangovers in County Cork while the Century 17 people were not taking “no” for an answer explains why I’m driving a ‘96 Ford Contour in Cape traffic and their descendants are flying to Nantucket.
Seriously I’m not trying to demonize the wealthy. There’s way too much of that going around as it is without me adding to it. Whatever Bill Gates has made in his life, he didn’t take it from me. If he stuck a fork in a toaster when he was a kid and got killed, his money wouldn’t be flying around in the air waiting for the rest of us to grab it like we’re in a glass booth on a 70s game show. He created wealth. More power to him. If I was better at cornering the market on operating systems instead of bar trivia, I might be him. But I’m not. And I’ve got little to no chance to give Bill Gates smallpox and move into his place.
Which brings us to another, even less surprising thing you learn. That rich people are happy. Much happier than you and me. To a person they walk around with a perpetual Ben Affleck “Boiler Room” grin. Ear to ear baby. For centuries, the non-rich have been convincing themselves that the for real rich are miserable, empty hearted wretches, wishing they could be loved for only for who they are on the inside instead of for what they possess. Maybe that’s true some of the time, but ask John Henry how he feels next time he’s eating edible gold leave off his hot young wife’s chest in between his two World Series trophies. My guess is he’ll tell you he’d rather be doing that then getting a memo saying his health insurance is going up and skulking around a country club hoping no one asks him what he does for a living.