It’s Tuesday, this must be Hoboken

 

 

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

 

It is Tuesday, this must be Hoboken. That terrible old movie still haunts me as does every other weekday cliché about Tuesday. I keep wanting to go to Rome and buy a hamburger.

Burger King John left a message for me to call him back. We had rough words the last time he spoke. He’s always full of schemes, even as down and out as he is. For years, I thought he was unique, even when I delved into the dark world of cocaine and prostitution. He seemed so middle class, so upright, a capitalist dreamer saddled with the American Dream and the concept that he might become “a mover and shaker” some day.

Those were the days when I lived in a subplot where John struggled with cocaine addiction while I dated a go-go dancer with the same problem. How strange it seemed to me that he – a portly businessman and she, an accountant in her real life, should hover on the edge of doom, wandering in that shadowy area between the depths of social depravity and the surface world of normal life.

I always saw myself as the outcast, the non-conformist character who had no real place in society, not fully understanding that the upper world of laws, church and a two-car-garage are the illusion, mirrored by a darker world just the way a tree is reflected in a dark pool. John and Peggy are the fodder of that underworld, the stuff upon which the predators feed.

John and Peggy fell into a web of drug use precisely because they wanted to stand out in the world. They both had ambition. They both needed to become more than just another clerk standing on line at the fast food restaurant. They are part of a breed of middle class kids who want to be escorted to the best tables in the best restaurants and treated like they are movie or rock stars, rather than clerks.

They are part of an army of sad kids flocking to the cities to make their mark on the world, both too old by the time I met them to qualify as Yuppies, but stuck with the same disease as to how to stand out without standing out, needing to feel important, but not like a freak.

Peggy got spoiled early, caught up with real superstars when she was very young, she got all the cocaine and men she wanted until she aged out of the market and the men she wanted no longer wanted her, finding their kicks in younger girls.

John had dreams of becoming a capitalist. He voted Republican. He believed all of the right wing crap talk radio handed him. But he couldn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t know how to get from being a clerk to being someone like Michael Bloomberg, not realizing that the hard work they teach people in school is a crock of shit. In the end, you become important mostly by being in the right place at the right time. If not, you don’t make it.

For both of them, cocaine and alcohol became substitutes for success – just as it does for a whole generation of overpaid Wall Street clerks – giving them the feeling they want, but without any of the real satisfaction of having accomplished anything.

In the 1960s, certain powerful capitalists benefited by having drugs flood the ghettos, keeping the population so sedated it never broke into justified revolution. The same might be said of the middle class in the 1980s until now, cocaine keeping people happy while their lives are built on smoke. This is why so many people are angry at Madoff. He made his killing by selling the same illusion. Our courts crucify him as a kind of smoke screen so that nobody looks too closely at the whole system which is exactly the same scheme, but institutionalized.

Peggy accepted her fate in the end and became a calculating barfly that used pudgy middle class men to supply her needs. She encouraged them to fall in love with her as she bilked them and so slipped into the underworld as a player.

John still struggles – partly because he has more conscience than most yuppies, and down deep has a sense of humanity many of the masses of Wall Street clerks lack. He can’t just turn off his basic beliefs the way other yuppies can. He has warm blood in his veins instead of ice water, and it is killing him.

He keeps trying to find a scheme that will get him out of his deteriorated situation – much in the way a losing gambler looks for a long shot horse to bet out that allow him to win big so he can come out even in the end.

I keep thinking of the guy in the black Mercedes on Route 3 last week, whose car over-heated and forced him to the side of the road. When the police arrived, they found a cat had crawled up inside the fan belt. The man didn’t care. He never stopped talking on his cell phone and was particularly angry at the inconvenience. He could care less about an injured cat. He would no doubt kill it himself if he could get on with his business.

John’s not like that. While he would like to use someone else to get ahead, that person must have done something truly evil to justify it. That’s why John won’t get ahead. Wall Street and capitalism require more people like the man in the Mercedes, cold, calculating people without human compassion. Anyone with a heart can’t make it, and must seek some substitute such as cocaine to even feel like they have.

A news analyst yesterday said that would-be capitalists haven’t yet learned humility despite the downturn in the economy. Instead of finding heart, they – like John – are still looking for schemes for them to get even again. Unlike John, they could care less about the dead cats or even people they might leave in the wake of their return to success.