Homeland Elegies(48)

Joining Riaz’s board exposed me to aspects of the world I’d only read about. He fast-tracked me onto the executive committee, then turned me into a trusted sidekick. I met Hillary at the State Department. I sat next to Elon Musk at a donor dinner prepared by Alice Waters herself at Chez Panisse. I went backstage at Hamilton with a group that included Mos Def. I went fly-fishing in Idaho with Fareed Zakaria, golfing at Pebble Beach with Neel Kashkari. I flew first class to Venice, where Riaz and I spent three days on the Lido at meetings with Muslim artists there for the Biennale, then we spent three days in Abu Dhabi at a conference devoted to Islamic microfinance. A week later, we were in Frankfurt to host a gala where we raised more than a half million euros to support gay Muslims being persecuted in Chechnya. In Chicago, we dined at Alinea with Jeanne Gang and John Malkovich. In London, I shared a samosa with an MP at Chutney Mary. At the American Academy in Rome, Don DeLillo spilled Chianti into my soup.

As I made the rounds of these exclusive haunts, I came to be seen (and to see myself) as an honorary member of the privileged class. Invitations poured in. To artist residencies in Wyoming and Marfa. To the juries of the film festival in Rotterdam and a drama award in Oslo. I was asked to oversee the dispensation of funding to young writers in the “Middle East.” At Sundance, they comped me in a multifloor suite; in Munich, I was put up in a villa built for the Fairy Tale King himself. One night, at a fund-raising dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an Italian industrialist and his wife overheard me complaining about getting work done in my apartment in New York—the construction on my block was deafening. They approached me after dessert with an offer to take up residence at their exquisitely quiet summer house on Lake Como. They would be traveling through the steppes of Asia in July and wouldn’t be using it. My neighbors next door, the wife informed me, would be George and Amal Clooney—if they were there.

I went. I didn’t finish the play I was writing. I was too busy playing basketball and drinking Aperol spritzes with the Clooneys’ houseguests.

I was getting used to asparagus season in the Marchfeld and Sauternes with my fois gras. It hadn’t taken me long—a mere eight months of playing Riaz’s show pony—to start taking myself for a latter-day Saint-Simon or Samuel Pepys. I noted details of meals eaten and hotel rooms booked. My Moleskines were replete with thumbnail portraits of the wealthy and powerful, their crepe de chine dresses and Italian wool blazers, their obsession with faience and face-lifts, their drunk, lazy tongues, the putrid odors of their scented aging, the hors d’oeuvres (and cocktail waitresses) chased across the room, the private jets, the summer homes, the winter homes, and absolutely everywhere—or so it seemed—the yammering about works of art they neither understood nor liked but on which they regularly spent more money than I expected to make in my lifetime. I imagined I was penning a coruscating catalog of the new aristocracy, an outline of their outlandishness, an indictment of the enduring, indelible stain of human status seeking. In fact, my journal was no such thing. It was fatuous and self-regarding, full of obvious critique and sloppy language. Worst of all—and I do hope it will not compromise too much the reader’s view of me, though I would understand if it did—I was a pig with women. The episode with Julia at the theater in the wake of Riaz’s first visit still haunted me—an object lesson in proximity to wealth as an aphrodisiac and the seemingly endless depth of my own racially charged sexual hunger—but oddly, not in the way it had been most remarkable, for the capacious, self-revealing pleasure that had subsumed us both. That elemental reciprocity appeared to have been lost on me. Instead I feigned interest and intimacy and offered mediocre, absent-hearted sex to more lovers than I’d like to admit. I didn’t seem to care. After all, there was so much fucking to be had and with so little effort.

In the words of George Monbiot, I’d become a neoliberal courtier, a subaltern aspirant to the ruling class, bearing the foundation’s not-for-profit coat of arms expressly for that purpose, an eclectic and exemplary defender not only of inalienable human rights and enlightened rage but also of freedom itself, both sexual and monetary, an eager frontline recruit for the purported progressive ideological battles of our time. My awakening from this stupor of self-congratulatory entitlement would be swift and brutal. An accumulation of private and public misfortunes—a copper penny rash on my palms, my mother’s death, the election of Donald Trump—would disabuse me of my will to benevolent privilege. I’m ashamed it took me so long to wake up to the bankruptcy of this purported moral vision. Until then, I was susceptible; I was culpable; I was a willing and enthusiastic advocate; this vision of the good life felt good indeed; I was a believer in the politically enlightened late-stage capitalist individualist creed; I loved Obama; I was tongue-tied with awe when I met Sergey Brin. Who could blame me? What more, what better, for me, for anyone else, did the world have to offer?

Before my tumble from this worldview, I spent more time thinking about money than ever before. I knew the life I was leading was predicated on capital. I knew I didn’t have any. How much longer would Riaz let me float along on the swollen river of his seemingly endless lucre? I didn’t know. Money was no object to him, of course, but I could see the writing on the wall. Whatever luster I possessed for those he used me to impress would eventually fade. They would tire of my tencent words and my canny political provocations. I would fall out of favor, and when I did, it would mean returning to life in my dim, tiny Harlem one-bedroom with only my imagination—and my iPhone!—as sustaining distractions. No more fancy scenery to oppose to my fear, to the constant worry that I mattered not a whit to anyone beyond myself. Put crassly, I didn’t want a life in which the 2 train was how I did most of my traveling. Indeed, I now despised the subway—its screeching, the press of its surly, smelly throngs, the predicate of predetermined stops that shaped my daily itinerary. With Riaz, I rode about in that sleek black Mercedes limousine that had so enchanted Emily on their night out. I felt the same about that quiet enclave on wheels as it slipped through the city’s hustle-bustle, parting the crowds, fetching us from one door, dropping us at another. If we walked, it was because we wanted to! I knew I would never have money like that but also knew—had always known—the usual pittance that foundered in my checking account was not enough. I needed more. Much more. The example of my friend Danyal Ramin had haunted me for years. Danyal was likely the most extravagantly talented of my college classmates, a theater artist who’d studied in Vermont with the Bread and Puppet troupe before starting his own group in Brooklyn; a visionary designer and director whose arresting shows went up at the Public and were invited to Avignon and Salzburg; a singular voice hailed by critics as a New World heir to Tadeusz Kantor; and a man who’d gone for much of his adult life without health insurance. He got married. Had a child. The pregnancy was covered by Medicaid, and so was the new family, until they weren’t. When Danyal was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder, well, you can probably guess the rest of the story, its entropic denouement by now as much a staple of American life as apple pie: a well-meaning crowdsourced appeal online raised enough money to keep the wolf from the door, but only for so long. Treatment was expensive—the medications alone ran into the hundreds of thousands—but his parents found the money. He survived. His theater company didn’t. Neither did his marriage. Last I heard, he’d moved back home to North Carolina, where he was working at a Starbucks. At least the job gave him benefits. A once-in-a-generation talent, mind you. Making double-shot extra-wet lattes for real estate agents on bathroom breaks between appointments.