Homeland Elegies(49)

Danyal was but one of many I’d seen fall prey to the gap between the logic of their talents and the treachery of an American society that abandoned the weak and monetized the unlucky. You had to be brain-dead not to know you couldn’t really flourish in this country without inordinate amounts of cash or extraordinary luck. I’d been the beneficiary of the latter and had always worried how long I would make it without more of the former. In the wake of my experience with Riaz—my initiation (if you will) into the reality of the only good life in our great land—my concerns about money were no longer just prophylactic, various forms of worry about rainy days. No. Now I realized what I’d been missing all along. Here was true freedom. Serious money was the only path to liberation from the indentured servitude of twenty-first-century lower-and middle-class American life.

An artist? Really? Are you kidding me? And you expected what, exactly?

Indentured servitude. It was a formulation I took from Riaz. We spoke often and at length about what it took to flourish in what he called the System. Riaz was not alone in diagnosing social ills, bandying about the latest statistics, conceiving of paths to better futures for his fellow man, woman, and dog—these favorite pastimes of the moneyed class, though Riaz went deeper than most. To him, the System was fully evolved, by which he meant optimally effective and efficient. It specialized in the manufacture of debt, which was the great enabler of capital, the surest means to, yes, indenture the vast hordes of the lower and middle class (and the nation’s youth) to the process of money’s growth. For what grew now were not communities or economies but capital itself—and debt was the means, which meant it was also, now, the dominant cultural logic. Debt prescribed social realities, guarding and guiding the choices that made up most contemporary human lives—domicile, health, education, the prospects of one’s progeny, and now (and most centrally) access to the devices that did the lion’s share of one’s cognition. Of course, Riaz explained, debt had always been a way to entrammel the masses—it was from him I first heard that famous John Adams quotation: “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation: one is by the sword, the other by debt”—but something was different now. With the advent of Reagan and the innovations of Milken, this predation on the populace was now the very basis of our increasingly global economy. The current of anger growing across the world had nothing to do with immigration, he believed, but was all about the System that debt had created, an inescapable, asymmetrical, transnational force. The people paid into this regime with their catalogs of monthly debt payments and subscription fees, all to support what was now the only true political order of our time, a corporate regime that offered no representation, no vote, no participation in either the velocity of its appetites or the bearing of its destructive course. If you weren’t part of the System, you were just grist for its gullet; your life and the lives of those like you were mixed and milled into portfolios of fixed monthly payments—for everything from cars and college tuition to streaming services and same-day delivery—payments that accrued only to the benefit of the ever-increasing mountains of money that were our real masters. People felt all this without knowing it, Riaz would say, and the effectiveness with which the truth was kept from them was a sign not only of the System’s genius but also of its maturity. (Even the System’s own crises, like the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, ultimately served—Riaz would explain—only to expand the reach of its ever-more-encompassing power.)

If he seemed to speak in moral terms, it wasn’t because he believed things needed to change. He felt certain no such change was possible. But to “make a real mark”—he would say—you needed to understand what everyone was up against; there was no excuse for anything less than all the clarity you could muster about the world as it truly was. Back then, I thought I understood what mark he wanted to make and imagined I was helping him to do it, however modestly. In truth, I thought I understood it better than he did: that the charity was cover—psychological and otherwise—for his race to a billion dollars. Once he had that, I thought, he would finally feel redeemed, finally feel that he was the best of what Americans thought they could be, finally know that he belonged.

It turns out I was projecting. I had no clue what he was really up to.

And it wasn’t until I saw my own money grow that I would find out.





5.


When my mother died, in May of 2015, she left me $300,000. I did the usual thing someone in my shoes did: succumbed to the advice of a financial planner, who offered to invest it in the stock market for a fee. The concerns I owned went down and up and down again, and after months of fretting—for, in the circles in which I now traveled, all the talk was about another looming financial crisis—my holdings showed a net gain of $14. Riaz offered to invest the money for me. We were enjoying a drink in his kitchen, a superlative Japanese whiskey for which he’d paid some astronomical amount of money. Chilled with granite stones, it was yet another invigorating march of contradictions—rich, crisp, mellow, bright—so common to my time with him.1 I sipped and marveled; I marveled and sipped. Riaz seemed vaguely distracted as he stared out his wall-size view of the day fading above the East River and, beyond it, the low-slung, dimly lit industrial thorp of waterfront Astoria. He mentioned rents in the South Bronx rising. I mentioned I had money I needed to invest.