THE MAN ON THE OTHER END of the line is furious. Last time we came, he says, we left his basement buried in dust. He spent hours cleaning our mess, a process he now describes in detail. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “I’d like to do what I can.” I ask him to go to the basement and look at the furnace, where he’ll find a sticker with the names of the technicians who served him.

As soon as he sets down the receiver I know he’s mine. A minute passes, then two. I ready my plan. When he gets back he tells me the names, and I take a beat. “Like I thought,” I say with studied camaraderie, “them. We let them go shortly after that.”

Actually, I’ve never heard of these technicians. I’ll forget their names as soon as I’m off the phone. “Listen.” I sigh. “I feel terrible. Let me do something about it.” I raise the price $30 so I can tell him I’ll take an extra $30 off, in addition to the $40 he’ll save thanks to our fall sale, which will become our winter sale, and then our spring sale. Two minutes later I hang up the phone and spin around in my office chair. “Bling!” I yell to Tuck, the pit boss.

Ninety minutes into our four-hour shifts, Derek—who must have been about 40, average height and weight, thin black hair cut short, red face pitted with acne scars—would emerge from the storage closet he called his office, take a drag from his Marlboro, squint his eyes, and scream, “Spin ’em around!” It was a daily ritual. On days we were selling well, the speeches were short, but on one particularly slow day in June at the end of the millennium, he delivered what would be his masterpiece:

There are two kinds of people in the world. Fuckers and fuckees. Which are you? Are you a fucker? Or are you someone who gets fucked? Look. We’re having a shit day. Tuck, what’s the tally? The tally’s shit. You bastards aren’t selling shit. You say it’s June, no one’s home, no one’s thinking about their furnace. Lemme tell you a secret. You making a sale, it has nothing to do with furnace and duct cleaning. It’s about one thing. Are you a fucker? Or do you bend over for the bitch on the other end of the line and get fucked? You say the sheets are bad, you have a shitty neighborhood. Look. You making a sale, it has nothing to do with who’s on the other end of the line. They own a home, they have a furnace, you make a sale. End of story. It has zero to do with the sheets. It has to do with precisely one thing. Are you a fucker? Or are you a little bitch who gets fucked? You let him hang up on you? You got fucked. You let him check in with his wife? You got fucked. Tell him, does he ask his wife before he mows the lawn? Does he ask her before he jerks off in the basement? Tell him, I’ve got a sweet little opening for Tuesday at three, how’s that? Wanna know a secret? I’ve owned a home for fifteen years. How many times do you think I’ve got my furnace and ductwork cleaned? Sawchuk? Sinykin? Boehmer? How many times? Twice? Fuck you. Zero. Zero times. You think it matters, what we’re selling? You think it matters, the product? The product is shit. Only one thing matters. Those people on the other end of the line, they’re weak. They’re waiting for you. They pick up the phone and there you are. You tell ’em, Here I am. You say, I’ve come for you. You—you—are fuckers. You are fuckers. And you fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck.

In the lull before September 11, before the Iraq war and resurgent white nationalism and 4chan, we were young, upper-middle-class white men with excess energy, more than we could expend on Swedish death metal or catfishing with a 28.8 Kbps modem. Our lefty cousins, ahead of the curve, attentive already to wealth inequality and wage stagnation, fought the Battle of Seattle, smashing Starbucks windows and looting Niketown against globalization, an augury of Naomi Klein and, much later, Occupy Wall Street. Meanwhile, I wrote essays defending urban sprawl and deriding global warming as a hoax.

Ours was a pastiche conservatism, rooted in our belief that we were smarter and more deserving of success than anyone else. Because we lacked evidence for this belief, we adopted an ethos of quotidian domination; we were debased Nietzscheans for whom cruelty signaled strength. We convinced the school to let us do an independent study on Ayn Rand. We called it “Philosophy.” Because we had already read Rand’s full oeuvre, we spent our time creating an elaborate joke, a series of intricately illustrated posters for made-up clubs—the John Stamos Society, the Council of Elders—vehicles for coded slander and eerie absurdism expressed through Simpsons and South Park quotes, lampooning a classmate’s mother’s alleged sexual habits or depicting two clowns discussing an abusive father over a water cooler. We had a mentor, a young social studies teacher who was named Branden after Rand’s acolyte and lover, Nathaniel Branden. But he was a liberal, for which we mocked him to his face.

I was only 17 but longed for a radical transvaluation of my life. I’d grown bored with my trifling mendacity and skeptical of Rand’s righteous dogmatism and maladroit prose, skeptical less about her truth than her usefulness to whatever game I was playing. I shed all my allegiances. I quit marching band, math team, drama club. I was kicked off the cross-country team for insubordination. When I spotted the ad for American Summit in the paper that November, I was spending most my time skipping school to get lunch at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet—or, once, to pick up the latest Tool album from Best Buy—before going home to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon’s humor, elaborately linguistic and stupidly slapstick, seduced me, quietly and over the long run, toward his politics of the marginal, the liberatory, the ephemerally utopian.

Michael McVay created American Summit in 1997. The company quickly moved from his garage to a number of well-appointed office buildings. By 2003, it was the seventh-largest IMC in Minnesota. Like the others, it specialized in nonconventional mortgages, designed for people who would be rejected by most banks because of insufficient capital, low credit, or a spotty employment record. Nonconventional is another name for subprime. “They’ll find money for people in bankruptcy,” Forster wrote. “Or they’ll sell to customers like the one [American Summit’s director of marketing] described as hiding from the repo man, waiting for the sheriff to serve him foreclosure papers on his home, and up to his neck in credit card debt.” The question about bankruptcy that I asked each person I called was not, as I’d thought, an attempt to suss out a warning sign, but an enticement. I was checking not for a red light, but a green.

Hundreds of other IMCs behaved the same way. What American Summit did that most didn’t—what allowed its bosses to claim they could “turnkey an office and be profitable within eighteen days”—was use “aggressive marketing techniques.” That is, telemarketers.

For my cohort—white, middle class, liminal, too young to be Gen X, too old to feel millennial, post–cold war but pre-Google—it’s difficult to believe that for most, the ’90s were a time of quiet desperation and slow violence. We came of age during the glancingly brief end of history, raised to believe that our futures were limitless and that our nation’s narrative—at least the one it told its kids—was trending forever up. The reality is difficult to believe even for me, who as a kid spent my weeknights tallying the nation’s debt, on the phone with its debtors.

MOST PEOPLE TOOK subprime loans because, by the ’00s, real average wages in the United States had stagnated for thirty years, the social safety net had been disassembled, and yet prices had continued to rise. Wealth inequality had reached heights not seen in a century. Ordinary people were not buying mansions they couldn’t afford. Ordinary people were taking subprime loans to keep the lights on, and the heat, and the gas, and to feed their kids. They were taking subprime loans to survive.

I was the first point of contact. Subtending all the trading, the hedging, and the rating fraud was a simple phone call where I explained how much money I could save my desperate new friend. When I hear the suggestion that ordinary people were living beyond their means, I think of these phone calls. I think of how I used every trick to convince my new friend to stay on the line. I think of the promise threaded into my every word, the promise sewn into the fabric of this nation, the threadbare fantasy of an American dream.

He grabs at his friend’s drink. Everyone scrambles. His QPOC friend’s friend, a much larger man, gets up and tells him, “OK, my guy, time to move along.” It defies all reason that he’s getting ejected from a picnic just for airing opinions in good faith, by this swollen alpha dickhead flaunting his gallantry. This was the male ally they preferred: not the intellectual who challenged them as equals in an open dialogue, but this muscle-confused fucking silverback gorilla. They’re all happy to hide behind patriarchy when it suits them. He snatches up his READ MORE WOMEN tote bag and leaves.

On one of these long nights, an ugly curtain lifts in his head: he’s old enough to know that relationships don’t guarantee happiness, that the source of his pain is an illusion agonizingly elaborated over decades. His mental habits are so ingrained that even if he got a girlfriend, he’d still feel rejected. Around this time he starts to feel breathless, a constant compression garment around his lungs. [...]

Now that I’m older, I suspect my mother used marriage as a way to reinvent herself. As if she could slough off the past and emerge whole and unmarked, ready to slip into the circumstances of someone else’s life. Her own circumstances, the ones she was born into, were poverty, eight younger siblings, a brick and aluminum bungalow, a backhoe parked out in the yard. Thick, golden-brown hair that fell to the middle of her back. Eyes the color of an azure butterfly. A tall, graceful frame. The broad-faced bone structure she inherited from her grandmother. An accent that wherever she went would betray her origins, a variation on the Ozark hillbilly and Deep South. When she left the small town where she’d grown up, she found a dialect coach and “neutralized” the accent. Evidence perhaps that she had ideas about the kind of person she wanted to appear to be. Also that she understood how to cork the past, contain it inside her.

[...] I was a teenager and so already understood myself to be something of a creature unlike others, a being of anomalous or uncertain nature, a half-formed human trying to find a way to exist among all the fully formed humans I was certain everyone else already was. I wanted to believe that this sense of lessness or halfness would one day be a sense of moreness or wholeness, but also carried with me a certainty that everywhere I might belong was elsewhere, anywhere but where I happened to be. [...]