View all notes
[...] I was a shop girl, not a poet. In an inexplicable way, I savored my ordinariness, my affinity with the office girls and waitresses I had briefly moved among. My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart. Sometimes, in certain pictures, I thought I could see this hollow phantom world tingle in the air around me, making you want to look at the picture, sensing something you can’t see. In these pictures, I was what I had once longed for: a closed door you couldn’t open, with music and footsteps behind it. I was holding Ava’s hand, but I was turned toward Pia, and the fire of her eyes was reflected in mine.
“You made choices,” my mother said to my father. “If you’re not happy with your life, you can choose to make it different. That’s what I did. I chose to come back to you, and I can choose differently.”
A Jazz Age band was on loud and jumping The TV was on, too, and Sara was hunched up in front of it, doing a crossword puzzle with one hand pressed against her ear to shut out the jazz.
“Choices! Choices! What choices do you make when you’re fifty years old? What choice did I have then with a baby to feed and another one coming and another one after that? I had to take what they gave me!”
His voice was pleading, but his rumpusing music mocked us all. Sara made a fist of her ear-blocking hand, muttering curses and gripping her hair as if to tear it out.
“She also means choices inside yourself about how you handle things,” I said. “Like you can let the people at work upset you or you can—”
We spent the night going from bar to bar. Wherever we went, Miles took Polaroid pictures of whoever was in front of us; a well-dressed middle-aged woman with wild eyes and a tough shiny nose; a sleek redhead in a T-shirt with a hairy grinning rat on it; a very blond man in a black shirt and thick black glasses, standing ramrod-straight and looking weird on purpose. I noticed Miles didn’t choose anyone too fashionable or too beautiful. He was going for real. The real women tried to look sexy. But there was uncertainty at the bottom of their eyes. Miles threw their pictures on the table with our drinks. I looked at a picture of a woman in a suit. Her clothing was rumpled; her forehead and nose shone with splotches of abnormal light. She was smiling like she believed “fun” was something that could be grabbed and held, and she was still trying very hard to grab it.
I went home in a taxi that cost one hundred dollars and walked the peopled gray beach behind El Sereno, feeling my aloneness. It did not feel bad. It felt like something hidden was slowly becoming visible. I thought of Joy, Cecilia, Candy, Jamie, Selina, Chris. They fell away from me like empty potato chip bags thrown from a car. Even Patrick. He was good, I thought, but now he’s finished. And I pictured throwing away an empty milk shake container. These thoughts and images scared me. I could not believe I was really like that. I thought of Veronica. Here there was a change. Veronica did not fall away or seem finished. She seemed to go on forever, all the way down into the ground. I asked myself why and was answered immediately. Her pain was so deep that she had become deep, whether she liked it or not. Maybe deeper than any human being can bear to be.
She was in shock, and because she was heavily medicated, she kept dropping her knitting needles and her silverware. I had to cut her airline food into pieces for her. I poured her half a cup of water and she trembled so that she spilled it on herself anyway. The stewards and stewardesses rolled their eyes behind her back. They didn’t know about her son. They weren’t able to see her grief. They saw a fat old lady who kept screwing up, and they thought it was funny. One of them caught my eye and smirked, like I would think it was funny, too; I gave him such a look that he blanched and turned away. But the others kept giggling. I wanted to march down the aisle and make them stop/ But I pictured myself, skinny and prissy, shaking my finger and acting the good girl. I wasn’t the good girl. The old woman couldn’t see them anyway and would have had to put up with my climbing over her so that I could be the good girl.
If I remain baffled by the way some people seem able to blithely chuck away something I find so difficult to retain, it is not because I do not understand the rules of capitalism so much as I marvel at the hidden workings of the human mind. With the life’s work I’ve chosen and settled comfortably into, the writing and editing that sits at the centre of my world, moneymaking is less an objective goal as it is a scarce by-product. It preciousness waxes in proportion to the difficulty of its extraction. But watching people gamble firsthand, their dedication to it, the hours they put in as they empty their wallets and take their chances, I can’t help feeling that they’re in it to lose.
I have seen men and women at the blackjack tables itching to leave, batting away the real-world commitments constantly tugging at their sleeves – removing their wristwatch and placing it in a pocket – and watched them ‘push’ whatever money they had left onto their box, piling it high, wanting to lose, despair gnawing at them as the cards were dealt, their defeat a blessed release when it finally came.
chimes w the neil gaiman quote that i love so much
Slot machine players in particular seem to crave what the cultural critic Michael Crawford terms ‘automaticity’ – or a state of pure passivity in which they are at one with the machine, reactive, responsive, but no more than that; the whole of their sensorium shrunk down to a tiny forcefield. Press the button, or don’t. In such a state their gambling qualifies as ‘play’ only in a twisted fashion, in relying on an absorption born not of focus or concentration but its opposite: an alienation so profound they can no longer connect to the world. Once unplugged they empty themselves of everything.
They don’t care about the money any more. They know it’s hopeless.
I believe that losing, in this sense, triggers a kind of emetic impulse, a desire to vomit up one’s fears about the uncontrollable nature of the world and to purge oneself of deeply lodged hurts. In losing there can be tremendous relief, even rebirth, in that only once you have lost everything can you walk away and start over, or start again, living out the mundane reality of your life until the tension once more becomes unbearable. Winning is far more problematic, because there is responsibility in the win – what to do with all that money! It’s the opposite of release.
You want to lose. Out of what writers Frederick and Steve Barthelme, accounting for their own haemorrhaging losses at the tables, call a ‘unique despair’.
The thought is so powerful that it winds me. The gut punch comes from the way that gambling at full throttle turns losing into a species of self-harm. I think of my father and his roulette compulsion, and I wonder if behind his dapper and gregarious front he might have secretly reached the end of himself, too: the point at which however much luck he believed he owned, he had given up on hope. [...]
I didn’t write poetry or perform anything publically about my deafness for years because I didn’t think there was poetry in it. Deafness was something I was trying to look away from, something that stained my humanity. It didn’t deserve language, it didn’t belong in the ‘Perfect Species’ or the story I was trying to tell about myself. I didn’t know it could be written or asserted on the stage, and if it did, wouldn’t it be a self-pitying ploy? A novelty? How would I centre something about myself that I was actively resisting?
i like this
As the chapters in this book explain, private equity firms also hasten the “financialization” of the American economy through the increased power of banks and other financial institutions over companies that make and sell useful products and tangible goods. Today, the finance industry gets a quarter of all corporate profits, up from a tenth in the “greed is good” 1980s. At the same time, it employs just 5 percent of the country’s workforce and largely fails to deliver a useful product for many Americans: a quarter of households, for instance, don’t have access to a bank account. By controlling the operation of companies in the rest of the economy, private equity hastens this trend toward financial control.
crazy
Most private equity firms are paid on the 2-and-20 model: a 2 percent annual fixed fee on all the money it invests and 20 percent of all profits above a certain threshold. The United States taxes money made from investments—so-called capital gains—at a lower level than money made through ordinary labor, whether at a factory or in an office. The distinction is ambiguous and unfair, but even more so, private equity firms have convinced the IRS that their 20 percent income should be taxed at the lower capital gains rate than at the higher ordinary income rate.109 This means that many private equity executives often pay a lower effective tax rate than the retail employees, secretaries, and factory workers they employ. But the industry as a whole has fought hard, and successfully, to defend this imbalance.
Private equity firms use so-called management fee waivers to give more of their income this preferential treatment. Here, private equity firms waive some or all of their 2 percent management fee (which is taxed at a higher rate) in exchange for a priority claim on the profits earned (which is taxed at a lower rate). Through a variety of tactics, however, the firms virtually guarantee that they will make this money back.110 Some of the biggest firms—KKR, Apollo, and TPG Capital—used these fee-waiver provisions.111 Many of these schemes might violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. The IRS investigated fee waivers during the Obama administration but very little came of it. An audit of Thoma Bravo for use of the tactic, for instance, took four years and resulted in no actual adjustments to the company’s tax returns. In 2015, the Obama administration proposed regulations to bar the most aggressive forms of fee waivers. But nothing came of that either: the regulations were never finalized. Ultimately, both of President Obama’s treasury secretaries—Tim Geithner and Jack Lew—left the government to work for private equity firms.