Most of the guests were Benny’s dynastically wealthy high-school friends, whose parents cushioned their salaries with passive incomes, affording them the means to fill exciting, sub-living-wage positions at magazines and non-profits; invest in quality homeware from the windows of boutique stores; and, when they eventually met their timely, old-person deaths, to expire in the same private healthcare practices whence they’d long ago been born. I lived on minus money, in an overdraft that was almost overdrawn. On my mother’s deathbed, my main non-existential concern would still be rent.