Four bullets. He took four bullets, each one an occupational hazard. Or at least that’s how polite society would characterize them.

He was fine. Or as fine as you can be after getting shot. It was 2007-ish, which means I anyway wouldn’t have run any stoplights on the way to the hospital after I got the call. A fifth-a-day liquor habit meant always driving under one limit (the speed limit) to avoid being arrested for driving over another (the legal limit). I probably listened to NPR on the way, the soft monotone of “All Things Considered” belying the ostensible urgency of the moment. Maybe I smoked a Camel Turkish Gold. Probably.

The hospital scenes aren’t like you see in the movies or on TV. Adriana La Cerva’s not crying her cake makeup onto one of three Paulies fretting in a waiting room, and Enzo the baker’s not there. Nobody’s there, actually, except for a disappointed (but unsurprised and usually single) parent, a (typically condescending) doctor and, almost invariably, cops.

I don’t know why, but I remember the sun that day. I was sitting in the corner of the room in one of those impossibly hard plastic hospital chairs. I turned my head and it came shrieking in at an angle from behind the blinds. I winced and shifted one chair down in a row of three, landing on a magazine (People or whatever) which I pulled out from under me and pretended to read while two very white detectives with God only knows how many shot-black men under their belts between them, played pin-the-crime-on-the-victim with my friend.

“What were you doing down there in the first place?”

“I be down there all the time. Got folk down there. Ain’t never had nothin’ like this happen. And I ain’t even never seen them dudes before.”

“Which one haven’t you seen before?”

“Sh-t, neither of ’em.”

“So you have no idea who these guys were? No idea at all about who just shot you or why?”

“Naw. Guess they wanted money.”

“So you had money on you? How about a white Altima? That ring a bell? Help us out here, man. You don’t want the guys who did this to you off the stree–?”

“I’on want no man locked up. Cause bein’ honest wit you, if my little girl need diapers, I’m probbly crashin’ out too. It’s like — what you call it? — law o’ the jungle and sh-t.” (I cringed, scrunching my eyebrows between my thumb and forefinger.)

“So you did have money on you? How about jewelry? Any drugs?”

Silence. Golden silence.

They pressed on. “Do you want what just happened to you to happen to somebody else?”

“I ain’t say all dat.”

“Well they’re still out there walking around.”

Annoyed, and more than a little day drunk, I interjected, but without looking up from my gossip rag: “For now.”

“How’s that?” They hadn’t paid me any mind until then other than to marvel (“You’re a friend?”) at the peculiarity of what, in the deep south, was an odd scene: A white man in a hospital room where a black man lay shot.

“For now. They’re still walking around for now.”

“What’s that mean?” Now they were more interested in the discrepant white well-wisher than the shooting victim. “What’s that mean?”

I looked up and shrugged: “Guys like that — you know, violent criminals — life tends to be nasty, brutish and short for them. It’s Hobbes.”

One of them scribbled on a pad. I smirked.

“This is funny?” the other one asked, gesturing at my friend.

“No, it’s just — I don’t think Hobbes is your man.”

There’s no such thing as natural selection with indemnity. No inalienable rights in the jungle. No church in the wild.

If Social Darwinism isn’t completely discredited (and it generally is), it’s completely indecorous, unseemly, indecent and, on most interpretations, unacceptable and even immoral. First know that.

If, knowing that, you’re still determined to espouse some version of Social Darwinism, at least have the intellectual propriety not to carve out an exception for yourself (and your ilk) by delimiting the terms “strength” and “weakness,” then stacking the deck such that you’re always in the “evolutionary” winner’s circle.

What is Social Darwinism, and why am I talking about it? In a nutshell, Social Darwinism is the application of natural selection to social contexts. Wait. Let me back up and tweak that. It’s the misapplication of natural selection to social contexts, and in that respect it’s an example — probably the most famous example — of our insistence on the self-evidently false notion that soft sciences can be transformed into hard ones with enough skill and effort.

I’m talking about it because in the aftermath of the pandemic, voters across Western democracies, and particularly in the US, appeared to reach a breaking point with spiraling inequality, which on some metrics was already approaching Belle Époque extremes. Calls for redistribution — demands that the rich “pay their fair share” — have rarely been louder in modernity, and the rich are uncomfortable with the decibel level. One defense mechanism entails explaining why a situation which seems absurd on its face is actually preferable, for the best and anyway decreed by science and nature.

The figure below uses data from the World Inequality Database to illustrate the long-term arc and trajectory of wealth and income inequality in the US. Fiscal income, you’ll note, is the total of all income items on tax returns, before deductions. National income is a measure of total income available to the residents of a given country.

Since 1980, which is to say since America convinced itself that tax cuts, deregulation and the shameless prioritization of stockowners’ interests over those of all other corporate stakeholders, was the surest path to economic prosperity, all three of the metrics illustrated above have doubled, or nearly so.

Many readers will recognize those statistics as the handy work of Thomas Piketty, as well as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, arguably, the only modern economics volume with a place in the canon. In addition to a lot of fame, accolades and, most probably, money, the book earned Piketty a claim on a seat in a pantheon which hasn’t welcomed any new members in decades. Economics is a profession which hadn’t produced a thinker on par with the greats in half a century, at least. The notion that one of their contemporaries should sit next to the likes of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes was simply too much to bear for a famously hubristic group of academics (economists), many of whom were, and remain, overcome with covetous resentment towards Piketty.

Unable to stake their own claim on notoriety, or in many cases even to write something worth reading, Piketty’s detractors set about clout-chasing, which is to say they endeavored to make a name for themselves by using his name. And so it was that a cottage industry was born: Refuting Piketty, typically by quibbling with his math, became its own strand of economics.

To be sure, you can take issue with Piketty’s math and methodology, and as a pedant myself, I’m highly sympathetic to the idea that more precision’s always better, and that if someone’s found to be derelict in their methods, or they resort repeatedly to ad hominem when responding to critiques of their methods, that’s a person who’s probably not worth taking serious. (Present company and his occasional recourse to ad hominem excluded, of course.)

That said, I’m a big believer in the notion that there are experiential thresholds for phenomena beyond which denying their existence, or demanding additional proof beyond what’s plain for everyone to see, is to persist in a kind of deliberately ignorant obstinacy which, depending on the phenomenon in question, imperils the species. The best example of that is climate change. It’s not a coincidence that Piketty has equated his detractors with climate deniers, nor is it surprising that the duly indicted charge Piketty with being a crusading, obdurate ideologue (the same charges leveled by climate deniers against climate activists).

After considering the evidence in its totality, and being myself on the right side of Piketty’s famous inequality equation, I can confidently say that all laborious efforts to disparage, dismantle and disprove his methods, series and math, respectively, the thrust of his work is as irrefutable as global warming: Inequality is, by and large, growing, and generally speaking, it’s the most extreme today since the Gilded Age. The disaffected masses have had enough of it, and the rich are at pains to justify the unjustifiable, and also the unjust.

In a testament to how topical this really is among the rich, Howard Marks — the billionaire distressed debt investor who periodically commits his internal monologue to the written word — spent quite a bit of time a few weeks back explaining why the figure below is just the natural way of things in a capitalist economy operating largely unfettered, if not unfettered enough for folks like Marks.

The top 0.1% of American society — 133,168 households — controlled about $21 trillion in wealth as of September 2024, while the bottom 50% — 66,450,228 households — controlled less than $4 trillion between them.

It gets better, or worse depending on how you want to look it. When you dig down into the distribution of wealth within the 0.1%, you discover that just over 800 people (the number of billionaires the US boasts) control $5.7 trillion by themeselves. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it, “when ~800 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.”

Yes, a “very serious problem,” and as much as I’d hate to offend a billionaire or, worse, Mother Nature in the event she actually did decree such a skewed distribution, a system in which just 800 people, a group that happily includes the above-mentioned Marks, own far more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of American society combined, seems somehow less than “natural.”

The closer you look, the more cartoonish it gets. In a short 2022 paper, the above-mentioned Saez and Zucman noted that in the US, the share of total household wealth controlled by the top 0.0001% has multiplied tenfold since 1982. There are just 18 (that’s eighteen) tax units in that cohort. The wealth concentrated in their hands “has increased particularly fast” post-pandemic, Saez and Zucman wrote, adding that as a consequence, “the ratio of wealth to national income doubled from less than three in the late 1970s to over six in 2021.”

In his September memo, Marks didn’t explicitly defend extreme levels of inequality like those illustrated and described above (in a 2020 memo, he actually decried them), but he did explicitly equate capitalism with evolutionary biology. “Darwin described the way species are strengthened through what is known as ‘survival of the fittest,'” Marks wrote. “It works, and species evolve upward.”

The term “survival of the fittest” actually didn’t originate with Charles Darwin, although his work obviously inspired it. That famous phrase comes from Herbert Spencer, the godfather of Social Darwinism who coined it in his 1864 tome Principles Of Biology. Here’s Spencer to explain:

[I]f the individuals of a species are… necessarily made unlike, in countless ways and degrees, then among the individuals, some will be less liable than others to have their equilibria overthrown by a particular incident force [and] it cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces will be those to die. [T]his survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest [a]nd the continual destruction of the individuals that are the least capable of maintaining their equilibria. This survival of the fittest… is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection.’

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published in 1859. The phrase “survival of the fittest” showed up in the sixth edition — the last edition over which Darwin personally presided — published over a decade later.

It’d be incorrect to call Spencer a villain, and indeed he was a veritable celebrity in his time. But there’s a reason you don’t find him in the canon with Smith, Marx, Keynes, Piketty and so on, despite his (Spencer’s) synonymity with laissez-faire. Think of Social Darwinism as a gateway drug. One day you’re toking up in a dorm room with a couple of friends waxing philosophic about liberty and free markets, the next thing you know, you’re in a Bavarian beer hall listening to a failed painter high on meth sermonizing about eugenics.

The principal problem with Social Darwinism is what’s often referred to as the naturalistic fallacy, which makes the somewhat pedestrian observation that just because some outcome can be attributed, however loosely, to the tenets of evolutionary biology, doesn’t mean that outcome’s “right,” and it certainly doesn’t bestow any sort of moral legitimacy on the otherwise illegitimate.

I’ll steer clear of that argument though, being as I am avowedly agnostic about normative statements. I want to argue, rather, that Marks and the billionaire class are actually the antithesis of the very process they claim drives human progress.

Marks in September extolled the evolutionary virtues of free market forces which “requir[e] people to fend for themselves.” Redistributive policies are a “contravention” of those forces, he said. So, on Marks’s telling, welfare recipients and anyone who avails themselves of government programs designed to “even out citizens’ incomes and quality of life,” as he put it, is an affront to biology and an impediment to social progress. Maybe he’d word it differently, but that’s a corollary of his general assessment which, again, is just Spencer re-heated. It’d be better, Marks went on to intimate, if free markets were allowed to run mostly unimpeded so that the “collective economic welfare of society is maximized.”

It’s pretty rich (no pun intended) for a billionaire to argue on the utilitarian merits for a conjuncture that finds a few hundred people lording it over hundreds of millions. You can certainly make the case — as the rich generally do — that were it not for the system of capitalist incentives which enriched the few, the masses wouldn’t enjoy anywhere near the quality of life we take for granted across the developed world. But the sheer blatant absurdity of appealing to utilitarianism to justify concentrating more wealth in the hands of several dozen individuals than 77 million households seems completely lost on Marks.

Many readers have likely come across some of the statistics from Oxfam’s widely-cited 2023 inequality report, but they’re worth recapping all the same. Over the last decade, the world’s richest — the billionaires — saw their worth double, a windfall that sextupled the wealth increase which accrued to the bottom half of the globe over the same period. During that 10-year stretch, nearly $55 of every $100 of wealth created went to the top 1%, while just ¢70 — that’s 70 cents — went to the bottom 50%. From 2020 through 2022, billionaires gained $1.7 million for every dollar the bottom 90% gained. There are a lot of adjectives you might use to describe those statistics, but I’m not sure “utilitarian” works.

Oxfam’s 2024 report brought more good news for the rich. Over the last four years, the richest five men on Earth saw their net worth rise from a “measly” $405 billion to $870 billion. The figure below paints an even more dramatic picture: If you go back and calculate the rough net worth of today’s five richest men on December 31, 2019 (i.e., on the eve of the worst public health crisis in a century), you get $384 billion, give or take. As of October 31, 2024, that figure was $1.05 trillion.

Some might suggest that comparison’s distorted by the rise of Elon Musk to the top of the ranks, but that begs the question. The whole point is to illustrate the exponential process by which the richest are becoming gods.

Over that same period, five billion people around the world saw their combined wealth fall. As the 2024 Oxfam report helpfully noted, “if the wealth of the five richest billionaires continues to rise at the same rate as it has over the last five years, we will see the first trillionaire in 10 years [but] will not eliminate poverty for 230 years.”

Is this all just the natural way of things? Nature selecting out the weak, so that the species can be purified and distilled down to the richest 500 or 50 or even five people, who can then procreate (or clone themselves) into a race of superior beings? Spoiler alert: No. Even a cursory inspection plainly suggests spiraling inequality is the result of a system in which those who control the wealth protect it not through fair competition with those who might seize it, but through government capture, tax loopholes, a dizzying hodgepodge of artificial barriers and, ultimately, recourse to the state’s monopoly on coercion.

Call that what you will — I’d call it a plutocracy — and argue as you might that a precondition for organized society is the ceding to government exclusivity on the legitimate use of violence — but don’t call it survival of the fittest. Maybe it’s fair to include artifice and all its synonyms in the definition of “fitness,” but if you’re going to count contrivance, it’d be odd to exclude the purest manifestation of human strength: Brute, physical force.

If the rich are allowed to resort to bribes (e.g., lobbying), creative accounting (e.g., tax evasion) and legalized segregation to protect, preserve and perpetuate their wealth and position at the top of the food chain, why can’t someone without the financial means to compete leverage what’s available to them (e.g., superior physical attributes) to even the odds? The rich have recourse to property rights and the state’s monopoly on force in the event the physically superior try to seize what’s “rightfully” theirs, but what recourse do the downtrodden masses whose opportunity set is unnaturally circumscribed by a rigged system have against the rich?

How do the rich rig the system? Let us count the ways. The most obvious is the tax code which, notwithstanding the wailing protestations of the people who benefit most from a regime that’s laughably regressive in places, protects the mega-rich “as if [they] were spotted owls or some other endangered species,” as Warren Buffett put it, in a famous 2011 Op-Ed for The New York Times. He’d know, and indeed that was the point of the Op-Ed: It was a showy, and I’d argue disingenuous, “take it from me” exhortation to the government, which he followed up a year later with another Times editorial proposing a minimum tax on very high incomes.

It was a nice sentiment from Buffett, but as Saez and Zucman were keen to remind anyone somehow unapprised, “As long as Jeff Bezos, Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg [and other billionaires] do not sell their stock, their realized income is going to be minuscule relative to their wealth and true economic income.” Indeed, they went on, Buffett’s adjusted gross income from 2010 to 2015 was “in the tens of millions” even as his wealth was is in the tens of billions.

Consider this: When Buffett wrote his 2012 editorial, the combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans — the “Forbes 400” — was $1.7 trillion. The class of 2024 on the same Forbes list was worth $5.4 trillion, a near tripling in 12 years. If you start at the top, you don’t even get out of the top 10 names on Bloomberg’s global billionaires list before you eclipse the $1.7 trillion America’s richest 400 were worth in 2012.

Should the unrealized gains behind that exponential wealth creation process be taxed? Probably, and you needn’t be any sort of social crusader to understand why. Yes, unrealized capital gains are “just paper gains” (as the critique goes) but as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities dryly put it, “Claiming that unrealized gains are not ‘real’ is akin to claiming that individuals such as Bezos and Musk are not rich,” and anyway, if Bezos and Buffett and Musk don’t have to pay taxes on their unsold stock, why do you and me have to pay taxes on our unsold homes?

If you’re wondering what the distribution for unrealized gains might look like, the figure below — which shows that distribution for realized, long-term capital gains in 2022 — gives you a good idea.

Households making $1 million or more accounted for almost $7 of every $10 in long-term capital gains. That figure for the “bottom” 80% (and here you’d be “bottom” if you didn’t make at least $183,000) is just ¢90.

“Because of deferral, wealthy households only report a small share of their total capital income on their tax returns,” Chuck Marr wrote, in the September CBPP article mentioned above, adding that “without policy changes, much of [this wealth] might never appear on income tax returns.”

As for what tiny share does get reported, it’s treated favorably. For example, there’s no Social Security tax on investment income, which is nice if you have a lot of it — a lot of investment income, I mean. Poor people have none, almost literally. The bottom 50% of American society owns just 1% of the nation’s equity wealth.

Buffett’s Berkshire has nearly as much cash in the bank as the bottom 50% of America owns in stocks between them. It’s an apples to oranges comparison, of course, but it’s remarkable all the same. Don’t let the repetitive nature of these statistics desensitize you to the starkness of the divide: That figure compares the combined value of all the stocks held by 67 million households to the T-bill holdings of one man‘s insurance company-turned hedge fund conglomerate.

Running quickly through a few more ways the rich are “showered” with tax blessings, to employ Buffett’s apt description from the 2011 Times piece, the rich famously pay almost nothing in payroll taxes when you calculate their effective rate, which is to say when you account for their total earnings.

According to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, taxpayers earning $1 million or more had an average employment tax rate of just 1.9% in 2022. As the chart below shows, that figure for the lowest income cohort was more than 14%.

Basically, if the vast majority of your earnings come from something other than working, payroll taxes are negligible. As Buffett put it 13 years ago, “if you earn money from a job, your [tax rate] will surely exceed mine, most likely by a lot.” “You can be sure,” he continued, that “any payroll tax” for the richest Americans is “inconsequential compared to [their] income.” In 2022, the $1 million and up category shown above was the only income bucket where long-term capital gains exceeded wages.

Tying some of that together, the rich were done paying into Social Security for 2024 just two months in. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research pointed out, the cap for income subject to Social Security’s payroll tax was $168,600 this year. So, someone making a million dollars would’ve hit the limit in early March. “This means a millionaire’s effective tax rate is less than 1% and they aren’t required to pay anything for their unearned investment income,” an irritable-sounding research assistant wrote. “The burden of paying for Social Security rests on working class people in this country.” The implication is that, as Connecticut Democrat John Larson noted, “a CEO with a $20 million annual salary stopped paying into Social Security just three days into 2024.”

Of course, cutting corporate taxes serves to amplify these dynamics through any number of channels. “In high-income countries, falling rates of tax on corporations have coincided with a period in which a rising share of income is going to the top 1%,” Oxfam wrote in this year’s inequality report, titled “Inequality Inc.” In other words, it’s not a coincidence that ever lower corporate tax rates coincided with ever worsening inequality and a veritable explosion of wealth at the very top of the pyramid, where the CEOs and founders of the world’s largest companies sit. “Evidence shows that corporate taxes are progressive and they are borne disproportionately by the richest people [which] means the collapse in corporate tax in recent decades has essentially provided another huge tax cut for the richest people in the world,” the same report went on, citing, among other things, The Triumph of Injustice, a well-regarded 2020 volume by Saez and Zucman. (If you’re interested, Bezos will sell it to you in any format you like for prices ranging from $0.99 to $16.51.)

I could go on (there are offshore tax havens), and on (there’s carried interest) and on and on. So could many of you if asked to regale an audience will all the ways the tax system’s set up to benefit the rich and the corporations they run. The most important point for our purposes here, though, is that this isn’t some natural process that came about as a result of “evolution.” Rather, it’s a system that’s bought, paid for and maintained by the people to whom the benefits accrue. Government capture’s endemic, and it’s a feature not a bug.

According to a 2009 article published in The Journal Of Law And Politics, $1 of lobbying money spent in connection with a tax holiday on repatriated earnings generated $220 for corporates, a 22,000% return on investment. The authors gently called that “compelling evidence that lobbying expenditures have a positive and significant ROI.” In 2008, an article published in the American Journal Of Political Science found that a 1% increase in lobbying expenditures “lowered effective tax rates by somewhere in the range of 0.5 to 1.6ppt for the average firm that lobbies.” Not too bad. In arguing for a minimum tax on high incomes, Buffett decried “the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultra-rich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours.” He called lobbyists “warriors for the wealthy.”

This setup is self-fulling at every turn, and in exponential fashion. It creates higher and higher walls between the rich and everyone else, and in doing so, it insulates the rich from the very dynamics that Marks and his ilk claim as a justification for their positions at the top of the social pyramid. This is what’s meant by the derisive phrase “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.” “Corporate welfare” is a related term. The masses are expected to toil and compete in something akin to a Darwinian survival contest, while the rich are safe behind the barriers they’ve erected with the help of the governments they’ve bought.

In the hours after Donald Trump was reelected on November 5, the ten richest people in the world, a group that includes several billionaires who’ve made a point of endearing themselves to Trump, saw their combined net worth rise by $64 billion in a single day, according to Bloomberg. Musk, who’s poised for an official role in the new Trump administration, saw his on-paper wealth jump by $50 billion in the 72 hours after Trump swept to a second term. As Buffett put it, “It’s nice to have friends in high places.”

In 2020, Howard Marks struck a somewhat different tone on inequality in America, and particularly on racial inequality. Aghast, apparently, at the death of George Floyd, Marks said his heart breaks for black “teenagers denied a quality education, who can’t think of things to hope for or can’t imagine their dreams.” It’s terrible, he said, that fathers have to tell their sons to ‘”yes sir’ the police” lest they should be shot. It’s tragic, he went on, that some workers in the pandemic didn’t “have the luxury of ensuring safety by socially isolating.”

While apologizing to black America in June of 2020, Marks had an epiphany: The proverbial “rising tide that lifts all boats” was “no longer rising as strongly.” As he put it, “the advantages enjoyed by those with education or capital are being magnified and the inequality of outcomes is simply no longer acceptable.” What happened, one wonders, to that Howard Marks? Because that’s not the same Howard who said, in September, that Darwin should decide. The “cold-blooded process through which the strong thrive and the weak perish” is, Marks wrote a few weeks ago, without so much as a hint of the empathy he employed during the pandemic, “good for the whole of the species, but not for every member.”

There’s something profoundly ironic about the application of Darwin to social contexts, and particularly those in which one group — the rich — sets about establishing a system which perpetually, and by design, deals a winning hand to the very few while stacking the deck hopelessly against the many whose only recourse (to force) is blunted by an all-powerful government which wields its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence most often, and most zealously, in the service of protecting the thing most conspicuously absent in a Hobbesian state where natural selection could, in theory, run truly unimpeded: Property rights.

It’s worth noting that Hobbes’s war of “all against all” is a feral, perpetual melee. You could argue that if there’s never a break in the skirmish, natural selection wouldn’t have a chance to work its magic, given that notwithstanding meaningful differences in physical attributes and mental acuity, we’re all just humans, and any one of us is generally capable of killing any other at any given time. A more realistic version of a natural state is one defined by plodding amoral competition (the iterative process through which natural selection takes place), not fast-paced, abject chaos.

In a 2009 article published in Genetics, H Allen Orr wrote that, “Taken to their extreme, Darwinian defenses of laissez-faire capitalism shade into arguments for full-blown Social Darwinism of the sort often associated with Spencer: Competition in human society may be ruthless but it is natural, inevitable and defensible scientifically.” That, in essence, was Marks’s argument in September. But there’s an internal contradiction, and a rather glaring one at that. In laissez-faire capitalism, property rights are sacrosanct, but capitalists ultimately depend on the very sort of state intervention they pretend to despise to guarantee those rights. It’s competition, but with recourse and rules.

Competition with rules isn’t survival of the fittest. Rather, competition with rules is just a game. And the game of American capitalism is hopelessly rigged. A natural state, by contrast, is no game. And the further down the social ladder you climb in America, the closer you get to a natural state. There are still opportunities to thrive and prosper economically, but you have to defend your property and your capital as you would in nature.

There’s no such thing as natural selection with indemnity. No inalienable rights in the jungle. No church in the wild.

We knew who they were, of course. And even if we didn’t, the city’s finest gave it away in the hospital room. Detectives have an incurable penchant for giving out more answers than they extract. In the projects, everyone knows everybody else by their car. “White Altima” was pretty specific.

“Hey!” She slid a coaster towards me and posed like Rodin’s Thinker, the blood orange star tattoo on her right elbow resting on the bar. “It’s — sh-t, I forgot.” “Aden.” “Ah! Right. Tip of my tongue. Whatcha havin’?” “Jack and Coke.” “Comin’ right up ‘hon.”

The two hooded sweatshirts beside me were 19, maybe 20. Not old enough to be at the bar, and clearly nervous about it. She put my drink on the coaster and introduced me. “Aden, these are your guys.” They eyed me warily. “Man, he old as hell.” She flicked her hair, shrugged and went about making drinks.

“She said you was in college,” the one closest to me smirked. “I’m a grad student,” I told him. He stared back blankly. I tried again: “I got a term paper due.” That seemed to register. “Oh so you tryin’ to stay up then?” I mustered my aw-shucks cadence: “You got it!” “What-the-f-ck-ever, how much you tryin’ to spend?” I pulled 10 twenties from my jacket pocket and reached it under the bar top. He snatched at it clumsily, eyed it long enough to surmise a sum and stuffed it in his jeans. He muttered something and the other one pulled out a plastic Easter egg and passed it to me. It was pink. This was uniquely silly, even as first rodeos go. “In here?” I asked.” “What the f–k do you think?” the one beside me snapped. “Alrighty, well thanks,” I reached out for a handshake. He swatted at the air and stood up. They gave me a final disapproving once over, and headed out the door to a white Nissan that looked like it had a rough life.

She watched them go and came back over. I passed her the egg. “In here?” she laughed. “I know.” “Why is it pink?” “I don’t know, just hurry.” She disappeared behind the wall of liquor, and reappeared a few seconds later. “It’s ours, right?” She nodded: “Yeah. There’s inositol or something on it, but it’s ours.” I tapped out a text on a flip phone. A gray Civic with an air-brushed Mexican flag front plate grumbled to life outside and idled. Eventually, the Altima’s lights came on and the trunk rattled with bass. They pulled away, obnoxious and surely oblivious to the Civic pulling out behind them.

She poured two shots of Hornitos and put one in front of me. “Aden, huh?” I chuckled. “You like it?” We clinked glasses and threw back the shots. “I don’t know, I can’t see you as an ‘Aden’,” she said. “Me neither.”

“Poor f-king kids,” I sighed. She scoffed: “We’re doin’ them a favor. You saw them, they won’t survive out here.” “So they’re gonna meet José and then — what? Go get day jobs?” She leaned in and put her index finger on my bottom lip: “They’ll know that if they already have day jobs, they shouldn’t quit them.” I laughed. My lip started to numb.

“And since when are you goin’ soft, anyway?” she gibed, pouring us another round of shots, and raising her glass: “To the law of the jungle!” I raised mine: “To Hobbes.”

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