Sixth sense (the iconoclast)

 

Casey’s an assistant manager at a supermarket chain in semi-rural South Carolina. And she gets it. Gets me I mean. Intuitively.

After so many years spent superimposing reinvented selves on past personas, intuition’s the only way to get me.

Though discarded at personal watersheds out of circumstantial necessity, my quondam identities still betray their traits. I’m not unique in being unique, of course. People’s lives are infinitely more textured than the reductionist biographies we reflexively pen when forming an initial impression, which is usually the only impression we conjure, the vast majority of our interactions being fleeting.

As Pulitzer prize winner Elizabeth Strout might put it, “everyone’s a world.” Being inherently and inwardly varied doesn’t put me in an exclusive club. Rather, my outward, and in most cases accidental, eclecticism seems to overwhelm the automatic mental process that collapses convoluted, multi-dimensional biographical collages into simple, flattened typecasts.

This looks ironic through a Kahnemanian lens. Intuition, after all, resides in the brain’s “System 1,” where mental shortcuts obviate the need to expend undue cognitive bandwidth. I reliably (and inadvertently) subject System 1 to brute force attacks, rendering most heuristics inadequate and compelling people to choose between engaging “System 2” (which Daniel Kahneman famously described as “lazy,” “slow” and reluctant) or writing me off as more trouble to comprehend than I’m likely worth. Most people naturally choose the latter.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of Western consumer culture is the extent to which it discourages true individualism by replacing free choice with free selection from a curated list of standardized aesthetics.

Wittingly or not, happily or otherwise, most of us acquiesce: We self-categorize from the list. The result is an assemblage of mass-market stereotypes, not a kaleidoscopic assortment of individually-conceived styles, even if the number of selections on offer is sufficiently large to create the illusion of differentiation.

The part of our brain that avails itself of aesthetic heuristics to instantaneously create biographical CliffsNotes for the people we run across relies very heavily on those standardized motifs. Lamentable as that is on many levels, it does work. The look we select does typically say something about us. It doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. Or even a fraction of it. But as self-selected, stylistic shorthand, it’s a reliable cue.

Try as I unconsciously might what with the low six figures I spent on designer ready-to-wear over the past five or so years, I don’t do especially well at exhibiting any standardized aesthetic. My closet looks more like what it is — the expensive costume collection of a man playing too many characters — than the accumulated misspendings of someone trying to emulate an LVMH photoshoot.

For out-of-town culinary excursions, my ensembles are deliberate. Not so much for everyday outings. In a lot of cases, the haphazard pairings don’t make much sense. A Charlie Brown Iceberg sweater with some Nike basketball pants and Chuck Taylors, for example. Or a Marni beanie with a plain Hanes t-shirt, some Celine jeans and loafers.

At the risk of trafficking in the preternatural, it’s a special, and seemingly rare, kind of intuition that’s able to ascertain me with minimal effort and no background information. Call it an aptitude for being in on someone else’s existential joke. Or just call it a sixth sense for the absurd. Casey has it in spades.

Aesthetically, she’s so anti-conformist that I don’t know how she was hired for a public-facing position of quasi-authority in a corporate environment. Her hair’s red (dyed deep crimson, not natural, orange “red”) and looks like it might be cut, by her, at home, with kitchen scissors. Her earlobes are gauged to comedic proportions, she wears a septum ring and has no eyebrows, which is to say she shaved them off completely, with a razor.

In the marketing world, the practice of packaging and selling “rebel” aesthetics to the masses is known as “commodifying uniqueness.” The irony’s so obvious as to be scarcely worth a mention: Rebellion ceases to be non-conformist the moment it’s commodified. That’s not Casey. Casey’s aesthetic is such that if she applied to work for Enfants Riches Déprimés, they might turn her down for being too much of an iconoclast.

The juxtaposition between such a genuinely irreverent personal aesthetic and the corporate dress code to which this young lady assiduously adheres in her role as an assistant manager, is a wonderful (and wondrous) thing to behold.

I’ve never spoken to her at any length. She knows nothing whatever about me. It’s that total lack of context which lends an air of clairvoyance to her unmistakably wry smile during our wonted, two-word exchange.

“Sup?” I inquire, when she invariably takes a break from managing the floor to bag my groceries. “Sup,” comes the sardonic repartee, always accompanied by a canny chin-up nod.

Mine aren’t the only groceries Casey bags. This particular supermarket chain — you’d know it if I named it — insists on a checkout setup no one likes. It’s one of those cramped cash wraps with no conveyor belt and virtually no space for scanned, but un-bagged, items. There are no dedicated baggers, which means if no Caseys are around to assist, customers have to choose between bagging their own groceries or forcing the clerks to bag as they go, lest the quantum of un-bagged items should exceed the capacity of the kiosk counter.

“I appreciate it,” an overweight, overburdened clerk said, as I busied myself bagging on my last trip. “Oh, don’t thank me,” I told her, looking around for Casey, who was apparently off, or anyway not on the floor that day. “Most people just watch it pile up and wait for me to do it,” she went on. “Well, I try to stay humble,” I said, oblivious that I’d just declared her a member of a lower socioeconomic caste.

I carried on, completely heedless: “I remind myself every day that I could just as easily be working here as shopping here.” If she was annoyed, she didn’t show it. “There but for the grace of God,” she said, recognizing, perhaps, that my superciliousness was inadvertent. “Indeed!” I affirmed, before whisking my $274 haul away and leaving her to another several hours of servitude.

It didn’t occur to me until hours later how unmindful my well-meaning pretensions to empathy must’ve seemed.

Groceries or Gucci

 

As far as the mundane goes, grocery shopping’s something I look forward to. Quite a bit, actually. There’s something gratifying, and excessively so, about loading a large cart down with sustenance such that the wheels wobble and creak under the weight, with nary a passing thought paid to the price of my haul. That’s luxury on a deeper, albeit not on a grander, scale than haute couture or an Italian sports car.

“Grocery freedom,” as it were, is the second rung on a metaphorical wealth ladder mentioned occasionally in discussions about the psychology of marginal spending decisions. Simply put: The richer you get in real terms, the more insignificant the cost of the things you buy will become as a share of your net worth.

As you move further along the real wealth continuum, the relative cost of things becomes so insignificant as to be trivial from a psychological perspective. At a certain point, everything‘s psychologically trivial, even things that carry stratospheric price tags. If you’re worth $100,000, groceries are psychologically trivial. If you’re worth $100 million, Ferraris are too.

But in addition to the chasmic price disparity (i.e., the quantitative difference) between an Italian sports car and a cart full of groceries, there’s an important qualitative difference: You need food, you don’t need a Ferrari. So-called “grocery freedom” is thus liberative in a way that the wherewithal to purchase super-cars or take a trip to the Amalfi Coast (or even just to order as you please at restaurants), isn’t.

A corollary says anything less than grocery freedom’s distinctively oppressive and made more so by the nature of the shopping experience itself, which entails making dozens of choices in the presence of scarcity. Not scarcity of available sustenance (or at least not in the developed world), but rather of available money.

Even in a better-case scenario where the choice isn’t “Milk or no milk?”, but rather “Store brand or Fairlife?”, every grocery trip’s tantamount to a resource allocation exercise. That, in turn, means that in addition to the price of the items themselves (the monetary cost) and the demoralizing effect of being reminded that you live on the margins, both figuratively and literally (the psychological cost), the shopper pays a cognitive capacity toll.

In behavioral economics, that cognitive toll’s known as a “bandwidth tax.” The most famous exposition of its deleterious effects comes from “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” a minor classic published in 2013 by Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics, electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and Eldar Shafir, a behavioral scientist and Guggenheim fellow who teaches at Princeton and serves as the inaugural director for the school’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy.

In the book’s second chapter, on financial scarcity, Mullainathan and Shafir show, among other things, that “raising monetary concerns for the poor erodes cognitive performance even more than being seriously sleep deprived.” You can immediately understand how this is self-fulfilling: If someone asked you to make a list of things that keep people up at night, money (or, more to the point, a lack thereof) would almost surely land somewhere near the top of your list.

In short, scarcity perpetuates scarcity. Bandwidth taxes tend to be cumulative, creating “ongoing cognitive deficits” which “reinforce self-defeating actions,” as Shafir put it, summarizing the research in a 2014 interview with the American Psychological Association. Those cognitive deficits are conducive to suboptimal decision-making and underperformance, which in turn conjure a false image of the poor as inherently less capable than the well-off.

In the book, Mullainathan and Shafir outline a study in which New Jersey mall-goers were presented with a question about a hypothetical car repair. In one version of the question, the repair cost $300, in another version $3,000. Participants were then administered a series of Raven’s Matrices problems, among the most widely-used tests of human intelligence. Respondents were put into income buckets based on self-reported household finances.

When the hypothetical car repair was $300, there was “no statistically significant difference between the rich and poor mall-goers” on the test outcomes. But when the cost of that repair was raised to $3,000, the less-well-off subjects suddenly underperformed. And badly so.

That’s a remarkable result given that the question was purely hypothetical. Or not. Perhaps it wasn’t remarkable precisely because the question isn’t really hypothetical for the poor.

The point is that the test scores weren’t picking up any actual difference in intelligence between well-to-do shoppers and less-affluent mall-goers. Rather, they were picking up the cognitive toll — the bandwidth tax. When the study question raised the cost of the car repair tenfold, “the all too real non-hypothetical thinking about scarcity [came] spilling out,” Mullainathan and Shafir explained. “Preoccupied by [that] scarcity, [the poor] had lower fluid intelligence scores.”

That finding has important ramifications for a meritocratic account of economic success or failure. At the very least, it hints at a role for circular causality in explaining why the well-off consistently make “better” decisions than the poor. Critics would argue the meritocracy narrative’s less convincing in proportion to how large that role is. Mullainathan and Shafir’s research is hardly alone in suggesting a lead part for scarcity dynamics in the macroeconomic play.

Although housing costs understandably garner what feels like the lion’s share of media coverage related to America’s overlapping affordability crises, an AP-NORC poll conducted in August of 2025 suggested groceries are actually a bigger, more acute concern.

In the survey, an alarming 53% described the cost of food as a “major” source of stress in their lives. Fully one-third said grocery bills were a “minor” stressor. (Those figures for housing costs were 47% and 27%, respectively.)

Consider those findings through the lens of Mullainathan and Shafir’s scarcity research. More than half American adults are subject to a very high cognitive bandwidth tax by way of their grocery bills. How’s that for regressive taxation?

Perhaps even more remarkably, just 20% of survey respondents making $100,000 or more per year said they don’t worry about grocery costs at all. That suggests the income threshold beyond which one attains true “grocery freedom” is considerably higher than $100,000. The median household income in America is $84,000. This kind of freedom — the freedom to ignore prices at the grocery store — is a privilege, not an “unalienable” right.

You could argue that’s as it should be as long as people aren’t being asked to go hungry or make tradeoffs that adversely affect their health or the health of their families. To use a stylized example, everyone may have a legitimate claim on affordable bread, but not necessarily on black truffle-infused olive oil.

But even there, the distinction’s not as bright-line as it appears at first glance. If luxury grocery items are a “reward” for being successful, but scarcity’s an impediment to success from an initial conditions, equality of opportunity perspective, then we have a chicken-egg dilemma. Suffice to say the meritocracy argument works best, and maybe only, when the juxtapositions are cartoonish — i.e., between $50 olive oil and $2 bread.

GenZ and younger Millennials are increasingly opting out of this debate as part of the “affordable luxuries” trend. Put as a question: What if you’re willing to go without bread, milk, bananas, cereal and maybe some other things too, particularly other luxury items like, say, a Gucci bag, if it means getting that black truffle olive oil?

“When people talk about luxury goods, they often mean high-end designer brands, [b]ut a new trend has emerged among the younger generation,” Delish, a website for food enthusiasts, wrote in a 2024 piece, editorializing around data from BofA, McKinsey, Vogue and Whole Foods which together evidences a “remarkable shift” in GenZ’s spending habits.

Grocery stores — not designer boutiques, not concert venues, not travel sites, not even restaurants, but supermarkets — are increasingly likely to show up near the top of the list when it comes to where GenZ and younger Millennials are inclined to “splurge.” As Delish put it, “for people who can’t afford traditional luxury items, groceries are becoming the ultimate status symbol.”

Earlier this month, while working out the logistics of a culinary tour that’ll find me dining at one of The New York Times‘s 50 best restaurants in America, I stumbled, figuratively, into a doctor’s office waiting room, where my long-time accomplice G. was updating her patient information forms.

“Why the fuck does the paperwork ask about groceries now?” she wondered. “Oh, that’s the SDOH screening. It’s to be sure inflation isn’t starving people,” I told her. “But it is!!!” she replied. “I got a bag of quinoa and two heirloom tomatoes the other day and paid $23!!!”

Interlude (the riverbank)

 

Another day wandering the banks of the Styx. How long’s it been? 15 years now, I reckon. Gotta be. I stopped counting at 11 when a swell washed away the tally I kept on a sandbar, but it feels like I’ve done half that again easy — even with allowances for how slowly time passes when you’re engaged in drab monotony.

The shoreline’s not much to see, and that’s putting it nicely. In places, Cormac McCarthy might’ve consulted on the set design. “The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions.” And the grey monochrome: That’s just oppressively dismal.

All deliberate, I guess. But if there were a complaint box (and there really should be, the accommodations being objectively insufficient, even for limbo), I’d suggest the post-apocalypse motif’s a bit gratuitous.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for The French Riviera. But this isn’t a jail. It’s a waiting room. The fact that I have to pace this matted waterfront for a century isn’t punishment for my (admittedly manifold) sins, it’s an administrative consequence of a procedural oversight. I died, whoever performed my funerary rites forgot to send me off with cab fare and Charon… well, he’s a stickler: “No coin, no ride.”

Sure, I’ll probably be condemned to Tartarus. But it seems unfair I should have to suffer this bleak, featureless expanse in the meantime without so much as a six-month-old copy of People magazine to read.

Maybe it’s karma. For bleeding people dry. Maybe the person who found me dead didn’t have an obol to spare.

Gunslingers and Goyard

 

On May 30, 2017, then Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele debuted a new cruise collection at sunset in Florence, where the house was founded nearly a century previous.

Among the more than 100 ensembles in the lookbook from that evening was a fur bomber jacket with exaggerated balloon sleeves monogrammed in the iconic double-G “web.”

Brooklyn-born Olympic gold medalist Diane Dixon wasn’t amused. “”Bish’ stole my look!” she exclaimed, on social media. “Give credit to Dapper Dan. He did it first!”

She was referring to legendary Harlem haberdasher Daniel Day who, in the 1980s, outfitted gangsters and hip-hop pioneers (among other eager customers) in bespoke apparel made from, initially anyway, authentic European luxury accessories.

Operating out of his 125th Street atelier, Day refashioned (figuratively and literally) luggage, leather goods and even garment bags from the world’s most celebrated fashion houses to create what were, in effect, authentic knockoffs.

One of those pieces was a fur coat featuring balloon sleeves made from Louis Vuitton’s famous coated canvas. Day designed it for Dixon in 1989, nearly three decades before Michele unveiled what The New York Times aptly described as a “reappropriati[on] of the appropriation.”

Facing a social media uproar, Gucci conceded the glaringly obvious: Michele’s piece was indeed inspired by Day’s creation for Dixon. As Gucci put it in an obliquely apologetic statement, Michele’s coat was “an homage to the work of the renowned Harlem tailor Daniel ‘Dapper Dan’ Day.” For good measure, the house added that the coat should be considered “a celebration of the culture of that era in Harlem.”

Just months later, Gucci announced an official collaboration with Day, which the house marked with an elaborate rollout, including a podcast and an Ari Marcopoulos photoshoot of the special collection modeled by “young faces from Harlem.”

These days, Gucci’s website features a section dedicated to Dapper Dan’s “original boutique,” as the house lovingly describes the shop Fendi once sued out of business. Ironically, Fendi was represented in that pivotal litigation by none other than Sonia Sotomayor, who at the time was an intellectual property attorney. (Day represented himself. It didn’t go well. Fendi won an injunction, Day’s shop was raided and his equipment confiscated.)

To call Dapper Dan a trailblazer in the context of what’s today known as luxury “logomania” would be about like describing Daniel Boone as a pioneer of the American frontier. That is: The relation’s nearly one of synonymity.

Day didn’t just anticipate the 21st century’s most ubiquitous luxury fashion trend — transforming heritage house monograms into an ever-expanding array of logo-heavy, ready-to-wear apparel — he created it with his own two hands. Put another way, Dapper Dan invented “loud luxury,” the standardized aesthetic embraced today from hip-hop video sets to white suburbia and back again.

Gucci’s embrace of Day in 2017 was a watershed moment. It wasn’t the first time a storied fashion house emulated counterculture, but the reciprocal nature of the appropriation broke the fourth wall, to borrow a theatric metaphor. European luxury was officially in business with a culture it traditionally shunned even while obliquely referencing its motifs. The taboo was lifted. The floodgates were open.

The very next year, architect-turned-luxury streetwear entrepreneur Virgil Abloh was named artistic director at Louis Vuitton. Abloh wasn’t the first African American to helm creative at a French luxury house — he was preceded in that regard by Olivier Rousteing at Balmain and Ozwald Boateng at Givenchy — but the appointment of a black streetwear designer to such a senior role at a Big Four house was a historic coup. Abloh, who interned at Fendi a decade prior, quickly became an icon. Tragically, he died of cancer in 2021 at just 41 years old.

Abloh’s successor was none other than super-producer and fashionophile Pharrell Williams, who took over the men’s creative role at Louis on Valentine’s Day in 2023. As a hip-hop producer, it’s impossible to overstate Williams’s influence. With the exception of Andre Young and Kanye West, you’d be hard-pressed to name someone who’s had a bigger influence on contemporary rap. But neither Young nor West can claim Williams’s cultural relevance beyond the hip-hop world. Pharrell is, simply put, one of the most beloved musicians of our time, and an international celebrity that meets any definition of “A-list.”

Across nearly 30 years in the music business, Williams, known in rap circles as “Skateboard P,” among other monikers, lent his creative genius to countless acts often to magical effect. One of those acts is the Virginia rap duo Clipse, comprised of Gene Thornton and his younger brother Terrence, better known by their stage names, Malice and Pusha T.

With Williams’s help, the Thornton brothers turned cocaine rap into an art form. In contrast to their Atlanta-based contemporaries, Clipse’s tales of drug-running were rendered with grammatic precision. As The Guardian put it, of the younger Thornton, “Pusha could run a finishing school for those looking to transfer from the dope game to public speaking engagements or voiceover work. Each track is an elocution lesson.”

In a full-circle moment for the ages, Clipse’s coke-dusted 2025 reunion album (the elder brother stepped away from the rap scene for over a decade, during which he pursued spirituality) was recorded entirely on-site at the Louis Vuitton headquarters in Paris, where fashion illustrators and seamstresses created new Louis garments while serenaded by the Thornton brothers. Pusha, who’s now a brand ambassador for Louis, captured the collaboration as only he can: “C-L-I-P, S-E-et P, 8ball LV.”

On September 13, 2025, Clipse became the first rap act in history to perform at the Vatican. “Street gospel in the holy city,” as Vibe put it. Those familiar with the group’s catalogue were whisked back to 2006 when, on the critically-acclaimed, Pharrell-produced, Hell Hath No Fury, Pusha rapped, “Open the Frigidaire, twenty-five to life in here, So much white you might think your holy Christ is near.” An elocution lesson indeed.

Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes, Prada, Loewe, Bottega Veneta and others, still emphasize their roots as purveyors of fine leather goods and accessories, of course. Handbags and luggage remain a cornerstone of their businesses. The Birkin bag endures as the Holy Grail of high fashion.

But the inescapable reality in the 2020s is that European luxury owes its cultural pervasiveness at least in part to the product mix shift anticipated decades ago by Dapper Dan. The aggressive expansion into everyday clothing — from t-shirts to hoodies, from tracksuits to bomber jackets, from jeans to sneakers — was the Rosetta Stone which translated heritage brands into everyday status symbols.

Because the desire to attain and convey status cuts across demographics, European luxury’s now part and parcel of an almost communal aesthetic. A soccer mom at Whole Foods may wear the same Gucci tracksuit as a drug dealer, and an otherwise hypermasculine rapper might carry the same Bottega bag as a dainty debutante.

Even houses which stick assiduously to their roots are finding it difficult to buck the trend. Goyard, which has a limited “textiles” offering but nothing approaching a ready-to-wear category, this year began allowing consumers to buy a limited number of its items online. That wasn’t an easy decision for the maison. Rather, it was a grudging concession. In an effort to avoid increasing the supply of pre-owned Goyard goods for sale on the second-hand market, all online purchases require customization with the buyer’s initials. So, if you’re Tom Smith and you want to resell your Goyard Victoire wallet, you’ll need to find another “TS.” Or someone who doesn’t mind being “TS” when they’re checking out at the grocery store.

My nephew just graduated from high school. He’s not really my nephew. But we’re “brothers,” his dad and I. In spirit at least. So I’ve been “Uncle C.” since his mother and father brought him home from the hospital to a townhouse adjacent to the one I was renting at the time.

I sent him an E-gift card for some Jordans, but I haven’t given him a proper graduation gift yet. “Do you think he’d wear that Dolce&Gabbana sling bag?” I asked my brother. “If he would, I’ll bring it with me to dinner.”

That dinner, on July 10, will be the first time I’ve shared a table with both my brother and G., the downstream linchpin of our bygone racket, since the glory days of our operation. It’s a reunion. A lavish repast.

“You know he’ll wear whatever you wear, C.,” came the reply. “But he ain’t gon’ appreciate something like that.” “He might!” I said. “Belt bags are a big deal. And this is a damn nice one.” “You don’t need it no more?” he wondered. “Nah. I never wear it. I just got my second Goyard,” I said.

I sent him a picture of my Belvédère PM, which joined its less-expensive cousin, the Coursier Messenger, in my closet a few weeks ago. He struggled to craft a reply — iMessage typing dots appearing, disappearing, appearing and disappearing again. Then, finally: “Damn. That’s crazy, C. If I didn’t have all these mouths to feed, I’d be ballin’ right there with you.”

Interlude (Tartarus)

 

I walked in from the gloomy darkness and took a seat in the middle of the bar, which was empty save myself and a smartly-dressed barkeep. Unblinking eyes. A gaunt visage. He said nothing at first, his lips frozen in a mirthless smile.

I looked around at the empty room and tried a Kubrick joke: “A little slow tonight, isn’t it, Lloyd?” If he got it, he didn’t let on. “What can I get you?” “It’s Jack Torrance — err — Jack Nicholson,” I explained. “Oh, I get it,” he said, with a faintly sinister inflection. “Ah. Good. That’s good. So, ‘Hair of the dog that bit me!’,” I pronounced, quoting again from The Shining. “Balvenie on the rocks then?” “That’ll do her. And it’s The Balvenie,” I reminded him. “The DoubleWood 12’s fine.”

“I’m glad to find a bar here,” I said, as he poured my Speyside. “I gotta say, I’m surprised, though. Figured this town’d be even lighter on the amenities than that godforsaken riverbank.” He pointed to a dedication plaque on the wall. “In honor of alcohol’s outstanding contribution to local population growth,” it read.

“Ha! That’s… well what can I say? That’s perfect, ain’t it?” “Management thought it exquisite,” the barkeep replied. I raised my glass: “Cheers to that. And to all those miserable years on the wagon and the irreparable harm it’s caused me.”

The door opened behind me just then. A haggard-looking fellow came in. “You open?” he wondered. I answered for the house. “They sure are! Pull up a seat.” The barkeep looked displeased. “Oh, was it just supposed to be us?” I jibed. “Give this man a– whhadyu drink?” “Gin,” he said. “Beefeater and tonic for my new friend.”

“So, what’d you do?” I asked, making small talk once he was a few sips in. “Oh, I–” he hesitated. “You sure you want to know? It’s pretty bad even for this place.” “No, no. Not what you did to get here, what you did professionally. Or are they the same thing?” “Oh,” he chuckled. “Psychiatrist. And no, that’s not what landed me here.”

I mulled that over for a minute. “Psychiatrist, aye. So you can explain why I am who I am then?” I asked him. The barkeep pursed his lips ever so slightly. A reminder. “Or, um–” I corrected myself. “–why I was who I was?” “Maybe,” the psychiatrist replied. “What’s your story?” “How long do you have?” The barkeep’s smile turned droll again. Another reminder. “Oh, right,” I said, answering my own question. “Forever.”

Cognizant that my egocentric mythologizing can drag on, even when you’re marking time to eternity, I spared the good doctor the long version. By the time he got to the bottom of a second Beefeater, I’d wrapped up a truncated version of my autobiographical monologue.

“So?” I pressed. “Whhadyu think?” “I think you’re a pretty easy study,” he told me. I was a little deflated. “Yeah? I fancy myself something of an enigma.” “Well, let’s see. You were raised by a political science professor, then by a Yalie Guggenheim fellow and spent your teens apprenticed to a bookmaker on the frontlines of the opioid epidemic. That pretty much explains every facet of you.”

“Do you know anything about socialization theory?” he went on. “I know enough,” I told him, suddenly irritable. “I know something about everything.” He laughed good-naturedly, but with a dash of ridicule: “So you’re a polymath?” “I’m a regular Kant,” I snapped. “Speaking of, you should see my notes on the ‘Groundwork.’ In fact–” I tapped the bartop with my index finger for emphasis, and also to signal the barkeep for another scotch. “– in fact, I was arrested trying to retrieve my marked-up copies of the ‘Critiques’ when a disgruntled accomplice held my personal library hostage.” “Is that right?” “That’s right. That‘s how valuable my notes are. Would you go to jail for your marginalia? Because I did for mine.”

I wanted to tell him that wasn’t the half of it. To prove that I wasn’t just an amalgamation of my adolescence. That I was so much more than the sum of my biographical parts. That hypomanic delusions of grandeur turned term papers into full-on treatises and recreational eight balls into half-kilos. But there was no point. He didn’t get it. Couldn’t possibly get it. You had to be there. Had to see it yourself. No other way to get it, really. No other way to get me, I mean.

The shrink, having heard enough, left me to it. The barkeep poured me another scotch. Then another. By and by I took out my wallet. “I best be gettin’ on too, I suppose.” “To where?” the barkeep asked. I grinned and wagged my finger at him. “You’re a funny guy, you know that?” “Well, you can put your wallet away. There’s no charge to you.” I eyed him quizzically. “That so?” “Your money’s no good here. Orders from the house.” “I like you. I always liked you. Much obliged,” I told him.

I gathered myself up and smacked the bartop. “I’ll see you again!” I said. His countenance turned unmistakably wry. “I’m sure you will,” he replied, and bid me adieu with a canny, chin-up nod.

XX

 

“When was the last time you sat across from someone who could keep up with you?”

Talking to her on the phone was a bit surreal. We were in high school when we dated. Try as I might, I can’t picture her as a grownup, so hearing an adult inflection overlaid on an otherwise familiar voice was a bit disorienting.

She didn’t know me past 19, which is to say she doesn’t know me at all, something she readily admits. To her, the story of my twenties is hard to believe. And in some respects, hard to take.

She’s not alone in that regard, nor is she alone in recognizing, through that story, that what most mistook for precociousness was, in fact, a kind of alternating monomania, if you can bear the linguistic paradox. If you can’t, call it polymania.

When another acquaintance from my childhood stumbled across the images of my obsessively-annotated philosophy volumes, he was taken aback: “I’m shocked that I could’ve missed how absorbed you were.”

But to my brother, to G. and to E. — the only member of the quartet who won’t be at dinner this month — this isn’t news. They saw it every day. And they understand that my inability to move on and embrace a new identity 20 years later, even as I immerse myself in yet another non-sequitorial, multi-year tangent, is a manifestation of the same obsessive psychology.

To them, the ostensible incongruity of a macro-market maven MBA who insists on defining himself as a racketeering philosopher-academic, isn’t discrepant. Not at all. Not when you really know the man behind the self-fashioned mythos.

As to me, I’m comforted by self-awareness. I recognize the farcical nature of the reality — or, perhaps more aptly, the unreality — of the legend I’ve built around myself. I’m in on my own existential joke.

The answer to my high school sweetheart’s question is “never.” Never has this polymanic polymath sat with someone who could keep up with him. Not in graduate school among dozens of social science PhDs. Not in Manhattan, while conspiring with a Bulgarian polyglot to foist the Kremlin’s geopolitical narrative on unsuspecting Western netizens. And certainly not while sitting across from any psychiatrists trying in vain to read a book that’s a little too open.

I could, I suppose, use the proceeds from my success to buy myself into a club of “new friends who share my interests,” as the nauseatingly clichéd entreaty I’ve heard too many times goes. But those “friends” won’t get me. Not really. You had to be there. Or you need the sixth sense.

Ironically, the more successful I become in my current incarnation, the better able I am to make real my last, or at least to deliver on some version of the promise I made: That we’d all be rich, come hell or high water.

The rackets may be dead, but the dream’s alive. That dream says it’s better to “die enormous than live dormant,” as Shawn Corey Carter famously put it, explaining why he and his confidants embraced the drug trade and the myriad risks that came with it.

G. will never fall into the lower-half of America’s “K-shaped” economy. Not while I’m alive. And my “brother” and “nephew” will always have access to the status symbols that define an aesthetic appropriated from their culture.

For dinner next week, I ordered four Gucci accessories, all custom-stamped with “XX,” followed by our first initials, to mark the 20-year anniversary of a pact that’s infinitely more real to me than it is to the three of them.

“XXE” will remain unclaimed next Friday. But I’ll look after it. Just like I’m sure she’s looking after my library. The door’s not closed to her. Her seat at the table’s still there. But we don’t have forever. Even if I am marking time to eternity.

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