My confusion about the concept of wealth began in early childhood, when my parents drummed into me how very wealthy we were. I believed it, though it was evident we were not wealthy. I've suffered from lifelong bronchitis and easy dehydration from my mother's adament refusal to buy me drinks during long drives, shopping trips, etc. Drinks are cheaper at home! The discomfort certainly didn't make me feel "privileged", but kids can be made to believe things amid direct evidentiary conflict. They're pliable that way.
The wealthy feeling was certainly true for my parents, though, as recent emigres from the dreary slums of Yiddish Brooklyn. And it was contagious, so I framed that way, too. It held fast even during visits to the mansion of my uncle, a highly successful anesthesiologist. He lived on several rolling acres with a swimming pool and Japanese gardens. A childish dysmorphia convinced me that our house, a boxy little suburban number, was equally fabulous. Which, in a way, it was (who wants to live in a mansion?) but...well, you get the idea.
I found it hard to find level ground as a kid, and this chronic confusion kindled my lifelong curiosity (confusion and curiosity being two sides of the same coin). This Slog is where I attempt to piece it all together!
I know fat people who believe they're skinny and skinny people who believe they're fat, and this is exactly like that. My parents kept telling me we were rich, and I kept believing it, and the spell didn't break until I was 45 years old, and my mom was fixing to sell the house to move to an apartment, and a fancy lady came over to give us an estimate on the value of our best stuff. Our heirlooms. Our treasure.
The lady did a yeoman's job attempting to mask her sneer, but I noticed it. She very, very politely let us know that the market for second-hand goods is just so particular. "Buyers like what they like," she explained, with a hapless shrug, thanking us for having her over and wishing us the best of luck with our home sale.
The scales dropping from our eyes, my mother and I both peered around and clearly saw ourselves standing in a sagging generic mid-century suburban house with paneled basement and olive green fuzzy carpet, and that literally all our stuff was worthless shit. The new owners demolished it - appliances and all - and started fresh.
None of of this felt demoralizing, because I had no real stake in any notion of privilege. It was just a thesis I had never thought to question, so I easily moved on to another thesis (I reframe well).
For the 25 years since I'd left home, I'd struggled financially, even while finding success in both of my main careers. Food writing at that time did not pay well. And jazz trombone never paid well. I was working constantly, but could barely survive.
Musician's joke:I was averaging 200 to 250 gigs per year, some of them impressive, and was a cult favorite food writer. But I would never crack 30 grand/year, and there were nights when I went to bed hungry.
Q: What does a jazz musician do with a million dollars?
A: Work till the money runs out!
It was particularly confusing because, by my 30s, after all my nonagenarian black musician friends had passed, I was running with a rather fast crowd. Back in the 1990s there weren't many people who knew where the good food (or good anything) was at. You couldn't check your smartphone! I was pretty much it (and I'm only barely exaggerating for comic effect).
So I was an essential person to know, and the people I met, via music or writing, tended to be highly successful, even illustrious. Oddly, they looked up to me, because while they knew all the usual places to go spend $500 or $5,000, none of those places offered the satisfaction of the soul food diner in Jamaica Queens with jazz jam sessions in the basement every Wednesday, or the little Chinatown haunts not listed in Zagat, or the secret German bar on the Upper East Side run by an old lady who only let in friends (I was, naturally, a friend).
I had my finger on such pulses (and zillions more), and so I attracted a crowd of adventurers well above my economic class. Disorienting!
Then I started Chowhound, and was attracing tons of press and everyone assumed I was extraordinarily successful because my name was frequently in major media. And, for the first time, I had to deal with jealousy.
Not jealousy for running a cool thing, or for my publicity. That was an issue for a crowd of would-be food poobas, who I kept at a safe distance. No, I had actual friends jealous of my supposed elevation, which was horrifying, given that I was dead broke, horrendously overwhelmed, and in a state of panicked dread so thick and irresolvable that I avoided walking near busy streets due to an unceasing impulse to throw myself in front of cars. To plummet to such a horrendous low point - afflicted, stressed and desperately dead-ended - while a significant number of one's friends turn snide from envy - is a level of hell even Dante never catalogued. Talk about "worst of all worlds"!
My confusion only worsened when I sold Chowhound. To this day, most of my friends and family assume it made me titanically rich. A bar owner once invited me to invest a couple million to help him expand his operation (my reply: "DOLLARS?????")
The more I deny it, of course, the more certain they all become, including those who understand that I'm moving away in part to extend my savings to avoid a cat food diet in my old age.
But here's the thing - the deepest confusion amid all the greater topsy-turvy confusion. Going from desperately poor to reasonably comfortable (dentist comfortable) actually felt like a huge step-up; much more meaningful than a reasonably comfortable person coming into a billion dollars. So I actually do feel massively wealthy.
You see, I'm POOR-guy-rich, just like my parents fresh out of Brooklyn in their proud little suburban house. I take pay bridges! I buy not-the-cheapest-wine! My phone's less than a year old and has no cracks in the display! I'm living the life, baby!
Wealth confusion and dysmorphia have been with me from the start. Compounding it, I recognize a few truths that others miss. Like that everyone in America is rich. Even our "poor" are rich.
Whenever I hear young progressives bitching on Twitter about those damned RICH PEOPLE, friends of mine in Oaxaca and Morocco come alive within my cranium, howling with laughter. America's a place where rich people bitterly complain about marginally richer people. What deluded and entitled asses!
I know that the difference between the self-styled struggling American proletariat and Elon Musk is way less practically significant than the difference between me, circa 1985-2005, and the poorest of them.
I appear to be the only American who realizes we're living in Utopia. We are akin to gods, with infinite entertainment, communications, comfort, security, and health care; and more discretionary income and time than any generation that's ever lived. Julius Caesar would eagerly trade places with any of us, for the antibiotics alone.
What is wealth, in the end? Is it being able to afford the BEST car and the BIGGEST house? If so, well, that certainly serves the aspirational need of humans to keep climbing ladders mindlessly until they croak from exhaustion.
But that's the only insight I can offer. The whole thing is a house of mirrors. A meaningless tally on an imaginary scoreboard for a game existing only in our fevered imaginations. Yet here's the truth: even I, in my highly detached bemusement, still get caught.
As I recounted a month ago, my net worth (on paper) more than doubled for a few weeks, while a bug in my electronic scale had me convinced I'd lost a slew of weight. I was practically floating on air!
Ah, good times! That was wealth! That was attainment! I hardly recognize what's become of me since those brief, heady salad days on paper!
Nah, I know. I'm the exact same dude, living the exact same life, bearing up quite well despite the tragic shift in a meaningless tally on an imaginary scoreboard for a game existing only in my fevered imagination.
I've been that same guy all along. All through a youth that felt normal, but was framed as rich, but was actually working class. Through a young adulthood that felt poor, but was the envy of a high-toned set. Through apparent fame and fortune that was an actual kick-in-the-teeth. And through landing on my ass as a reasonably comfortable dentist feeling like a trillionaire in his poor-guy wealth, actually far below other people's expectations. And let's leave aside the unfortunate up-and-down I experienced earlier this fall - a mere blip from which I swiftly recovered, mostly just wryly ashamed of myself for having gotten caught up.
It all shifts and changes and churns around me, like a carnival ride, but it's somehow always me in here. The same me. Never not him. The numbers go up or down, expectations and assumptions weave into confusing patterns inspiring tectonic nausea (if I pay too much attention), but, in here, it's the same me.
These days I'll sometimes eat a $50 sushi lunch, giggling giddily to myself. It never gets old! I hardly recognize this guy! Yet I'd easily concede that a $7 chicken parm roll is no less toothsome.
A $7 chicken parm roll is no less toothsome.
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