Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody. But it’s customary

to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”

Plenty of Codex-flavored book reviews hardly loiter past first scroll before cracking their knuckles and donning their p-hats, but when it comes down to quantitatives, Very Important People: Status and Beauty on the Global Party Circuit cares about just four: height (ideally, north of six feet in heels), weight (conspicuously, if not ludicrously thin), age (certainly less than thirty, preferably less than twenty-five), and facial attractiveness (left as an exercise to the reader).

That’s me. So in the name of qualitative research I found my sample-size-of-one self in a Manhattan restaurant one evening last November, accepting a fruity drink nestled in an inflatable flamingo koozie as I sat down at a long table of like-bodied women, bracing myself for the global, the party, and the circuit.

i) TAO Downtown

Perfect timing one of our promoters, M, greets me as I arrive an hour later than was asked. A friend called just as I was crossing Seventh Avenue, there was a bomb threat a the NYU dorms. She doesn’t handle those things well. I awkwardly satellite at an adjacent empty table for a few minutes, until another waiter M can bark at comes into range. Hey, can we pull up a table for her?  The flamingo’s cute. Hate to be the busboy stuck spending his afternoons blowing these up, though. Or maybe the bartender handles it while he’s shaking the drink. Shake-blow-shake-blow.

Tonight, it’s Baby Brasa, followed by TAO Downtown. The one-two punch is by design, the book warns me:

Treating girls is the basis of the VIP economy. In exchange for dinner, girls are implicitly expected to spend time at the club with a promoter…The uncertainty over exactly how or when repayment happens can make a gift more burdensome than a clearly delineated market transaction. Girls and promoters dance around this silence: By accepting the invitation to dinner, she is in a social debt to the promoter, but what, exactly, is expected of her?

The night is to be rife with such ambivalence, I’m told. The rich spend, the wealthy spend nothing. My beauty is priceless, so I will go uncompensated for it. I am obliged to have fun; my presence in a space is not to be mistaken for my presence in a space. Strings are attached to everything, and everyone wants to feel like they’re the ones pulling them. We’ll all tango through these tripwires, for fear of collapsing the superimposition into any one legibility which may paint us in a bad light. And everything is already priced into those markups.

M thrusts a plate of grilled chicken my way. Just a plate, of pieces of meat, put on display, passed around a table, of pieces of meat, put on di—no cheap analogies I stop myself and heap a few portions onto my plate, eliciting another M comment: I would have never guessed you ate meat. Starting to like this guy. I eye the rest of our spread. Not much to write home about. Of course, I was warned about this, too:

Usually at comped promoter dinners, dishes were served family-style and without regard to anyone’s preferences, and the kitchen often sent out the cheaper food, or what hadn’t been ordered much that evening.

Which, I mean, understandable, given half of it will be purged later anyways. Am I still vegetarian if I don't digest meat?  I be social with my immediate tablemates for a bit. I'm a fashion designer! I lie. Totally knew from your outfit, they say. I don’t remember if I returned the question in kind, or if or what they answered. One was originally from Turkey, I think.

You German?

M, again, to me. Speaking of. That men in this city so often peg me as Ambiguous East-ish European, it feels like a recurring gag, to have a major trait of yours assumed so consistently, exotically wrong. They must not get out much. I remember what an ex told me:

No, I can see it. You look simple, but devastating enough.

Devastating enough for what?

If I could, I would play dress up. Olga from the Volga, daughter of one of the old-school oligarchs, one who fell out of favor with Putin decades ago, or Petra, nineteen, who has seen things dangerously beyond her years in Berlin nightclubs, they’re serious over there, you know. I have none of those accents in my repertoire. At least I know after I hit the wall I’ll be able to pull off a babushka.

No, I’m from Texas! I tell M. You like the Cowboys? he asks. I don’t really follow sports. C’mon you grew up there though, right? Yeah, but geographically closer to the Texans, so that’s my team?

Are you a Cowboys fan? I ask him. Seems like one of those sports teams that has an implausibly large number of out-of-state fans. They can’t all be expats, there’d be no Dallas left. No, I like some team from Florida I can’t remember. But I’m from Detroit. What? Don’t they have their own team? Aren’t they pretty notable? You guys are weird.

He gives me a that’s the way the ball bounces shrug. He’s wearing a black tee. I come to find they all wear black tees. Clients, too. It’s like they’re all in on some grand shoot-the-moon strategy where most men wear Fruit of the Loom, but enough wear Tom Ford to introduce just enough uncertainty such that any one man exists within a rich-not-rich superimposition. And it’s rude to collapse that superimposition. Just as it’s rude to ask a woman what she weighs. Tit-for-tat. We have our own shoot-the-moon strategy, we simply winnow ourselves so thin we’re one-sided. So thin your guess will be too high knowing your guess will be too high. Nothing much collective about that strategy, but then, that’s the point: we, the tall the thin the young the pretty, are the negative space of our gender:

One powerful pull for women to join the VIP scene is precisely the knowledge that other women are not allowed in. Part of the fun is getting to join a world that excludes and devalues others.

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play, a card-carrying womanizer once said. Royalty, as it is known, is not the fault of the royal, so much as the fault of each and every commoner who is born not-royal:

“Oh, no, models in New York City are, like—how can I compare them?” Eleanor continued, “I’m not gonna say they’re like the royals of England, but I guess—it’s not power—but the praise they get, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life.” Exploiting our fundamental human assumption that the more attractive you are, the higher your social status is, clubs and their promoters want beautiful women of a specifically rare sort: fashion models. Or at least women who look like they could be models.

I have no good reason for why I fall into the latter category. Must’ve been the mall scout’s day off in the suburban Texas town I grew up in. People will endlessly but you me for answers when I tell them the truth, that I’ve never been a model, like they would demand answers of a rich man who blows a large portion of his wealth on rubber ducks. Fashion designer is my current answer: people accept it as a worthy surrogate without complaint, with the same reverence they afford an actor who does his own stunts.

Nor do I have any explanation as to why I’m just now getting into the club scene, either. Several weeks ago, had you subjected me to word associations, it would have gone something like global variable! party toe the line! circuit city!. Years of living in New York City, and as a Slavic seductress at that, yet noone was ever more babe or in the woods. Frittering away my prime years as olicharch-girlfriend material. Until.

I walk through the West Village on my way home from the gym, a white, four-door Porsche slows down, the man driving it calls out to me: Hey. Beautiful. I ignore him. It’s rarely that easy. Up ahead is a corner restaurant with outdoor dining booths running along the cross street. I round the corner, slowing my pace. Suddenly, the vehicle zips to the other end of the booths, then idles until I walk past, then matches my now-brisk pace. He calls again Hey, beautiful, I again slow the pace of my walk, absorb another Hey, beautiful, and with all the detached graciousness I can summon I make eye contact.

That’s better.

My spine straightens into more of a question mark.

I wantchou to come party with me.

Uncle Sam wore it better I think to myself. I continue staring at him.

Come, have some fun with me. Already holding out a fanned stack of business cards, he retracts his hand into the vehicle and scoops up a second helping, as if seeing me up-close cinched things for him. And bring all your gorgeous friends too he says, as a silent-laughter smile breaks out over his face. He turns and drives away. The minute he’s gone, I tear the slips of paper up and walk away in the other direction, feeling very much like a big shot. I was pretty pleased with myself until I looked up Very Important People several days later, after stumbling upon author Ashley Mears’s interview with Tyler Cowen, and a dozen pages or so in it dawned on me that no, all these men, they weren’t inviting me to participate in something shady, or at least nothing shady enough for me to cave into my stranger danger part.

All these years, petering away my party potential. All the pedestals I could’ve been put on. All the gaudy pairs of Louboutins I could’ve been sugar daddied. To my credit, I’m not the first to harbor an unexamined suspicion of promoters:

Promoters are widely criticized as pimps and “model wranglers,” for whom the fashion industry’s surplus of underpaid newcomers, known as “girls,” are easy pickings…The strategic tricks they use—gifts, flirtations, touches—do in fact resemble the work of pimps.  Promoters were painfully aware of how their job looked, and they tried very hard to distinguish themselves…

When I first moved to the city, I remember promoters were seemingly every fifth match on Tinder, but from what I can tell they’ve since banned all such off-label uses. Too, numerous times I found myself on the blunt end of what I now recognize as promoters’ top-of-funnel efforts while I was a member at the Equinox in Soho, in an area the book confirms as ground zero for promoter activity:

As he typically did on a sunny afternoon, Sampson parked his black SUV at the corner of Spring Street and Broadway in SoHo, downtown Manhattan. Two renowned modeling agencies are located at this corner; nearby are a dozen casting and fashion studios. It was a warm Friday, ideal conditions for scouting. If Sampson didn’t have afternoon plans to take models to lunch or to castings, he came here looking to meet new girls.

Having torn up my one active lead, and no longer being the kind of person who’s vain enough to work out at the Soho Equinox, I was up a creek. Time was of essence, each tick of the clock one second closer to my turning twenty-five and sprouting wrinkles. It’s not often one can review a book directly, just by living in its world for a while. I could’ve waited another few weeks, probably, until I crossed paths with another promoter, but instead opted to cold-message the most-followed Instagram account I could find with promoter somewhere in the name.

This was R. He was nice enough, and put me in a group iMessage with and an unidentified number, and the unidentified number put me in a second group iMessage with M, and thankfully the round robin stopped there because I was starting to get the girl is missing vibes from the whole thing. Book list to guest list. I join in halfway through a lumbering Happy Birthday we’re all singing to an older man at a nearby table. The majority of us are filming for social media purposes. Afterwards, a gaggle of giggles, as if we’re all residing in the wake of the funnest thing we’ve ever done, a sort of a reflex equivalent to the phone-voice most women adopt when they start speaking to someone unfamiliar to them.

It seems we’re making to leave now. M, who’s been standing for some time, comes over to me.  [Redacted], you’ll go with A he gestures to two girls already standing together behind him and K to TAO. I greet them, I haven’t met either yet. By the four criteria I identified earlier, we’re the only three women out of the dozen who fulfill them all. I take a last swig from my drink as I stand to join them, resisting the urge to deflate the flamingo and stuff it in my purse as a souvenir.

We make a pit stop before we leave. The restaurant isn’t all that crowded anymore but is somehow still absurdly inefficient at getting butts in stalls, and we’re badgered in line for close to ten minutes by a trio of guys who want us to join them. At one point, a too-large black ring I’m wearing slips off my middle finger and goes flying somewhere. It takes the combined efforts of all six of us several minutes of scouring the black floor before I find it myself, heading off any chivalrous debt I might’ve owed had one of the men found it first, thank god.

Soon, A, K, and I are outside, perched on the tip of the triangle of pavement formed where Greenwich Avenue veers into Seventh, awaiting our Uber. The girls seem like close friends. Freed of our suitors, we finally get the chance to introduce ourselves:  I’m A I’m K I’m [Redacted]. This is my first time ever going out clubbing! What?! Really?? Yeah I don’t know why I chose to girlboss it up here my job is pretty stressful, and someone from work told me I should try this because they said I might like it, because work hard, play hard, right?

One of the promoters called the car for us, and he sends A periodic updates, in the form of screenshots. No, he’s down here! We follow her south down Greenwhich. That’s cool though! Don’t worry! We’ll watch your back tonight, you’re with us! Shit, this way I think. We dogleg it down Perry Street. Are you with V? I have no idea who V is. Yeah, I am! Oh, we loooooooove V! He really takes care of the girls he brings out with him. He took us to get facials, after we’d been out one night with him a few weeks ago!

Further obfuscating their labors were the many pleasures women experienced from their position as girls.

It was like, six a-m! Oh, this way! Neither mention R at any point. I’m just along for the ride, I guess. Which so far has just been a lap around this entire little triangle block thing Brasa’s on. We still can’t pinpoint our driver; all this trigonometry is giving me blisters. One of the promoters from the book chauffeured girls around in his own Escalade, V needs to get with it. Oh shit, is that it? A starts towards a white Camry flashing its hazards. It was it, we pile in.

Maybe R’s the intake form. Dinner’s the cattle call, where M sorting-hats us. Harsh, but, well, The Categories Were Made For Men. And maybe V’s the more white-glove of the trio. A true model wrangler, a proficient pamperer. Not all are such good sports:

Models, on the other hand, were more likely to be a “pain in the ass”—they were too demanding, in his view, probably because they knew their value.

A, K, and I, what is our value? Its essence, exactly? Can we roll it up and smoke it? If you can think of babies as time billionaires, are we looks billionaires? Do some of us exceed the GDP of whatever podunk Balkan we hail from? During these evenings, the following take from the book became a sort of Tuanian koan for me, in my greater moments of dissonance:

A “girl” is a social category of woman recognized as so highly valuable that she has the potential to designate a space as “very important”

which, if you can muster more surface level-reading than the contents of Borges’ library printed on a Gabriel's horn, is kind of sweet and uplifting. But of course, Very Important People leaves skin-deep value judgements in the capable hands of its nightlife denizens:

“It’s the quality of the woman. It’s the perfect thing. It’s just so beautiful to see and watch. A model is a model. She goes into a club, and she’s, like, flashlight. She’s here, you know. And the guys next to her, they’ll be like, ‘Damn, this club is hot. Get me another bottle.’”

I pretty much threw a dart at my highlights for that quote. Here, want another?

“Some girls are street pretty and some girls are models,” Malcolm concluded. At the time, Trevor couldn’t quite tell the difference. Sampson was constantly reprimanding him: “He’s bringing me girls all tits and butt, you know, girls he likes. I’m like, ‘That’s not what they want. That girl is just taking up space. Don’t bring that. No tits and ass. Just skinny and tall.’

A superficial value judgment a day keeps the inner beauty thinkpieces away:

Likewise, a New York club owner told me that models weren’t even that pretty. To him, they were strange, but “it pops in the club because they’re seven feet tall.” Promoters’ own tastes in women may have been different from that of the VIP look, but their work necessitated a restructuring of their vision around four key indicators: height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. This vision of beauty defines the VIP field as a high-status space, crowding out and even belittling alternative visions of beauty.

Height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. Height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. Height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. Heightslendernessyouthandfacialbeauty. These four elements alchemize into the gold standard of, well, everything. Everything life has to offer is more fun if you’re a model. Truly, everything under the sun: coding, law, elephants. Anything you do, it isn’t just something you do, it becomes an accessory, bathed in the glow of your magnum halo effect. You’re off-duty. Which means you could be on duty, but, again, it’s the negative space that throws everything into relief. Your off-duty state is sort of simultaneous slouch and flex, greening others with envy:

“…to most people, models represent the dream. They represent the elite, trendy world, the high-end world of fashion and beauty. They are the dream. I am not attracted to her, but she is my target. We need those girls.”

Because just like not all clients can’t be Saudi Royals or Jho Low, not all girls can be models. There’s a pecking order to these things:

“She’s hot,” he said casually as we kept walking. “She’s not a model but she’s hot, I’d definitely get with her. That’s what we call a good civilian. There’s models and there’s good civilians. A good civilian is a girl who fits the description of model but is not really a model. Like she’s not as slim or, you know what I mean, she’s not five eleven, but she might be five eight. She’s just a pretty hot girl, something that the clubs will see and say, ‘Ok, she’s pretty hot.’ ” “But you can tell the difference?” I asked him. “Oh, everybody can tell the difference.

Hence why M split us up from the main group, maybe. Away from the good civilians. I ask A, who is showing K and I a TikTok of her cat-cowing I mean that’s like a good cat-cow, I really worked hard on it and K if either actually models. Kinda kinda I receive in a flam. No one just whole-hog hustleporns it like I’m passionate about modeling. Always Yeah, I’m good at this, but I don’t really think about it. It just happens. But it’s not, like, my thing. 

Do those fine-grained differences, between models and not-models, really matter? To someone spending oodles of money for the privilege of our company, yes, they do:

“Someone spending $15,000 a night in a nightclub wants the real thing,” he said. “Just the peace of mind that he is now part of that A-list, that social elite. I think that is what the actual difference is.”

Curiously, this pickiness lends some credence to the common promoter refrain I am not a pimp:

Promoters emphasize the visibility of beautiful bodies, not the quantity of sex acts that can be consummated among them. Thibault explained as much, emphasizing that the visible display of high-status femininity, not sex, is of prime importance.

If three inches doth tarnish a halo’s glow, the evolutionary circuits in play might be more sophisticated than Cro-Magnon do copulation (beats chest). Becoming part of the A-list was more subpar as a spread-your-genes-far-and-wide gambit back on the savannahs than it is now. The lizard-brain logic which enables sex sells as the marketing tactic par excellence has a healthy respect for diminishing returns; it’s more noble sorts of compulsion that let femininity facilitate:

While barely discernible as individuals, as a collective the girls played an important role in helping the men talk with each other about their worlds of business….Most clients and promoters simply believe that a room full of men is less comfortable than a room with women.

Did I say noble? I meant oh god please assuage my homoerotic anxieties:

Rudik, a Russian promoter working in Hong Kong and occasionally in New York City, explained that company managers entertaining clients hire him to bring girls to the after-hours entertainment. “Because it’s five guys, with a fucking magnum of champagne, and they look like fucking faggots

Look how straight we all are, we have our own fucking harem for chrissakes! It’s…certainly one use case of wielding femininity en masse. Still, pretty based. You certainly can use The Collected Works of William Shakespeare as a doorstop. Or, you can use it for its intended purpose:

Women were conduits of men’s power, Rubin argued, because men control the exchange systems through which women circulate as gifts….

There we go, conduits of power, sounds like a band from the eightie. That’s more like it. Do away with the Wildeian middleman altogether, yeah, now everything’s just about power.

…women are largely cut out from the value that their exchange generates…

Wai-

The unequal ability of one person to capitalize on another is a classic measure of exploitation in Marx’s terms.

…oh…

Men’s surplus value from girl capital goes largely unseen, since girls’ participation in the clubs is assumed to be fun, leisure, and not work.

Hey…

It would be too easy to say that promoters and clubs exploit girls for monetary gain; we would miss a crucial insight into how relations of exploitation operate. In short, promoters show us that exploitation works best when it feels good.

I…guess. The most surreal aspect to me throughout these nights was, despite never having modeled or otherwise directly made money off my physical appearance, I could nonetheless viscerally six-sense the cash fluttering about my invisible slipstream. Hear soft little cha-chings. Picture the little pile of bills that would accumulate at my feet if I stood in one place for a while. I’m actually being literal here, it’s a pretty easy game to play, during the more boring stretches spent around promoters’ tables. Twenty dollars, I’d think, for existing in this space, for my contributions to the revelry, over the next fifteen minutes. Is that a reasonable guess for how much Tao Group Hospitality might attribute to me? Divide annual revenue of the entire company by however many clubs they own by days in a year by hours in a day by six, take out whatever five percent the alcohol actually costs, divide by number of women in the room, don’t bother weighting out models from good civilians or whatever, is that twenty dollars? Or If I whipped around and demanded twenty dollars or I’m leaving from the client behind me who’s very clearly enjoying my company, wou-

We double-park it on Ninth, time to go. Yeah, TAO’s definitely more clubby, like it’s an actual nightclub. It’s not like a bar that’s really loud with music, like some places we go to are K is telling me as we three slide out of the backseat and step onto pavement and bound down Sixteenth like we’re chained together, past the terminus of the line of people snaking towards the club’s entrance, squeeze our way through the tiny patch of open sidewalk between people in line and a hotdog stand, and step over the velvet perimeter of the entrance to join V, and T, another promoter in the outfit, apparently.

I notice that V instantly does not like me. I instantly dislike in kind. I had a psychiatrist once, one who frequently featured in the society pages, an off-brand Christopher Nolan making an admirable attempt at accessorizing his blazer-over-unbuttoned-shirt with a thin scarf. I showed my mom, and she pegged him as He’s cuter than he thinks he is. Same for V. Later, I looked up his insta, one recent post is a clip from the reboot of Mean Girls, in…which he’s…walking down some red carpet affair with a woman on each arm. Absurd levels of consistency there. I often wonder if he was the single live player I encountered in the course of my nights out.

Is that dress Zara? K asks me about the black slip I’m wearing, under a cropped leather jacket in a dark  green roughly the same vibe as a banker’s lamp. It is! Thought so! I remember seeing it online a few months ago. The hem falls six inches past my knee, and I suspect it was my original sin for V.

Sampson kept a simple tight black American Apparel dress and high heels in his SUV, and he was ready to tell a girl to change into this outfit or go home.

Too modest, too elegant, too regal, too stuck-up, too frigid, too cold and unapproachable. Even with a considerable slit up the left leg, terminating at my upper thigh, and four-inch heels. We advance to the front of the line. VaxcardsandIDs, VaxcardsandIDs a white, efficient-looking man in all-blacks chants, seems he’s the head bouncer or something. The face of face control.

One by one by one by one by one we comply. Purses, purses crowed the bouncer manning the next station, awkwardly situated right up against the bottom step of the steep stairs that lead down into the sunken entryway, one by one by one we comply, V and T look on, and then hold the doors for us as we enter. A very dark, stubby hallway later,  I behold the main floor, which ups the ante on the sunkenness considerably. Vaguely Compactor 3263827-feeling, with the rough brick walls that glow reddish-orangish in the lights scattered about. And the monster down below.

Up until this exact moment, participation was nowhere on my radar. This is because I read a sociology book about something no normal person would get themselves involved with because they read a sociology book about it. Really, I believed I could get away scot-free as a student of humanity, eager to behold facets brought to the fore by alcohol, by cocaine, by marijuana, by ecstasy, by short skirts, by red-soled shoes, by flashing lights and sizzling sparklers, by house music, by trap music, by subwoofers, by testosterone, by peacocking, by status games, by outrageous parties, by heavenly bills.

But now the threat of it is everywhere. I am an active inhabitant of a world I’ve grown accustomed to opening and shutting at will. That all eyes are on me sensation starts roaring in my ears, no longer am I concealed behind my one-way mirror. We descend down into the activity, pushing through people like they’re the undergrowth of a jungle. Crowds are really, really not my thing. The volume of the music, the lights, both hit you like Bergeronian handicaps dialed to the max. And the continued chill from V, and not really knowing anybody here, and perhaps residual transference from talking my friend down earlier, the whole feedback loop runaways me into something like a fugue state.

I vaguely remember: Being introduced to another girl, maybe a good civilian because she seemed a bit older. Accepting an empty flute glass from someone, and them pouring Prosecco into it. V, gripping a half-empty bottle of champagne by the base, holding it out to A, tipping periodically so she can guzzle. Typing observations into my phone, locking it, and then unlocking it and deleting them. Tequila, then a little while later more Prosecco. A Bitcoin-themed bottle train thundering by, what if Satoshi cashed out all his holdings and went on like a giga-Jho Low bender. K, showing me a single, tiny, blue music note tattooed on the underside of her wrist, It’s a reminder to me, that the difficulty of letting go doesn’t have to be that bad, you know? I have a difficulty of holding on in the first place I tell her Which is why I don’t have any tattoos. T, offering up an unsolicited You look a little pissed to be here.

As the evening trances on for me, as my blood-Prosecco content gradually dulls away the agitation into a sleepiness, until about two-thirty, when a burst of reflexual anxiety oh shit I haven’t been watching my drink that’s what They tell you always gets girls kidnapped into sex slavery jolts me back to my senses. Oh. I look around for a while, take it all in. In not too long I decide to leave, it doesn’t seem like another six-a-m spa trip is in the cards anyways. I shout my goodbyes to M, K, and T, not V, and push through the hordes to the stairs.

Outside, I wind my way around the Google building, to the sidewalk on the far side of Fifteenth. I sit down on a stoop to change into my flats, and am almost instantly splattered by a deluge of chemically-white bird shit. It’s the most I’ve ever seen come out of one bird. On my green jacket, it looks a bit like a Twombly blackboard; everywhere else, my hair, my shoes, it’s just gross. I stand up again, my feet newly stumbly as they deacclimatize after hours spent in high heels. My ears are ringing ferociously. This feels like a setup for enlightenment I think. I continue home.

The nuance Mears renders plenty unsubtle is that girls, their youth and beauty, are to nightlife economics what gold was to the Bretton Woods agreements: the value to which status is pegged, and pegged to that, all other in- and outbound vectors of this world, like clients' piles of money, promoters' hours of labor beneath the surface, social media-fueled lifestyle envy, beds at rehab clinics. Pop sociology book sales.

Yet, of the four personas Very Important People studies⏤girls, promoters, clients, club owners⏤it renders girls most obliquely. In terms of aggregate airplay, we hear more from promoters, clients, and club owners about girls, and from girls who either are themselves promoters or the girlfriends of promoters, than girls qua girls. Most we do hear from are models, or, sorry,

…in the morning, it’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Oh, hello.’ ‘Uh, what do you do?’ ”— the client here took on a high-pitched voice and pretended to be the imaginary girl in bed next to him—“ ‘I’m a model!’ …

Mears peppers in a few exceptions. A girlboss with an MBA! A philosophy grad student! The exceptions belie a rule, implicitly argued: a girl is nothing if her looks. Melt this gold down, shape it whichever way you wish, it’s still only worth its weight. To be beautiful is to be a present tense, to bind specific points in space and time together in holy infatumony. What is it like, to be a present tense?

What Very Important People is, is a book about promoters. Full stop. It introduces, I would argue successfully, what must be a novel archetype to her core audience of academic-adjacents: the lives of precocious charmers, for whom vocation finds them; careers of brokers for whom the Faustian gives way to the Cosasian, whose labors hide so acutely in plain sight; desperations of dreamweavers, for whom a sort of gradual whiplash sets in, when it becomes all too obvious, all too late, that it is themselves they have hemmed in, that the affliction of a Midas Touch is something aspiration alone cannot inoculate against.

You’ll see though, her book's cover isn't this model-minority promoter. It isn’t some sleazy-snazzy client or a crusty club owner, either. It’s a girl. Nevermind that, how that meeting went, We loved your book about how sex sells, now, how do we go about marketing it…?, authors have little say in those matters. Rather, her cover, what gave her access to this world, her only vantage point, was that of a girl’s. But it's just that⏤a cover, for Mears-the-detached-observer. The full extent of her introspection follows:

It is difficult to convey just how incredibly seductive and thrilling these nights could be…

and after that, several glossy, disassociated paragraphs that read right out of a Become A Girl brochure:

…Moments of delight may build up over an evening, beginning with a lavish dinner in an upscale restaurant with beautiful people who don’t have to contemplate paying the bill, followed by being whisked past the velvet rope, ahead of everyone waiting outside in line…

…These intoxicants are consumed amid elaborate light and sound systems with famous DJs delivering beloved house and hip-hop beats, which inspire friends and strangers alike to lose their inhibitions…

Beloved. Mears-the-girl is left in search of an author, as Very Important People’s is totally uninterested in interrogating the qualia of one who embodies the elemental component of nightlife, like an economist studying America's role as global financial hegemon in the twentieth century is indifferent to the oxidation states of 79Au. Says so right on the tin, if you can consider the second half of paragraph two, of footnote number thirty-nine, of chapter four to be the tin:

By considering appropriation and ownership, sociologists can move away from analyses of [bodily] capital as a personal advantage, to consider how systems of power relations enable value accumulation from bodily resources that are not one’s own.

Given the faculties of Departments of Systems of Power Relations that Enable Value Accumulation from Bodily Resources that Aren’t One’s Own Studies are made up of people, who are human, like everyone else, she was no doubt keen on avoiding even a whiff of racy-New-York-diary-

of-a-socialite, since

Using sex appeal and “erotic capital” may in fact exacerbate women’s exclusion from masculine realms, which tend to be more authoritative, higher status, and better paid.

And I can’t fault her. As-is, nightclubs, today’s certainly, are almost too perfect a subject to observe under the sociologist’s microscope; catering to so many lowest-common-denominator pleasures, naturally they are ripe with delicious contradictions and just sos. A definitive, general treatment was needed, and long-overdue because we’re just nerds. We had no hope of ever infiltrating Studio 54, or the 90s scene in general, which is why polatches and other rituals of the indigenous remain our most up-to-date touchpoints on human nature. And of course I know first-hand the first-initial trick just works.

However. An economist who wields alchemy is no longer an economist, nor an alchemist. They are a mutant of some kind. Perhaps this is not so outlandish, a few could be considered among us already. What of other subjects? Where are other openings for the interplay of insight and fiat? By definition, any such investigation proceeds against the grain of orthodox sociology, away from systems of power relations, and towards analyzing individuals’ idiosyncratic accumulations of bodily or mental, or emotional capital. From powers that be to be your own powers.

For those closely tracking, no, I’m not a mutant. Endowed with mint’s worth of sex appeal, bodily capital, reality privilege, fatal attraction, feminine mystique, and a looks gap to rival my thigh gap, maybe, paired with whatever tic compelled me to spill this much ink over the sociology of the sociology of nightclubs. However, I’m still very much learning how to go brr. But I can't wrestle with Friston or stat-check Georgism, so I go with what’s readily available to me. Enjoy the next seventy pages’ worth of it.

ii) LAVO

Hey do you wanna join us at the lavo nightclub tonight? We have an 11:30pm walk-in let me know brightens my lockscreen while I’m at work the following Thursday. I let it sit for hours, then come back with a lame tiebreaker: is bird poop really good luck?

“The widespread belief of bird droppings as good luck is based on how uncommon it is to be pooped on by one. With countless birds in the sky and numerous people, getting pooped on by one is extremely unlikely — in fact, it is said to be even more unlikely than winning the lottery ticket, but the bird chose you.”

The bird chose me. hey yeah sure i can make it! I scroll up some, past last Thursday, past several times he asked and I was busy, until I rubber-band at the top.

hi it's [REDACTED] | 

so i just read ashely mears’s |

book on your kind of thing, & i’m

kinda wanting to try it out

| Lmao I read her article

| When you come out with me you’ll

realize most promoters are normal

chill people 😂

yay yay |

ha i work in tech & honestly |

from the book ya’ll seem wayy

more down to earth than some

people in my world

| I feel like tech / stem people

can lack social skills sometimes

and they just end up being unpleasant

Lol

| I was on the robotics team all

4 years of highschool so I saw

enough haha

| All brilliant kids but my god

you wouldn't want to bring them

to a party

| A lot of them work for like

Amazon and google now they're

doing well

I swipe out and over to another app to schedule my cab for the night in advance, which sometimes saves me a few dollars. I'm in "Uber jail," I heard someone call it that, because I forgot my mask last week on the ride I took to Brasa, and the driver happened to be a stickler. I put my phone down, rummage through my tote, pull out my mask, put on my mask, open my camera, take the damn selfie to verify I'm masked up for my ride in eight hours, and curse whichever of R’s former teammates is at Uber now and doing well.

Later, at home, buried in my wardrobe’s banish pile, is a little black shirtdress, about two-hundred dollars' worth of polyester and markup. Models, especially, were considered so beautiful that they could wear a basic dress out and still be considered top quality. I scoop out the pile from the back corner of my closet and sift until I find it. It was my go-to first-date outfit of the summer, until, already running late for yet another date, I almost tore myself out of it after spending ten claustrophobic minutes tangled up in this sort of Mobius loop-fold it does at the waist. But it’s short, so short, they don’t even bother with the -dress, and I'm tall enough people argue with me about what sports I played in high school. It’ll turn heads. It’ll do. I grab a sort of floral Jacquard thing I just bought which I can wrap myself in to pretend I'm not naked from hips on down, should a need for sudden modesty arise, some heels, and a bag which I hope is J.Crew-looking enough to not attract any thieving hands.

Allowing a generous amount of time for potentially more fingertrappery, I still have a few hours to fill.  Hannah, nineteen, claimed it took her five minutes to get ready, as she never fussed with her hair and she wore the same clothes to the club at night as to her castings during the day. But eventually, the time  I scheduled my ride for arrives. Hop in car, shut door, pull-down-dress-pull-up-mask, check phone. *What’s your ETA?* R asks. For once I opt not to be the sort who screenshots Uber and hits send as if it's more utilitarian. The sort that can lack social skills sometimes and just end up being unpleasant. 11:28! Ok I'm outside wearing a blue hoodie. I stuff my phone back in my bag.

Twenty-three twenty-eight, 58th and Madison. Prompt punctual partygoer. Some gawks and remarks from two men leaning in a recessed doorway as soon as my feet hit the pavement. This time, the girl understood the assignment. Four feet of legs high-heels-to-hips amble their way towards a nightclub. It mists, such that umbrellas are beside the point. A blue hoodie under LAVO's bluer awning. He's younger than I expected, from photos. Shorter. Hey.

A look. Hey R says, glad you made it.

Yeah. Glad we could meet finally.

Yeah, sorry about the other night, I had to handle something that came up. How was it?

Maybe his...associates?...didn't say anything? Oh no worries. It was good!..Different. My first time, it was kind of what I was expecting, from the book at least, some parts.

 Oh, yeah, that. I remember reading an article about that when it came out. There's...not really that..much?...though? Like...not for a whole book to write about.

Yeah it's repetitive, it could've been better as, like, a New Yorker article, and focused more on the stories of people. But it was a sociology book, and academics really get off on voyeurism, so it probably worked for her audience.

So you're a writer?

Ha. No, sometimes, but not things like this...like...I work in fashion, on the tech side of things at a startup in the indu-

Do you model, too? You could model, you definitely look like one. Yeah, you don't model, though?

I, just… ...it never really came up...never got into it. You?

Yeah I do some. I’m talking with an agency in Brazil, to do some work for there. I don’t know though…I feel like there’s a lot of money in modeling, but not really for the models, you know?

For sure. You’re Brazilian?

Laughs. No, I’m not, but that’s what people think all the time about me, when they’re trying to guess my ethnicity.

Me too! I get that I’m German a lot, or Russian. Had a guy stop me on the High Line the other day insisting, like wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Like, ‘Sorry, comrade, lemme through.’

Yeah, you look like you could be either of those…Hm. If I were guessing, I’d say you look Croatian, though, you could be.

That’s a new pin on my map. Wow, really? I didn’t know they had a look like that, a distinctive enough one…I’m white bread from Texas!...‘Croatian’...

Now guess me, for real.

…Columbian? Maybe?

Nah, but I get that all the time, too. I’m Indian.

Oh…hence the robotics.

Oooohohhh…oh my god, I forgot that we talked about that. I haven't told anyone since high school I did that! Yeah, my school used to go to competitions, and we'd get killed by the Brazilian and the Korean teams...I was majoring in engineering, at CUNY, until I dropped out at the beginning of this year.

If you can’t beat ‘em, model underwear for ‘em. So you’re promoting now? And modeling?

No, we just started doing that over the summer. You should've run with us then, it was warmer, we had some fun nights. Modeling, but I do marketing for some clubs and restaurants here. Like there's a club called Etiquette, that's another one you should go to with me sometime.

He pauses, and pushes his hood back some, then again a beat later, like it’s a dial of a kitchen timer he's tracking his monologue with.  

They offered me like six figures to work for them, but I didn't want it, since I'd have to give up my other clients. I still run their social for them, though. Helping get their accounts verified has been a big thing for me, getting references in articles and things for them.

Oh no way, hey get me verified, Wall Street Journal covered an app I made a few months ago! Shit.

Thaaaat’s… impressive. A second genuine reaction from R, but I wish I hadn’t mentioned that, it kind of destabilizes things, because either way I come off as being disingenuous about something, I’m either lying about that, which is just a weird thing to lie about, or lying about other, unmentioned things, because what girl who could model but doesn’t picks up that sort of accolade only to casually brag about it to a promoter who recruited her off the street on her second ever night out clubbing.

You went to school for that? Still in college I say at NYU, I started out studying literature, but I’m in one of those programs that lets you design your own major, so I’ve kind of switched into mostly computer science things now.

Oh, nice, my mom was going to the dentistry school there. But she dropped out when my dad got her pregnant. And then I came along nine months later. The last sentence he says with a kind of pop! goes the weasel affect. I went to study engineering at [one of the city or state colleges in New York, I can never keep those straight and forget which he told me he attended], but I haven’t been there in a while.

Six figures out of two consecutive dropouts. Not the norm—it’s surreal, how much R is like some character a neural network would’ve regurgitated had you fed it Mears’s depictions of promoters.

The majority of them come from lower-middle- and middle-class backgrounds, yet they earn six figures, drink high-priced champagne, and share social space with the superrich. Given the limits to class mobility in the United States, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

Hey R says to V as he walks up to us, ending our conversation. Hey. A furtive glance my direction, but it doesn’t seem to be for R’s benefit. I keep my own Hey behind my teeth. Charming individuals are like pulsars, you notice this when you find yourself perpendicular to one’s pole. But there’s no denying the beacon draws people in.

 ...of the thirty-nine male promoters I interviewed, only one sought out the job on his own initiative. Rather, the job had a way of finding them. It’s easy to see why: they are charming men, flirtatious, stylish, and persistent…

It has to—otherwise, it’s coercion. Or, worse yet, blatantly transactional.

When I asked a club owner why he doesn't just pay girls directly to attend his club, he told me, "That would ruin the fun."

Fun is putting it loadbearingly. As is typical, the dignity and efficiency of an individual are inversely proportional to one another. Status

…cannot be bought outright without, of course, a loss of status. VIP clubs have to construct the potlatch in a way that suspends the deliberateness of status-seeking, primarily by making it fun and seemingly spontaneous. Clubs are spaces designed to sublimate people’s criticism of clients’ wasteful displays and refashion them as play.

Ambiguous transactions give more surface area to least-worst interpretations. Thus, if we take Occam’s Razor to it, what we find is not the system apparatusing out parcels of status like they’re widgets, but the individual manifesting, overflowing with, his own élan vital.

Most people, including Veblen, imagined ostentation was an inherent trait of the rich. I found, however, that it takes considerable coordinated effort to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.

Of course, this demographic, they’re not exactly the BYOG type…

For “someone like me”—not for himself personally, [the client] clarified—who “went to MIT,” he began. “You’ve seen the girls on that campus? Okay, so you know what I mean. In finance, these guys come to New York after four years of being in schools like this, and they start working at Goldman Sachs making tons of money, and they can go out and get bottle service and you get to hang out with models. So the club scene is basically giving them something that was never attainable for them.”

…but that part, the hordes of women like me, is sort of the stone in the soup, so to speak. So:

The tables inside a VIP club are carefully curated and controlled. Even though this scene looks like the life of the party, it is the outcome of tremendous backstage labors—the unseen work that makes conspicuous consumption possible.

Promoters’ tremendous backstage labors, that is. Of course, nothing is stopping clubs from putting promoters out of their jobs by holding their own casting calls, but the obvious:

Hiring a broker is a common means of obfuscating a stigmatized exchange...Clubs do not want to hire girls directly because it moves them out of the business of nightlife and into the business of brothels. The broker alleviates this stigma, but then he bears the moral burden of the suspicious transaction.

R is talking with M, who just appeared at some point, I guess. Two girls with us tonight are underage. Ok, we’ll just be careful and see how things go. We all get in line now, me, R, V, M, and fourish other girls. None four-out-of-fours, objectively. R introduces a pair to me, I cran my neck down. They’re French, visiting the city for the first time I learn. He has a huge count of Instagram followers, which I assume is his primary avenue of recruitment.

…such a person “need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function … His main qualification is that he is public…

Maybe Etiquette had offered him a-dollar-per. R, along with M and V, all seem a generation younger than the promoters Mears followed, greener, their identities less wrapped up in their careers. Less lengthy lengths they’re willing to go for their livelihoods. Not like the promoters Mears followed during her research, who go so far as to start model apartments, to expedite the exploitation and all that:

The apartment required a hefty deposit of $50,000, but within six months, Vanna said, they had already made it back. Girls living there were required to go out at least four nights a week with them between Monday and Saturday, for a minimum of three hours, from 12:00 to 3:00 a.m…Promoters could make serious money with a model apartment, which guaranteed a reliable quantity of high-quality girls at their tables every night…

V maybe would, just for the power trip that must come along with being a shady, capricious landlord like that. Side note, the rest of the paragraph offers resounding evidence in favor of the Hot Girl Messy Room theorem:

…Vanna and Pablo hired a housekeeper to come once a week, but in the meantime, trash piled up everywhere: garbage bags near the front door, cans of Four Loko energy drinks and full ashtrays in the living room, dried-out contact lenses stuck to the kitchen counter. Food didn’t stay long in the pantry. One girl hid a set of clean dishes, since her roommates were always leaving their dirty dishes in the sink for days.

Expedite the exploitation. Entire eons have come and gone within the realm of social media in the decade that’s elapsed since Mears’s fieldwork took place. Cruising around in your Porsche, flagging down pretty pedestrians, when you could just be dmming away in your jammies. Cultivate deep ties with the bitches? Over time, involving gifts that cost financial money, involving intermittent emotional labor? Thank u, next.

Have social media aptitude, will travel. Like twenty-two-year-old R’s sixer marketing job offer. Whether the goods you’re moving are Hims or hers, makes no difference. To them, the promoter propper is obsolete, a sort of relic with a decadence we ascribe to all the mechanical turks of bygone, like clockwinders or pinsetters. Humans in the loop. Below the API before there was even an API one could unwittingly find oneself below. This is the irony of the promoter who specializes as such: what it takes, truly doing the job with verve, is to mask your implementation details so well, that you yourself can no longer discern the seams:

How one acquires social capital has an effect on the perceived legitimacy of its holder...Interactive services are typically characterized by clear asymmetries...But the promoter, in an effort to craft an "authentic" consumption experience, cultivates and performs a relationship of equality with clients...They believe [they can] convert their connections into profit—in part because they see their job not as conducting a service relationship, but as leisure time spent with friends.

The book’s emotional peak is a brutally understated few pages of For sale: glittering deals, never materialized:

Every night it seemed [Dre] spun a different tale about his music career just about to blow up, his hip-hop album about to drop, his car company, or his import company. “...All the people that make money in this world, it’s a question of relationships. It doesn’t happen any other way. No other way. You introduce them and you take your cut…”

Dre’s partner was supposedly negotiating in Europe to sign a contract to secure their broker’s fee, and, rather ambiguously, Dre spoke of his impending “30 percent for the next ten fifteen twenty years. I just got the text message.” He quickly added, “This is one of twenty deals.” Ostensibly, as Dre told it, because he brought the girls to help make the business dinner a success, he was to be paid a cut from the deal.

When asked about how the telecommunications coverage would expand from the Balkans and to which parts of Europe, Dre did not know the details; he’d have to check with his partners. The deal never materialized.

R, V, M, they seem to harbor no illusions about their positions vis-à-vis clients, owing to the more mercenary posture operators savvy at adopting and incorporating new technologies have. Relational to transactional, that’s what happens when the API comes to town.

And now, after steeping myself in the scene for a while, Very Important People reads less like a timely sociological treatment of the troubling realities behind moneyed leisure, and more like a poignant chronicle-of-the-plight-of everymen chewed up and spat out by an idiosyncratic service sector job.  Born too late throw debaucherous polatches, born to early to wirehead it with our sexbots, the role of a promoter was spun up by neoliberalism as a scapegoat, whose sacrifice would shoo away the tsks of those self-appointed policemen of invconvenient social moores we had to violate in order to have our fun.

They had a good run, from the mid-nineties to the late-tens. A lot of things did. Shoulder pad-free blazers. The end of history. I whip out my umbrella, the mist is heavier now and is obeying gravity. Now you take that out from R. Not worth trying to explain the nonlinearities of ambient moisture to someone with a crew cut. Not a minute later I have to whip it back in because we’re headed inside. Down the stairs. Can’t these places just be on the ground floor, or do they like seeing us giraffes teeter like that much?  Coatcheck runs the length of the landing’s right-hand wall. I guess I could shed this rug. I slip out of the jacquard coat, pass it to the attendant, This I say.

Five dollars. What? Coatcheck is five dollars.

I have to pay for something? Mutter This wasn’t in the book to myself as I open my purse, open my billfold. Two dollars, in ones. Least I can rub them together. Venmo? She hints in a helpfully exasperated tone. Oh. Phone out. Venmo open. She gives me the username handle. Declined. Shit. Months ago my purse was stolen, along with all my cards, I hadn’t used the app since. I explain this unhelpfully as my eyes dart between my left hand feeling around the insides of my billfold for my current card and my right thumb bouncing around submenus. Minutes have passed now. How undignified of you to nickel and dime your royals li-

Suddenly a hand squeezes my right shoulder while another passes the attendant a five. Thanks I say It’s good R says. She slides over an orange stub with black text. 06117. I try to Ramanujan-taxicab it on the spot, 06117, 06117, nothing, can’t even intuit if the thing’s prime. Take a picture of it. What? Take a picture of it. With your phone, in case you lose it. Oh.

Finally I turn around, pretend to be oblivious to the queue that’s formed, and we walk towards the action. LAVO is much cozier than TAO, the dance floor is sunken, too, but less subterranean cavern, more 70s den. We push through to our table, it’s crowded already. A few introductions to people already around the table. R offers me a drink. Just tequila, please. Just tequila? Just tequila. He pours.

Gregarious me tries to introduce myself to a newcomer: Hi! Hi! I hear Where are you from? so I answer

I’m from Texas! and receive an enthusiastic Happy birthday!.

Almost as soon as it’s begun, the evening wears on. R tries to include me in some shot-taking ritual. I gulp down the vodka, bleh, but veer out of range before he can capture me in an insta story he’s filming. M offers to take my purse and store it in one of the cubbys in the seat of the booths. Wait, one sec I tell him and pound some few digits into my calculator app. Our group seems to occupy both the table I’m standing at as well as one more to our immediate right, which is wedged into the back right corner of the room. To our left is a table of people who work in finance. They just do. To the right of our other table is a pair of older men, fifties probably, surrounded by people they didn’t know before tonight, and then the stairs leading down to the floor from the mezzanine.

I'm kind of wedged in a weird spot. I’m facing away from the dance floor, facing the people at our table who are facing towards the dance floor, and past them, the wall. There aren’t any ads on the wall to stare at like there are in subway cars, which seems like a missed opportunity. And I stupidly put my phone in my purse. I’ll spend the whole night like this, awkwardly avoiding staring at the people in front of me but also trying to avoid looking like I’m looking at a blank wall with great interest I think to myself.

I am an incredibly, highly sensitive person in this way. Not really in the socioemotional sense–call me names to my face, I don’t care. I was an ugly duckling, believe it or not, I’ve dealt with my share. No, the sensitivity is geared towards some long-gone threat that’s anticipated to happen before a face-to-face confrontation occurs. Some ancient tripwire strung taut to sense confrontation as it’s inbound, indifferent to those already happening. Don’t be seen, and you won’t attract any attention.

A former lover called my body an “early warning radar,” for being so tightly wound so as to sense some threat that sends me tightening even more.  My muscles and tendons are always vigilant, vigilant, vi-gi-lant. He would try to massage me and find more knots than not. Like I’m so knotty, Santa misheard, and gave me coal in my Christmas stocking.  Mountain was and still is the hardest yoga pose for me for this reason, especially when I can see myself in the mirror, which I usually can’t because I keep my eyes closed throughout the class, but sometimes the instructor asks that you keep your eyes open, and I’m nothing if not the obliging sort. Meanwhile my shavasana is just peachy, the lights are always off for that one.

I can’t seem to bear the prospect of being seen moving without some airtight alibi. At TAO, beneath the sensory overload, and feeling like I just fell through the looking glass, was this. And here now. My little spandrel state of petrified modesty. Don’t look me in the eye, I’ll turn to stone. A modeling career was never on the table, What do I do with my hands? They won’t stop hiding my face. I had to ctrl+f in at least a dozen places while editing this, I slipped up nearly every time in typing out good civilian as model citizen. That’s me, a model citizen–a girl who fits the description of model but is not really a model. Like, she has the ‘up,’ but she’s still waiting on the ‘-glow.’ Has a fucking license to kill, with her looks, but she’s fucking vegetarian. She just enjoys playing dead fish too much because she can get away with it. It’s just the truth, she don’t know she’s beautiful. 

You know how serious I am, linking you to that. Vibe energy chutzpah moxie, that’s the fifth thing a girl needs, but that’s a metis you can’t hope to measure. Thank god promoters see like a state, for the sake of this exercise. Just an innocent civilian nerdsniped into this wretched Valhalla. Through the looking glass, ind–Everyone's asking us where we found our model!

*...*

He shouts again for my benefit, Everybody is asking us where we got our model!

Really? Hearing this sparks a little something. My usual dead-fishness was transmuted into what probably came off as some ethereal detachment, an arresting bitch face. Like I said, just get me straight to confrontation, I can handle myself there. Collapse that superimposition, tell me what I already know so it means something to me. Get up here, you’re our prettiest girl! M bends down and shouts into my ear a minute or two later, grabbing my wrist to help me up onto the booth, and then the back of the booth.

Now I’m ten feet tall. My muscles relax just enough for them to become slightly entangled with the music pulsating through the room. I song I actually know comes on:  Just a a-pol-lo-linian gi-rl…livin’ in a dio-nes-ian wo-o-orld. I play a game of Mook or Mogul, looking around the room at the clients and bucketing them into either of the dichotomy Very Important People identifies:

Duke, a former club owner and now a real estate magnate in downtown New York, calls these people mooks: “You know, a mook. Someone who doesn’t know what’s going on … It’s the dentists that come in and buy the tables, thinking they’re in the company of the cool people, and the beautiful people.”

Mook is often used interchangeably with lettuce, the carb-free term for "bread-and-butter":

“It’s like making a salad,” continued the club owner. “What’s the most important ingredient, the biggest ingredient in a salad? Lettuce. That’s our affluent New Yorkers, guys with small bills of three to five thousand…” [They are] your run-of-the-mill banker, tech developer, or other upper-class professional with a disposable income. While on the lower end of importance compared to whales and celebrities, they are central to the VIP scene; in fact, they bankroll it.

Whales are what lie at the other end of the customer continuum:

…most valuable in this hierarchy of men is the whale, a term you might know from casinos and speculative finance. Whales can drop huge sums of money from their vast riches, sometimes over a hundred thousand dollars in a single night. Their reputation is legendary in nightlife. The biggest whale at the time of my fieldwork was a Malaysian financier known as Jho Low…

…and a few pages detailing his exploits that rekindled my ire over the world’s largest experiment with liquid reserves of cash coming up a complete bust because that lucky yokel possessed an imagination inversely proportional to his hoardings.

Of course, I saw a few celebrities too, but no one who clashed at all with the context. Joe Jonas. Fetty Wrap. I don’t see any looking out over the crowd at LAVO, nor many whale-looking types. At one point I notice both the older men a few tables over raise their glasses at me. I gamley reciprocate, hopefully enough gamely that they’re bowled over by how politely uninterested I wanted them to know I am. They look like, like exactly like, the mobster caricatures in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Bridge and tunnel, I think of them, I’ve never used that term before. Feels uncouth. Me, I’m more South of West 110th & East 96th. Call me that to my face, I don’t care.

All meaning, this place isn’t very hip. I used to work at a place in the Tunnel, of Psycho nightclub-

scene fame, and the ancient spirits of the night were no doubt calling me bridge and tunnel as I scurried across their hallowed ground from La Columbe back to the office. I still felt cooler there than here. Cool. If you can bottle it up, it’s not real. You can’t bottle up the other side of the pillow., for instance. I always wonder what it was like to be a hip person in like 2004 or 2011. You know, have a few thousand Instagram followers, when that was something. You know something’s become nothing if you can bottle it up, someone said that once, and people have been bottling it up ever since. Such is life, such is nightlife:

The cool people don’t stay in one place for long, and club owners can both spend and earn a lot of money in pursuit of them. Each club follows a similar life cycle. First it attracts high-status guests and excludes everyone else. Over time, as the VIPs gravitate to other, newer clubs in the city, the club opens its doors to the lower-status masses and the crowd gets less exclusive. “If you put it in New York terms,” explained a banker and club regular, “it just gets a lot more bridge and tunnel … They’re just happy to be there …

The very idea of there being a “hottest place in town” seems a little quaint these days, in a post-Covid, ghost-kitchened world. You know cool isn’t cool anymore, given one of the more recent Schelling points for coolest place in town was somewhere you could hear everyone and see noone.

I’ve had enough, the only cool I’m hankering for now is the side-pillow-other kind, and I hop down, boothback-booth-booth-floor. I refill my glass myself for a change. In the next fifteen minutes, M offers me a blunt, asks me to take a selfie with him, and shows me a middleschoolish picture of him holding a koala bear. No, thanks, no, thanks, wow, you look so…proud?… R isn’t anywhere. My birthday well-wisher isn't anywhere. Bridge and his pal, Tunnel, are still over there, a few tables rightward. Do they charge tolls after midnight? How 'bout I'll hit and then blow the smoke into your mouth?

In short order I do the thing where you discover it's wild, really!, how much you have in common with another girl from a group in your vicinity that's making like they're making like they're about to leave, you spot it by a particular way everyone cocks their heads at their phones in close succession. And the script is just Yes, and. Oh, wow, my brother went to Fordham for law school! I break the news to M, I mean, they're my ride or die, what can you do.

You have NO Instagram? M yells into my ear as he's leaning over while I'm leaning over while I'm up to my shoulder socket blindly casting about the boothback cubby for my purse. Yeah, my name  was taken already, not gonna add random numbers like I'm some band from the aughts. Sleight of hand, shmeight of hand, they all just feed into some giant hopper under the dance floor. Finally, I feel a shaggy golfball charm and extract my bag like it's a claw game prize. Someone like y-

‘Someone like me’ should what, have an Instagram, like it’s some mechanical cause-effect sequence, like ‘You’re hot, so you then have an Insta’ is the same as some bowling ball rolling across the room and bumping into a pool cue which falls across the kitchen table and hits little spoon catapults that launch a bunch of marbles off to god knows where?  ‘Someone like me’,  who can point to yearlong gaps where not even a single photo of me exists, like I thought living as dark matter for a while would be or something?  

‘Someone like me’  was someone who was pulled out of eighth-grade algebra class to a meeting with the vice principle and school counselor and to–

…and he’s paying no attention whatsoever, he's been waiting for me to finish my spiel, he passes me his phone wordlessly, keyboard up, cursor blinking in the First Name field. I tap my number out, hand it back to him, feel a buzz a few seconds later in my purse. Fieldwork, I think to myself in 3-D-rendered in blocky light-gray type on a black background  and rotating slightly, sparkles glittering off of it. Meanwhile, my squad's Uber is here. We say our goodbyes and skirt around the dance floor toward the stairs that lead up to the entrance.

I peel off as we pass coatcheck. Did none of them- Same attendant. She has to remember me. She still has to see my ticket. 06117. I can hardly contain my numberphilia as I pass it to her. If only math was  as cool as this place is to Bridge and Tunnel. It's not prime. I know, it totally looks like it though. It's also a zipcode in Con-

Everything good? I turn around. V. Yeah no what do I have to do to earn my fucking facial at one of these things, get up on the tabl- just headed home. I lack social skills sometimes and just end up being unpleasant, like when I half-shove an iPhone blazing a light-mode Uber app in his face in the darkened club to bolster my point.

Zero dark-thirty, 58th and Madison. Passive piscine partyleaver. Four feet of legs high-heels-to-hips stumble away from a nightclub. Dead fish walking. There's no longer any precipitation of any form, such that umbrellas are beside the point. A Gray Honda Sienna driven by someone named Pei. What I expected, from the app. Hop in car, shut door, pull down dress, check phone. Pull up mask. I scroll past Maybe M's message from earlier, scroll back, open it.

| Everything’s bigger in Texas 🤠

Hhm.  

💬

bigger than in germany, at least | 

iii) Etiquette

Well, I'm glad you made it. To… he glances around, as if searching for something toastworthy in the room, past me, at the all-male gaggle of R's friends-cum-clients, none of whom would ever be mistaken for Brazilian or Columbian, pulls focus back to me, whips left to note the winged robot on stage next to us, back to me …

‘To _____!’

What!?

T says, I said, ‘ To _____!’  He’s doing a sort of loud talking you do as a last resort before shouting, which is never attractive on anyone, no matter the necessity, it's like the volume equivalent to speed-walking. I can’t hear him. I hope I’m not toasting to anything obscene. I’m just shouting.  

I…sure!  

We’re at Etiquette, a sort of pop-up nightclub with a significant dinner theater component. We’re very underground. I spiraled down least four flights worth of marble stairs to get here, behind the trundling bouncer who escorted me down without slowing down halfway through at coatcheck so I could bare my teeth at those nickel and dimers, after I walked up directly to the entrance on Forty-Sixth and was whisked inside before I could even spit out my name or R’s. Can’t wait to party at M42 next week. Very cavernous in here, too. Caverns, it’s always caverns. Where are all the second-wave feminists decrying skyscrapers as monuments to phallocentrism now, huh? Oh, right. Face control.

The sheer kitsch of this place. King Freddie Mercury, with flamethrower. The I’m a F*cking [sic] Rockstar tagline. There’s a direct-to-video decadence to it all. Just their silly promo on their site:

ETIQUETTE PROVIDES AN IMMERSIVE, HIGH PRODUCTION, HOSPITALITY EXPERIENCE THAT ENCOMPASSES LIVE ART, WORLDLY PERFORMANCES, NIGHTLIFE, MAGIC, AND THEATRE INTO A WORLDLY DINNER NIGHTLIFE EXPERIENCE.

Worldly. Marvelous. Of all the nights I spend surveying the party circuit, tonight’s atmosphere feels emptied out of a certain taut significance most clubs peddle, and which of Very Important People’s  frame uncritically imputes. It’s a whisper, an undercurrent of charismatic epistemology continually reaffirming your suspicions: There is someone behind the curtain. There is a fiat that transcends the trappings of high status it is backed by. The rich are more right in their preferences than you in yours.

The outside view confirms this. There is not a sociology book about the enjoyment of your own preferences you can read. You however have read one about theirs. From this you deduce the existence of a superimposition that has been forced on you. By fiat. Theirs. And it continues on and on like this. And a vanishingly small proportion of readers are women who are north of six feet tall in heels, conspicuously, if not ludicrously thin, less than thirty, preferably less than twenty-five, and whose facial attractiveness is left as an exercise to the reader who will experience the ouroboros of it all for themselves from the inside and yank back the curtain to find there’s no one there.

None of this is helped by the book’s mascot, the polatch:

Potlatch is typically enacted by a group leader seeking prestige and status. Status was most obviously generated when a nobleman gave gifts so large that his rivals could not reciprocate, provoking their humiliation and establishing his dominance. …In a potlatch, a tribal chief or noble lavished gifts of considerable riches upon his guests to advance his title or rank, doling out large quantities of food, woolen blankets, or silver bracelets. Potlatch ceremonies often began as a feast and culminated in a fire, sometimes with the outright destruction of property, like tossing blankets into a fire, breaking canoes, or throwing heirloom coppers into the ocean…

Ah yes, shoehorning indigenous peoples into theories about timeless, universal attributes of human nature, that timeless, universal attribute of sociologist nature. Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, all just wanna spray Dom Pérignon on girls taller than them in rooms with inordinate numbers of subwoofers. The rituals of the ancients, press-ganged into whatever context you need them to fit within, just works.

I don’t fault the book in the slightest for taking this tack. Had my aims been the same, my means would have been the same. It’s simply a no-win position from the outset; one’s hands are tied: the more seriously a book takes its subject, the more seriously the reader takes the book. Mears’s conclusions are brilliant:

For sites designed for the display and squander of money, VIP clubs undertake elaborate efforts to conceal economic exchanges. Money is front and center in the champagne potlatch, yet it is also carefully hidden in the relations between clients, clubs, promoters, and girls. Direct monetary exchanges between these groups is taboo.

For clients, clubs afford them the chance to act out domination over each other and over girls’ bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly, a relation that teeters dangerously close to the brink of sex work. In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.

But after experiencing the world the book studies directly, I believe the it’s chosen frame–taking for granted the fiat of nightlife is intrinsically worth what it claims to be–inherently limits space for analysis, and by its own lights fails in its aims:

This book revives Veblen’s original critique and advances it empirically to ask, How does conspicuous waste happen? I document competitive spending rituals as organizational achievements, hugely dependent upon the backstage work of vulnerable women and marginalized men.

Because perhaps not entirely in Mears’s time, but certainly now, clubs are to status as Everest is to danger: venues of an embalmed élan vital that once made them frontiers. For their part, clubs’ inventions of ever more baroque VIP gimmicks read like a fractaling list of mountaineering exploits: First female ascent without supplemental oxygen. First to descend by paraglider and survive. Invent stupider and stupider games, dispense stupider and stupider prizes.

Nightlife is just rated-R Dave & Busters; it’s a bunch of mooks who think you can purchase a ticket to the opposite of Disneyland. The banality at the center of this world is difficult to communicate with the straight face Systems of Power Relations Studies demands of its practitioners. There’s no disassociating it away as a detached observer–you have to inhabit the world you present as a character in your own right, because you already do. You must seek to understand how your own idiosyncratic accumulations of capital affect things, because they already do.

I look around me. Confetti everywhere. I’m liking the dinner theater thing, it’s refreshing. For once, delicious visuals that are not female bodies are just as much on display as female bodies. I’m in such rare form I get up onstage and dance when the other girls do. When in Rome. No, I’m not in that photo. There’s a jester’s privilege to this place; there are clubby aspects here, still bottle service, still girls, but these only heighten the uncanniness.  It takes surreality to unmask surreality. I’m watching this guy dance on the table next to me when an feel the buzz of an errant DM, and decide I’d rather talk to this rando than anyone in my immediate vicinity.

| Watcha dooooin

 being a pretty decoration at a |

nightclub as a favor for a promoter

friend of mine lol

| Hahaha got you locked innnn

lol it’s not like that |

long story lol |

| What are we drinkin

| And how loud is the music

hope you can still think lol

straight tequila lol |

| Thattagurl

I send him a photo I took of the robot actor who was onstage earlier. Not only was he winged, but his big, boxy helmet was covered in LEDs that cycled between facial expressions in sync with the music. And he had green lasers shooting out of each and every digit, even his toes. I also send a video of him battling what seems to be his arch nemesis, a gladiator with LED-studded armor a square screen mounted to his chest displaying a silhouette of a dancing, scantily-clad woman on top of a colorful background, who is pounding on a snare drum that’s strapped to him, like he’s the Little Drummer Boy who grew up to become this degenerate.

🖼 |

🖼 |

crazy place lol |

can’t beleive people actually pay

for this experience lol |

straight tequila lol |

| Thats actually a pretty cool photo

| At least they have entertainment

yeah they had a saxophonist and |

like acrobats earlier

makes it less boring lol |

| What would you prefer to be

doing?

lol actually this lol |

like i sail long story |

| Haha must be

| Boogie on on down then

| Bottle service?'

lol yeah |

i'm quite pampered |

| The only way to go

| Did they do the sparkler thing

I am well equipped to answer this, because at one point Very Important People helpfully explains what a sparkler is:

The sparkler is a live firework that shoots out as high as eight inches. It burns for up to fifty-five seconds.

of course |

even bitcoin themed lol |

| You're from Texas- what part

| Bitcoin fully mainstream now dang

so crazy

Houston! |

| Are you shouting at me from

across the dance floor!

yes lol |

forgot how much this |

makes your ears ring lol

and it’s all in 4/4 lol |

| Four on the flooooooor

The music really is atrocious at these things. Beloved house beats lol. It was strange initially, hearing these songs pumped out of terawatt sound systems. Before I assumed they could only ever emanate from the tinny stereos of Ubers, some west coast soylent treatment of Muzak which drivers are contractually obliged to blast. Or in spin class sometimes. I associated the particular genre with motion. You’re going somewhere. But at the club, it’s You’ve arrived, you f*cking rockstar, you. It’s New Year’s Eve from here on out. You’ve made it to the top, now you’re here. Unfortunately, arrival has a miniscule shelf life. It gets baroquer, quicker, than almost any sensation. The store-bought version offers less a zennish reach-the-peak-be-enlightened aura, more the murdered anticipation of a roller coaster getting stuck seconds before the it can coast down the initial precipice.

I put my phone away, deciding to leave. One of the aerial contortionists whipping around above almost killed me when her braided wig flew off her head and almost beaned mine, and I lost another ring of mine on the floor earlier, this time for good. Not my night. I’m yanking my coat out from beneath a leg of the table I stashed it under when I hear someone shout at me:

Are you a model!?

Da! I finally get it free, and stand back up to find myself chest-to-face with a good civilian. She stares up at me and tilts her head to one side a bit.

What!?

I feel like that godawful term’s gotten into my water supply for good. I hope she’s here writing her own book. I hope she’s hoping I’ll give her ammunition to savage me as the avatar of this whole gilded funhaus of mirrors. This imported bitch is so pathetic she couldn’t even get herself invited to Saint-Tropez, she’s just here, partying it up on a Saturday night with Alcoholic Betty Boop. I hope she writes better than me, is more concise. Everyone here is writing, undercover, I hope, busboys, bouncers, the person who lights the sparklers, I hope the whole game of nightlife turns itself inside out and the ascent to higher and higher simulacrum levels becomes the most incredibly seductive and thrilling part of these nights.

No, I’m not!! I am not a model! I figure it’s too loud for her to argue with me. She doesn’t ask me any follow-up questions.

✧

Sunday, it still feels like morning to me, and I’m in my bed, sprawled out and tangled in the covers and skipping through stories from last night until I find myself. It doesn’t feel like there’s any grand qualia on the horizon like when I first dove into this world. Thanksgiving is next week, maybe I’ll eat my way to good citizenship like I’m Christian Bale or something, if I can keep from polatching it all up, see nightlife through another perspective. You don’t know what you’ve got un–there I am I spot myself finally. This is the girl. I do kind of look imported, in this context. Natasha, little Croatian flag emoji. twenty-two, Major Model Management, dm for booking and inquiries. Has a small dog, and a boyfriend who looks to be a gas station attendant. Must live near that Art Nouveau building fascadé she always uses as a background for her outfit pics.

What is it like to be a that? it feels more straightforward to ask her than to interrogate myself. Wring the blood out of that stone-cold stunner. I owe Mears something of an apology, this all is difficult to convey.

---

iv) Silencio

One night, sometime during these weeks, I remember a dream I had. It’s either very late, or else time has been murdered entirely, and I find myself walking up to the entrance of TAO Downtown, alone. The location was definite⏤Sixteenth Street and Ninth, Google building behind me, Chelsea Market catty-corner, the weird porthole facade of the building above the nightclub around the corner⏤but the streets bleed off into inky blackness beyond that perimeter, and no other people are present, nor any signs they might be. No parked cars, even. The silence was of the kind that oozes. Perhaps the absence of time entails the absence of people, because we read its effects on others in order to triangulate its passage, like watching the wind rustle through the boughs of trees.

That’s what I love about these girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age. Above all, isn’t this the brand of reality distortion that clubs proffer? I knew I was there to meet R, already inside, in that way you can clutch tightly onto only a single, atomic fact at a time in dreams, white-knuckled for fear of the consequences of this knowledge slipping into oblivion on your watch, for fear that it’s the lynchpin keeping this magic carpet you’re riding  from unraveling. For fear your grace should fall; for fear tonight is all.

In no time or an eternity later, I stood in front of the velvet rope, and on the other side was a man. Fifties or sixties, black windbreaker, crew cut, several inches shorter than me, a voice than can cut through a crowd; he was there my first night at TAO, manning that same post. I recite my reason for being, there, or anywhere, with the rote exactitude of a toy whose string has been pulled: I’m here with R. My charge released, and proud of my brevity, I don’t pause for breath, and prattle on: I’m still new to the party circuit...

The bouncer cuts me off at that, before I can mention the book, before I can establish a toehold of irony about my presence there. He’s warmly receptive in this, though, opposite my real-life impression of him, and I find his salutations briefly jarring... He continues, saying I ought to be introduced to tonight’s manager, Tuesday, who manages the club on Fridays, like tonight. I notice a small grin ripple across my face. I ask, Who’s on First?

Yeah, he says, in that sort of courteously bemused tone one reserves for marveling at stale novelties for the benefit of others, and Friday’s managing the place on Tuesday, and... I awoke at this, at my dream world being too rapidly peopled and calendared out to remain intact.

And tremble like a … Flower!

---

v) The Fleur Room

I hop out of a cab in NoMad a few weeks later, in early December. I ignored R’s and M’s invitations for weeks due to Thanksgiving travels, a major work deadline, and a major thesis deadline, but no longer. It’s Wednesday, and it’s three parties for tonight: I’ll join R at The Fleur Room at ten, followed by a trek over to another sibling TAO joint, the Marquee, sometime after midnight, lasting until presumably whenever. And I failed miserably in splitting the difference wardrobe-wise between these two engagements, and my first of the evening, my company’s holiday party.

I walk into the restaurant and weave my way back to the private room to join my cowokers. Six-pm, to six-am, the starting pistol goes off in my head as I step across the threshold. The forty-something of them are all here. I wrap the ruggish-looking long floral jacquard-knit coat I wear tighter over my short, short, short green-sequined holiday dress. It’s warm here, more than in the restaurant, much more than outside. I sit down, where I can find an empty seat. A waiter asks me what I’ll drink. A tapestry walks into a bar...

Nobody’s heard that one. Party girl walks into a club... everyone. The punchline at least. Me. Shriveling up at twenty-five or twenty-eight or thirty. Gaining weight after a harrowing breakup. Running into a propeller. Live by the sword, die by the sword; they’ll only shed crocodile tears when you bemoan your lost charm. Personally, I drive it like I stole it, especially given I had more than enough of an ugly duckling phase, not in the joyriding and stunts sense, but in the paranoia and cautious monotony so you don’t get pulled over and asked for papers which is when they notice something is amiss sense.

So I brandish my cover story throughout the evening indiscriminately: I have another party after this... Yes! That’s why I’m dressed up, like this... I know... Right after, the timing worked out perfectly, fortunately... What? Oh, no it’s not too far, it’s nearby... A friend’s Christmas party... A lounge nearby I think... No, I’m actually a little cold, still... Zara! Oh the dress you mean, Michael Costello... You’re not boring, it’s Wednesday! If it weren’t for that I’d be too... I know... His company’s party, I’m his plus-one... Oh, you know, finance, long hours, otherwise... Yeah, it’ll be pretty swanky I think... Long story…

Dinner is family-style, not unlike that at Baby Brasa. I nibble at the salmon. Someone remarks on how little I’ve eaten. Attention drawn to what you don’t eat when you do. My boss gets up to deliver a short speech, rally the troops and all that. He’s wealthy, from previous ventures, he tells us; he pauses, he switches his gaze from one side of the room to the other, he continues: But you’ll find it’s not as big a piece of the puzzle as you’d thought, he pauses again at this, he lets it settle, he continues: It’s impact, it’s several other things besides money.

I envision myself giving the same speech, almost verbatim, behind the velvet ropes of a club entrance, standing on a soapbox I brought with me for this purpose. I’m model hot I say to them, them being a crowd of good civilians and down on, gathered ‘round the perimeter of the velvet ropes, waiting to be let in Which is why they gesturing to the bouncers around me and then the club behind me indulge me when I do things like give impromptu speeches like this I pause, and switch my gaze from one side of the crowd to the other, and continue: But you’ll find it’s not as big a piece of the puzzle as you’d thought, I pause again at this, let it settle, because unlike him I don’t even know what puzzle I’m trying to solve in the first place, if there is one.

Your grand prize for winning at the things we’ve won at in life is Congrats, you’re now on the other side of a fucking rope, and you’ve been Tower-of-Babel’d so you can’t hope to communicate with those on the other side in any meaningful way about why and specifically how fucking meaningless that rope is. Because on the other side, the trappings appear to be the essence. So goes the halo effect. This is me generalizing, I don’t know what it’s like to be wealthy from previous ventures, to have been there and done that. I’m worse because I didn’t earn my advantage, all the gold in Fort Knox was just handed to me:

One club owner described his door as similar to the “Fort Knox experience.” He meant that as a selling point.

Albeit as more of a high-interest loan that will soon come due, yada yada yada. I tell him none of this as he, I, and a few others sip down coffee together. [Redacted] just has the coolest stuff he says, holding up my arm by the black ourborousish bracelet I’m wearing. We’re some of the last to leave, me to my next party, the others before they go home, to a one-year-old who’s already asleep, to a boyfriend of three years, to a nighttime tea ritual they’re militant about performing.

I stop by the restroom on the way out to let the coffee do its diuretic thing. Wash up in one of the co-ed sinks, reapply lipstick, take stock in front of the floor mirror behind the door. Temperature hasn’t turned me into a party girl melt. I slip out of my cocoon in something of an undress rehearsal and strike a pose to double-check my outfit for the night, my real outfit. It’ll do. The door opens, a coworker I hadn’t seen yet tonight replacing my reflection, struck briefly when he sees me. Anotherpartyafterthis I blurt out my spell as I squeeze past him and vacate the restroom, furling my coat behind me as if I were a fairy who’d just visited him.

“Tapestry walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘Look like ya got th’ rug p–’

‘Just a vieux carré,’ the tapestry cuts him off, clarifies, ‘for me.’”

✧

I hoof it a few blocks north to join R’s group, arriving just as they’re rummaging around bags and swiping through camera rolls to display proof of vaccinations. Unnervingly, to the bouncer who had cameoed in my dream. Of course. If someone’s really behind the curtain, they’re brilliantly subtle about it when they want to be. I walk-straddle over the velvet rope and take my place as caboose. When it’s my turn, I hand my vax card and ID over. He takes both in one hand and positions his flashlight over them. Turns it on. Looks. Turns off. Repeats this sequence with a stateless monotony, as if he refreshed a webpage that had just finished loading. Whatever he needs he gets on try number two: Okay, the young lady goes up. Up the stairs and past the lighted sign I go before I start believing that was narration.

Five girls and a promoter all crowd a narrow hallway. The elevator’s in the middle, and opposite branches off a short passageway leading to coatcheck. We're waiting, it’s not clear what for. I wander over to the opposite end of the hallway and gaze into the darkened, empty barroom there. R is on his phone. The others are still clumped by where we came in. There’s an elevator attendant, and a woman stationed in the coat check booth, both exude inaction. V joins us from outside. More minutes pass. If Tuesday takes Fridays, and Friday, Tuesdays, does that make tonight’s manager Saturday, or Sunday? Finally, one girl from our group takes initiative and engages the coat check woman, but this backfires when neither she or any of the others have cash on them. Rookie mistake. Still, it has the effect of rebooting the evening somehow, and I hear the elevator twice over the din of the haggling.

V stays behind, ever the fixer, R and I enter the elevator alone. We shoot shit about our workdays, how we’d answered emails and attended meetings, as if these were our talismans of maturity; wave them about, and they’ll reframe our participation in the evening’s frivolities. We have other things going on, mostly. Balls in the air. Irons in the fire. We work hard, so we play hard: the near-universal paean of club clientele Mears interviews. It’s kind of a backstop answer. Some do claim their revelries as vectors for more hard, hard work, and with same breath opine over how deserving they are of a break from their hard, hard work; cosmetic dentists and lawyers, go figure, seem to find clubs a hotbed of clients-in-waiting. They can’t be that dense, no one is. They know it’s high-proof homo ludens, and that only. So why not go all the way and take a flâneur’s razor to it? They’re that Puritanically bulimic? Work, play, flash, thunder. Every Manhattan money manager in these places probably crosses their heart and hopes to die that correlation ain’t causation. Yet this order of operations is sacrosanct.

He grouses about the other girls some. They just...they don’t have their shit together. Like, you mean they’re difficult to coordinate with? Yeah, that, but... I don’t know... They’re just... Like herding cats, huh? I remark, a line I realize I lifted from a promoter the book quotes. R looks past me blankly for a beat, nods. The rest: You have to do two things: make them purr and hit them with a spray bottle.

Doors slide open, even his facade of effortlessness goes back up a little effortlessly, and we wander down the hall together and into The Fleur Room, a lovely little lounge, thirty-five floors up from a one-block radius of Manhattan known sometimes as The Flower District, with a pedigreed disco ball looking something like an n-sphere. From what I understand, it’s something like the designated TAO pregramming joint. Only a matter of time and scope creep before they get into the hangover triage unit business. No booth-back cubbies, so I fold my handbag into my fuzzy coat and stuff it in the corner and hope people mistake it for a throw or something. Like I said, effortlessness.

R pours me my usual and hands it to me. This, and other Wednesdays here, are branded Whisper Wednesdays, the duration for which the women are made to wear these little headbands with light-up, deep violet devil horns and feel even more like part of the decor than usual. Kudos to marketing, generates user-generated content like a charm. One or another of R’s goons is approaching, with close to a dozen bangling up one of his arms to pass out. I say No, thanks, I don’t wear purple since Prince died, with the maximum solemnity one can impart in a club setting, which works.

Now angelic by comparison, I mill about alone as I drain the night’s first finger of tequila, cherubic in countenance and gazing ethereally out over the lights of the city, unwilling to chance sullying myself by association. Do not give the devil a foothold. Until I feel an insistent finger jab the back of my left bicep a couple of times, V, I notice as I turn to face him, who stuffs a pair into my drink-free hand and continues on before I can register anything other than the or else expression on his face.

When in Rome. Does it hurt, I ask myself, donning the dæmonic headpiece, As I fall from heaven? I make my way back over to our table. Tables, now that more girls and promoters have joined us. R has a little go-to move, we all do, something to tread water in clubs with, a bit like a boppin’ Hitler salute. An arm extended and swaying briskly to the beat, some of us mimic it for a bit along with him. Every so often a budget George Clooney scampers between a few tables, he’s sometimes speaking into a mic, holds it perfectly perpendicular to the floor like his fist is a gimbal. His emceeish tone is all I can make out over the music, and it’s unclear if he’s with TAO performing some or other function or just a rambunctious client. I catch him looking straight at me, once.

I hope we get to keep these! Snapped out of my own little world, I notice the speaker is several inches taller than me. Rare. This not including her ‘fro. Same-enough heel-heights. She must be six-three or thereabouts. A brief flashback to a friend, who tried to launch a line of pants for tall women. Turns out, looking like regular folk in tall-people clothes is even more jarring than looking like a tall person in regular-folk clothes. Surely! I concur. Some women get free trips to St. Barths out of their time in clubs, and some get headbands with little plastic nubs.

She tells me her name: C. [Redacted], I offer my name in return, and we strike up the typical kind of lossy conversation over the music: Do you go out with R often? No it’s my first time!, I’ve only been in the city for a few months. Are you coming to Marquee after this? Yeah probably, maybe, I have work tomorrow. What do you do? I say, a little slowly in a cat-out-of-bag tone I’m a fashion designer, which wasn’t true then but is now. Ah ha, knew it from your dress, I love it so much! Thanks, yeah, I know, me too, the cut is just so good! I wore it for my company’s Christmas party before this, it was perfect! What’s your insta?

Here. I hand her my phone so she can type in her handle, you can’t hope to parse Underscore! No with an ‘E’! Dot! Another underscore!, and make a start at pouring myself more alcohol, but she holds up her drink hand’s index finger and navigates with phone hand’s thumb through submenus, and flashes a screen displaying a QR code in my direction. Oh. Right. The future!, and I hold my phone over hers and tap. I lean down again, shovel another round’s ice into my cup, then concoct a little tequila and a little more orange juice together.

Going to two parties, and at each blaming the other for being overdressed. I wasn’t born in this city, but I got here as fast as I could. I gaze around, sartorially smug. Not a single devil in the building wearing Prada. Pity. Though, perhaps not surprising. At the outset of all this, I was gung-ho to wear my Loubitons out, which cost me more than my rent. Like, Mears takes pains to describe her mildly tattered and so last season to the nth power, Chanel, hand-me-down-from-a-cousin clutch, as if the nightly ritual of baring your handbag’s interior to bouncers for evaluation concerned sharp looks rather than sharp objects.

No such high bar. Wherever she saw the haphazard bouquet of empty Dom Pérignon bottles and pairs of the red-soled shoes, I’ve yet to behold anything so poetically on-the-nose, not that I have any particular thesis I’m in search of metonymic support for. Might Instagram, only nascent during Mears’s period of fieldwork, have proved itself a venue better suited for these lavish displays? The reach and relative indelibility of a post, versus the ephemerality of nights spent clubbing. Add to it the snap-and-return dynamic—it’s an arms race you enter IRL at your own peril.

Or perhaps Zara’s simulacrum of high-fashion is so advanced the Venn diagram of clients, of men, who both care that the dames are decked out in designer duds, and who can actually discern whether the designer duds the dames are decked out in are indubitable, is totally disjoint? Sorry, in other words: if you took a bridge or tunnel to get here, you’re not too picky if the girl around your arm’s wardrobe did, too.

Mass consumption nipping at the heels of conspicuous consumption. Polatch, meet premium mediocre. The hunk of plastic adorning my scalp, that floated across the Pacific in a shipping container and will return to floating across the Pacific in a garbage patch, is the only choice of clothing I’ve felt coerced into making, so far. I hold up my phone and try to take a selfie, but the soft purple glow is absolutely blinding, compared to how dark the room is, and ruins every attempt.

Something something halo effect. I really hope I do get to keep these, though. I spot C, now across the room at a client’s table, a duo of bald guys, the taller one sporting a double-breasted glen plaid blazer over a black turtleneck and looking vaguely like the villain from Goldfinger, given the six or eight additional girls semi-circling around their booth. I peg the pair as Germans—takes one to know one.

How do normal people pass the time at these things? Prior experience shows I can get away with being a dead fish indefinitely. Part of my appeal, I’ve come to understand, is that I don’t look particularly happy to be here, such that I don’t look if I’d be particularly happy to be anywhere, but by designating here as the site upon which I shall mete out my disdain, I’ve added value. A “girl” is a social category of woman recognized as so highly valuable that she has the potential to designate a space as “very important.” That’s in the book somewhere. Someplace else, it elaborates that this of mine designation is not only valuable, it’s commodifiable; only, not by me. Any attempt would cause the entire charade to fall apart. It devolves into borderline prostitution, that way.

I suppose genuine revelry is always an option. Not that I have that gear. I could have brought a friend, we would find some way to commoditize each other, maybe. Not that I have friends to which club settings aren’t anathema. Brooding in the corner is fun, though: They don’t know I’m here because Tyler Cowen recommended a sociology book on his blog. They don’t know I’m writing a thesis on the geometry of computation. They don’t know alcohol would classify as a Schedule-I drug, were it introduced today. They don’t know all is vanity and vexation of spirit. They don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. They don’t know that in 19-

A couple of younger guys arrive at our table, probably my age. Would you get in trouble if you poured us a drink? one says, to me. I realize I’m the only one within arm’s length of potentially fulfilling this request. Not clients then, I guess, Go for it, you can yourself!, but definitely not promoters. We can’t, but you can. The room is small enough, that I’m surprised they let any chum here, a term for table-less patrons I’ve read about but not yet heard used. Oh, I say.

Why not. What is TAO going to do about me giving away their bottom-shelf tequila, scold me? I arrange a few glasses so I can try my hand at filling them all in one tip of the bottle. Just at the club, pouring drinks, for my friends. Classic me. Models ‘n bottles, I’m both. Too busy being gregarious, I fail to notice Goldfinger is closing in, fast. Cover blown. I don’t have any exploding tacks on me to throw in his path. When they came for my neighbor, I was silent. When they came for m-

You are very, very beautiful. You are a model? he asks.

Why I haven’t come up with a canned response to this one yet. I am. Exact same cat-out-of-bag tone from earlier.

You should call me sometime, if you ever come to Europe. I know a lot of models there. You could work with friends of mine.

Oh maybe, I should, embarrassingly I’ve never left the US before, I really need to! Where in Europe are you located? C’mon...

I’m from Germany yessss but I now live in Paris.

Everyone tells me I look like I’m German, they guess it all the time.

You do look like you could be German he agrees. You live in New York?

I do! But I came from Texas originally!

Texas he repeats. Every foreigner says Texas in their cute, unique little way, with varying clips to the T, ranging from half an s on the end to two full ones, differing weights on either side of the barbell with the x at its center. Your name is..?

[Redacted.]

I don’t remember his, if he told it to me, but he goes to shake my hand but does this weird thing where he sort of raises up my right forearm vertically, slowly, and then encircles my arm just below the wrist with his hand, and caresses his way up, until he’s cleared my fingers. Does it again with the left arm.

[Redacted.] from Texas he concatenates my replies, as he performs this…move...okay...

You work in fashion?

Watches. My friend and I  he gestures towards to his bald counterpart across the room came here on business, to the city. As if to clarify, Not this club on business.

We have clients in the city we are visiting tomorrow and the next day. And then we go back.

At this he pulls out his phone, and insists I enter my contact info. I aquicese, and take it, and enter my digits into it. Passing it back, he pecks the little green Call circle before it can fully leave my grasp. Several seconds tick by. My gaze is still locked on his phone; I don’t look if his is on my phone in my hand, or my face. Several more. It lights up, my phone, that is, and I think about picking up and saying something cute. Or seeing if I can hold it close to his and generate a few screeches of feedback. He hangs up and pockets his phone too quickly for either. Come join me at our table?

He extends his hand, I take it, we wade around couches until we arrive at his table. Their table. There’s sort of an odd-couple energy to the pair of men I pick up on, it reminds me of former neighbors of mine, Jason and Jeffrey, and I silently christen my new German acquaintances with these names. Jason introduces me to Jeffrey. Our hands only shake, and he doesn’t go for whatever weird sensual caressing thing Jason did. I’m taller than Jeffrey, with heels on at least, and a bit shorter than Jason. Besides them, I’m the only one standing.

Framed in the window above our booth, the Empire State Building changes the color of its lights, and I wonder if someone’s ever used the app from this vantage. In all the marketing material for The Fleur Room, it’s bathed in the same hue as my horns, the purple is probably for NYU, but you capitalize on positive externalities when you can. They have a bottle of pricey vodka, and no tequila. I had put my drink down earlier to play bartender. Jason offers, and I agree to a mixture of cranberry juice and the potato liquor.

Meanwhile, the emcee from earlier has parked himself at our table. I’m introduced, he’s TAO after all. Much less a blur of motion than before, he seems as if he were waiting in reserve for something. I lean back away after shaking his hand, and he regards me with the same look as earlier, eyes trained on me generally but gaze resting on no one part of or point on me, as if that resolution’s his highest setting, even though we’re much closer now.

Jason ruffles the sequins up and down the small of my back a few times, their chainmailish texture amusing  to him. Other girls around the table look on, still about six or seven, but C isn’t among them now. I haven’t paid their table close enough attention over the last few hours to notice if I’m just the latest in the night’s long line of current fancies, or if the mens’ interests in me are novel. Now the music has largely stopped, and I’m not sure if last-one-standing or sit-to-stand-another-day is preferable.

The manager is taking us to another club soon, you should join us. At the Marquee, you mean? Yes.

Jason appears to marvel at me. It’s hard to communicate what being marveled at feels like. Marveled at for how one’s atoms are arranged rather than how one has arranged atoms. You distrust it because you played no part in it. No cue-do-reward, no feedback loop. Spooky action, sans résistance. Yes, technically, you reflect photons in a manner which finagles some other’s evolutionary circuits into firing in some way that choreographs the marveling. So does fire, so does food. So does money, in most. You refuse to believe you played dice with the universe, and rolled perfection. Because to fully grasp the magnitude of your winnings, is to understand just as viscerally the variance in what life doles out is that high. And from your extreme vantage, it’s a trough, all the way down. You simply refuse to read the altimeter, in order to live.

I realize I should answer him. I’m not sure, I have work tomorrow, it’s late already, I go on appending  lame clauses. He wears a crestfallen expression at this, much convincing ensues. His persuasions penetrate me like x-rays, I’m sure he sees enough to see through all of my excuses, but they mostly pass through me harmlessly, so long as I don’t stick around to accumulate too many more microsieverts. I break off from the table’s orbit and snake back through couches to collect my faux throw. R’s group is long gone. I scoot out of the room without even a wave.

Waiting for the elevator, I think better of it, realizing the Germans weren’t far behind with their coats, and Mr. Tao, whose livelihood depends on convincing people to go to nightclubs. Not optimistic I’d last thirty-five floors against his onslaught given how much tequila’s in me, I hightail it to the bathroom. Poking around inside my purse, I’m pleased to discover no one stole all the $5 bills I don’t carry in it to not pay for coatcheck. l look at myself in the mirror, taking it all in. Purple horns, blonde hair, hazel eyes, green sequins. I yawn, then contort my face into a Satanic sneer. This is what makes the whole twenty-eight billion-dollar world go ‘round?

vi) Harbor

| Hey there!

| Have t read it lol

| Yes, I have Harbor tonight

| Latin Party

| You're welcome to join

It’s the next day, I figure I’ll try a different promoter, get a bit better lay of the land that way. I’m also a bit miffed R left me to fend for myself against the Germans. Who knows, next time it could be Croatians. A scan of tagged posts turns up no mandatory headgear.

yay what time? |

| 11:30

sounds good, think i'll come!

| Awesome

| Whats your phone number? I'll

group chat with the promoter I have

there tonight

Joy, it’s in Hell’s Kitchen. They have a Blackbird and a Concorde parked there, and they still bungle it. The only person I don’t like in New York City lives in Hell’s Kitchen. Nevertheless I’m outside the club a little before midnight, lines snaking out to the left and right of the entrance. The promised group chat never materialized, so I message the guy again.

hey can you send me the group chat |

i’m here |

| Call Ricardo +1 (123) 456-7890

| You'll be under GERMAN Guest List

You’re…really look like that much of a Frau, do I, huh. I call Ricardo, to no avail.

no answer 🤷🏼‍♀️ |

| Found him

| He just answered in the group chat

| Call him and tell him you’re with

GERMAN

This is going nowhere. Das kaput. I walk up to the entrance and make eye contact with the nearest bouncer and Hi, I’m here meeting a promoter, they said his name is Ricar- and he unclips the velvet rope between us and waves me up -do. One flight up, a hallway juts off the landing and terminates in a large, fluorescent-lit room with drop ceilings. It looks like a sample sale, racks with puffers and fake furs strewn about the ancient beige-and-black carpet floor. It’s so dramatically ad-hoc it takes me a second to register it’s the place’s coatcheck before I keep moving, bastards.

One more flight up, I step into the club. First impression is a weird sterility, despite the clumps of plants stapled to the wall behind me. Maybe just the lazy architecture, white plaster walls and bare concrete floors. You really have to commit to the unsanctioned warehouse vibe if you’re going for it. Mostly the unsanctioned part, otherwise it kind of gives up the ghost, but the decor matters, too, and this place feels less Berlin, more suburban megachurch. Almost immediately, I’m shoved out of the way so people can continue taking photos in front of the biomass, which I now notice has a neon rendition of the club’s logo embedded within its ferns.

Where to go, beyond this corner. Maybe my promoter knows. I made it into the club, past the bouncers, that’s supposed to be the hard part, right?

| Ask

| For Ruben’s table

| Or Ricardo’s table

ok |

I don’t think Ricardo is someone I want to meet anymore. Or Ruben. Or Rahul. Or Remy or Rilo Rowan or Rashad or Randall. There’s no doubt some delicious sociolinguistic answer for why promoters are disproportionately Rs. And Ask who? A bartender? I am not trick-or-treating around the room’s tables.

well thanks for nothing no one |

seems to know who i’m talking

about

| What do you mean?

| Table 16

Thank god these tables are numbered like the aisles in a grocery store, what do you mean. This whole Byzantine network of promoters thing. I switch to iMessage

i do!

and aw thannks |

| We are going to Soho now and you

come with us to go shopping.

| Would you come?

well i have work until around 5 and |

then i need to go home and study

for an hour

so  after six i could!  |

| Ok.

| We are going to dinner tonight for

business with several people we work with then.

| After we would go to a club Marquee  again if

you go.

| Let us know.

but it’s like two seconds later when a promoter walks up to me and tries to vulture me off to his table, before I can type anything to send to Jason. Huh. Fault tolerance. I double check first–You’re not Ricardo are you. Who?–and follow him to his table, in some VIP section to the right of the DJ, at least eight or nine girls are already at it. He stashes my coat and purse for me, and offers me vodka, or vodka. Really, no tequila? No tequila, sorry. Ah, fine, put some orange juice in it too.

I step off to one side of the booth, I don’t really feel like getting up there tonight. Soon this guy walks up to me. He’s tall, and has something like an entourage. He looks like some guy from my high school. But almost every guy looks like one or more of many some guys from my high school, or the other high school I attended for only my senior year, which never felt like a my high school and still doesn’t, but it, too, had some guys who often make superficially apt comparisons to some guys I encounter today.

It's all a sort of a homogeneous individuality I get lots of mileage out of wrapping my axle around. You do that, if you stand out. You’re the only one who fully focuses on everyone else. You start to notice the nature of your foils. Start to listen for signals in the background noise. Like that story, about a candidate telegraph operator, who jolts up in the waiting room full of applicants and barges into the back office because they’re playing and replaying a message in Morse Code over the intercom that instructs one to do just that, and he gets the job. Like TAO’s one bouncer, things conspicuously recycled. Perhaps signs of simulations, though my priors for that explanation are lower than for others.

Hey.

hey.

You’re tall, for a woman. How tall do you think I am?

6’5 I say without hesitation.

…

…

…yeah he says in a tone of voice that’s suddenly too small on him, like correcting the usual delta is some kind of coup de trump card he's counting on to sweep me off my feet. Probably’s never gotten a wrong answer from the opposite direction. What if I had guessed 6'6? You play blackjack, you go bust sometimes, thar be the nature of things. He launches into contingency mode with this Private Conversation move, I call it that, tall guys do it, a half-step forward, unslouch, leans over you a bit, it's not swoopy enough to mistake for the kiss you’ll soon share, and tries hard to Rico Suave his tone for what he's about to say:

There's no one here for you.

…What?

Your height, there's no one here for you.

What am I supposed to do with this, just give him his doe-eyed But you? It’s too early in the evening or  morning for that. I decide this is a good time to launch into my spiel: Basically my first time – a sociology book I had to read for school – it’s all new to me had no idea – Texas  – no not like this – winged robot – amazed they weave this whole dreamworld – pimps –  don’t have one – work tomorrow – sleep deprivation makes me more productive – bird poop – halo effect – NO tequila – right?? – I –

While I’m substantiating one or another of these latter clauses with wild arm gesticulations I notice his head snap back andOhohmygodI’msosorryfuckI’msorry I stabbed this man right in the cleft of his manly square chin with the aggressively geometric ring I’m wearing. Oh my god he’s bleeding I feel terrible oh my god you’re bleeding I feel terrible! I pivot around and wad up a bunch of napkins from the table and hand them to him Please tell me you’re not hemophiliac and he sort of stares at me dramatically over the napkin wad he’s pressing against his chin and we enter a trance together for a moment like this. The instant he pulls the wad away I rush to fill what now feels like silence again Everybody has a plan until they get gouged in the chin? There, that was my kiss as promised, it even looks like I left a smidge of lipstick behind. I make no bones about being a prickly conversational partner at times. Kudos to the guy, overall he took it like a champ and wasn’t angry or anything, and we kept talking for a little while longer.

6'5 moves on with his buds eventually. I watch them as they reabsorb into the main mosh. Maybe that was Ricardo. Hope he finds a shorter girl he can pull rank on easier. Two staff? bouncers? are stopped watching me, about a dozen feet away. I stare back, with a Would a real cop do that? look. I haven’t chatted with any tablemates and don’t feel like starting now. I make a lap around the perimeter of the sea of people. I do another a few minutes later, this time a shorter man who looks to be exactly thirty-five peels off from the crowd and follows me around part of the way, until he gets discouraged and peels back on. Rather than repeat the ritual again, it feels like it’s time to make my exit. I gather my coat and purse, and thank the promoter who brought me to the table.

I’m scooting past the foliage toward the exit when I notice I’ve attracted another tail. On my way out I try to say with abundant Can’t you read the sign energy. Oh that’s fine, I’m a promoter the man says as he squeezes into the stairwell before I can pretend I didn’t hear his response. Wish you had tracked me down earlier, I say. Yeah, what’s your Insta? he’s fiddling with his phone as he backwardly descends one step ahead of me. Here I move us out of the flow of traffic and into the halfway landing nook leading to coatcheck. He’s paying if they come out to charge us for standing here. Still fiddling. Here I hold out my phone, now displaying my insta account QR code, like I’m one of those types of girls who frequently has solutions to things. He looks up, looks at my phone like it had two heads Oh. That’s fancy, I didn’t know it had that.

So it’s not just me because I live under a rock. Apologies to any Discoverability Leads at Instagram canned, but this is like your use prime case, you’ve failed twice now. Does everyone just want a piece of me? I ask as I watch him scroll through my feed, hoping to put him on the spot enough he’ll not want to continue speaking with me..Yeah, they do. I mean, you’re hot he holds out my most recent post to me, a selfie I took in an all-red altheisure getup. Yeah is how I respond to him.

I’m out on the street again, on Forty-Sixth. I start walking east to meet my Uber, past repair garages, a man from inside one calls to me. Besides the stabbing, this is my most vivid memory from the night. You don’t encounter them in Manhattan anymore, since the Hudson Yards developers ran roughshod over most of the concentration that remained there. I hear there are alive and, well, alive, out in Willets Point. The Valley of Ashes. Running into the repair garage vibe must be some essential, fated part of partying in New York. There are more Great Gatsby connections than this, wanna see how deeply spurious I can get? My favorite line from the novel:

[Gatsby]  He’s quite a character around New York—a denizen of Broadway.

[Nick] Who is he, anyhow, an actor?

[Gatsby] No.

[Nick] A dentist?

[Gatsby] Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.

Notice how after his first guess, Nick—logically!—guesses again with the nearest corruption of what he thought he heard, denizen -> dentist. If only Gatsby would have presented him with Meyer Wolfshiem’s QR code to scan, Nick simply could’ve read the man’s bio. Fitzy’s brilliant in those ways, sneaking in that bit of  literature-of-loud-places magic like that. Dentists get a shout-out here too, and their psychographic profile is weirdly overrepresented in–you guessed it–nightclub attendance!:

Duke, a former club owner and now a real estate magnate in downtown New York, calls these people mooks: “You know, a mook. Someone who doesn’t know what’s going on … It’s the dentists that come in and buy the tables, thinking they’re in the company of the cool people, and the beautiful people.”

And from the book’s research appendix:

…Among the clients in this study, the average age was forty years old; half of them worked in finance, two were cosmetic dentists, one an insurance salesman, and the rest identified as entrepreneurs.

Want more? Leonardo DiCaprio is Jho Low’s best friend-for-hire, and of course, who did he play once, in a certain  movie?...Not that he hasn’t had his more Tomish moments, either. All this to say, Fitzgerald had the New York City party scene so well-figured-out a century ago that we’re still piecing it all together, and I’ve finally caught up to my Uber, and I now notice some other guy who must have exited the club around the same time I did walking parallel to me, in the street, showing every sign he believes the car up ahead of us is his Uber, too. Sorry, think this one’s mine I say to him just before both arrive at the passenger door on our respective side, open it, and shout our names in unison at the driver, who breaks our tie in my favor.

Told you I mouth to the guy before he slams his door shut. I notice a DM from tonight’s original promoter, and send him a response:

| Im sorry for not being there tonight

nw someone grabbed me for their |

table lol

| Im  sure everyone wants to have a

pretty girl like you at their table lol

| Sorry again I just couldn't make it

tonight

lol 😂 i'll take anywhere that'll give |

me tequila

nw catch you next time |

| If only if I knew 🤦‍♂️

| Haha

| Yeah I'm usually out Friday/Saturday

I promise I'll have tequila for you

specially 🔥

ha i might be free |

sounds good lol |

| You should be free cause that's

the only way I can do things right

hahaha

lol like i said i'm just kinda |

fascinated this whole world exists

mostly in it for the novelty so take |

advantage while you can before i

move on to something else lol

| I like how that sounds

| We gotta make this novelty more

interesting then

| Something memorable 😏

maybe i'll even be tempted to write |

a book about it all like what

inspired me to do this in the

first place lol

| FYI I'm very committed to this

since we'll be writing a book lol

| Happy to contribute to some

Literature

| How's the party btw?

lol my kinda guy, other promoters i

talk to think i'm crazy lol

which i probably am but still |

| Maybe Craziness keep this world

interesting

ofc!|

i mean this whole world is crazy to |

me lol being from like a really

conservative part of the south

| It is crazy! From where exactly?

| How's the party btw?

like modesty was beaten into me |

as a virtue and the fact i can just

enter this world based on my looks

is crazy to me

texas! lol why i like tequila |

and ok, dont know anyone so may |

go home soon lol

| This crazy world needs some

modesty and beauty from you!

| Nice, how long have you been here?

| You reached out very late! We

should've started with the book

tonight lol

about 3 years! but i've been un |

college + working the whole time

so i haven't really had a lot of time

to explore other things lol

the book? |

| You haven't?

| You better start now

| 😏

| Yes, the book! If you get inspired

| Whats the most spontaneous thing

you've ever done?

oh lol thought you were referring |

to some other club or something

lol as in there was some event

earlier in the night 😂

mm i used to live across the street |

from an office building and some

guy asked me out by writing on a

whiteboard and putting it in the

window and i actually said yes &

went on a date w him despite

being creeped out a bit lol

turns out it was facebook's office |

but still lol

| Hahahah

| No way

| How was that experience?

| Yeah I meant to explore other things haha

meh he was boring and not my |

type and shorter than me so 😂

| Lmao

| Naaah if he was boring that

doesn't count

| You gotta do it right haha

| How tall are you?

i mean everyone who works in tech |

is boring lol i used to work in it

...6'1 😂 |

| Promoters are better 😎

| Lol

| Yeah a model needs to be tall

| So no memorable experiences

from nyc yet?

ha i don't model but i tell people i |

do bc i'm tired of making up

reasons why i don't

i mean...lots, but not really of the |

wild party sort

| Nobody won't ever agrue after

lookin at you haha

| We gotta start, life can't be just

work and school lol

like i said i was kinda goody two |

shoes until recently lol so memorable

experiences are kinda bland/work

related

i know i know  😭 hahaha |

The wildest?

Where do you live?

oh god you're gonna think i'm |

a nerd

...most memorable is an app i |

designed/programmed was in

the wsj, forbes, etc recently  😂

Ooh really?

Haha sounds interesting

yeah idk how it happened just |

right place right time i guess

| Ooh woow

| Need a break from work and

so something fun

| Something you'll write about later

haha

yeah the few time's i've been out |

so far have been really great lol totally

the perfect break from everything

no one cares that i have any brains |

lol i can jsut play dumb all the time

and people don't care haha

| What would people do if they

get the right frame from you?

| Idk if most of people just play stupid

or they actually are 🤣

| Can't tell

| It's better to play dum so you get

to know people better

"right frame"? |

i mean...i'm a comp sci major |

at nyu...i can't imagine i'm the

only model on the party cirtuit

who has one hahaha

i know right it's so weird it's |

like...people will open to you

more if you're on their level vs

if their impressed/intimidated

by you

lol i gotta go to bed have work |

tomorrow, lmk if you're going

anywhere interesting

| Exactly that's what I meant

| Go to bed this early? Well science

needs you

otherwise seems like i can just show |

up and they'll let me in and

someone will just take me lol

yeah i made it home wasn't really |

finding anyone i'd vibe w/

| I don't want that to happen agai.

| I wanna be there and be the one

grabbing you haha

| Like I said before

| Cause I wasn't there lol

| Otherwise we wouldve been

drinking some tequila still haha

ha all they had was vodka 😭 |

| Nooo

| Really?

went home just to break into my |

stash

i know right |

should've just hopper tables til i |

found some

*hopped |

| You should share it

| I read somewhere is not Good to

drink alone haha

| I don't think anybody had tequila

| Everyone drinks vodka in this city

| It seems like that

lol hate vodka |

if i wanted potato that bad i'd |

rather eat a baked one

| Hahahahaha

| A sweet one

what i *really* want is mezcal lol |

but unless someone buys me a

drink tequila is fine lol

| We should go for a tequila right

Now

well i’m off to bed…got a friend’s |

theater thing earlier in the evening

tomorrow but free after so lmk

nooo i need sleep lol |

actually have work tomorrow |

morning lol

| Hahahaha kk you’ll take that to

bed

| No bueno

| Oooh shit

| If you don’t like your boss we

should go for that mezcal

| Hahaha

| All good, I guess I’ll see you

tomorrow!

ha sorry actually i like my boss |

he understands me more than most |

but that’s a long story lol

| Never read this in my life

| That’s an story I’d like to hear while

drinking mezcal

yeah it’s kinda hard to explain

but…yeah guess i got really lucky

hahaha maybe i’ll put that in the

book too |

| Hahahaha that's a different

chapter tho

yeah it's becoming quite a lengthy |

book lol

---

vii) The Marquee

It was very generic, I guess that’s what threw me.

Because I was like, I don’t think this is you writing this.

I was drunk, it wasn’t me writing that.

And I can write generic when I want. Remember college essays?

Oh, stop. What if it hadn’t been you?

Or they were coercing you?

I would think of something. I started putting my key under the neighbor’s mat whenever I leave my apartment to go to these things.

Because even if they steal my purse with my building key, I usually hold onto my phone, I can get into the building that way.

Oh, that makes me feel better.

I could say something like, ‘I forgot to put my key under the mat tonight,’ otherwise I’ll say ‘I remembered to put my key under the mat tonight,’ or nothing. But what if I forget because I actually forgot to put my key under the mat one night and I slip and tell you without thinking about it.

What if your phone dies?

‘What if my phone dies?’  Because these people who kidnap me into sex slavery will respect the one-phonecall thing in the first place.

EX-actly! This sarcasm from her is worth all the world to me. It’s a big stretch. Her only daughter, her baby, reads a book and now she’s a party animal. Sociology, that samizdat, Not Even Once. And that I’m writing some goddamn thing about it, I was telling her earlier how the length just got away from me on it:

So I think it was during the Truman administration, it was after World War Two, when everything was up for grabs. There was this diplomat I think was living in one of the countries threatened by the Iron Curtain or was witnessing it firsthand like that. A lot of policy after the war in the Forties was up for grabs, and he sent this telegram to Truman that was basically him laying out what eventually became a lot of early Cold War forign policy, because he was close to what was happening. I can’t remember if it was about nuclear policy or just Iron Curtain stuff about the Soviets presenting a threat in general, because nuclear was really up for grabs then. But he knew he needed to get through, so he sent this scroll of a telegram. I think it was like seventy or ninety pages’ worth on whatever angle he wanted to get through to the President. And it became known as the “Long Telegram” because of that. And I think he meant it, as a PR move. The length carried it forward initially, because the ideas were too new to work on their own, but then the ideas became orthodox on their own two feet, because they had some training wheels initially…

HEY how about ‘Pineapple?’ Impossible to mistake or get garbled over the phone, can probably even get it out through a gag.

Um…perfect! I’m not sure if she knows. 

So I’ll just blurt that out when they give me my one-phonecall before they drag me into the van.

Just be careful! And watch your drink. You have been watching your drink?

Yes, I have, maybe I’ll even get that nail polish that you can dip in it and it changes colors if someone spiked your drink.

They make that? Wow…just..stay safe. My baby…

Or that ring of mine, you know, the pointy one. Poke their eyes out.

Just…be safe…

I hope neither Break Glass If Getting Kidnapped Into Sex Slavery are necessary tonight, the Germans are still interested, and I’m in the mood for some more rendered in 3-D with sparkles glittering off of it Fieldwork:

|We are thinking we go back to club later.

| The Marquee.

hey yeah i think so! |

i have a friend’s theater thing out in |

brooklyn until 11 or so  

so it would have to be after that |

| That sounds good.

| Let us know.

The friend’s theater thing doesn’t happen because I leave work late, because I don’t want to go. It’s out in Red Hook, for starters, which is so far off the beaten path a Swedish company came in and subsidized a ferry over to it just to embarrass us, iT’s TiMe tO BuIlD, and every Manhattanite visualizes a parody of that New Yorker cover when they think about the area. And then there’s it: the play forcibly conscripts you into your own cast of one, and then scripts at you to Marina Abramović your way through displays of furniture until you’re enlightened:

…a guerrilla, branching narrative performance that transforms the mundane spaces of a well-known store in Brooklyn into a series of worlds, fantasies and meditations…Participants are prompted to navigate and interact with the store through a series of choices and tasks….Play along with [Redacted], who's turning 40, as we consider the narratives we’re being sold, the pathways we’ve chosen, and the personal and societal costs of our choices.

Besides triggering my early-warning system like dozens of nukes vaulting over the North Pole—hours on end of wandering around IKEA performing some inscrutable ritual that’s so conspicuously a simulacrum of the furniture shopping everyone else watching me is doing they’ll probably stone me with meatballs for appearing to be possessed—the character you inhabit for the duration of the production’s name is [Redacted], too. Hearing another [Redacted] narrate my thoughts

and qualia in the first person inside my skull for so long, I’ll probably contract some inverted strain of  the Capgras delusion. No part of me wants to consider the narratives I’m being sold, or the pathways I’ve chosen, or the personal and societal costs of my choices. And I’m not a character in search of an author to do it for me. I don’t own a pair of headphones or earbuds right now, either.

Walking home from work, I break the news to my friend, and that reminds I also have news to break to the promoter from last night:

hey so sorry gonna have to flake on you |

couple of rich German dudes i met at |

Fleur earlier in the week invited me

to their table at marquee  

| OMG

| we’re not writing that book then

lol |

we can just call it even then after |

leaving me high and dry last night

| Lol fair enough

I promptly collapse into bed and off to sleep upon arriving home, the late nights and at-my-desk-at-

nines from the last two days overcoming me. I come to, something about falling asleep when it’s dark, only to wake up when it’s still dark, elements of the dream world don’t stay put like they should. Like your body knows you only get one good shot at the unconsciousness it needs to do whatever repairs or or bottoms-up or top-down consolidating it needs to do, and by not seeing light at one end or the other of the tunnel it’ll fight you for sentience, its foot on the brake, yours on the accelerator. I get up and try to draw on some eyeliner all groggily to balance out my humongous pupils.

Nothing from the Germans. I check the time, they probably think I’m just being noncommittal because I want them to leave me alone. At least I’ll be a surprise. I theorize to myself, who else, about labor some while I don my uniform: It’s funny, how gray-area superimposition roles like girls, like the legibility of the role is such that it’s not that ‘their labors are so well-disguised’ they’re thought of as ‘less-than’ a real job that’s recognized as such, but it’s like their labors are so literally ‘well’ disguised that it’s such an intense thing that the role can’t literally be thought of as a job, like we can’t look at the sun because it’s too bright, not because it’s not visible. I’ve never left my apartment after one-am before. For once, Uber doesn’t ask me for photographic proof I’m masked, like it has been recently, like even all the mechanical turks are asleep now. I hop in, soon enough we’re going up Tenth. The driver slows down and veers over to the curb on the right side, opposite the street of The Marquee.

I peer up at the at the towering apartment blocks on this side of the street, a decade ago there was this little cartoon building monster that was kind of the anti-mascot for this grassroots campaign against a high-rise development in a residential neighborhood in another part of the town I grew up in, I remember driving through it recently and seeing some of the signs still up in people’s yards, like if vigilance were to dip too low the googly-eyed bushy-browed buildingzilla would feel he’d been given license to rampage through the sleepy hamlet. I’ve received a message to Jason:

hey i’m here! |

should i just come inside? |

I hit send and hop out. The two bouncers manning the club’s exit are watching. I hear a comment about me as I step onto the sidewalk. I turn back around so they can’t see my further reactions. Now my back’s to the club, like I’m facing the wrong way as I stand in an elevator. But I can’t turn back around, tacit admission. I hunch my shoulders up inside my trusty jacquard coat, because an upright carpet is less notable than a six-one girl all alone. I check my phone:

| Where

|Where are you?

i’m here outside! |

hurry cold |

A documentary I watched in a class, years ago, featured the apartment block across the street I’m staring at. Some angle on inequality, the contrast of forty-thousand yearly tuition at the private school one block south drew particular ire. One of the rich kids commits suicide, the doccumentrary implies, because he was so guilt-ridden about being complicit in that stark display of inequality. Buzz:

| At The Marquee?

They’re Not Here dawns on me like I’ve just witnessed a flagrant violation of object permanence, after Wednesday I moved their pieces on my tabletop Manhattan over to Marquee and that was that.

| Coming there now

| We are on the east side

Why did I think they were here. Think the day’s earlier invite meant it was set in stone. They can’t come here now. On account of me not knowing they weren’t already. The obligations of it. Strings tripwires collapse bad light. I have to stop this. Them. They’ll go back to godknows what I tore them away from when I sent up my bat-signal.

look i’m sorry, i though y’all were |

here already with a table

| I am begging you

|We are two minutes

Their poor driver. I’m almost facing north now, I’ve been folding imperceptible bits of rotation into each shift of my weight, which in heels you do often. The club enters my field of vision again, the line of people waiting to get in, the main entr-Fuck! Not now. Fuck this. Bouncer. Yes that one. You will see me... two more times, if you do bad. Twenty-Sixth Street is a few dozen steps, I picture myself making a break for it, continuing west until I’m fully submerged in the inky blackness of the river. But some stubborn honor-bound piece of me.

| Please

| I am begging you to stay

| We are almost to you

I feel my phone buzz and buzz with more of this all through the guaranteed two minutes and the bonus three minutes after them, at some point I tilt-shift the scene in my head and try to mesmerize myself away in the ebb and flow of traffic, watching the cars and the cabs whiz by, sometimes more cars, others mostly cabs; a few cabs and Ubers drop off partygoers, who scurry over to take their places at the back of the main line, and one group of people leaves the club, the two bouncers hold open the doors for them, and they perch themselves nearby on the curb for the three cycles of traffic-notraffic it takes them to succeed at hailing a ride; the timed stoplights switch to red to green to yellow quickly to red again in domino-collapsing succession at each intersection all up the avenue, shooting beyond the dark horizon and giving the impression this process must circumnavigate the earth with each color’s playhead advancing at near-lightspeed pace. Sufficiently lulled, I can stay like this forever, they won’t arrive, daylight won’t arrive, only the changing lights, Will the circle be unbroken, by an–

They arrive, the two German men. Seeing them materialize out of the cab like that does nothing to dissuade me these nights, that this all, it all, happens just for me. Beck and call beck and call, who’s the solipsist of them all? They wait for traffic on Tenth to pass and cross over to me. [Redacted], from Texas Jason again with the lead, Jeffery saying nothing. I can’t remember anything at all that was said. If that was even his greeting. Their English seems inconsistently broken, a moving target I keep trying to derive grammar out of. Circuits that usually parse bits of conversation into memory footholds fail to activate.

I know we stand in front of the club’s entrance for at least a few minutes before Tao’s omnibouncer motions us to get in the left line, an empty lane shaped by two parallel lines of metal barriers. The line on the opposite side is packed. So far I’ve only seen promoters or groups of men and girls that look like promoter outfits use this one. They could’ve let us hop the rope in front of the entrance instead, where we were just standing, we wander around the lane’s mouth with the same sulking plod you do when the TSA can’t be bothered to tear down the further reaches of the security queue during the airport’s off-peak hours. The dinky little formality of it.

They keep slipping into German with each other, This fucking bitch, making us scramble like that, or Fuck I’m glad we made it, just look at her, no clue how they’re feeling about this whole thing. Jason looks back and smiles at me, as if to sweep the deutschsprachigen under the rug. I look for something in the way of reassurance in my guardian bouncer’s demeanor as he reaches through the pair to take my vax and identity cards first and scrutinizes them like it’s the first time he’s seen either. This is like your club, right, you wouldn’t dream of letting anything bad happen to me while I’m inside, right? Doesn’t make eye contact. He hands both back and moves on to the men, I guess he’s seen theirs already too, when they were at Fleur. Alright, the young lady goes in through the North Entrance, and the Gentlemen enter through the South.

Something about the tidiness of these two euphemisms defuses things a little for me, but I still feel like I should’ve beat it around the corner when I had the chance and dealt with whatever embarrassment I would’ve felt from the two bouncers from earlier. I catch Jason’s gaze as he’s watching me, for confirmation I’m inside. I take a few steps to lean against the wall near coatcheck while they’re at some window that looks like one you can purchase movie tickets from, talking with the attendant inside. Several minutes pass like this, the pair and the attendant exchange a few things through the slit between them. They finish and walk over to me. Take your coat? I shimmy it off and hand it to one of them, I don’t know why, it binds me to them even more, I guess I’m bowled over a bit at not having to pay my own five dollars for once.

We pass through a short hallway with a large neon sign and it spits us out right into the mass of people dancing on the main floor. They’re clearing a table for us Jason shouts into my ear over the commotion of the beat and drags me by the wrist to the right, along the perimeter of the main floor and toward the bar at the back of the club. He flags down a waiter, and she runs to fetch me a shotglass of tequila after I tell him that’s what I want and he tells her that’s what he wants. Stupid. Thinking I could just stop off here whenever and walk in and find them at a table already, like they’re non-playable characters and that’s all that’s in their programming.

I’d find them surrounded by another harem, built up just so I could wreck it and preside atop the jealous rubble. Mr. Tao would be with them again, too, so I could talk to him. Club owners keep mum in Very Important People, wheeled out on occasion to dispense snide little pot-kettle remarks disparaging everyone involved in nightlife but them. I doubt the folks at Tao H.Q. got there as the commenting sort. Loose lips sink whaling ships. But I’m not undercover, at least not on behalf of the serious people who want to read serious things about the world he facilitates, I’m on my own rogue research tear. We’re taken to our table, which club staff booted a promoters group from to free up for us. A few of the girls with them are really glowering at me, They must really have something else going for them to have a girl like you with them.

Client-something privilege, I think. Billed as a privileged look into the lives of the illegible moneyed elite, clients are rarely studied up close as people by the book vis-à-vis their debaucherous proclivities. A peek at the underbelly, more than a beholdance of the beast. Some are interviewed, twenty of them, but they’re rich, so can count on that sample to lean heavily self-selected, and there’s very little rich folk do better than self-selection. The only show-don’t-tell depiction of a client ever is:

Next, the whale played a game. He held out his Cristal bottle to nearby girls’ faces for them to drink from. This caught most girls by surprise: they paused for a second, registered his invitation, and accepted a drink. Most did this by holding onto his bottle with one hand as he pushed it to their lips. But one girl, who looked like a model, declined his bottle by turning her head away. In an instant, he grabbed her chin and pulled her face to the bottle of Cristal. She frowned, but he held her face in place and managed to dip the bottle into her mouth. She swallowed some of it, but the fizz was too much, and she had to spit it out with a little spray, wiping her face and scowling. The client quickly turned away and ignored her, pumping his fist into the air to the DJ’s set, the bottle of Cristal in the other hand, while the girl sat down, shaking her head and wiping her face, looking disgusted. She left shortly after this…

…As I thought this, the client turned to me and held out his bottle. I put a hand on the side to steady it, drank, and said “Thanks!” in as chipper a tone as I could muster.

But even that’s interspersed with an immediate, less-than-chipper generalization:

…This scene of masculine domination should give anyone pause. When scholars like French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu use the concept of masculine domination, they usually do so to describe the subtler registers of the symbolic realm, those small ways in which women come to view themselves as inferior relative to men. But here, with a $1,700 bottle of champagne, brute masculine power can be symbolically and physically wielded over a woman…

Both the big game and the hunters, clients aren’t where Very Important People is keen to spend its limited human-interest budget, overwhelmingly favoring the hunting guides. This is largely to the benefit of the book that was actually written, a book about one surprisingly intricate impedance- matching mechanism within the larger apparatus that launders wealthy individuals’ unlimited means and churns actual atoms into the manna that satiates their equally unbounded appetites. Reading the research appendix, it doesn’t appear Mears went out with clients as their guest during her time in the field, save for one group trip to the Hamptons which she notes was organized through a promoter. The general aboveboardedness of the effort was in all likelihood a limiting factor here:

With permission from the Boston University Institutional Review Board for research with human subjects, I began to observe and interview promoters systematically…

Review boards are notoriously Kafkaesque, and no researcher was ever inquisitioned for making a Type I error. This goes double for sociology, since one isn’t potentially saving lives in exchange for accepting…what sort of risk, exactly?

Strategic intimacy is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as the parties involved share equivalent understandings of the degree of economic utility.

Ah. Another double-bind. Do you see it?Very Important People is about systems that aren’t quite systems, or are perhaps more than systems, in that they perform real coordination without much in the way of straight lines. There are no statecharts here, only strings attached. And this success isn’t by dint of some metis they’ve accumulated over the eons—potlatches were very different back then, subwoofers are hard to justify lugging around if you’re nomadic—so the curvy contradictions of the modern nightlife economy are not reflections of some hyper-dimensional optimization going on under the hood. They are not elaborate rituals for processing cyanide-laced tubers.

Sociology largely concerns itself with attempting to straighten out these lines, as if resolving  contradictions gives us greater insight into the nature of contradiction itself. However, here, more is different: At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which is as fundamental in nature as any other. Complex numbers have no natural orderings, and likewise, in many arenas, there simply is no up. In both cultivation and fruit, Sociology hopes to remain in the real. But the complex beckons: abstract, imaginary, magical means, by which meaningful results about the real world, those not amenable to straight lines, may be elucidated. These methods were not readily accepted by mathematicians, nor were they in the arts, but other disciplines have not even begun in this.

Any hint of quid pro quo and your results are impugned to death by committee–the tripwires are all cut, the superimposition collapses into a harsh, unflattering legibility. Thus, in order to do good work, any work, you must embalm your own élan vital, bottle it up until the substance is dead in heart and legible in word.  That’s what separates us from the bad guys. Maybe, in the movies. Any hint you employed your personal accumulations of capital, your mutantness, too much to your advantage in ways others could not hope to follow, The Departments of Systems of Power Relations that Enable Value Accumulation from Bodily Resources that Aren’t One’s Own Studies are highly adverse to systems of power relations that enable value accumulation from bodily resources that are one’s own. They’ll brand you as an alchemist. But perhaps that attitude is starting to thaw.

Who watches the watch dealers? Right now I do. Jeffrey seems to have roped in a few of the girls who were part of the departing promoter posse. We stand around the booth as we dance, Jason is slightly behind me and to the left, to his left are two of Jeffery’s girls, Jeffery, and then another girl. Two German citizens, three good citizens, and me from Latvia or wherever. We have our array of bottles now, among them some good tequila, like, the good stuff, Jason already poured me a proper dose of it on the rocks, in a proper glass. Jason and Jeffery frequently catch eye contact with each other for short periods of time, like telepathic deutschsprachigen is also within their repertoire. Double-key encryption. I’m watching on one occasion as they stare, and then break into smiles, nodding slowly, like they’re congrats themselves. I’m part dancing, part Steve Irwining them, when something like a pile driver squashes open-toed right big toe nearly through the raised floor our booth sits on.

Oh, I’m so sorry!

Pain, pain pain, pain, pain. Fuck. I’m nearly doubled over. Jason doesn’t immediately leap in with a chivalrous shake-the-life-outta-the-guy-by-the-lapels because he was preoccupied by something  Jeffery was gesturing to him, of course.. Ah– Ah–  Oowwwwa–I bolt upright when I feel a draft because my entire bum is now exposed in this short fucking dress. Another grimace ripples through me and then, tranquility. I’m now staring through the guy’s chest at whatever’s behind him, pillowed in a sort of post-brainfreeze lull. He notices the signs somebody’s home again, grips my left bicep, crans his neck to get closer to the ear on that side of me, and shouts You’re beautiful! in such a genuine way the compliment can’t possibly be misconstrued as an apology for the stomp.

Having only partially collected myself,  I elbow Jason and motion for a refill. A question pops into my head, and I shout it into his ear after he’s returned and we’ve clinked our glasses.

How much is like a watch you guys usually sell?

I lean back as he untilts his head, smiles. On this trip? We have six deals we have done. One of them was he names a dollar amount in the mid-six figures.

One of them? What abou–

I fall silent as I track his gaze, which has fallen on Jeffrey, he’s reaching across the two good civilians for Jeffrey’s wrist, which the latter had stuck out before I even halted with my follow-up question. Jason holds his partner’s wrist perpendicular to the floor, like he’s just KO’ed a guy. I severely wish I had dated a watch guy prior to this. It looks like a watch. John Mayer, if you’re reading this, call me, you’re not too old. There’s no way Jeffrey heard what I asked Jason. They practiced or something. Jeffrey never even broke eye contact with Good Civilian Number Two. Jason is still grinning, and as he slowly releases Jeffrey’s wrist to melt its way back into the beat, now looking at me again. He’s doing this anticipatory smile, he does this thing every now and then, both today and at Fleur, sometimes in concert with Jeffrey. Like I’m stringing them along as they await some shibboleth that’s scripted somewhere to come out of me and they’re nervously going Yes, and… until I get this train back on its tracks, to everyone’s great relief. I turn back around and close my eyes and pretend to be lost in the music. Like I’m a jazz drummer taking a solo, and they’re hoping I signal the one because they’ve otherwise lost track of it while they were mesmerized by what I was putting ou—

I feel Jason’s hand latch onto my inner right thigh and squeeeeeeze, and slide up to the cheek and squeeeeeeeeeeeze again, he massages it for several more seconds before I register any of it, before I can register he’s past all my usual pre-confrontation defenses that have almost always handled these things in advance for me and shirked any conscious decision on my part. I have to decide something. I have to decide something. He’s making his way up to my crotch. I decide I am not fucking chipper. I think about going up to the DJ booth and taking the liberty of handling the record scratch myself. I very much want to be an impartial detached observer right now. I want there to be something that separates me from the bad guys, I want this to be a movie. I want to consider all the narratives I’m being sold, and the pathways I’ve chosen, and the personal and societal costs of my choices. Fuck this, no, this is bad, not doing this, can’t do this and I whip around and grab his hand at the wrist and push it down and off, tripwire cut, string no longer attached. Idiotically thinking I’d get sole bragging rights to having kickstarted my very own discipline of Mutatnt Studies like it’s the next iteration of Progress Studies, like I’d be some unique brand of wunderkind for parlaying a book review into public intellectualdom like it’s my version of a sex tape I’m leaving, thank you for everything why do I fucking thank him I have to go, I want to go home. It’s late…

 Ok, you go to get your coat from coatcheck he digs around in his pocket and hands the ticket that corresponds to my coat and come back and we will walk out together. Ok?

I nod and shout something in the affirmative and stumble down the first few stairs and catch myself and leverage myself up and pause and hold my hand holding the ticket in front of my face so I know I still have it and take the rest one-by-one because of the tequila and onto the dance floor and squeeze between-along the mass of bodies and the wall and a rain of confetti and green and blue lights and if I drop the ticket I’m done for because of the confetti and I’m near the front and there are tables behind a velvet rope along the wall and a man with big biceps says to me as I walk past him in a loud magnimions tone Come join my table and I nod my head no no, no no and keep walking a few more steps straight ahead towards the curtain concealing the exit and another man who just unclipped a portion of the velvet rope that’s ahead of me how nice and I walk past him and shit and he this isn’t the exit clips it behind me as soon as I realize and I’ve just joined and turn around and look at the indoor bouncer and no no no wrong way sorry and it takes him agonizing seconds and seconds to realize what I’m asking and reunclip the portion of the velvet rope and I bolt and find the hallway leading out past the neon sign down the hallway coatcheck ticket initials what I need your initials and Someone did it for me I didn’t check it I need initials um  J G W please just give it to me she leaves she comes back coat shimmy in out North door bouncer? no hailcab traffic-notraffic-traffic cabhailed open dive [Redacted] Street home key mat apartment bed.

Rollover.

 Fuck!

Roll back over. 

I gave in. With Jason. I gave in. I gave into it. The Bergeronian impulse. I gave in. Their handicap, it went off in my head, sent me stark raving out of there. I decided I had to decide, I felt what I felt what I should have felt I felt, ‘You’re not–’,  ‘You can’t–’, The Cathedral instructed me to felt it. What’s the difference, where’s the qualitative difference, anyways? Between me getting dressed up like that and going out like that and being looked at like, you know, that, like that, and being felt up like that?  The touch barrier? Are eyes dumber, less imaginative, than hands? And what about that guy who smashed my toe into the floor? By walking in there, like that, don’t you think, I’ve already sold my soul? And then they act like haggling over the amount is what capsizes the whole enterprise back into virtue. As if I’d actually have to pay up this one time, when that bill for selling my soul comes due, I don’t pay for anything in this world, that’s the golden rule here, you’re telling me this is different? What’s the difference, tell me, between Jason or any client feeling up your body, something you didn’t work a single second for, and the tsk tsks of some abstract Review Board you never once consciously invited into your very own head having their way with your research methods, your fieldwork, however anarchic or laissez faire, your sweat-blood-tears your—Would, on my own, my early warning system have tolerated his feeling me up much longer, much higher? No, probably not! Maybe! But we’ll never know, because I decided to—We’re supposed to be detached observers of reality, right up until we actu—

I roll back up, breathe in sharply, suddenly, and this trips the circuit on this whole mini Feyerabend firebrand episode, and lazily nod my gaze around my apartment on the outbreath, as it all washes over me. Laptop. I grab it from my bedside table, open it, and soon enough I’m watching the black-and- white opening of Casino Royale. Why on earth I decided to decide to watch this, search me, you won’t find it, and I certainly can’t, by now you probably know you’re better at it than I myself am:

…Well, your beauty's a problem. You worry you won't be taken seriously—Which one can say of any attractive woman with half a brain—True, but this one overcompensates...which gives her a somewhat prickly demeanor...

…I suppose I don't have to tell you how beautiful you look…Half the people at that table

are still watching you…

…I'm afraid I'm a complicated woman—That is something to be afraid of…

Dawn is breaking by the time Daniel Craig spits out The bitch is dead, and I roll over back back over, and sleep for a few hours.

---

viii) TAO Downtown

I’m scooting my way down the sidewalk on Sixteenth alongside the line of people snaking out from the club’s entrance, it’s one day later, I’m heading back at TAO Downtown on my own to full-circle this thing so I can move on with my life when Hi, miss, we’re recording a series for TikTok for a school project–What’s the craziest or wildest thing you’ve seen at a nightclub?  Two youngish-looking guys have managed to trap me in the hotdog stand chokepoint. To take the long way around, I’d pass by where the stand exhausts its smelly fumes. Gross. Fine.

I look between this guy and his friend with a camera on his shoulder that’s pointing at me. I didn’t know cameras on shoulders could even talk to TikTok. But wait what the fuck, I’m a primary source now. That happened. Do you two realize how much of an outlier I am? I’m radioactive, 198Au, I’m mangling the footage you’ve already recorded while I’m stalling so I can finish counting the zeroes on my altimeter and tell you how deep is this rabithole. I am kid in fourth grade who picks himself to write his very first ever biography about impartial here. If I so much as open my mouth your distribution gets dragged so hard Dewey defeats Truman.

I… … um… …nothing, really…you know… difficult to convey… … I’m spinning in a daze of Gell-Mann Amnesia, how many icebergs like me did Mears potentially interview during her fieldwork? Of course it’s less than one, probably, but it’s not zero, not entirely. You can’t just declare the buck stops here on this sort of recursion, ensconce your subjects and their world within a little snow globe, that’s not how the paraverse works. It’s a snake-eat-tail world out there, no methodology is that sound, even hers:

Ethnography is well suited to the observation of practices behind coordinated action like a potlatch; here, supplementary interviews were necessary to understand the surprisingly conflicted meanings participants constructed about ostentation…

She tells us she accompanied something like forty different promoters on more than a hundred nights out, and god bless her, I couldn’t stomach enough to go beyond single digits. For the sake of these two’s project I’m as meek and merciful as possible in meting out my conflicted meanings I’ve constructed: … you know… difficult to convey…it’s only like my second or third…time… girls like me…we… well, all that glitters isn’t gold, exactly …

Sooner or later they’re satisfied with what material they’ve gotten out of this participant, and I resume my scooting. I’m with R, or maybe I pull more R-names out of my hat until they just wave me on through at the entrance. A guy ahead of me who’s getting metal-detected at the security checkpoint down below does the male-chin-raise thing as he mumble-growls That’s the kind of girl I need to one of his friends. I pretend to be preoccupied with not falling over on the steep steps. Now it’s my turn, I get an incredulous You walked here? from the bag-search bouncer as I Mary Poppins one flat and then the other out of my teeny purse so he can check inside it, I give him a small whatcanyoudo shrug like yeah, Escalade’s in the shop. He waves me on, waits for me to finish stuffing my shoes back into my purse, and waves me on again.

Once inside, I contemplate checking my trusty coat and just leaving it there to haunt this place forever, zerosixoneoneseven, zerosixoneoneseeeeeeevennnnnnnn. I find it appears back in my closet one day, I’ll know for certain the people behind the curtain have me marked for life. A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall be no sign given unto it, but the sign of the bird po–

[Redacted]?

Shit. Another one of the promoter associate buddies who’s connected to R somehow. He looks like someone who will grow up to become a limo driver. A network’s impact is the squa–

Do you want to come join us?

Why not. Full circle. at least to start the night. I follow him down the stairs and onto the dance floor, and we push through the throngs of partiers to get to a booth on the far side of the floor. Men in chains adorn the table next to us. I exchange greetings with people around our table, and pour myself some Prosecco, full circle. I start talking with a guy at our table who’s not a promoter, but not a client: a rare Male Pretty Wallpaper sighting, Very Important People mentions promoters sometimes enlist these guys to get us girls to come out.

Hey!

Hey!

This is my first time, this is crazy!

It’s not even one yet, it’ll get a hundred times wilder than what you see right now! His button-down is killing me, the fashion designer part of me, it’s so amazing for some reason. Are you in college? He asks.

Yeah, NYU! You?

UChicago! I moved here six months ago after I graduated, to New York.

He’s gotta be one of us. No one who goes to UChicago is someone who attends these things unironically. I press for more. I almost went there! But I just loved NYC so much, Chicago’s so cold. What did you study?

Oh, I went for acting! He says this like it’s some kind of technicality. I moved here to find work, but so far I’m still kinda like in my starving-artist phase, you know? I don’t. I go to these things because of the free drinks.

Just an out-of-work actor. Here for the alcohol, free-as-in. I need a cover story like that. He had me for a minute, or maybe it was his shirt. A promoter, a different one I don’t know, interrupts to offer us tiny little plastic shotglasses of some orange concoction he poured out of a thermos he’s holding. This is my last night clubbing, ever probably, so statistically I don’t see much of a risk. I accept. This happens more, the bootlegging-offer-taking-up-on. Between those and the prosecco, I’m already a bit more drunk than I’ve been at any of these things. Mears claims she was never much one to imbibe:

Copious amounts of alcohol and drugs are supplied to women free of charge in these settings. I usually held a drink during the parties, taking occasional sips to fit in, but rarely consuming enough to cloud my senses.

But drinking your way through a subject can be great fun. Theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian. I decide to go client-hopping, my new, original slang for it. I haven’t been up on the balcony yet, so I wander up the stairs and barge in uninvited. A foreign-looking normal Jared Leto in a black velvet blazer seems to be the ringleader client, he’s surrounded by a few other men and a few girls, a half-dozen more are leaning over the railing to get a view of down below. I go over and ingratiate myself. He pours me some champagne from a bottle with a little glow-in-the-dark label. At one point a waiter with a bill-looking piece of paper comes up to us to verify something, but I can’t sneak a glimpse of any amounts it displays.

I get up from the booth and look out over the railing, taking it all in. I should post a story I think because I’m drunk, and off-brand things sound more fun, and I do just that, this ends up thoroughly confusing everyone who follows me on insta I know personally. The alcohol is catching up with me. It doesn’t feel like I’ve quite full circled everything in sight yet, but inebriated me has her head screwed on enough to know I ought to make it home before I full pass-out. I thank my host like I owe him something, and for some reason tell him:

I’d love to stay, but I’m going to church in the morning. It’s nearly four and I’m at TAO Downtown on my fourth consecutive night of clubbing, and nothing like this has ever been said here before, in this context. He looks me up and down, like he’s screenshotting.

Are you Croatian? he asks me.

Full circle I think to myself, but put on a show of being exasperated, out of principle: ‘Am I Croatian?’ God no I’m not Croatian, I’m not Germ–

He grabs my arm to steady me, because I almost stumble over while winding up to gesculate. No, I said, ‘Are you Christian?’ 

I haven’t answered this question. Still, I think. But at a minimum, I haven’t answered this question in any state where I was sufficiently lucid for the event to pierce through the present and bleed into the second dimension of temporality, let alone while sober, ever. And I haven’t answered this question while my senses were more clouded than this webpage, ever, unless I do, now, or maybe that other time, as I have been this drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was this right now. In fact, I have always answered this question. I have answered it for old churchy-looking ladies, who, if had I answered in the negative would have perhaps croaked right then and there, dangling from her arm which is linked with her husband’s, who zoned out after gurgling up his required follow-on salutation, but would be zoned back in by this grisly turn of events, but most likely would’ve just scowled, such a waste of a young woman like that, with the fervor of some who scowl at me for not ever modeling, such a waste of a young woman like that, but thank God for her I have never answered that question, not for her, not for no one, never; I have answered this question for edgelord freshmen, at NYU at that, there they are legion and a different breed altogether, who would try to flex their knowledge of some words which were long-dead in the hearts of people who were marginally less long-dead, for whom their relationship with this long-legged capitalist remained the opposite of affectionate, and chaste and every synonym of, but thank God for her I have never answered that question, not for them, not for no one, never; and I have answered it right now, for foreign-looking normal Jared Letos in their black velvet blazers, but thank God for her I have never answered that question, not for them, not for no one, never, but if I can string three coherent words together, in which case I have answered this question for once, but the way I answer this question, unless I can string three coherent words together and answer it right now, God knows how I answer it right now if I can, which in the other case case, the way I answer this question the majority of the time, which is every other time until I answer it right now, is in a sort of jiu-jitsu way: growing up, I was my parents’ church’s golden child, born on the day the church was founded—my parents joined as members a few weeks later—and as I grew, it grew, like two conjoined live oaks in the far-East Texas soil, and when I turned fourteen, I was a minor musical prodigy, and when the church turned fourteen, it was a megachurch, and when we both turned fourteen, someone on the pastoral staff got the bright idea to stage a consummation of sorts, and I was from then on, lead guitarist within the extended rock opera universe the church co-created with its thousands upon thousands of congregants each weekend, my image was splayed upon the big screens and everything, every weekend, and this was enough for people, for old churchy-looking ladies and edgelord freshman, for whom the bandwidth of this answer overloaded their circuits and spilled over into a binary yes; it was still more -direction than mis-, I mean yes they would have likely walked back this answer of theirs of mine if they knew many of the other members of the church’s stable of musicians smoked or were divorced or spiraling into an alcoholic depression because of divorce or openly cheating on his financé with two weeks to go with a girl who worked in the church’s front office, but remember I somehow made it through four years of this, these people, unscathed, because my God I didn’t know what partying was until I read a sociology book about what partying was, and more generally yes this answer yes of theirs of mine favorably collapsed a superimposition the constituent elements which had I done it for them, that answer of mine of mine would have no doubt coagulated into something not only no-adjacent but also not cleanly so, a no with with heretical overtones them, this answer of mine of theirs; this was not only because I spent so many years on the other side of the alchemy of the extended rock opera universe and knew flashing lights and loud music stirred up what must have felt like genuine spiritual catharsis within those watching and experiencing and of course I psyopped myself with complimentary fare like Bowling Alone too but more so because the sages of the Theology Department at the Baptist high school which I attended added during this time fuel-to-fired all this with their very convincing and very damming dammings of the faith-experience I was complicit in alchemizing on my weekends like that it runs itself very near the shoals of Manichaeism and other things like that, and they also got me high on Wredeian Jesus Christ Secretspy notions which of course predisposed me in all my world-weary seventeenness to observe old church-looking ladies with my one unblinded mutant-eye with something that was nothing like pity and everything like a being-

threatenedness in the A prophet is not without honour, but in his own extended rock opera universe because if they knew knew all the samizdat ricocheting ‘round my noggin they would infinitely rather I’d have just admitted to smoking or cheating on my alcoholic depression with my fiancé with two weeks to go until I divorced a girl in who worked in the church’s front office; four years of this of course leading to this sort of complex templatizing itself onto most all the samizdat like Very Impotent People I would go on to fill my round my noggin with about the worlds like that of nightlife whose denizens I could go around spying at with my little lone unblinded mutant-eye, detachedly observing them with nothing like pity and everything like a being-threatenedness in the A prophet is not without honour, but within her own island but this isn’t even my own island because I’m the biggest hick in this TAO joint having been born and raised not in Moscow or Serbia like all these hicks who took bridges and tunnels to get here assume but in Texas which a journey into Manhattan from requires you take at least one of the following bridges or tunnels Neck Throgs Narrow Verrazzanos Carey, Hugh L. Holland Henry Hudson Bronx-White-...-stone…Queeens……..Mid-Midtown………………….Gil Hodges Queens This weekend Elon Musk suffered the great humiliation of being turned away from Berghain, Berlin’s most legendary nightclub. Berghain is openly discriminate about who it allows to join the party. If the bouncers don’t like the look of you, they look you up and down, shake their head, say “nein” and gesture for you to leave the queue. There can be no kick-back, no fuss. You have been rejected from the gates to techno heaven, and you must do the walk of shame all the way back…Whitestone………………….Queens Vetrans Hodges Gil Memorial Vetrans Verrazzanos Narrow Neck When’s Narrows the last Verrazzanos time you got a manicure that could also prevent date rape? Undergraduate students at North Carolina State University created a nail polish called “Undercover Colors” that changes color in the presence of common date rape drugs like Rohypnol, Xanax, and GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid). To see if one of the drugs has been slipped into her drink, a woman has to stir it with her finger. Not exactly discreet (or good manners, or very hygienic), but arguably more stylish than similar inventions...Gil Holland Hodges Hugh Henry Hudson Whitestone Throg Do I wait in line? Neck No. I’ve never, ever, waited in line my entire life. But I think a good way to keep from standing in line is to go right up to the door and push the bouncer over a little bit and say, ‘Excuse me!’ and walk right in. Then they totally think you’re in already... …………………..Midtown-Queens-Midtown…… ………. Parkway-Marine-Parkway …. ..….Hodges-Gil- Hodges …..…Veterans …………………..or the fiscal 2021 fourth quarter, the Tao Group Hospitality segment generated revenues of $69.7 million as compared to $1.3 million in the prior year period....…………. Memorial…The term "controlled substance" means a drug or other substance, or immediate precursor, included in schedule I, II, III, IV, or V of part B of this subchapter. The term does not include distilled spirits, wine, absinthe, malt beverages, nicotine or tobacco, as those terms are defined or used in subtitle E of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986……………………..Lincoln...Kennedy… ……Lincoln’s secretary Kennedy warned him To scan his QR code from your profile: 1.) Tap 👤 or your profile picture in the bottom right to go to your profile. 2.) Tap 🍔, then tap QR Code. 3.) At the bottom of the screen, tap 📷 Scan QR code. 4.) Hover the camera over the QR code until it is captured…………….Fify-ThirdQueens…..Fift-Third ………………….Fifty What Verrazzano hot people are doing today, smart people will be doing in 10 years... Fify ……………….The Canadian government disagreed, outlawing polatches from the late nineteenth century until 1951, in an attempt to curb what they saw as natives' economically irrational behavior…… ……………………………..Steinway Canarise The public was invited Rutgers to vote via the magazine's website, text messages and postcards to determine the "Greatest Croatian," and the final results were published in the 6 January 2004 issue...the poll had no rules on ethnicity or nationality of candidates, with readers free to send in votes for whomever they felt contributed to the history and society of modern-day Croatia...………………Canarise Canarise Canarise…………….We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually be just another dream world)..........................Rutgers Whitestone-Bronx ………….Queens-Midtown…… ………. Marine Parkway …. ..….Gil Hodges …..…Veterans ………………….. The gold standard (and sometimes bi-metallic) regime...was without precedent...claims to gold became a global means of settling claims and easing foreign trade and investment. While the system was based on some central bank intervention, most notably from the Bank of England, it was self-regulating to a remarkable degree...it was not obvious that the West would arrive at such a felicitous arrangement…………CranberryThe syndrome was initially considered purely a female disorder...Cases in which patients hold the belief that time has been "warped" or "substituted" have also been reported……………..Clark…………………… Clark Carey L Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on the subject of alchemy...for example he talks about the green lion and the sordid whore. These are terms that had very specific reference in 17th century alchemy………………. Montague……………….Wonderland has only one reality principle, which is that “time has been murdered. Nothing need be substituted for time, even though only madness can murder time. Alice is only as mad as she needs to be……………………………….Throgs Joralemon Neck Narrow Narrows…………....involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification...I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel...………..Clark………….Canarise Cranberry Canarise Canarise Cranberry………………Cranberry… ……………………………….Cranberry ……………………………..……………………………..I’m the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep…………………………………..

…………………………………………………………………………………..Wake Whitestone Wake up, pretty girl……… ……………………………………………

✧

I wake up, cottonmouthed and feeling like a barge on the East River’s worth of crud needs to be scraped out from inside me. It’s barely light. I lean up, and look in the mirror at the foot of my bed to see how intact my makeup still is. I’ll make it to church, after all. Easy li–rrrrrahgghh gets late early I roll back over and bury myself in covers ten or fifteen minutes later when it dawns those snatches of light were dusk.

Once, years ago, I was in my hometown, at a retirement party for my elementary-school art teacher. It was a Baptist school, and the little third-person bio blurb about the dainty old woman in the bulletins they were giving out contained the sentence Her younger years saw her rebelling against the ways of the LORD, until His grace and mercy called to her through a career opportunity in Christian education at [Baptist School]. You don’t know what that rebelling entails, exactly; only, you know she quit going to church for a few years during college, or maybe was a minor accessory to a friend’s abortion, or she was a fixture at orgies at The Factory. No in-between. Oh, I used to go clubbing is probably what I’ll say about these few weeks of my life. They’ll take this, with my faded beauty, and wonder.

✧

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there.

Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes…”

Christmas morning, my parents stuff my stocking with hangover pills and five-dollar bills, read that like the country song it is. I eye my stack of presents over under the tree. One's a book, I find when go I unwrap it, Letters to My Weird Sisters, and I read a few bits from the preface before I move on to unwrapping a bottle of Dom Pérignon or something:

It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it.

What laws have I broken, though? Am I too good a citizen?  She of six-feet-four in heels, lithe in her ludicrous thinness, this not even twenty-five-year-old whose brain has still yet to fully develop, facial attractiveness a fraction that equals a whole number. Can’t I just have my mail-order diplomatic immunity and be done with it all?

Still the book looks enlightening, more my speed than Very Important People, maybe. I stack it next to the pills ‘n bills, and save the ribbon.

Pineapple.

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