Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  Business James spends his days brooding on the imminent unraveling of life as we know it while he does the business equivalent of shoving serried towers of chips into the pot and surveying the blanched faces around the poker table. So he tends to think in terms of weakness and strength (or maybe it’s the other way around: he found the right job for a person who thinks that way), and he tends to scare the people with whom he and his wife socialize—the hypereducated, rich, dutifully liberal progressives of greater Boston.

  You could make the mistake of thinking that Business James hates these people, who are of course his people. After all, he calls them the Irrelevant Class, complaining that they have all the credentials and pretensions of a ruling class but none of the will, the strength to stand up to those who really run the country—like the oil men with whom he makes money. But you’d be wrong. He doesn’t hate his people. He wants them to wake up, sense the danger, and rediscover their strength in time to fight back against the gathering forces of doom. When he terrorizes them at dinner parties with half-ironic talk of melting ice caps and dissolving social order, it reminds me of the climactic scene of Blade Runner, in which the superhuman replicant Roy pursues Harrison Ford through an abandoned building, apparently trying to kill him but really trying to show him what it means to live.

  Nothing drives Business James crazier than the quality of education at the school his young children attend. Not that it’s a bad school. It is in fact a lovely school, staffed by decent, committed educators. It’s exclusive and widely admired and expensive, and parents in his—our—social circle angle vigorously to send their children to it. But James believes that the school’s educational philosophy, enthusiastically supported by the parents, emphasizes gentle sensitivity to the exclusion of efficacy. “The end of an age is coming up fast in the rear view mirror,” he wrote to me recently, “and they can see it, but they’re utterly baffled.” In their uncomprehending bafflement, they continue to value above all else the tantric soul-smoothing function of a post-’60s finishing school that turns out sweetly vague, tolerant, well-intentioned, unambitious, underequipped copies of their parents. “They’re slow-running deer,” he wrote, “with targets painted on their foreheads.” They’re going to get slaughtered, in any contest for power and resources, by the righteously selfish children of the oil men, the upwardly mobile children of the immigrant strivers James employs as analysts at his capital fund, the children of all those people out there who know that gentleness without strength amounts to abject weakness.

  On a cool, drizzly, slate-gray October afternoon, I took my kids to this school’s annual fair, where we ran into Business James and his kids. The fair, a fundraiser, was as well attended and competently organized as you would expect from a community of lawyers, doctors, professors, architects, editors, money handlers, and other professionals with good connections and good taste.

  The Irrelevant Class was out in force. The mothers knew something about art and clothes, the fathers knew something about wine and music, and they all knew something about money—although not the way James did, since they didn’t play for keeps the way he does. They all thought Sideways had been hilarious, and so well acted. They voted. They nodded grimly when reading Paul Krugman’s column in the Times. They had owned the Buena Vista Social Club CD ever since it was featured on All Things Considered; their kids knew some of the lyrics, even though they’re in Spanish. Educated, lean, and cultured, these people were not wholly deluded in admiring themselves and each other: slow-running deer with targets on their foreheads, pausing to check out their reflections in the water while hunters gather nearby.

  At the pony ride, I had a small epiphany when my daughters took their turns astride the plodding little mounts. Yuan, the little one, compact and cheerful, looked like a two-year-old Sancho Panza as she was led around in a circle by the attendant. When Ling-li, the big one, a four-year-old built like a flexible blade, came around the circle and caught sight of me, she smiled—almost a smirk, really, the outward sign of an inward dawning of command, another thing she could do, another stone added to the rising cairn of her purpose and self-reliance. She was wearing a purple fleece jacket with the hood up, the drizzle having picked up as the afternoon deepened toward evening. Holding the pommel with both hands, she slouched familiarly in the saddle, swaying easily with the pony’s motion. Smiling that ancient smile, she looked for all the world like a veteran of many campaigns passing through a village of harmless, well-intentioned souls, making a mental note to come back sometime with her sister-in-arms and sack it.

  Now, Ling-li is scared of all kinds of things: pirates, thunder, even the fake pop-up snakes in the school fair’s ultramild haunted house. I have not yet found a kids’ movie so innocuous that it won’t freak her out at some point. Even the Muppets disturbed her at first. But she’ll never back down from anything scary that’s real—not a doctor with a needle, not a snarling dog, not five boys messing with her sister. She’ll look over at the five boys and say, musingly, “I’m going to charge them,” as if she weighed considerably more than 33 pounds and had sharp horns growing from her temples.

  Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t worry about my kids ending up as slow-running deer. My wife and I—educated and liberal enough to qualify for the Irrelevant Class, but not rich enough, and not operating under the delusion that we matter—are not raising the girls in some special weakness-expunging way, but they seem to have come to us already inclined to self-assertion. Maybe they were born that way; more likely, a year in a kind-but-spartan orphanage gave each of them an early education in the exercise of strength. They lead pleasant middle-class lives that only rarely call upon them to use that strength, but very occasionally I give in to the thought that, should the science-fiction era of chaos that gun-show Christian survivalists call The Coming Times of Economic Collapse actually come to pass, I’m fairly confident my kids would do all right. In a Hobbesian free-for-all, they could get what they needed by taking it away from the children of the Irrelevant Class, their friends and neighbors. Some people just have that inbuilt strength, and no amount of countertraining can entirely change them. Nor would I want to entirely change them if I could. If you strip the drama from Business James’s worldview, you get something that looks a lot like mine.

  Over dinner, I told Boxing James about the school fair and Business James’s impatience with the Irrelevant Class, and he said, “Have you ever thought of them as evolved, rather than weak?” I confessed that I had not. I mean, some of them think of themselves as evolved, but I’ve always regarded that as a fairy-tale self-conception they pick up at Pilates or Princeton. Boxing James went on, “Look, they may not be able to protect themselves, but the fact is that nobody is going to come along and take their shit. It’s not going to happen. They don’t need to protect themselves because they’re protected, they’re insulated, and things don’t change that fast or that much in this country. Maybe the way they are is a rational response to the life they have.” Maybe it’s false rigor to insist that they cultivate in themselves, as a class, a strength they won’t ever be pressed to use. Maybe their gentleness constitutes a kind of triumph.

  Business James, had he been there, would probably have argued in return that they should regard exercising meaningful influence over the political and cultural direction of their country as part of their shit, and that they better wake up to the fact that somebody already did come along and take it from them (while giving them tax breaks that further insulate them from noticing or caring). I spent Election Day 2004 going door to door with him though suburban subdivisions in New Hampshire, getting out the vote for a candidate we both despised. It was another thing to hold against Bush: he obliged us to support Kerry. When we were done, we drove back down to Boston, listening to early projections on the radio. Most had the election too close to call, and we permitted ourselves to believe there might be a small chance that things would come out all right. We stopped by a party, thrown by friends of Business James, for people who h
ad worked for the campaign. The well-appointed house, a place of unimpeachable decorating decisions that communicated wealth and ease in the understated Boston manner, was filled with informed people of good will. They drank wine and exchanged cutting bons mots, radio-ready snatches of policy analysis, and rumors of promising electoral news from across the country. More than one of them expected that a Kerry administration would come calling about an appointment in Washington—a chance to make a difference, a nice new item for the CV. There was nothing wrong with these people or with the party, but when I walked in the door I knew all at once and for sure that Kerry was going to lose. Weakness pervaded the house like the plague in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Business James felt it, too. He swiftly drained a few drinks, then went to sleep on the thick rug in the den in front of the television. The Irrelevant Class buzzed ineffectually around him, waiting for Peter Jennings to bring them good news that never came.

  My wife and I have a running conversation about the difference between judging and accepting, between getting things done and digging beauty. You can see the world as a set of opportunities to accomplish something, to exercise your will upon it, or you can see the world as a set of opportunities to appreciate how it works, how it is. Everybody strikes some kind of balance between these opposing principles, but most people don’t strike it right down the middle. My wife, for instance, leans toward judging and accomplishing, while I lean toward accepting and appreciating. The two Jameses help me seek a balance between the beauty-digging toward which I naturally incline and the exercise of will I accept as necessary to making a way in the world.

  Business James woke up on the morning after Election Day in 2004 and started planning how to perform a backbone implant on the Democrats in time for 2008; from time to time, he gives me updates on his progress. Rather than inspiring him, however, the Democrats’ victory in the midterm elections of 2006 seems to have sent him into a funk, as do the presidential candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Ba-rack Obama, which have inspired a false optimism in the Irrelevant Class about an imminent return to proper relevance. “I’m planning on eight years of McCain and a lot more damage,” he says. “Then we’ll see what we can do with what’s left. Things have never been worse than they are now.” He lies awake at night thinking about what currently inhabited parts of the world will be underwater and when.

  Boxing James, like Business James, sees trouble coming. “I don’t recall any time during my lifetime that the world was in as rough shape as it is presently,” he recently wrote to me in an e-mail. Were he still in the business of exploiting others’ misfortune, Boxing James would be enjoying a boom that shows no signs of letting up. “Things are now irrevocably fucked up enough that, Democrat or Republican government holding sway, there’d still be crack houses in Brockton or Santo Domingo where I could get some work done,” and he could count on an inexhaustible supply of “poor women who needed to be hookers, poor suckers who wanted to be pop stars, and poor black guys fresh from prison who were willing to be opponents for my slightly better stable of fighters.”

  But, unlike Business James, Boxing James expects that the Coming Times aren’t coming for anybody except the poor. Trouble won’t touch the Irrelevant Class. “The protection and privilege provided to it remains virtually untouched by our political system,” which means there’s no reason for the Irrelevant Class to cultivate atavistic virtues like strength, toughness, or force of will. It doesn’t matter how slow the deer run. “The jungle has changed a lot. We outsource shit now, including having people who are stronger, more intuitive, sharper, and meaner handling our business for us. Those qualities are now not much more than service-industry skills.” The Irrelevant Class can therefore carry on refining its beauty-digging skills and shed any vestigial aptitude for the jungle. “The toughest aren’t the ones who survive. Even the smartest aren’t always the ones who survive. The new survivors mostly consist of those who are, for a multitude of reasons, the least attackable. And, to my mind, the least attackable are the most evolved.”

  One night I took a break from writing this essay and went to the fights at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Hall in Dorchester. Most of the bouts were terrible mismatches, typically featuring a locally based Irish guy with a winning record throwing thunderously amateurish punches at a black opponent with a good body and a bad record who had been recruited from out of state to lose. Sitting at ringside while the combatants heaved and strained before me, I told myself, as I always do, that this is what life looks like when you take off the cover and inspect the works. Fighters need all their resilience and potency, all their scary competence in locating vulnerability and striking into the gap, because they are the least protected, the most attackable, the weakest of the weak.

  * * *

  Original publication: The Believer, April 2007.

  Three Landscapes, with Gamblers

  Water-Gazers

  I was idling at Pier 11 in Manhattan on a breezy weekend morning, waiting to take the Seahorse Express boat down to the racetrack at Monmouth Park on the Jersey shore. It was the day of the Haskell Stakes, a day of big races and bright July sunshine, and I was eager to get away from the routine of postcollegiate life: office work, bars, playing house with my girlfriend. Seagulls called in the narrow, potholed streets that surrounded the deserted pavilions of South Street Seaport. I had intended to give the racing form a thorough reading while I waited, but the play of sun on water distracted me.

  That made me a water-gazer. In the first chapter of Moby-Dick, Ishmael marvels at the pull exerted by the sea on New Yorkers: “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the Battery, where the noble mole is washed by waves and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. . . . Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier heads”—as I was—“some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.” They are all, Ishmael reminds us, “landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” What he wants to know is, “What do they here?”

  Most of the water-gazers waiting for the Seahorse Express were in their sixties or older, outfitted for leisure in brightly colored sweats and other loose attire that snapped like sailcloth in the waterfront breeze. The gambling crowd, especially the more modest players, is an older crowd. This was in the late 1980s, before the opening of Indian casinos in Connecticut and upstate New York provided convenient places to warehouse those persisting in the interval between retirement and death, but even then Pier 11 formed part of a regional landscape of legalized gambling traversed by thousands upon thousands of retirees. Grandmothers loitered outside corner stores, waiting for the bus to the Atlantic City casinos; grandfathers crowded into smoke-yellowed Off-Track Betting outlets; in grocery stores, you patiently cradled your milk, sixpack, and Daily News while somebody at the front of the line tried to parlay grandchildren’s birthdays into a lottery winner.

  Playing slot machines, the lottery, or the ponies is like gazing out to sea at what looks like more life. You feel yourself to be at the verge of some other dispensation that begins where the materials of the everyday come to an end—the lath and plaster of work, family, neighborhood, doctor’s appointments, Social Security checks. The unremarkable money you wager, which you earned while nailed to one kind of bench or another, mixes promiscuously with more glamorous money from places unknown, money which a few hours previous was out of sight of land. When you lose, all you get is a taste of salt air and the slightly dazzled feeling of having looked out to sea. If you get lucky and win, your money brings home some of its new seafaring acqu
aintances, although the exotic charm of such winnings never lasts. Sooner or later, it’s all just money again, burning a hole in your pocket. Most casino and racetrack gamblers who win do not even manage to get their winnings home: they throw away house money even more heroically than their own, seemingly hell-bent on leaving the premises dead-even or broke, already recharging the capacity for longing that will draw them back to the water’s edge tomorrow.

  Gambling as it is done by most people—fitfully, with studied inexpertise, betraying a quasi-religious impulse to lose—proceeds from a willingness to treat one’s money as somehow tainted by the work that produced it. In the bewildering logic of “gaming,” one disposes of that sweat-stained cash as swiftly as possible, replacing it, ideally, with magically fresh and exciting money one has acquired through play. Ishmael knows better. Recognizing that “there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid,” he goes to sea as a working seaman “because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I heard of.” This is not strictly the case on land, since casinos often give passengers on charter buses their fare’s worth of coins to dump in the slots as a preliminary to dumping their own money in the slots, but Ishmael has a larger truth in view: if going to sea, like gambling, feels like throwing off the bonds of drudging routine and reaching for more life, remember that the workaday round of salaried labor gives form and meaning to any attempt to escape from it.