It must be said that we were not clever about money.
We loved it, certainly, but we were as dumb in that appetite
as in all others—once the night was over, it was gone.
I began to notice in myself a tendency
to gravitate toward friends with more than me.
Just as the neighbors sniffed out my expense account.
That was the celestial command: Look up, look up.
And what did you pay for the privilege?
Deference and admiration tax. What a great
thing. You have found, made, bought.
It was better to have the party at that loft.
Those shoes, court heels,
two months’ salary, were necessary.
So I got a raise. Or I got fired; and I got
a raise. And by 3:30 in the morning,
sitting on the padded swivel stool at Grigori’s, usually
declining the junk not from sense but only from
sensibility, because by then I had my fist
around a bottle of champagne and thought it was a cola,
I would laugh when someone owled-up on junk
launched a few opinions about the decline of the cash economy
and the poisonous abstraction of the Nasdaq. I also heard about
survivalists, how dangerous they were, out there in the land
where everything was flat and all the wrong people had guns.