March 28, 2014, 9:21 a.m.
I.
Uncle Chuck drove us over in his grey Suburban. I sat in the front seat. Oliver, my four-year-old, was in the back, in a car seat. There was a lot of snow and ice on the road from Chuck’s house.
“The road’s not heated?” I asked.
“No,” Chuck said. “Only in the Village.”
I remembered the rube-ish awe I felt on learning, many years ago, that the main road snaking up Snowmass Village is heated—as good a metaphor as any for the wealth, comfort, and privilege in this place. It is literally under the ground.
“Our driveway is heated too,” Chuck added, turning left on Owl Creek Road.
Five minutes later, we pulled into the roundabout outside the “Treehouse Adventure Center” at the base of Snowmass Mountain. Chuck said he’d wait in the lot. I unbuckled O., who was head to toe in blue fleece, and grabbed a bag with more ski clothes: a red-and-gray jacket, made by Obermeyer, and matching pants with suspenders.
I paid for three days of ski school at the registration desk. I used my metallic blue Chase United Visa. O. would be a “Big Burn Bear.” It took about a half hour to check him in. Writing his name on strips of masking tape. Buying him orange-tinted ski goggles ($33.07). Holding him for five minutes on a bench outside the “Bear Den” because he didn’t want me to go. Thinking, as I waited impatiently, that every moment of my impatience will be repaid when I am old and sad and he is grown and vigorous.
Then Chuck took me to rent my own skis and boots ($133.18 for three days with a 50% off card he had for me, because season pass holders get these discount cards) and buy my own lift ticket ($67 for a day, after the 50% off), and I just slid through it all, like driving on ice, all motion, no direction.
Deep in my pockets lay these receipts, these slips of crumpled thermal paper that I always take and never know what to do with. Now I have an idea, to really account for these exchanges; to make, over time, a ledger of the quotidian and the extravagant and the reckless and the romantic. To write my life in receipts.
Since my Dad died, I have felt like I’m floating. I inherited a fortune from him and it’s just so complicated. Having tried and failed to keep a diary of my life, having tried and failed to begin to narrate the coexistence of staggering material wealth and enduring spiritual sickness, I have decided to write a series of dispatches— 26, I commit, one every other week for one year—pegged to receipts.
These thin slips of paper I will make my anchors.
II.
When I was six or seven years old, I was afflicted with an acute anxiety about where money came from. I had become aware—or so I reckon, as I try to reconstruct the thinking around my apprehension—that money was as important as oxygen, and that, perhaps, one day, like a miner in a pit, the opening through which it flowed to me could be cut off. This fear lasted a few days. Then, just as suddenly as the question had come to vex me, I found an answer, while watching my mom outside the Fifth Third Bank on Springfield Pike. Money came from a machine on the bank’s red-brick wall, facing the parking lot.
Was it magical thinking or a moment of clarity? I suppose it was both. Aside from the fits my Dad threw after the divorce about his bank account being overdrawn (and he was sure, he inveighed, that mom was living pretty on the money he sent her) and aside from Mom’s fits when we asked her for money for something that she was sure Dad ought to pay for (field trips at school, say, or shoes)—aside for these moments, in my childhood, money basically trickled into my life in a stream of needs noticed and addressed; luxuries presented and consumed.
I feel the need to say that we were not rich. [1] When my parents split, my Dad lived for a few years in a two-bedroom apartment with shag carpeting and walls so cheap that my brother Jon—agitated by the sound of birds from what seemed like inside the wall—one morning put his fist through to the wrist. A few years later, my Dad moved into a house on a cul de sac with a one-car garage and a converted attic where my brothers and I slept. He drove a blue Fiat he got from my grandfather. For vacations in those days, we drove 1,100 miles from Cincinnati to my grandparents’ place in North Miami Beach, stopping in Atlanta to stay with my Uncle Bill.
I haven’t done the math, but I would say that we were standard-issue American middle-class in those days, except, we were never out in a desert, but were—you may have caught it already with the Fiat detail—at the dry-ish mouth of a stream, and those trips from Cincinnati to Florida, I remember them so well, were us clambering along the shores, and once we arrived, we’d get to the river’s source, to a resort called Turnberry Isle; to valet parking; to a snack bar with $6 hamburgers (this is circa 1980); to tennis courts where Jimmy Connors practiced. My grandfather was, to me, certainly rich; and in my early teens, it seemed that the flow of money around him, the immense liquidity, began to take on a roar, as though a waterfall. I beg your pardon for introducing an actual water craft when I have drawn on metaphors of water so copiously, but the single best image I can summon for the progression of those years were: Early days at Turnberry with my grandfather: rides on a borrowed motor boat. Later days at Turnberry: rides on my grandfather’s own yacht.
Around this time, suddenly, my Dad’s own life in our suburb of Cincinnati came increasingly to resemble my grandfather’s: The Fiat gave away to a beige BMW sedan, which had controls in German. The little house on the cul de sac gave way to a sprawling house on a hill with a four-car garage. This is circa 1984.
A few years later, my Dad had a house in Snowmass and here he emerged from his cocoon, from rich man’s son to a rich man. And now my Dad is dead and I am a rich man.
Two days ago I came to Snowmass with my son.
III.
Snowmass is a mountain village, about 20 minutes north of Aspen, but you can call the whole area “Aspen” just like you can call the metro area that includes Santa Monica and Pasadena “Los Angeles.” Aspen sometimes feels like its own country, or maybe more like the U.N, with delegates from all the rich corners of the world. [2] In the waiting area outside the gate at LAX, waiting for the 2:07 p.m. direct flight, I noticed all the markers: the floor length fur jacket—fur that really announces itself, because you can see the stitching between animal hides; the Tumi luggage tags; the faces ruddy from leisure sunshine and the hands, though I didn’t shake any, probably as soft as rubbed leather.
You know how, in the gate to a plane to Las Vegas, there’s just a certain feeling, a smell almost, of longing and desperation and lust and depravity ready to bust out from under its buckle? The gate area to a plane to Aspen also has a very distinct feel: I want to say it’s a combination of wealth and nonchalance. My cousin, who lives in Snowmass, tells me that he finds it among the least class conscious places he knows, because no one cares what you drive or what you wear, and I believe him, but I think it’s something like the way no one goes around checking your passport once you’ve come inside the border.
I myself have a place here because my uncle, my Dad’s youngest brother owns a house on Spruce Ridge Lane, and he picked my son and me up at the airport in his Suburban and took his home for grilled trout, sweet potatoes, and salad with radicchio and endive and pine nuts. Chuck is a good cook, and not pretentious about it. He rubbed that trout with olive oil and six different spices, and I felt right at home. Oliver played with a Spiderman toy that my Aunt Joyce bought him, and he said he wasn’t hungry, but he did eat just before bedtime, and though I didn’t think of it this way, I fed him like a princeling, fresh fish and tubers washed and split and roasted, the best greens of the field.
Our first morning, I took him to ski school. My cousin Alyssa lent me the fleece and the Obermeyer jacket. Chuck offered to drive us. And just like the gate at LAX, I found myself in the United Nations of the Rich [3]— thick southern accents and New Zealand accents and a hot mom from Mendocino and a plain looking mom from New Jersey. The wealth was rubbed into our bodies like sunscreen, mostly settled into the skin, but showing up here and there in splotches. The Helly Hansen outfits. The Oakley sunglasses. (Is that the $4,000 pair I’ve read about?)
But the point is not the stuff. The point is the feeling, which was this weird thing of being an outsider and an insider simultaneously. Grateful and angry. Not sure whether to schmooze or attack.
And the feeling, meanwhile, of being out of time. You may know E.B. White’s essay, “Once More to the Lake,” which his about his returning, with his own boy, to a place he vacationed with his own father, and which dwells—a recurring theme for the White—on the way time is not linear, but circular. He sticks this point like a moon man planting a flag with the final image: One afternoon at the lake, a thunderstorm comes, and White watches “the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe,” the crashing sounds and like kettle drums and cymbals; “the crackling light”; the comedian wading into the water with his umbrella. After the torm, his boy decides to go swimming. “I watched him,” White writes, “his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”
In Snowmass, I, too, felt the circle of time. My Dad once bought me lift tickets, and enrolled me in ski school, and gave me $5 to tuck into my ski pants for lunch on the mountain. I thought nothing of it, no more than a baby kangaroo thinks about the pouch. Later, I came to think about it obsessively, and I still do, though not without much clarity, so perhaps “think” isn’t even the right word.
Now, as I slid my credit card across the counter; as I watched “B. Lemmon” slide it vertically against the attachment to her monitor; as I signed the receipt and put it in my pocket; as I watched my son go into the room marked “Children Only, Please,” I felt, not the chill of death in my groin, but the heat of anxiety in my heart, like the feeling in the dream where you’re playing a role and you don’t know the lines, and you’re in boxers, and you’re looking at everyone around you playing their roles with what seems like aplomb, so good looking and distinguished, so obviously rich, and I want to scoff at them, and I want to join them, I want to be, at once, Prince Hal at the tavern with Falstaff and Henry V ordering his army into battle. I want to spend my father’s money, and squeeze my son as his voice cracks, “I’m not ready for you to go.” But even more, I want to let my own voice crack, and want to grab onto my own Dad and tell him the same. He left so long ago and I’m still not ready.
***
[1] It would be stronger to say “We were not rich,” but the point is not the absolute condition of my family’s wealth, what we were or were not. The point is that I feel the need to qualify, to you, my imagined reader—to set myself on a chart of your imagining.Also, such a declaration would have given the misleading impression of a settled mind, clear on categories. My mind is the opposite of settled. I am addled, by which I mean a blend of “confused and excited” though I see from the dictionary that it also means, of an egg, “rotten,” and perhaps here I have given an introduction to the way my addled thinking connects a broader malaise, which not only affects my spirit, but my relationship to narrative. Thus my fixation on the moment of clarity in a receipt, its detail.
[2] This story takes place mostly in Snowmass, a mountain village, about 20 minutes north of Aspen, but you can call the whole area “Aspen” just like you can call the metro area that includes Santa Monica and Pasadena “Los Angeles.” [3] One night in Snowmass, I couldn’t sleep because of the altitude and because my son wanted to be in my bed and he’s a thrasher—he moves about in his sleep like Elaine Benes dances—so I read John Cassidy in The New Yorker on inequality, reviewing the economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. From my notes:“Eventually, Piketty says, we could see the reemergence of a world familiar to nineteenth-century Europeans; he cites the novels of Austen and Balzac. In this ‘patrimonial society,’ a small group of wealthy rentiers lives lavishly on the fruits of its inherited wealth, and the rest struggle to keep up.”
Piketty: W/ colleagues established the established the World Top Incomes Database, which now covers some thirty countries. In 2012, the top one per cent of households took 22.5 per cent of total income, the highest figure since 1928. (Rich as I am, I am not in the 1%, though I think Chuck must be);
“The richest eighty-five people in the world—the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Carlos Slim—own more wealth than the roughly 3.5 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.”
“In terms of income generated by work, the level of inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.”
