THE BILLIONBUCKS PARTY

YO THESE PRINCES ARE WIIIIILD

— 1 .

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF UR LIFE? —

. . . an odious question, almost as bad as “what’s new?” : Gaby’s biggest pet peeve : U, suddenly beamed in a heavy spotlight, forced to pluck like a salmon from life’s stream a grand accomplishment for an indifferent near-stranger’s show & tell; as if daily progress, endurance, routine were inimical to a life well-lived.

Ask a tree what’s new!

But, if U R a prince (life’s bounty strivelessly in hand): what would be Ur purpose?

“He was making up a general balance sheet of his whole life, trying to sort out of the immense ash-heap of liabilities the golden flecks of happy moments. . . In the growing dark he tried to count how much time he had really lived. ‘I am seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived, a total of two. . . three years at the most.’ And the pains, the boredom, how long had they been? All the rest: seventy years.”

Giuseppe di Lampedusa was the last in his line of Sicilian princes before his family’s title was revoked; he spent his life reading, thinking, & chatting with his friends; he spent his final 25 years working on a testament to his contemplation, and right before his death he finished The Leopard (1958), — which was only published after he died. . .

“The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece: no other task is of any consequence. But how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, lay aside their latest piece of iridescent mediocrity! Writers hope their next book will be their best; they will not acknowledge their present way of life prevents them from creating anything better.”

I went to the Hamptons this weekend with Gaby to stay with a client of mine: Carrie. Usually, I give boxing lessons to Carrie & her son, Liam, but this weekend my task was different. I was flewed out to write Liam’s college application essay.

The Hamptons: not my thing. But I was trying to figure out the appeal. . . it gives the metropolitan elite the feeling of small-town America, — unlocked doors & shrubbery, — without all the provincial vulgarities (like proliferous McDonalds), or the true demos that afflicts their city;

the Hamptons is a vision of their perfect polity: why U see generations less bred than cloned, womb-plopped with beach club argot engraved in their brains;

but for the weekend we were, — intoxicatingly, — included in their fragrant utopia. . . and we, “incomprehensible beings for whom a ball was fun and not a tedious worldly duty” had an exclusive-ass party to attend.

— 2 .

HOW SHOULD A PRINCE BE? —

. . . the party was at Mortimer Billionbucks’s mansion; I had trained his son, Red, a few times. I’m not crazy about Billionbucks. The first time I trained Red, they showed up 30 minutes late; Billionbucks sat in the corner, eerie as a crow, barefoot, staring with his (literally) expertly sculpted face,

“Quite suddenly Don Fabrizio felt a loathing for him; it was to the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, to their obscure intrigues and their tenacious greed and avarice that was due the sense of death which was now, obviously, hanging darkly over these palaces. . .”

I had my clients stacked up. I couldn’t give the kid the full hour. I ended when I had to. Billionbucks stormed over to the front desk, — barked & loomed until the session was comped.

He’s the rare kinda uruburic creature who venmo requests U down to the cent and spends the summer in an 85 million dollar house on the beach.

Carrie, on the other hand, is pure openhanded generosity, — (as soon as we walked in she gave Gaby a silk dress which Gaby put on immediately and wore all day, pretending she bought it when several women squealed, “WHERE DID U GET THAT?!”).

And to give U a glimpse of their lifestyle chasms: the novelist Billionbucks got to write Red’s college essay is Colson Whitehead. . . —

The party invite was a 28-slide powerpoint detailing the theme & appropriate costumage. Gaby read thru the whole thing gleefully; not me, I brought a gray Nike shirt, — the theme was moony ocean bioluminescence.

Everybody was DELIGHTED by Gaby’s costume; but they were equally flabbergasted she already had such moon-shale luminescence on deck. But buying a new outfit for a party is completely anathema to her; the brokest thing she said all weekend was when she saw Carrie’s costume, “HOW did U already have that in your closet?!”

I was duly glittered, tasseled, & bejeweled by the women; we pulled up.

The party was actually NOT inside the glass monstrosity they call home: which from the street U can see their new Jeff Koons crowning the infinity pool which juts out of the house like a modernist aquarium.

. . . U couldn’t get into the party without hearing the spiel from an Italian woman dressed like a sorceress, — Cerberus for hire, — basically, what we kept hearing all night, also harped on by a sensuous voice in the corridor leading to the beach:

every thousand years the moon & the sea speak to each other, unlocking something rare deep within. . .

Gaby said: “is that true?” I said, “absolutely not.”

We each got character cards: I was a Starweaver, Gaby was a Moon Rabbit. My “role” was to facilitate a liaison between a Moon Rabbit and a “Siren”; not wanting my Moon Rabbit to be otherwisely fucked, I abandoned my role.

— 2.5

I WAS HALF-EXPECTING A CASH BAR, —

. . . but not even Billionbucks is that obtuse. There was a menu of themed drinks: I must’ve had 15 “The Abysses” which was a spicy margarita with moon juice. One bartender was giving pettyterrorist: he didn’t know any of the drink names, and late in the night he made Gaby a ghastly mocktail with 10 jalapeños which almost killed her.

I’d never been to a Billionbucks party, but faillessly I heard they always had two things: horrible music & weird performances. There was a round stage set up in the middle of the party.

Carrie said, “I wonder if they’ll have the girl that spins around hanging by her hair.” Reader, they did!

I would imagine there’s a very sad backstory behind every hair-dangling acrobat, but thankfully, this woman got a good gig, — on retainer with the Billionbucks.

The acrobats spun & flipped & squeezed themselves into tiny boxes to widespread impatience, watch-checking; when they were finished, there were a few perfunctory claps. Certainly not a laudatorily remunerative gig, so hopefully they were well-compensated, but knowing their penny-pinching contractor, I doubt it.

Once the stage was cleared and the DJ (who was supposed to be a big shot) was back on, Gaby & I got up there, tried dance to music that would be monotonous in an elevator,

“They were the most moving sight, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script.

Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenious ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.”

but it was absolutely impossible. We dismounted. . . as the night wound on and we talked to classic rich folks, — always fielding the question, “how are U connected with the Billionbucks?” — like a 70 year old dude with his 25 year old girlfriend who was dressed in lingerie & angel wings (obviously she hadn’t read the powerpoint) whose other 20 year old girlfriend was squatting in his NYC apartment, or the wife of the real estate agent who sold Billionbucks the house (how hard could that fucking be?), the thought occurred to us:

Does this party suck?

And the further thought,

“For both of them death was a purely intellectual concept, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. . . it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.”

in 80 million years this magnificent house wouldn’t even be an echo of a memory, it wouldn’t even leave the material traces of crab-shell skeletons on the beach, it would be nothing, and I think of Lampedusa, rich as Billionbucks, devoting his time to a singular project, a real testament to his time on earth,

when he could’ve thrown a yearly beach party instead, so that people can come be seen & smile at the prince, talk shit soon as he turned his back, all his incredible worth, infinite resources, could’ve been sand on sand on sand, wasted. . . —

Red Billionbucks came to the party briefly to say hello; he stepped on a piece of glass, got a big gash on his foot. Carrie thought that was an opportune time to leave and we dipped. At least Colson Whitehead will have some good hardship fodder for Red’s essay. . .

— 3 .

I STILL HAD A JOB TO DO, —

. . . Sunday morning I woke up, went right into essay mode: me, Gaby, & Carrie toiling while Liam slept until noon. The college essay naturally has to be about something overcome, something that evinces struggle or specialness.

There’s an anxiety in the silverspoon American life alien to Lampedusa’s world: a milieu which would proudly invoke this motto from Montaigne: “Freedom and idleness, which are my chief qualities.” And it’s interesting: in the several decamillion dollar homes I toured over the weekend, there was not a single library.

A life of reading & contemplation, like Lampedusa spent, is too visibly IDLE; all these Hampton boys do spend their lives in idleness & repose, but they are pushed to don a hardscrabble aesthetic: SUCCESS is ACCUMULATION not CONTEMPLATION,

“Don Fabrizio wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent, and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to human beings, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome. . .

he had spent many hours in the observatory, absorbed in abstract calculations and the pursuit of the unreachable. Could those latter hours be really put down to the credit side of life? Were they not some sort of anticipatory gift of the beatitudes of death?”

We made a mountain out of Liam’s summer spent as a busboy. I was cooking: “a bus boy is an invisible windowpane a bird inadvertently crashes into.” Carrie wanted us to find a way to fit the app he created in there. Liam came out in his pajamas, wiping sleep from his eyes. “Tell him about your app, Liam!” “Well, it’s kind of a problem.” “Why?” “It’s not really made.”

I said, “perfect! In development!”

. . . there’s no normal way to live a life, I was reminded on the LIRR home when a man stood up in the aisle, started dancing, wildly banging his head, and the dude in the seat next to him said, “hey! Could U fucking cut that out?” The dancer took an airpod out, “what?” “stop moshpitting in the aisle! Can U just be normal?” And a woman two seats back said, “hey! There’s no one way to be normal!”

How are U supposed to usufruct time & resources? The Leopard is obviously a book written by a man who is dying. The question is on every single page: what lasts? once youth, love, passion, wealth, rank, importance, country, once EVERYTHING inevitably vanishes?

At the end of the book, we are 50 years from where we started. Don Fabrizio is long dead, his daughters are old women, living in a palace full of relics, — remembering. The only item left of Don Fabrizio’s is his taxidermied dog, Bendico; the book ends with his daughter saying to throw it away,

“As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled. A few minutes later what remained of Bendico was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.”

NOTHING will last; Lampedusa devoted his life to giving us a testament to his consciousness, and in the right trick of light, like Bendico, he seems alive again. . .

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COMMENT IF U EVER BEEN 2 A SICK FKN PARTY

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