by Choire Sicha
On second thought, maybe he did not subscribe at all to this maxim. It sounded stupid.
The countrywide contagion, as the Mayor had suggested, did seem to be ending. At least, people couldn’t sustain their attention on it. It wasn’t that everyone had a job again though. The panic had been half real, half imaginary. Plenty of companies and owners survived just fine. Some even prospered. It was the results of the panic that were all real.
And so the people who had jobs felt like they’d lived by their wits, and John felt this way most times. Or they felt they’d escaped by luck, and Edward felt this way sometimes—except when he felt he hadn’t escaped. And there were people who felt they’d escaped but only barely, and they knew it was maybe only for a bit. You could actually literally always be more poor than you were, as surprising as that might seem when you owed tens of thousands of dollars or made only a few hundred dollars or, in the City, a few thousand dollars a month.
But then, the whole point of being in this City, it turned out, was staying nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange things the City might choose to offer to you.
Movement started. Soon enough, Trixie got a job, and then an even better job. Edward was actually soon to get a job as well, with an office and a boss who would buy him a laptop computer. His boss was, of course, a rich millionaire, just like everyone else’s boss, and he would turn out to be domineering and impulsive and aggressive and perhaps crazy. But everyone was used to that in a boss by now. That was just how things were.
And soon enough, Kevin, who had gotten his current job after being laid off, would get laid off again by John’s owner’s cousin. He was more panicked by this second job loss than he would have thought he might have been. Surviving the first one was one thing. But doing it again? How disposable could one person be? he thought.
And Jason took up a hot and heavy affair with a really sweet guy that John had once dated. So, for a while, Jason actually did have a great apartment, a great job and a great boyfriend all at once. It turned out to not be as amazing as it was supposed to be.
Actually, almost all of everything changed after this night. Sally was the last of everyone they knew to quit their office. She felt like the last passenger stepping off a sinking ship and into the lifeboats. She was the last because, just before that, John left the company too, to go work for a much-bigger company—where their old boss Thomas was the new boss. Thomas’s new boss, that company’s owner, was of course an extravagantly wealthy man, just like the last boss, just like everyone else’s boss, but he was very old and secretive. And while the company was enormously successful, and no one was sure what would happen when he died, still, it felt like some kind of security.
Also John’s cousin did move out to go to school, and Edward did finally accept a key to the apartment.
And something else happened. It wasn’t that everyone stopped being friends after this one last night. They were still friends, after so much; they just weren’t so piled up together. It was part of the end of being young, or it was part of it having been the strangest, most exhausting year. Or it had just been a moment. After this, whole weekends, and then whole weeks, went by without everyone hanging out.
THE CITY, IT changed more slowly. One thing that happened, with the Mayor’s very loud support, was that it finally became legal for two men, or two women, to marry each other. That was something that some young people in love had to think about for the first time.
The funny thing about being the Mayor was that you weren’t, for all the attention you got, really all that powerful. What had the Mayor done, in all his time in office? His real work wasn’t in the announcements of rezoning or the opening and closing of schools—although he did shut down at least 140 schools in the City while in office—or in the little programs that were supposed to help people start small businesses. His real work was as a whisperer, a money-giver, an influencer. It was in the giving away of his endless supply of money, and in his rich-person-to-rich-person conversations, that he did his most important work. In private, he kept other rich people’s companies in the City—not that they would leave the City anyway. But from time to time, a company would pretend that it was leaving the City for someplace less expensive, and the Mayor would make sure they received tax breaks and other considerations, and so the company would stay. Well, the company itself would stay: But it would hire more workers, who worked for less money, in cheaper parts of the country or the world.
By its nature, the City gained back the number of jobs that it had lost, and then made more. But really they were only jobs for some people. In the month the Mayor announced his very first candidacy, the rate of unemployment in the City—the percentage of working people who wanted and did not have a job—was 5.3 percent. In the month that he won his third term, it was 9.8 percent. That rate never really receded significantly while he was the Mayor.
The City’s owners just had access to more people than they needed. A whole class of people had been created. They were unwanted: They weren’t needed as workers, and they were barely needed as consumers. Also if they weren’t workers, then they weren’t in a position to be consumers. Not enough money ran through them.
Across the whole country, the jobs that had for some time engaged people who were not rich quite literally vanished. Those jobs were replaced with either no job at all, or with quite low-paying work. So in the future, some people might climb up out of this class. But most would not.
It wasn’t like this was a thing that wasn’t talked about. Everyone knew about it! But it wasn’t like anyone had the responsibility of just giving people jobs. It wasn’t anyone’s problem, and so it was no one’s problem. It wasn’t in anyone’s interest to change this, which also must have meant it was in someone’s interest to not change this.
The City Council, at least, finally decided that they should pass a law to forbid businesses from discriminating against the unemployed during hiring. Businesses wouldn’t even be allowed to advertise that candidates had to be currently employed.
But the Mayor scoffed at this. He said that he thought this would be bad for business.
Before the Mayor left office, a 2,415-square-foot three-bedroom apartment in the building that bore his name sold for thirteen and a half million dollars. That apartment had most recently sold for just a bit more than five million dollars. That was just back at the beginning of the Mayor’s second term. Having money was really quite magical.
JASON’S THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY party was held at this bizarre place in the bottom of the City, down at sea level, just off the water, for now, where all the great fabled finance companies had their buildings, where all the money came and went. The place was clearly a home to gangster parties, or maybe the kind of place that businessmen went to meet women who weren’t their wives. Everything outside was blue-gray and cold, and the stone of all the buildings felt thick and wet and old. Inside it was like being in a secret city inside the City. It was enormous, on a second floor, all mirrored and crazy and uncomfortable, with security men who had guns.
Everyone was there.
There were plenty of problems. Jason was throwing the party with one of his best friends, Emma, and all her cool-haired girlfriends were there, and they were pretty dramatic. The party was a huge hysterical success, a real mess. There was a screaming match between the women and the security guards at one point. A guy had gone into the women’s room to help Emma’s girlfriend, who was busy vomiting out
rageously, and the security guard freaked out.
John had a flask in his tattered old coat, the same coat as last winter, and he’d sneak sips from the flask. Outside he’d smoke in his thin coat; it was cold and you could see straight down out to the harbor, like staring into the future. He’d get a new coat next winter.
The boy who’d introduced Edward and John came downstairs outside to bum a smoke. “He’s such a cig pig,” Jason said, with fondness.
Everyone got drunk. The new year was aging oddly. Edward needled John about how John’s friends all thought Edward was a fishwife. Don’t worry about it, dolly, John said to Edward. Edward did worry, quite a lot, but in time he’d try to get over it.
Ralph was on the dance floor. He was in good spirits, but, he told everyone, he was going to maybe be homeless for a couple of weeks after his roommate situation had suddenly blown up.
At this party, amazingly, Jordan, John’s ex, started kissing Tyler Flowers. The next morning, Jordan would call and text John like a thousand times. No one even knew why they’d invited Tyler! Old habits. Jordan and Tyler totally hadn’t slept together, Jordan swore to John. He was sorry!
John could not care less. Why had he been after Tyler Flowers again? What a strange, strange year. You’re welcome to Tyler Flowers, he said—you’re all welcome to him.
Still at the party, as it got late, Chad sat at a table in a mirrored hallway, his head literally in his hands. Boys were sashaying up and down the hallway. He was thinking about Branford. He was thinking about leaving Diego. He definitely also didn’t think he should leave Diego under any circumstances. He was thinking about sleeping with Branford. He was all tied up. John and Edward came and sat at his table. There were dozens of reflections of them from all these strange angles, all surrounding Chad. Edward was sitting on John’s lap. Would Chad or wouldn’t Chad? Would he or wouldn’t he? Throw it all away, start over, he wasn’t even sure, was it an obsession or something else, or what were these feelings? Could he have a secret affair? That hadn’t worked out so well for Edward. Or wait: It had, actually! For Edward. But not for Edward’s boyfriend. Would he or wouldn’t he? Tonight, at least, he thought it was very likely that he would.
John and Edward listened to this talk for a while. Then Edward got off John’s lap, and they went and danced, with everyone they knew around them in this magnificent hideout all tucked away in this City of limitless strangeness. No one would ever find them all there even if the search went on for years. It got very late, or very early, and John and Edward, all wrung out and laughing, went home to be alone together while they could.
Acknowledgments
IN ORDER: Jacqueline Miller Thomason, Susan Farmbrough, Philo Hagen, Dr. Robert Wolski, Peter Butler, Alexander Chee, Dale Peck, Leslie Harpold, Rosecrans Baldwin, Andrew Womack, Paul Ford, Jon Robin Baitz, Nick Debs, Nick Denton, Nick Philippou, Maria Russo, Elizabeth Spiers, Ariel Kaminer, Kate Aurthur, Jodi Kantor, Peter Kaplan, Suzy Hansen, Emily Gould, Tom Scocca, Sara Vilkomerson, Julia Cheiffetz, Alex Balk, David Cho, John Shankman, Carrie Frye, Ken Layne, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Brett Sokol and Mack Scocca-Ho. Of course, Andrew’s Couch. Also Cain, William James, Peregrine and Little Man. For their support, the New York Public Library, the Miami Public Library, the staff of Craft Restaurant and the unionized workers of American Airlines. PJ Mark and Barry Harbaugh. David Michael Valdez. Everyone who spoke to me for this book.
About the Author
CHOIRE SICHA is the coproprietor of The Awl. A two-time editor of Gawker, he has written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as a suspiciously large number of magazines exactly one time. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photograph © Konstantin Sutyagin/Shutterstock Images
Copyright
VERY RECENT HISTORY. Copyright © 2013 by Choire Sicha. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN 978-0-06-191430-0
EPub Edition AUGUST 2013 ISBN 9780062198990
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