Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “You can’t afford to drive across the state?” I say in a startled screech. I sound like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. In fact, last night in New York City, I got to see something Frantz has never seen: the inside of a Capital Grille restaurant. (I’m guessing Dennis and Rebecca have never been to one, either.) It was delicious and I didn’t even think about what it cost. There were stag heads and sculptures of horses and fine oil paintings of generic earls and lords and foxhunts. The milieu was very English country gentleman, although an English country gentleman would never put an “e” at the end of the word “grill.” Almost every waiter was light-skinned, but I did see one dark-skinned black man serving. So that was nice.

  “But there’s lots of stuff to do here in the Des Moines area that we still haven’t done,” Dennis says, brightening. “So . . .”

  “I know what I want to do,” says Rebecca.

  “What’s that?” says Dennis.

  “The drive-in movie theater and then the Incredible Pizza,” she says. “The Incredible Pizza’s got games and a buffet. You can pay thirty dollars, eat as much as you want, then play games until the money runs out. They have this tunnel thing going on. That doesn’t cost anything. Our son can take his shoes off and run in there for a while. . . .”

  Dennis smiles, but I can tell he thinks Rebecca has evoked a crappy way to spend a fifth anniversary.

  Dennis installs, maintains, and repairs “a wide variety of home medical equipment, oxygen equipment, wheelchairs, a smattering of everything.” Rebecca stays home with the children. She says their problems are twofold: taxes and health insurance.

  “He gets paid every two weeks,” says Rebecca. “For state and federal taxes they take about a hundred eighty dollars. Then for health insurance they take about three hundred seventy-five.”

  “The health costs go up every year,” says Dennis. “And not just the regular four percent for inflation. It could be ten percent, seventeen percent . . .”

  I ask them if they feel worse off than they did a few years ago. Rebecca says, “Yes, a little. The cost of everything, like health insurance, gas, and groceries, has been going up by leaps and bounds. Some things have even seemed to double. Versus our income not changing that much.”

  I tell them about the health system in my native UK—free health care for everyone. I say I remember Glenn Beck trying to scare America by saying that if Obamacare went through, things would end up like Britain, with a savage, failing, socialist health-care system.

  “But it’s not failing,” I say. “It’s great. And nobody has to pay anything.” (Actually, it’s funded by national taxation, and some parts of it work more efficiently than others, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Brit who doesn’t feel essentially proud and defensive of the system.)

  Dennis and Rebecca look at me warily, as if I might be pretending for some nefarious European socialist reason that the UK National Health Service is a functional thing. But it really is.

  So they’re going nowhere for their anniversary. Instead they’ve started seeking help at the local Food Pantry, a charity offering food to the needy. Rebecca says she was amazed that somewhere like Urbandale even needed a Food Pantry. But it does. And when she queues up, she doesn’t see only derelicts. She sees middle-class families just like them.

  Dennis says he wishes they were better off, but there are positives about being poor. It makes people community-spirited, he says. Plus, money can turn a man wayward. Dennis runs a church support group for sex and drug and alcohol addicts. Why did some of those men fall into a hedonistic abyss? “Because they could afford to,” he says.

  This is a little heartbreaking to hear. It reminds me of Frantz. He rationalizes his place in the ecosystem by saying it’s manageable as long as people talk to him respectfully. Dennis rationalizes his position by saying that, if he had more, who knows what pleasure-seeking scrapes he might succumb to?

  And there’s something else Dennis and Rebecca have in common with Frantz. They, too, say they leave the house only for work and church and to go to the park. They haven’t been to the movies in a year.

  “I hope you’re not offended,” I say, “but your lives seem unexpectedly similar to Frantz’s.”

  “I don’t find it surprising that we have the same struggles,” says Rebecca.

  “How do you feel when you hear stories of the super-rich getting away with paying hardly any tax?” I ask them.

  There’s a short silence.

  “I’d probably do it, too, if I could,” Dennis shrugs. “But I can’t.” He pauses and shrugs again. “So.”

  • • •

  FIVE TIMES Dennis and Rebecca, there is me. I make $250,000, double that in a good year—if, say, George Clooney is turning one of my books into a movie. Which doesn’t happen often. Just the once, in fact. Being a panicker, I live my life convinced poverty and disaster lie just around the corner unless I constantly and frantically work. Which I do.

  But I have none of Dennis and Rebecca’s struggles. I can vacation anywhere. I haven’t noticed rising gas and grocery prices other than hearing myself murmur a vague “Oh. That seems a bit more” and then forgetting about it. I have never felt so rich and so fortunate as I do as I drive away from Urbandale that morning.

  • • •

  THE WOMAN who makes roughly five times more than me—$1.25 million in a bad year, up to $3 million in a great one—wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call her Ellen. She’s a New York producer: movies, TV, Broadway. I meet her in London. She’s over on business. She’s brassy and loud and restless and alarmingly energetic and tough-looking and she talks incredibly fast. She says it would be “too weird and stressful” to reveal her name to the world in the context of what she makes. If you’re super-rich or super-poor, everyone can see that. But in the top-middle, one stays covert. Plus she doesn’t want letters begging for money. She once had one from her father, who is a “pathetic gambler.”

  “How does it feel to make what you make?” I ask her.

  I notice a strange tone in my voice. The usual chirpy sense of inquiry isn’t there. Instead I sound weirdly tense, as if the true reason for our meeting is for me to discover what I’m missing out on.

  “Good,” she says, nodding. “Happiness is having twenty percent more than what you need. The trick is not to be too rich.”

  “Why not?” I ask her.

  “People want to go on your private plane,” she says. “You fall asleep in the middle of conference calls. There’s a certain discombobulation when you have too much.”

  Maybe Ellen’s right. Maybe it would be bad to have your own plane. But for a second Dennis flashes into my mind, with his own imagined perils of having more money. I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory happiness. But Dennis and Ellen have both suggested to me, surely fallaciously, that greater fortune might lead to unexpected sadness. So we’re actually very good at inventing our own opium.

  Personally, I wish I was better at opiating myself. Instead I’m sort of glaring at Ellen in a hostile manner, wondering how I might scramble up to her level.

  “So what can and what can’t you do in terms of luxury living?” I ask her.

  “If you’re really rich, you can buy your doctors,” she says. “Mike Ovitz famously bought a couple of cardiac surgeons.”

  “You don’t have anything like that, do you?” I say.

  “No, of course not,” says Ellen.

  “Thank God,” I think. Becoming aware of what’s just out of your reach can pull the rug from under your feet. It’s comforting to know that having my own doctors would be massively out of my reach.

  “But I know a guy who knows a guy,” says Ellen. “I’m at a level where I don’t have to suffer. I’ve been sick. I had cancer. If you have money, you call the guy who knows the guy who’s the head of the department. The truth is, rich people with cancer versus everyone else with cancer? Longer life!
And I didn’t think about bills at all! I have a bill? I throw it in the box. And that box goes to my business manager. This is a key item if you have money. You don’t look at the bills. When I got money I vowed, ‘Never again will I suffer the small stuff.’ To me, paying a bill is the small stuff. ‘I don’t care how the fuck it happens, someone pay that fucking thing!’ It’s a good feeling.”

  I listen and nod and think, “I very much need a business manager.” “How much do you pay your business manager?” I ask.

  “A very small amount of money,” Ellen says. “A hundred thousand dollars a year.”

  There’s a silence. “That’s a lot,” I say.

  Ellen looks at me surprised. “No, it’s not,” she says.

  She explains that her business manager performs many tasks for her: He runs her office, does her bookkeeping, oversees her investments, files her taxes. And even though she pays him what can amount to 10 percent of her income, she has some money in the bank, so she can afford him.

  Rarely has an interview awakened in me so many dormant desires. Before meeting Ellen I had no idea I needed a business manager and a friend who knows top surgeons personally. I was a lot happier before this interview began.

  “I still worry about bills,” I say, sadly. “And I get knots in my stomach when the tax is due. Really big knots. Have you worked out how to pay less tax like really rich people do?”

  “No,” Ellen replies. “I pay forty-two percent.”

  “Good,” I say.

  • • •

  FIVE TIMES Ellen is a man named Nick Hanauer. His taxable income is, he tells me, “tens of millions. In a bad year it can be ten million.” We speak via Skype. I’m in London. He’s at his home in Seattle. What little I can see of it looks lovely. He’s in some kind of an office/den with an electric guitar in the corner. His parents made good money from the pillow trade. After college he set up a few OK businesses, but then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy. She said, “You two are going to be friends.”

  The guy had a business idea. Nick loved the sound of it. He invested all the money he had in it—$45,000 cash. The guy was Jeff Bezos and the business was Amazon.com.

  Nick asks me about the woman beneath him on my income list. “Is Ellen a highly paid salary person?” he wonders.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “She has to go to work every day?”

  “Right.”

  “If she stops going to work, she’s out of business?”

  “She has a bit of money saved, but basically yes,” I say.

  Nick smiles. “While we sit here, during this charming conversation, I will make twenty-five thousand dollars,” he says.

  I look at Nick. “That’s terrible,” I say.

  Nick roars with laughter. “That’s the difference between me and her! Hahahaha!”

  Nick has just been holidaying in Cabo. His life is ceaselessly luxurious, and always will be, because of one insanely clever realization—that Jeff Bezos was onto something—and the smart, subsequent ways he invested his Amazon profits.

  “Ellen says she doesn’t want to be any richer because you’ve got problems,” I say. “People want to go on your plane. You fall asleep during conference calls.”

  “Hahahaha!” Nick literally slaps his thigh. “People do want to come on my plane, and my wife and I make every effort to bring everyone we can.”

  “How much tax did you pay last year?” I ask.

  “Eleven percent,” says Nick.

  “Do you feel awful about that?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Nick.

  There’s something unusual about Nick, in that he’s come to believe that the system he benefits so richly from is built on nonsense—specifically the idea that “the markets are perfectly efficient, and allocate benefits and burdens perfectly efficiently, based on talent and merit. So by that definition the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor. We believe this because we have an almost insanely powerful need to self-justify.”

  And the biggest nonsense of all, he says, “is the idea that because the rich are the smartest, and because we’re the job creators, the richer we get, the better it is for everyone. So taxes on the rich should be very, very low because we’re essentially the center of the economic universe, the font of productivity.” Nick pauses. “If there was a shred of truth to the claim that the rich are our nation’s job creators, then given how rich the rich have gotten, America should be drowning in jobs!”

  “So if the rich don’t create the jobs,” I ask, “who does?”

  “The middle classes!” Nick roars. “A huge middle class will produce an unbelievable opportunity for capitalists.”

  I tell Nick about Rebecca and Dennis in Iowa, about how their health-insurance costs are preventing them from driving across the state to celebrate their anniversary, thus denying themselves happiness and small businesses across Iowa their money.

  “I fly around in a twenty-five-million-dollar Falcon 2000,” he replies. “And they can’t afford to drive across the state to celebrate their anniversary? It’s not fair, and it’s terrible for business. The best ideas in the world aren’t worth jack shit unless you have someone to sell to.

  “I don’t even know how much my health-care costs are,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter! For them it’s the difference between celebrating an anniversary and not celebrating an anniversary.”

  The solution, Nick says, is to raise taxes for the rich. He says a 50 percent rate for people like him seems about right. It would pay for the likes of Dennis and Rebecca’s health care and enable them to drive across Iowa, creating jobs at whichever bed-and-breakfasts and gas stations and tourist attractions they happen to stop off at.

  “If you’re so concerned about it, why don’t you write a check?” I ask.

  “You can’t build a society around the effort of a few do-gooders,” he replies. “History shows that most people would not do it voluntarily. People have to be required to participate.”

  So instead, he says, he’s dedicated his life to something more meaningful. He’s trying to persuade everyone he can—business journalists, etc.—that the system needs a radical change. He’s published a book about it: The Gardens of Democracy.

  “The view that regulation is bad for business is almost universally held,” he says. “But in every country where you find prosperity you find massive amounts of regulation. Show me a libertarian paradise where nobody pays any taxes and nobody follows rules and everybody lives like a king! Show me one!”

  • • •

  AND SO I JOURNEY to a place where that libertarian ideal is imagined in a soft, warm glow: B. Wayne Hughes’s unassuming Malibu office. As it happens, Wayne is a substantial donor to Republican causes. For example, he has given $3.25 million to American Crossroads, a super PAC started by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie that pays for GOP campaign ads. You’ll see a lot of “Paid for by American Crossroads” tags on your TV in the coming months. But I didn’t know his politics when I approached him. My first inkling that his libertarian philosophy is practically spiritualist in its passion comes when he happens to mention some old novel from 1939 he likes.

  “Read Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal,” he says. “It’ll tell you how to make your life a very satisfying thing. But it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with money.”

  “Oh, OK, thanks, I will,” I reply politely. Then I instantly forget about it. The recommendation of a silly-sounding novel doesn’t seem at all relevant to my story. But later, just as I’m about to wind down the interview, a weird thing happens. It’s when I ask him if he has any advice for wannabe billionaires.

  “I don’t know anything worth knowing,” he says. Then he pauses. A mischievous look crosses his face. “I gave you a secret in this interview already on how to make your life way better and you went right by it.”

  I look at him, befuddled.

  “Hahahahaha!” he says.

  “Was it that thing you said about Mr. Hudson and the . . . ?”
I say.

  “Exactly right!” he roars. “Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal. Read it! You’ll see!”

  And so I order it from some secondhand-book place. It’s out of print. It arrives, ancient and battered. It’s kind of pulpy, the story of a Dr. Hudson who encounters a mysterious gravestone engraver named Randolph.

  “I now have everything I want and can do anything I wish!” Randolph tells the doctor. “So can you! So can anybody! All you have to do is follow the rules!” Randolph hands Dr. Hudson a “magic page” upon which is written the secret, the rules for “generating that mysterious power I told you about . . .”

  You can imagine how excited I am when I get to this part of the novel. But the secret turns out to be underwhelming. It is this: If you perform anonymous good deeds, greatness will visit you. But the philanthropy must be carried out with “absolute secrecy.” That’s the key.

  When I read my B. Wayne Hughes transcript, I see that it’s peppered with covert references to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal. When I asked him which charities he donates to, he said, “I have over the years supported charities.” Then he fell mysteriously silent. Then he said, “If you talk about things you’ve done that you think are worthwhile, you subtract from yourself. And so therefore I will only say my principal charity is children’s cancer and I’ve been doing it for twenty-two years.”

  “You don’t want to say how much you’ve given away?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to subtract from my pleasure,” he said. “I especially don’t want it written up. It would be a disaster for me. It would hurt me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It would subtract from me,” he said.

  Then, later, he said, with an anguished look, “Don’t you think I have an urge to say, ‘I did this and I did that and I got studies going in twenty hospitals . . .’ I have an urge to say that but I’m sitting on it. Why? Because once I say it, I’ve lost it! It’s gone. Forever. The whale doesn’t get harpooned until it rises to the surface to blow. If you do a good deed, a deed you’re proud of, and you don’t tell anybody, it will be the most difficult thing you’ve ever accomplished, but with the highest payoff. You feel good about yourself. It gives you happiness and satisfaction. It makes you different from other people in ways people don’t realize. If you follow the rule, I promise you it is a life-changing event.”