Gail reports that she is buying only used books. My stomach lurches. When I first talked to my agent aboutNot Buying It, she registered alarm over this one consumer item. “But you have to buy books, Judith,” Joy ordered. “You have to support the industry.” I often ask myself if a business that hasn’t figured out how to sell about 80 percent of what it produces can claim the name “industry.” Still, it’s my industry, the only industry I’ve got, so I should stand by it.
This year, though, I am limiting my book-buying to work-related volumes that are unavailable at the library, in the process realizing a savings of about 75 percent. I am also buying used books when possible. (Mea maxima culpa,Joy!) Now I hear these proud words from Gail, and the economic impact of lower consumption hits me directly in the royalty statement. Call me a hypocrite, but I resolve right there that I will not marketNot Buying It with the slogan “Don’t Buy This Book.”
MAY 28
A. Zito & Sons, which for eighty years has been turning out chewy, crispy-crusted Italian loaves on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, announces it is closing. The culprits: a sharp rise in rent due to the gentrification of the neighborhood; and carbophobia created by the Atkins diet. If you’re a neighborhood, youcan be too rich or too thin.
MAY 30
Flavio, Ann, the kids, and I visit Emily, an artist who lives in a loft on a dark street in a gentrifying industrial neighborhood next to a vast tract of housing projects. The conditions are ideal for crime. The gentry and the poor are living cheek by jowl. Public services that were never much good in the poor section have not caught up with the residential needs in the gentrifying one, either. There are few working streetlights, and police coverage is spotty at best. This being Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend, it’s even spottier.
We come out of the house with the dregs of a picnic, climb into the car, and strap the kids in. The car doesn’t start. Flavio gets out and looks under the hood. The battery has been stolen. Nothing can be done tonight, so we trudge up the hill to the F train.
No sooner have we settled into our seats than a homeless man enters the car dragging a huge canvas mail cart, most likely filched from the loading docks of the main Brooklyn branch of the post office just a few blocks away. Clownlike, the man starts pulling an incongruous collection of items from the depths of the cart. “Software, software! Got your Windows XP, right here, right now,” he barks.
Wanting no software, we look away from him and talk to each other. But he’s not giving up. He plants himself directly before us. For two bucks apiece, kids admitted free, we’ve bought front-row seats for a little piece of New York street theater.
“Get it right here, right now!” He holds up a slightly bent luggage cart, then a Cabbage Patch doll wearing one shoe. “We’re here to treat you, not cheat you.” The “we” is a nice touch, as if he were the sales rep covering the underground-tunnel territory for a large retailer. “Treat you, not beat you,” he sings. On the “beat you” he whips out a spatula and spins it toward me.
“No, thank you,” I say. “I have a spatula.” I don’t tell him I’m conducting an experiment in not buying anything. It seems impolite.
“Do you have a car battery?” Flavio asks. We all laugh.
“Lost your battery?” the man says, concerned.
“Stolen.”
The guy shakes his head. “They some damn muh’fuckers, ain’t they? You can’t have a car in New York, but they goes and takes it.” In New York as elsewhere, people who steal your car battery, or your car, are commonly referred to as They. For the moment, this guy is one of Us.
“Dishonor among thieves,” I remark to Flavio as our subway salesman’s head dips below the rim of the bag.
“Dang, I justhad a battery, too,” he says, emerging with a little fuzz in his hair. “Just had a couple last week. Coulda gotchoo a good price, too.” I’m waiting for him to give Flavio a business card and ask him to call next week.
Paul and I have observed the workings of this microeconomy before, when my own car was broken into on our block and the radio stolen. Paul traveled out to Coney Island, where Russian immigrant peddlers just one step up from the pushcart erect plastic-tarp booths beside the boardwalk and sell new and used car parts and accessories. Their suppliers are freelance. As Paul stood haggling with a merchant, a kid of about twelve approached wielding two shopping bags loaded with car radios. The merchant waved him off, mouthing “Not now!” then turned to Paul and pressed on bargaining. The kid melted away, seeking another buyer.
Paul ended up purchasing a previously owned radio very much like mine for $25. I had bought my own radio in a used-part shop on Canal Street, a few retailing rungs above the Russian booth, for $50. So I was, in effect, getting a formerly owned radio for a total of $75. I was also indirectly profiting off the poor shmuck whose radio ended up in Coney Island courtesy of some underage shopping-bag-carrying middleman.
A few weeks later, perusing the wares laid out by a guy resembling our subway salesman on a blanket on Astor Place in the East Village (size 14 satin pumps, one-handed alarm clock), I spied yet another nearly identical radio. I wondered for a moment if it might be my own used and stolen radio, perhaps resold and reinstalled, re-stolen, and about to be sold again. On this tertiary appropriated-goods market, the price was an irresistible $10.
I met an economist at Harvard who argues that government and corporate corruption is a fundamental part of all economies, along with black markets and other underground commerce. Needless to say, such sectors flourish where necessities, whether material, social, or political, are scarce. So illicit drugs are among the biggest businesses in the world, right up with weapons and oil. Weapons sales are counted in the GNP, as are narcotics agencies and opium defoliants; oil prices are controlled by spectacularly wealthy oligarchs living off the subjugation of their people. Where do beggar salesmen and radio thieves fit into the political economy? Are they saving the taxpayer money? Creating employment, albeit self-employment? Compensating for gaps in the supply chain?
The subway showman now has us all engaged. He’s trying to interest Lucia in a Beanie Baby spider that looks as if it has been worked over by a gang of Beanie Baby flies. Lucia laughs shyly and declines, so he rummages in the bag and pulls out a video game, which he shows Emilio. “Cheat you, son, not beat you!” Emilio, who at four has never played a video game, raises his palms in a “don’t ask me” gesture, which makes Ann and me giggle. All this inspires Flavio to fish a dollar from his pocket, payment for the entertainment and perhaps a bribe to end the show (it doesn’t work).
Soon we pull into our stop. As we rise, I peek into the cart and notice a pile of ragged hardcover books at the bottom. Too bad I don’t have time to look through them. He might have a book on silk-flower crafts in there, or maybeThe Gift, by Marcel Mauss. I hand him a dollar, too.
“Thank you,” he says. “Now y’all get home safe.” It’s a valediction homeless beggars often extend to their donors. This man is a performance artist, an entrepreneur, a working stiff still on the job at 9P.M. on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. Whatever else you can say about him, he is moving goods and currency through the economy. By all rights, I ought to be able to wish him home safe, too.
True or false: The government can’t do anything right. Markets are rational. Art is a luxury. Scarcity is inevitable. We’re here to treat you, not beat you.
June
Redistribution
of Wealth
JUNE 2
Paul is at the kitchen table, surrounded by doves, storks, hippopotami, dinosaurs, pigs, lilies, and roses. They are all made of recycled typing paper. Defeated by the Great Silk Flower Book Heist, he has moved on to origami for Sarah’s present. The library has an abundance of origami books.
Hippo looks a lot like Dinosaur, which resembles Pig. The rose could be mistaken for an artichoke. I’m not thrilled with any of them. “I dunno about origami,” I say, as Paul contemplates the pattern for Bull (a cross between Dinosaur and Ro
se/Artichoke). “It looks”—I search for the word—“chintzy.”
Chintzy, aka cheap. Not sufficiently expensive. I’m worried that we won’t be able to make anything that is substantial enough. For if it is hard to have fun without consuming or conviviality without consuming or status or a job or even an identity without consuming, it is really hard to give a major gift without consuming. Paper, no matter how lovingly folded, doesn’t show enough love because it doesn’t cost enough.
It’s funny. Our family is pretty nonchalant about gifts. We celebrate few holidays; even birthday cards are exchanged irregularly. I know Sarah will be happy with anything we give her, including our company. And yet I don’t think I’m imagining that a bunch of paper artichokes from her fifty-plus-year-old aunt and uncle will seem stingy.
Every exchange, says Simmel, is an “exchanges of sacrifices.” How much can we, should we, sacrifice for Sarah? It sure would be easier to pick out a set of luggage at Macy’s.
Paul pushes his creased-paper creations to one side of the table to make room for the dinner dishes. I flick a dove from my chair onto the floor.
“Okay, soyou make a suggestion,” he says, fed up.
I’m clueless. “Something…bigger?”
Paul pouts, piling the paper animals as in a pyre. I am calling his sacrifice puny.
JUNE 4
Prudence e-mails from work. Two comps to the Mark Morris dance company—orchestra seats—have come across her desk. She can’t use them. Can Paul and I?Can we use them?! A couple of months ago, Ann’s friend couldn’t make it toKing Lear at Lincoln Center. She offered me the ticket. Could I refuse?
Vanalyne, in town from Chicago, buys me three sachets from a shop on Smith Street, infused with some mixture of herbs that makes me want to lie down naked in my underwear drawer. When I protest—no things, please!—she insists. It’s been six months since I’ve had “a luxury,” she says. I deserve it.
Jack, a psychoanalyst, suggests we have dinner at a Chinese restaurant near his apartment. I wager he will pick up the tab, and sure enough, when we’ve finished the meal he offers to. I don’t refuse. Then, emboldened by his profession and a beer, I confess my secret. He finds it amusing. When we part at the corner, he says, “Call me any time you need an excuse to cheat.” Jack is a sweet, gracious guy, the dinner is inexpensive, and at any other time I wouldn’t think twice about his kindness. Now I feel I’ve conned him.
Paul and I can’t stop our friends from being generous. Many of them don’t have more money than we do. All of them work as hard as we do. We’ve taken on this project not out of necessity but as an experiment—you might say, on a lark. Still, they offer and offer, as if we were deprived. And, being polite, we don’t refuse.
Being polite, actually, we could refuse. But here’s another part of the story. We (or I) don’t want to refuse. It is more blessed to give than to receive. But I gotta tell you, when you’re not buying anything, an evening with Mark Morris or General Tso is a blessing, too.
It’s no wonder we’re confused. All our lives, we’ve been operating in the market system. This year we withdrew to its margins in order to observe its workings. But we remain in the gears of the machine, and our personal transactions are lubricated by the familiarity of its rules.
As time goes by, though, I’m realizing that we have gotten enmeshed in another system: gift exchange. Like all exchanges, gift-giving operates in a social context; it has social codes, rules. The trouble is, in our market culture the rules of gift exchanges are ambiguous and covert, and the values upon which they rest are held in ambivalent esteem. When in doubt,Homo Economicus— operating in isolation, in rational self-interest, relating not to a culture but to a marketplace—returns to the marketplace to get his bearings. He values everything and everyone in dollars, “commodifies” even those things that are supposedly invaluable. What is she worth? Fifteen dollars an hour. How important is that country? It has a $300 billion economy. What’s the value of Head Start? “Investing” a yearly $20,000 in a preschool child saves $40,000 a year in preventing his imprisonment two decades from now.
And how do you mark a majorrite de passage? You go to Macy’s with a high-limit credit card.
Some cultures have explicit gift economies. In them, giving is also self-interested, gifts have value, too, wrote the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in 1950, in his signal essay, “The Gift.” But the rules that govern those interests and lend value to those things are not material. They are moral. Gifts may be symbolic objects, such as cowrie shells, that have no intrinsic use or monetary value. Yet socially, their value is central. Even in those gift economies that also barter or trade for money or goods, gifts are the currency that glues the society together and establishes or overturns hierarchies of status and power.
How do we give, how do we receive? The questions may be alien to the utilitarian Economic Man, but the social powers and moral obligations that are explicit in gift economies reverberate through our marketplace society. We still honor big occasions with gifts, like ours to Sarah. And we try to follow the rules, ambiguous and covert though they are. We know, for instance, that the wealthier the giver compared with the recipient, the more he is obliged to give. Paul and I can’t offer Sarah a pile of paper.
The laws that govern gifts in our society tend to sever giver from gift, underscoring the finality of the transfer. Legally, for example, a testator or philanthropist relinquishes control over his bequest once it is given. If the donor wants a piece of land kept wild and the recipient wants to develop it, a judge will rule in the recipient’s—that is, the newowner’s— favor. Still, giving is not without recompense, nor receiving without loss. Bill Gates distributes a portion of his gold to immunize the world’s poorest children. In so doing, he transforms himself from wunderkind-turned-mogul (with a dicey record of labor and corporate practices and a ludicrously big house) into prince of peace. His largesse makes himlarge in the French sense—generous, far-seeing, a great man.
Giving always establishes a relationship, with its own moral and emotional ties. And whatever the relationship between giver and recipient, whatever the gift, from mother’s milk to seashell, college endowment to promise of heavenly redemption, he who gives dominates.
This year Paul and I can give nothing. We are not only stingy but powerless. Yet, self-interested children of the marketplace, we (or I) can’t quite give up getting. We are caught between value systems, between roles in our own system.
Sometimes I feel like a mendicant Buddhist among Calvinists. Other times, as a Jew, I know I what I am: ashnorrer, the kind of person who always happens to drop by just when supper is being put on the table.
JUNE 6
I meet Debbie (the editor who suggested the “Don’t buy, don’t tell” policy back in February) for a picnic in Hudson River Park. I’ve made a lentil salad and crudités and have brought some baba ghanoush that Paul made from scratch. Debbie carries a Zabar’s bag of fancy cheeses and crackers, gourmet cookies and chocolate. I suspect she is overdoing it with the delicacies, since, poor me, I don’t get out much.
We walk around the Chelsea Piers looking at the yachts. Their prestige, like that of penises, is measured in length and girth. Debbie tells me that when she and her husband broke up and sold their summer house, they gave their small sailboat to her brother. About a year later, her brother sold the boat and bought a bigger one. She felt uncomfortable about it.
“He was breaking the code of gift exchanges,” I say. Gifts are scrutinized and compared for their monetary value (the size of the engagement “rock” indicates the degree of the groom’s love for the bride and predicts the richness of the marriage), but the value of the gift is not supposed to be actively transformed into money. “I can send you a bunch of flowers in the hospital, but I can’t send you the twenty bucks the flowers would cost,” I explain to Debbie. “And you can’t sell those flowers to the uncle of the woman in the next bed because he forgot to bring his own.”
“Ah-ha!” ex
claims Debbie. Her husband thought she was being sentimental about the boat, “but I didn’t care about the boat. I just felt queasy about his selling it.”
We stroll away from the river and into the streets of the Village. Soon, we find ourselves on Thirteenth Street approaching the Quad movie theater.
“Hey, let’s go to a movie,” says Debbie. “I’ll pay for you.”
“No, no. You don’t have to do that.” It’s hard to know which is more wearisome, saying yes or saying no.
“I know I don’t have to. I want to,” she responds.
Again, I demur. I know Deb is sensitive to the subtleties of the gift exchange, so after a few paces, I say, “Tell me why you want to do this. Do you feel sorry for me?”
“No,” she answers.
“Do you think Ishould go to a movie? Like maybe I need one?”
“Of course not.” She waves her hand in dismissal. “No big deal,” she adds.
But I press on. “Do you want to go to the movie because you’re bored with me?”
She feigns a look of exasperation.
“Do you want to give me a present?”
“No!” she exclaims. We both laugh at my persistence. “I just thought it would be nice.” She pauses. “I just wanted to go to a movie.”
I give her an apologetic look.
“I wanted to go to a moviewith you, ” she says with mocking niceness, and a laugh. “But since you’re not allowed to, according to your rules, I figured I’d just pay.” Ugh, my rules.
Not Buying It Page 11