We Eat Margarine Sometimes

Money is a many splendored thing. I spend time worrying about money like someone who cares about the planet spends time thinking about all the ways Mother Earth could combust or collapse from all the fucking terrible stuff we're pouring into her. I dream about money, all the ways I could spend it, the clink-clinking sound of coins dropping onto cold, hard marble-topped counters ringing in my ears. Man, nobody wants money like I do. I dream of holding it in my hand, the green dollar bills crisp and tight and smelling like Wall Street Greed, which to me, smelled like bagels and lox. It smelled like high-end sofas and shit like that.

It's a pity when when Gordon Gekko said, ''Gimme guys who are poor, smart and hungry," he forgot the girls and he definitely forgot someone like me. I kept a copy of the Wall Street Journal under my pillow at night and I read it like the Bible. People around me always aspiring to be doctors to cure cancer, engineers and lawyers- sure, they said, we'll make cash, but that's a bonus. We wanna do what we love, that's the most important thing. Well, the only thing I loved more than my family and a couple of my friends, was watching stocks and counting those bills. I can watch the S&P 500 like nobody's business, for hours and hours on end. I laughed when James Carville said he wanted to come back as the bond market because he could scare everybody. And then I laughed some more because I realised how fucking true it was.

I told my best friend, that I'd do anything for money. I would, and I still will. I did in fact. Girls in my school were worrying about how to tell the boys they liked that they liked them, boys were worrying about that too but they couldn't say that, and I was worrying about how to says Lloyd Blankfein correctly. Didn't want to mess up badly on the first day at my inevitable job at Goldman Sachs. Now, I knew I wasn't the best at math. Heck, I could be worse. But where money was concerned, I knew what I was talking about. I knew which commodities were gonna tank, which companies were the worthy ones of old-WASPy money and which weren't, and I definitely knew: stay away from penny stocks.

The thing was I carried around my greed like a book in my bag, and it weighed in my heart like a stone, and everytime I saw big houses, shiny cars, swanky restaurants, I grew jealous and that swelled my ego up like a balloon, that wouldn't be pricked. I want to be so rich that I'll have run out of ways to spend it after I get it, so uselessly filthily rich, and be so gaudy about it. I didn't care about old-money class and taste, I wanted to be gauche; the most nouveau riche person about town. I spent way too long at the bottom of the food chain being hungry to be polite. 

So, I didn't like Europe. You can't buy class, you can't buy an accent there just like you can't escape the socialist system sitting down on your lungs like a pack of Marlborough cigarettes filled with tar. I scorned England after Oxford rejected me, I didn't need the fake, condescending royal blood anyway. It didn't interest me. 

And so, I ended up in America, oh God bless America. That wondrous, splendid place where a dollar and a kind word can take you a long way. Sometimes, I think a good American would fear a tax hike more than a gun. 

"Guns? I have some one of my own," they'd say, "At least you can see them."

Taxes were nasty, Socialist things, and they had no place in America. The left wing there died alongside Eugene V. Debs. Everything else was milder shades of laissez-faire. Adam Smith would have given Reagan a hearty embrace with his invisible hand. 

I couldn't tell anyone in my office that I sometimes ate margarine, instead of butter.