Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City
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Authors: Choire Sicha
Tags: #Popular Culture, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
Very Recent History
An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City
Choire Sicha
For David
In Russia, if you told two people they could both become richer, but one would become
wealthier than the other, they would take the proposition, no problem. In New York,
people surveyed rejected this scenario. Only in New York would people rather be poorer
if they knew that, at the same time, someone else wasn’t getting ahead either.
—W. MICHAEL COX,
FORMER CHIEF ECONOMIST AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF DALLAS
No man has ever hung from the rafters of a second home.
—DAN BEJAR
n.b. Many names have been changed.
There was, for a while, a very large and very famous city. For an even shorter while,
the richest man in town was its mayor. This seemed, for the time that it was true,
like a very improbable coincidence.
More than eight million three hundred thousand people lived in this city then, but,
by any sane criteria, only a few hundred of those people mattered to any single one
of the others. One or more sex partners. The woman behind the counter at the nearest
deli. Colleagues and coworkers, if the person in question was employed. The friends
acquired along the way, like white hairs on a black sweater, from compulsory public
school or discretionary college. College was an advanced form of education that usually
cost a lot of money and that, in general, at least two out of three young people started,
but only one in two would finish. One grew up with these intense school friendships,
and then, as one grew older, those friends were joined, or sometimes replaced, with
new people: friends of former lovers, and lovers of current friends. A favorite bartender
or waiter, maybe. A millionaire, probably, or one of the seventy-one billionaires
that then called the City home.
Beyond that bright bubble was a hazy landscape of everyone else. From that middle
distance came the potential of a perfect match, the perfect accident, the perfect
path to money or renown. It milled in every bar or party or tedious elevator. A new
person would snap into focus and color for a second before blurring off.
Each person lived and moved and worked in his own thin particular slice, like a glass
plate in a high, compressed stack. The happier, richer people, it was imagined, were
up above in ever-thinner, ever-shinier glass plates. People with all the freedom,
or a great job, or a loving boyfriend, or at least an empty and gorgeous apartment.
And below: thick slabs of the poorer, the lonelier, and the hopelessly left behind.
Those were people who’d gambled maybe with actual money and lost, or who had never
had anything to begin with. There were so many more of them, an all-day warning to
the foolishly ambitious or the reasonably aspirational.
From time to time, everyone could imagine himself near the top, climbing the face
of this great glass pyramid, a feeling brought on by the fleeting exhilaration of
a new job, or a great outfit, or an unexpected night of kissing in a doorway.
The Mayor, who employed at his private company at least ten thousand people, took
an annual salary of only one dollar from the City while he held office. He leased
seven hundred thousand square feet of business space in a building with his name on
it, fifty-five stories tall. The building was completed just as he finished his first
four-year term as mayor.
The tower was then only the fourteenth tallest building in the City. It was a slaty
blue and everything around it was gray: gray gravel in the tucked-away driveway for
all the drivers, gray stone curbs beneath the darker coats on the men who stood attentive
at the slick glassy doors. This secret driveway gave a magical sense of the building
being off the great sturdy grid of the City, which was all laid out in hard lines,
except at some of the quiet and old edges, where the grid stuttered or became obscure,
mired in its own history.
In addition to the Mayor’s business offices this building had 105 apartments.
A hedge fund operator and investor named Peter Thiel lived there. A hedge fund took
rich people’s money—at their own request—and made more money with that money. In his
apartment were floor-to-ceiling windows, with floor-to-ceiling curtains. Everything
in it was gray and blue and black—a long dark table, with white linens, where his
private chef made him light and delicious breakfasts when he was in town.
A very famous and very beautiful pop singer named Beyoncé owned an apartment there.
A TV anchor named Brian Williams lived there. His job was to uncover, or to at least
read aloud, the news, which then came streaming into people’s apartments, for the
benefit of a company that was part-owned by General Electric. General Electric was
at the time one of the world’s most profitable companies. It was started by the man
who first distributed electrical power just 120 years prior to this time.
Actually, both the current and a former chief of General Electric lived in the Mayor’s
building where Brian Williams and Beyoncé also lived.
Now nearly everyone in the City paid to have General Electric’s news on the TV, and
to have General Electric’s power in their homes. They’d open up their refrigerators
and the electric cold would seep out all around them.
When it was new, a 1,360-square-foot two-bedroom apartment—so, a not particularly
large one—in that building was listed at 5.1 million dollars. A 1,726-square-foot
two-bedroom apartment could be rented for 17,000 dollars each month—there were then
twelve months in a year—which meant 204,000 annually.
One resident, Marc Dreier, a lawyer, had paid 10.4 million dollars for a four-bedroom
apartment on the thirty-fourth floor. He couldn’t live there any longer because he
was now going to live in a prison, which was run by the government at that time. He
was to stay there for twenty years; the laws he had broken included those prohibiting
money laundering, and there were five counts of wire fraud and some other things,
and so the apartment and everything in it was sold, to a man in the reinsurance industry
named Ajit Jain, for just 8.2 million dollars.
“Reinsurance” was a kind of business transaction, where a company that sold insurance
then transferred some of its insurance risk across multiple companies.
“Insurance” was an idea where, if you had something that you valued a lot, like an
expensive painting or a child, you could pay a relatively small amount of money to
a company and, if the painting was stolen or the child died, the company would pay
you the agreed-upon value of the missing, or dead, object or person.
Companies offered this insurance because they made the payments just expensive enough
that, almost always, the amount of money they were paid for these policies in total
was more than they had to pay to replace people’s paintings and children.
The “almost always” was what they called “the risk.”
The contents of Marc Dreier’s apartment that became Ajit Jain’s apartment included
a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Cuvée Rosé Brut, an alcoholic beverage that cost between
80 to 90 dollars. Also Ajit Jain found himself the owner of a fruit pie, kept cold
in the refrigerator. A pie was a dessert made from flour and butter and, in this case,
raspberries and peaches, but, unfortunately for its new owner, this one had already
been half consumed.
ONE COLD NIGHT
in winter a young man named John walked down a street in the City. It was free to
walk on the streets, although to take a public conveyance, such as a subway or a bus,
cost money.
“Hey, do you have a dollar?” said a man who did not have a home, and whose practice
of employment was that he would ask passersby for money.
“Sorry,” said John.
“It’s okay, I can tell you’re not rich,” said the homeless man.
“That makes two of us,” John said.
Before the winter had begun, a contagion had started in the City and swept across
the country. A number of the City’s companies—particularly the commercial and investment
banks, and the insurance companies with whom they did business—had made some poor
choices, and the effects of those choices had rippling economic consequences. Companies,
hungry for cash, or at least afraid of a lack of it, had begun to “lay off” employees—terminating
their employment agreements, which weren’t really much of agreements anyway since
most of the country had laws that treated employment as temporary. That meant that
employees could be fired for any or no reason. At the same time, it was also always
legal for employees to quit their jobs. In any event, companies needed the cash because
fewer people were consuming what they made, or, just as likely, because they had been
told by their experts and advisers that soon fewer people would consume what they
made. Also, for sure, they wanted to give more money to the people who ran the companies.
Two and a half million jobs had already disappeared. That was a lot of money to save—or
to pocket.
The City was a rich place—in a sense, the richest place in the whole country—and so
its economy, where the contagion had started, was damaged but not devastated. Still,
it was a quiet panic. The people of the City, in the aggregate, spent less money,
but did not stop. Some expensive things dropped in value, like paintings, and well-made
clothes, and even apartments, somewhat, too. In the rest of the country, many houses
and apartments became drastically less valuable, but that wasn’t nearly as true in
the City. But what all this meant was that there were many people without jobs, and
many people afraid of losing their jobs, and those that did have jobs often did not
have much to do. What it really meant for the City was that the ability for many people
to change jobs came to a near standstill for much of the year to come.
John worked, as did many people in the City, in the office of a corporate entity that
was privately owned. Some companies were owned “publicly.” This meant that, to one
extent or another, individuals or companies could buy “shares”—little pieces—in the
company and therefore become its owner, or one of its many owners. But the company
at which John worked was controlled by a small group of people, and it was just between
them and the entity that profit or loss flowed. Like many private smaller companies,
this was just one of a suite of companies that had little to do with each other except
being owned by the same person or family. Some of those companies were profitable—earning
more than they spent. This one was not.
The walls of this office were painted a cheap white color and the carpets were a darker
noncolor. A full-time employee, John was paid every two weeks by the corporation and
received some small amount of vacation, and some amount of his health insurance cost
was covered by his company’s owner.
This office was a modified “open plan,” meaning that there were few interior partitions
and few interior walls. The mayor of the City was a proponent of open plan office
use, which he had installed both at his company and at the antique City Hall as well,
as much as was possible there, creating a “bullpen” of a vast office. Other big corporations
had done the same. At the banks and financial service firms in the City, lowly vice
presidents sometimes sat next to managing directors—a title that conveyed more prominence,
and greater financial rewards. The idea was to air out the secrets that happened behind
closed doors, to allow for chance to create connections. Well, really, the original
idea was to pack more people into smaller amounts of space, thereby saving money.
The good stuff was just a side effect, as well as a handy sales pitch.
