“It’s a saying.”
“It is?”
“It must be.”
“Okay.”
Lillian kicked back her chair. She laid a leg upon my leg. I brushed the dirt from her shoe from my pants. She hit the roach and coughed hard. Her cheeks looked purple in the porch light.
“The account is ours,” she said. “God help me, I have a feeling. A rumble in my gut like the dam’s about to burst.”
“That may have been the shrimp. It felt a little slimy.”
“I didn’t eat the shrimp. I’m off shellfish. The smell makes me want to vom.”
I looked down at my plate. There were twelve shrimp tails on it. There were none on Lillian’s.
“Why’d you serve it?”
“It’s what you serve.”
She flicked a shrimp tail off the balcony.
Michael
Back outside, I was almost run over by a convoy of Citi Bike tourists speeding through a red light. With the introduction of Citi Bike, the increase in bridge tolls, the reliably annual announcement of long-term service stoppage on one or another subway line, and the continuing trendiness of those dumb caps with the flipped-up brims, New York had become a cyclist’s city, a war zone in which cars were the enemy, and pedestrians were bystanders in the line of fire. But while I appreciate the cyclist’s experience of the city—the way she hears words drift, car horns begetting car horns, and conversations cut up so that single syllables call out across avenues, each respondent ignorant of the next block’s aria—walking’s better for thinking, and I had a lot on my mind as I wound north through the Financial District.
Our office was uptown, but Ricky and I had a Monday tradition of coffee and omelets before riding the A/C to Forty-Seventh Street. He’d been my closest friend since fourth grade, when Steve Wyck called me a white-trash kike with a deadbeat dad who should’ve been killed in the Holocaust. I’d been about to point out that my dad wasn’t born until after the Allied victory when Ricky intervened with a judo chop to Wyck’s solar plexus, knocking the bully to the ground and earning my protector a three-day suspension.
I’d followed Ricky since: to Columbia, to Wall Street, to his gay bar du jour. I was not close with my parents, and had left home by the time my sister, Rachel, was old enough for joint commiseration. Until Wendy came along, Ricky was it, peer and mentor, bad influence, eccentric solver of problems. Even after, he was the only person who knew both versions of me: pre- and post-Wendy; the white-trash kike and the hipster millionaire. My fall was my own, but my previous prosperity had heavily hinged on his tips. And while his provocative nature didn’t always recommend him as a source of prudent guidance, Ricky’s role in my life was still that of advisor, and I currently, desperately, needed his counsel. He could be trusted in matters of finance.
Besides, I was interested in #Occupy. Protests now flared in previously #unOccupied Republican strongholds from Arizona to West Virginia; pro-#Occupy op-eds appeared daily on national news sites; and #Occupy leaders were finally getting face time on network news shows where they voiced increasingly popular support of the UBI. This windfall, they promised, would encourage participation in consumer markets and help the unemployed pay for privatized insurance. Recipients could quit degrading jobs and go back to school to earn higher degrees. They could contribute to the sharing economy. They could open small businesses knowing they’d have cash to fall back on if things went belly-up. As an added bonus, a financially contented populace might feel less imperative to freely spray bullets in public space. The logic went that if the ride or die Second Amendment crusaders could afford more powerful and expensive assault rifles then, paradoxically, they’d be less inclined to shoot the scary pacifists rallying to take those rifles away. But there was doubt on the right—from the very circles that fought so hard to abolish a public health-care option—that, left to their own devices, people could be trusted to correctly spend.
This was not the #Occupy I remembered from 2011, that Bonnaroo facsimile with its compost bins and People’s Library, its greased teens locking tongues beneath the honey locusts. There were still students, crust punks, and derelicts, but added to these ranks were laid-off workers from all manner of industries. These people’s tax dollars had gone toward the previous bailout, and they’d been repaid with foreclosures and overdraft fees. And now their jobs had been replaced by bots or shipped abroad. Unemployment was the highest in our nation’s history. The repeal of Dodd-Frank had led to another credit bubble, and speculators like me had sunk billions into industries bound to topple under the weight of an increasingly nonexistent consumer base.
The Senate was split on the UBI, though not entirely along party lines. Factories that our previous president had “saved” from offshore deportation had since laid off almost all their human labor, and thousands more were left jobless when funding ran dry for the half-built border wall. Senators in the affected states were more afraid of their constituents’ diminished spending power than they were of scary old words like socialism. At the same time, plenty of coastal Democrats kowtowed to their Wall Street backers who opposed the proposal. And initially supportive libertarians balked when it became clear that the UBI would not be funded, as they’d envisioned, by bulldozing federal benefits programs. In all likelihood, the decision would come down to the votes of a few undecided, including New York senator Tom Breem, a centrist Democrat campaign-financed by the very banks hit hardest by the bill.
Breem’s office was in Albany, but the chants and stomps coming from Zuccotti Park were intended to reach him. A FOX News anchor had deemed the scene an “unsightly display of Marxist manpower,” and I’d wanted to see it for myself. “Whose streets? Our streets!” sang the protesters, reminding the swarms of surveillance drones that these roads had been built with human hands. The Freedom Tower stood gaunt in the distance, a fragile monument to the dying era of the American construction worker.
If #Occupy’s previous incarnation fizzled under its supporters’ inability to agree on a set of demands, the new regime was unified by consensus on this single urgent issue. These weren’t pod people, but podcast people, the restless jobless who filled long afternoons listening to pundits preach the gospel of #Occupy. Groups as disparate as BDS, Black Lives Matter, and The Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association joined arms beneath the #Occupy banner. The previous administration had segmented the country into factions narrowly focused on their own safety and survival, but that administration’s end, combined with the employment crisis and subsequent crash, had heralded the integration of these financially progressive factions, now bonded in harmony against the fiscally conservative Republican moderates and Democratic centrists eager to reinstate the neoliberal status quo.
Once again, there was a 99%. I saw cabbies of every ethnically stereotypical stripe, from old neighborhood wise guys to club-ready Russians with slicked hair and Bluetooth attachments. I saw adjunct professors with bulging triceps because their only job perk was gym access; MTA maintenance workers wearing tool belts filled with possible weaponry; mail carriers raring to go postal. There were even people in Augmented Reality helmets, who saw, I assumed, a terrifically enhanced version of the protest. I pictured the US Steel building in laser-beam crisscross and lit from within, a radium hearthstone transmitting light waves the color of electrified money.