June 7, 1998

Some of My Best Friends Are Rich

By Matthew Klam

These are boom times — for my friends. Like me, they work hard, and boy, is it paying off. They're getting rich. Their lives are becoming more and more perfect. They're shopping, eating and sleeping in places where I can't go. They've vanished behind a curtain and sailed over the rainbow — and life is easier in that other world, because the future is secured. Bad things can't touch them.

Or maybe it just seems that way to me because I don't get together with them as much anymore, because they are gone most of July and August, or have moved to an incredible $4,000-a-month loft I've never visited, or to the suburbs — to the exact house I would have built, down to the kitchen with polished stainless-steel appliances. While many of my friends negotiate financial packages of staggering amounts, pondering one offer over another while planning their next vacation to Bali — or while hitting $7 golf balls into the ocean off their front lawn in East Hampton — I'm praying my checks won't bounce.

You see, short stories are my bread and butter — and the market for my commodity is flat. There was the year I made $21,000 selling stories and a proposal for a book I have yet to finish. Then there was the year after that when I made peanuts teaching grad students.

I close my eyes and see my cousin Jonny, pulling up last Thanksgiving in his white Range Rover, and later unrolling the blueprints for his gigantic new house across the dinner table. Or my buddy Lloyd, who, 10 years ago, had a play produced in a small theater in Manhattan but now works on Wall Street. His wife has an emerald-cut diamond the size of a Chiclet on her ring finger, and I can still picture him eyeing the engagement ring on my fiancee's finger. Lara's diamond is more like a Tic-Tac than a Chiclet; I was ashamed of its size in comparison.

So far the author's friends' fortunes haven't rubbed off on him. Standing behind him, from left: Peter, Lara (the author's fiancee), Abby, Scott and Carl (Photograph by Guy Aroch)

I gave a reading a while ago in a library basement, and my friend Peter showed up. (These moments are often ego boosts for me; they help balance out my feelings of inadequacy.) Like Lloyd, Peter abandoned writing a few years back. It was good to see him and we got to chat, since the audience was slow to arrive. He'll finish law school this summer, and then he's moving to Los Angeles for a job in entertainment law. I was happy for him — and even though between the two of us, I'm the successful writer, achiever of dreams (while he quit!) — he stood there grinning. He was grinning because he's glad he isn't me, waiting to see if enough people show, in a room that smells like mold.

Right then I wanted Peter's life so badly I felt like crying; I didn't want to wait to see if anyone else came to my reading; I wanted him to take me along to his law firm in Los Angeles. I wanted a suit like his, and I wanted to wear it driving a convertible in the California sunshine while those bad memories of never having any money faded away.

Why do these little moments stick with me? There's my friend Bill, who spent $400 at the supermarket last Sunday night because he was hungry; Chris, who flew himself to France to ride in a bicycle race (counting the equipment, the support vehicle and transportation — and the cigars he brought back — he spent 12 grand in six days); Karen, who bought a $3,000 Italian mahogany table because she likes to have dinner parties; Bill's wife, Samantha, who yesterday spent $1,200 on some — very nice — plants; Abby, who moments after her fiance Scott's most recent pay raise bought him $250 worth of underwear in fantastic colors; Elliott, who just got back from kayaking in Cabo (wherever that is); Nick and Linda, who went to Crate and Barrel and furnished their new apartment in three hours flat.

There are more reports like this than there used to be. In fact, the reports keep coming in. They're in! I'm out. These silly anecdotes have become like ghosts that follow me wherever I go, reminding me of what I am: a financial joke. I don't fit in. I don't make enough. You know how it is when you get together with old friends, and not a second is lost, everything is still the same? Well, it's not still the same. I don't feel like one of the guys anymore. What's a stock split? What's a data point? What's a Top Driver? Why is it revolutionizing the industry? I'm like a stranger in my own native land. I imagine this is how the Amish feel.

They aren't plain old middle-class pals anymore. These are actual rich people. My college chum Russ sets up initial public offerings and runs money into funds and everything is ramping nicely and he's bummed because his hedge-fund buddy recently bought a Lear jet. And I'm schlepping around, he says, in business class. He's 34. He's about to buy a yacht. Some days, to ease the undercurrent of tension when we talk, he pretends to envy me. You write because you have no choice, Klam, he says. It's your calling, so stop complaining. Your whole day could be spent in a bathrobe.

I graduated from college in 1986. The heartwarming film "Wall Street" came out around that time, and many of my friends went directly into banking. I'd majored in philosophy, and had absolutely no ideas, no goals, no plan for life. I felt inspired and wrote poetry — and then, in romantic fashion, I drove around the country for years, writing lousy stuff and making no money until, eventually, I found the tiniest nibble of success.

As awful as it sounds, I liked this life, wandering from place to place with a bank balance that hovered around $60. But things are a lot different now from when I dreamed this profession up at 22. I wasn't raised to be poor, or to be patient and have faith. Now I'm 33 and I go through terrible bouts of hating myself, when I wake up with regrets, 11 long years into Not-Being-Legitimate. The shame stays with me all day.

But, wait, you say, he's an artist. Where has the pride gone? Well, the heady times when I've felt like Jack Kerouac — when having my name in a national magazine meant more than anything — ended in a hurry. The look on people's faces when I tell them what I've been up to, the envy they felt for my freedom, that's over. They envy nothing now. They worry instead. Or they don't want to hear about my sorry money woes. It makes them... uncomfortable. They don't notice, when we go out to a restaurant, that I worry about who orders what, and why should they? It's not their problem.

I'm sitting across from the host of a dinner party in Georgetown; he's wearing a great suit with a gleaming crisp shirt, French cuffs, a bright tie; he looks athletic and well rested. He's very happy to meet a real writer, he says. He used to be a writer himself. He wrote stories all through college and still reads everything being published. He runs his father's investment firm now, but the more we talk, the more he's thinking of retyping a story he wrote in college and showing it to me. He wants to know what it's like to write all day and where the ideas come from.

I've had two giant glasses of gin and I'm tired and I don't like him but maybe that's because he seems to be employing a fake British accent. "The bloody thing about fiction writing," he says, "is that it has to be true, but you have to make it up." There isn't one stick of furniture in the entire three-story brick town house that I could afford except the salad bowl, but who cares? We're talking about what I do, and I'm the star of the moment. "Have you ever met Norman Mailer?" he asks. Bingo! I met him just the week before and I say so. My host's envy is pouring into me, and his eyes are boring holes in my eyes. He envies my life, my privileges, the secret places I've been able to get to, the stuff I've got. For the first time in a long time, I feel jealousy. It feels great.

This is how i get by: when the phone bill with the threatening red stripe arrives, then I pay it. When the credit card maxes out, I retire it. I don't ever talk about money with the friends who are loaded. If, as I suspect, my old buddy Spleef is worth $20 million, I don't want to know. I hope he doesn't tell me. Why would he want to depress me like that?

I've been engaged now for four months, to a professional woman with a growing psychotherapy practice and financial expectations — and if I had any secrets before, well, the vault that holds the deepest wells of humiliation has been violated. We haven't pooled our money yet but we're getting ready to, and around our kitchen table I've had to answer for my absurd economic realities, all those money issues I kept privately to myself (so successfully from myself) all these years:

Lara asks, "How much do you need per month to live on?"

"I don't know."

"What are you going to do this summer?"

"Leave it up to whimsy."

"What if that doesn't work out?"

"In that unlikely event, I'll be broke."

"But," she says, "two days ago you said you were rich."

"I know. I was. I've spent that."

I mention other moneymaking ideas, like a TV pilot I've discussed with a friend who works for UPN. She likes it. "I don't care about your money," she says. "You need it for yourself."

"Why do we have to talk about this now?" I say.

"It's good practice," she says.

I hate it. I want to have money — I want to be able to offer us all kinds of options, I want her to be able to quit working if she feels like it and go buy houseplants. I want to surprise her with a thick reddish cashmere coat with a hood, like one she saw in a magazine; it would look really good with her wrapped inside it. I want to pick up the phone and call on some real-estate agent so that we can go house hunting in his Lexus — he'll offer us coffee from a little thermos while we drive around — but I can't, because I don't have the dough.

"Eventually," I say. "I'll make more."

"It's O.K.," she says.

"Right now we don't need money," I say.

"We could live on sunlight," she says. "Like plants. How are we going to have children if you can't talk about money?"

"Children?" I say.

She mentions a funny movie we saw the other night, about these clever roommates who plot to murder one another for some money they stole, and adds: You could've written that. Why can't you write something like that?

I know she's just trying to help, and she's right. In the last few months I've done ghostwriting, advertising, business writing — it all pays better than fiction, but on the tip of my tongue is a suggestion that we take her 12,000 pairs of shoes and start a museum and charge admission. I want to have this talk about the future without the money component, no money fights ever, me handling everything and taking care of business, and we'd just be two lovers living on sunlight, plenty of green.

It's not a crime that she has a lot of shoes, or makes a decent living. She's not the only one. Many of my friends who weren't even interested in money have reached a point now of making a pretty good wage. I know a dentist who's 33 and has just built a $750,000 house on a lake. He bought a speedboat, and the boat has such a big motor it goes across the lake in five seconds, and then he has to turn back.

But to have his life, I'd have to be a dentist. I wouldn't want to be a dentist.

I don't want anybody else's life. And yet I think about quitting writing every 20 minutes. I'm sure my money problems are tied to my father's. He struggled with it his whole life. Not that he was poor -- he actually made money — but he was all messed up by it. He managed a team that sold invisible financial products, like estate planning, pensions, insurance for corporations. It didn't mean anything to him. He got more satisfaction from shining his shoes at night than from running an insurance agency. What he really enjoyed was being outdoors -- in the garden, on a horse, in the woods — or walking around the pool, every summer weekend, in nothing but a terry cloth hat. Business wasn't the right environment for my dad. He didn't have the heart of a money guy. And so he begged me, without saying so, to do something else -- to make something, though I'm sure he didn't think I'd be doing it for almost nothing.

I grew up in a really nice 250-year-old house in Katonah, N.Y., with a pool, a tennis court and two horses. My parents would have cocktail parties; groups of men with a pool, a tennis court and two horses in their yards would stand next to one another, uptight and cranky, acting like peevish kids, complaining because they had no friends. Living in Westchester County, we were surrounded by stories of families falling to pieces — and money was always part of the crackup. I remember the Mercedes-Benz our neighbor bought his wife, as a last-ditch peacemaker, and then quit payments on; and the horse she said she had to have -- her final demand — but only a $20,000 one would do.

Growing up in this strange environment, where it all looked like excess, money began to seem toxic. I'm not cut out for it — the cashing in. The whole thing scares me.

I had a college roommate, Carl, who upon graduation took a job doing the exact same thing that caused my father all that misery: selling life insurance. We said goodbye and I shook my head, watching him head off in his new Nissan Sentra — poor sellout! He was doomed, flying off like a projectile in the wrong direction. In his first week he made $3,800 in commissions on top of his regular salary, and in his second week he made $16,000 and immediately got a promotion. No more tuna subs for Carl. A year later he went on to sell computer memory modules for mainframes. He owns valuable company stock. He's one of the best salesmen in his company's history, and if he felt like it, he could retire tomorrow.

I remember once in college rallying him to pitch in for a letter-writing campaign for Amnesty International. Carl wasn't worried about torture victims in Siberia. He had to get through the sports section first. And anyway we were in rural New Hampshire. No torture victims there. That's Carl — he's a great athlete, he'll do anything for a laugh, he's charming, he graduated with a near-perfect G.P.A., he's not stuck up. Work, like everything else, is a game to Carl. He usually wins, and has fun doing it. Being a success works fine for Carl, because he does what he wants. He made a choice and he's happy. I made a choice, too. I wanted to write, so I write.

There are, however, a couple of other things I want, to help alleviate my pain.

I want. I want Campagnolo Super Record components for my road bike. I want this suede-looking Armani silk suit with a tiny waffle weave. I want a big front lawn overlooking the ocean. I want a 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass 442, dark green with a white rally stripe, convertible roof, black seats. I want a live-in cook and a new pair of cleats for baseball. I want a Psion Series 5 hand-held computer so that I can input data while I'm waiting on the checkout line at the Safeway. I want a Breitling Tag Heuer Bell and Ross organic titanium chronograph scuba diving watch. I want a big black stereo with one button on the front and a glowing red light. I want a plain-paper, all-in-one fax, color copier and printer. I want a hands-free wireless telephone headset. I want a one-gig Zip drive, a platinum wedding band and a ski house in Idaho. I want my fiancee to be able to walk into H. Stern Jewelers on Fifth Avenue and mill around for an hour, and I want to pay for it, and not have to worry too much about what she got. I want an electronic nosehair trimmer, something that literally rips the hairs out at the roots. I want to be able to buy for this 13-year-old who lives on my street some sterling silver widgets for the Irish flute he's learning to play. I want parabolic downhill skis. I haven't even gotten to the kitchen stuff. I want some Bernardaud porcelain plates in the Olivier Gagnere pastel patterns. And I want some ridiculous things that I'm embarrassed to mention.

I should be able to buy this stuff. I keep waiting to figure this out. It just seems to me, well, I'm as smart as my rich friends. I'm at least as smart as any of them. I'm the smartest person in the world!

I had all the opportunity. I still do. I could have done anything. I could have gone into law — and right now I'd be working with Ally McBeal, flirting with her, wondering if our tactics were ethical, eating takeout, pouting our lips; she'd have on a skimpy skirt, I'd be in a big suit.. . .But I didn't. I shunned the jobs that make good money. It's my fault. I'm indefensible. Some guys want to make money, so they make money. In them, I already see these trends: too much drinking, outbursts of rage, profound aimlessness. I guess I like to watch. Mine is a good job — witness to my generation. It's a damned dilemma that in this culture it's totally up to me whether I become a financial killer or a financial failure. To actually have this choice -- to be rich or poor — this psychological mind-set, is a particularly modern ambivalence. But the fact that I'm moving down from where I started seems to me most unforgivable.

"You'll be so glad when you finish your book," my friend Jodi says. She's an elementary-school teacher. Her husband, Rich, runs some mysterious business that makes a lot of money. "Because writing is more like a hobby. Then you can go get a job."