“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody. But it’s customary
to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”
Plenty of Codex-flavored book reviews hardly loiter past first scroll before cracking their knuckles and donning their p-hats, but when it comes down to quantitatives, Very Important People: Status and Beauty on the Global Party Circuit cares about just four: height (ideally, north of six feet in heels), weight (conspicuously, if not ludicrously thin), age (certainly less than thirty, preferably less than twenty-five), and facial attractiveness (left as an exercise to the reader).
That’s me. So in the name of qualitative research I found my sample-size-of-one self in a Manhattan restaurant one evening last November, accepting a fruity drink nestled in an inflatable flamingo koozie as I sat down at a long table of like-bodied women, bracing myself for the global, the party, and the circuit.
Perfect timing one of our promoters, M, greets me as I arrive an hour later than was asked. A friend called just as I was crossing Seventh Avenue, there was a bomb threat a the NYU dorms. She doesn’t handle those things well. I awkwardly satellite at an adjacent empty table for a few minutes, until another waiter M can bark at comes into range. Hey, can we pull up a table for her? The flamingo’s cute. Hate to be the busboy stuck spending his afternoons blowing these up, though. Or maybe the bartender handles it while he’s shaking the drink. Shake-blow-shake-blow.
Tonight, it’s Baby Brasa, followed by TAO Downtown. The one-two punch is by design, the book warns me:
Treating girls is the basis of the VIP economy. In exchange for dinner, girls are implicitly expected to spend time at the club with a promoter…The uncertainty over exactly how or when repayment happens can make a gift more burdensome than a clearly delineated market transaction. Girls and promoters dance around this silence: By accepting the invitation to dinner, she is in a social debt to the promoter, but what, exactly, is expected of her?
The night is to be rife with such ambivalence, I’m told. The rich spend, the wealthy spend nothing. My beauty is priceless, so I will go uncompensated for it. I am obliged to have fun; my presence in a space is not to be mistaken for my presence in a space. Strings are attached to everything, and everyone wants to feel like they’re the ones pulling them. We’ll all tango through these tripwires, for fear of collapsing the superimposition into any one legibility which may paint us in a bad light. And everything is already priced into those markups.
M thrusts a plate of grilled chicken my way. Just a plate, of pieces of meat, put on display, passed around a table, of pieces of meat, put on di—no cheap analogies I stop myself and heap a few portions onto my plate, eliciting another M comment: I would have never guessed you ate meat. Starting to like this guy. I eye the rest of our spread. Not much to write home about. Of course, I was warned about this, too:
Usually at comped promoter dinners, dishes were served family-style and without regard to anyone’s preferences, and the kitchen often sent out the cheaper food, or what hadn’t been ordered much that evening.
Which, I mean, understandable, given half of it will be purged later anyways. Am I still vegetarian if I don't digest meat? I be social with my immediate tablemates for a bit. I'm a fashion designer! I lie. Totally knew from your outfit, they say. I don’t remember if I returned the question in kind, or if or what they answered. One was originally from Turkey, I think.
You German?
M, again, to me. Speaking of. That men in this city so often peg me as Ambiguous East-ish European, it feels like a recurring gag, to have a major trait of yours assumed so consistently, exotically wrong. They must not get out much. I remember what an ex told me:
No, I can see it. You look simple, but devastating enough.
Devastating enough for what?
If I could, I would play dress up. Olga from the Volga, daughter of one of the old-school oligarchs, one who fell out of favor with Putin decades ago, or Petra, nineteen, who has seen things dangerously beyond her years in Berlin nightclubs, they’re serious over there, you know. I have none of those accents in my repertoire. At least I know after I hit the wall I’ll be able to pull off a babushka.
No, I’m from Texas! I tell M. You like the Cowboys? he asks. I don’t really follow sports. C’mon you grew up there though, right? Yeah, but geographically closer to the Texans, so that’s my team?
Are you a Cowboys fan? I ask him. Seems like one of those sports teams that has an implausibly large number of out-of-state fans. They can’t all be expats, there’d be no Dallas left. No, I like some team from Florida I can’t remember. But I’m from Detroit. What? Don’t they have their own team? Aren’t they pretty notable? You guys are weird.
He gives me a that’s the way the ball bounces shrug. He’s wearing a black tee. I come to find they all wear black tees. Clients, too. It’s like they’re all in on some grand shoot-the-moon strategy where most men wear Fruit of the Loom, but enough wear Tom Ford to introduce just enough uncertainty such that any one man exists within a rich-not-rich superimposition. And it’s rude to collapse that superimposition. Just as it’s rude to ask a woman what she weighs. Tit-for-tat. We have our own shoot-the-moon strategy, we simply winnow ourselves so thin we’re one-sided. So thin your guess will be too high knowing your guess will be too high. Nothing much collective about that strategy, but then, that’s the point: we, the tall the thin the young the pretty, are the negative space of our gender:
One powerful pull for women to join the VIP scene is precisely the knowledge that other women are not allowed in. Part of the fun is getting to join a world that excludes and devalues others.
It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play, a card-carrying womanizer once said. Royalty, as it is known, is not the fault of the royal, so much as the fault of each and every commoner who is born not-royal:
“Oh, no, models in New York City are, like—how can I compare them?” Eleanor continued, “I’m not gonna say they’re like the royals of England, but I guess—it’s not power—but the praise they get, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life.” Exploiting our fundamental human assumption that the more attractive you are, the higher your social status is, clubs and their promoters want beautiful women of a specifically rare sort: fashion models. Or at least women who look like they could be models.
I have no good reason for why I fall into the latter category. Must’ve been the mall scout’s day off in the suburban Texas town I grew up in. People will endlessly but you me for answers when I tell them the truth, that I’ve never been a model, like they would demand answers of a rich man who blows a large portion of his wealth on rubber ducks. Fashion designer is my current answer: people accept it as a worthy surrogate without complaint, with the same reverence they afford an actor who does his own stunts.
Nor do I have any explanation as to why I’m just now getting into the club scene, either. Several weeks ago, had you subjected me to word associations, it would have gone something like global variable! party toe the line! circuit city!. Years of living in New York City, and as a Slavic seductress at that, yet noone was ever more babe or in the woods. Frittering away my prime years as olicharch-girlfriend material. Until.
I walk through the West Village on my way home from the gym, a white, four-door Porsche slows down, the man driving it calls out to me: Hey. Beautiful. I ignore him. It’s rarely that easy. Up ahead is a corner restaurant with outdoor dining booths running along the cross street. I round the corner, slowing my pace. Suddenly, the vehicle zips to the other end of the booths, then idles until I walk past, then matches my now-brisk pace. He calls again Hey, beautiful, I again slow the pace of my walk, absorb another Hey, beautiful, and with all the detached graciousness I can summon I make eye contact.
That’s better.
My spine straightens into more of a question mark.
I wantchou to come party with me.
Uncle Sam wore it better I think to myself. I continue staring at him.
Come, have some fun with me. Already holding out a fanned stack of business cards, he retracts his hand into the vehicle and scoops up a second helping, as if seeing me up-close cinched things for him. And bring all your gorgeous friends too he says, as a silent-laughter smile breaks out over his face. He turns and drives away. The minute he’s gone, I tear the slips of paper up and walk away in the other direction, feeling very much like a big shot. I was pretty pleased with myself until I looked up Very Important People several days later, after stumbling upon author Ashley Mears’s interview with Tyler Cowen, and a dozen pages or so in it dawned on me that no, all these men, they weren’t inviting me to participate in something shady, or at least nothing shady enough for me to cave into my stranger danger part.
All these years, petering away my party potential. All the pedestals I could’ve been put on. All the gaudy pairs of Louboutins I could’ve been sugar daddied. To my credit, I’m not the first to harbor an unexamined suspicion of promoters:
Promoters are widely criticized as pimps and “model wranglers,” for whom the fashion industry’s surplus of underpaid newcomers, known as “girls,” are easy pickings…The strategic tricks they use—gifts, flirtations, touches—do in fact resemble the work of pimps. Promoters were painfully aware of how their job looked, and they tried very hard to distinguish themselves…
When I first moved to the city, I remember promoters were seemingly every fifth match on Tinder, but from what I can tell they’ve since banned all such off-label uses. Too, numerous times I found myself on the blunt end of what I now recognize as promoters’ top-of-funnel efforts while I was a member at the Equinox in Soho, in an area the book confirms as ground zero for promoter activity:
As he typically did on a sunny afternoon, Sampson parked his black SUV at the corner of Spring Street and Broadway in SoHo, downtown Manhattan. Two renowned modeling agencies are located at this corner; nearby are a dozen casting and fashion studios. It was a warm Friday, ideal conditions for scouting. If Sampson didn’t have afternoon plans to take models to lunch or to castings, he came here looking to meet new girls.
Having torn up my one active lead, and no longer being the kind of person who’s vain enough to work out at the Soho Equinox, I was up a creek. Time was of essence, each tick of the clock one second closer to my turning twenty-five and sprouting wrinkles. It’s not often one can review a book directly, just by living in its world for a while. I could’ve waited another few weeks, probably, until I crossed paths with another promoter, but instead opted to cold-message the most-followed Instagram account I could find with promoter somewhere in the name.
This was R. He was nice enough, and put me in a group iMessage with and an unidentified number, and the unidentified number put me in a second group iMessage with M, and thankfully the round robin stopped there because I was starting to get the girl is missing vibes from the whole thing. Book list to guest list. I join in halfway through a lumbering Happy Birthday we’re all singing to an older man at a nearby table. The majority of us are filming for social media purposes. Afterwards, a gaggle of giggles, as if we’re all residing in the wake of the funnest thing we’ve ever done, a sort of a reflex equivalent to the phone-voice most women adopt when they start speaking to someone unfamiliar to them.
It seems we’re making to leave now. M, who’s been standing for some time, comes over to me. [Redacted], you’ll go with A he gestures to two girls already standing together behind him and K to TAO. I greet them, I haven’t met either yet. By the four criteria I identified earlier, we’re the only three women out of the dozen who fulfill them all. I take a last swig from my drink as I stand to join them, resisting the urge to deflate the flamingo and stuff it in my purse as a souvenir.
We make a pit stop before we leave. The restaurant isn’t all that crowded anymore but is somehow still absurdly inefficient at getting butts in stalls, and we’re badgered in line for close to ten minutes by a trio of guys who want us to join them. At one point, a too-large black ring I’m wearing slips off my middle finger and goes flying somewhere. It takes the combined efforts of all six of us several minutes of scouring the black floor before I find it myself, heading off any chivalrous debt I might’ve owed had one of the men found it first, thank god.
Soon, A, K, and I are outside, perched on the tip of the triangle of pavement formed where Greenwich Avenue veers into Seventh, awaiting our Uber. The girls seem like close friends. Freed of our suitors, we finally get the chance to introduce ourselves: I’m A I’m K I’m [Redacted]. This is my first time ever going out clubbing! What?! Really?? Yeah I don’t know why I chose to girlboss it up here my job is pretty stressful, and someone from work told me I should try this because they said I might like it, because work hard, play hard, right?
One of the promoters called the car for us, and he sends A periodic updates, in the form of screenshots. No, he’s down here! We follow her south down Greenwhich. That’s cool though! Don’t worry! We’ll watch your back tonight, you’re with us! Shit, this way I think. We dogleg it down Perry Street. Are you with V? I have no idea who V is. Yeah, I am! Oh, we loooooooove V! He really takes care of the girls he brings out with him. He took us to get facials, after we’d been out one night with him a few weeks ago!
Further obfuscating their labors were the many pleasures women experienced from their position as girls.
It was like, six a-m! Oh, this way! Neither mention R at any point. I’m just along for the ride, I guess. Which so far has just been a lap around this entire little triangle block thing Brasa’s on. We still can’t pinpoint our driver; all this trigonometry is giving me blisters. One of the promoters from the book chauffeured girls around in his own Escalade, V needs to get with it. Oh shit, is that it? A starts towards a white Camry flashing its hazards. It was it, we pile in.
Maybe R’s the intake form. Dinner’s the cattle call, where M sorting-hats us. Harsh, but, well, The Categories Were Made For Men. And maybe V’s the more white-glove of the trio. A true model wrangler, a proficient pamperer. Not all are such good sports:
Models, on the other hand, were more likely to be a “pain in the ass”—they were too demanding, in his view, probably because they knew their value.
A, K, and I, what is our value? Its essence, exactly? Can we roll it up and smoke it? If you can think of babies as time billionaires, are we looks billionaires? Do some of us exceed the GDP of whatever podunk Balkan we hail from? During these evenings, the following take from the book became a sort of Tuanian koan for me, in my greater moments of dissonance:
A “girl” is a social category of woman recognized as so highly valuable that she has the potential to designate a space as “very important”
which, if you can muster more surface level-reading than the contents of Borges’ library printed on a Gabriel's horn, is kind of sweet and uplifting. But of course, Very Important People leaves skin-deep value judgements in the capable hands of its nightlife denizens:
“It’s the quality of the woman. It’s the perfect thing. It’s just so beautiful to see and watch. A model is a model. She goes into a club, and she’s, like, flashlight. She’s here, you know. And the guys next to her, they’ll be like, ‘Damn, this club is hot. Get me another bottle.’”
I pretty much threw a dart at my highlights for that quote. Here, want another?
“Some girls are street pretty and some girls are models,” Malcolm concluded. At the time, Trevor couldn’t quite tell the difference. Sampson was constantly reprimanding him: “He’s bringing me girls all tits and butt, you know, girls he likes. I’m like, ‘That’s not what they want. That girl is just taking up space. Don’t bring that. No tits and ass. Just skinny and tall.’
A superficial value judgment a day keeps the inner beauty thinkpieces away:
Likewise, a New York club owner told me that models weren’t even that pretty. To him, they were strange, but “it pops in the club because they’re seven feet tall.” Promoters’ own tastes in women may have been different from that of the VIP look, but their work necessitated a restructuring of their vision around four key indicators: height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. This vision of beauty defines the VIP field as a high-status space, crowding out and even belittling alternative visions of beauty.
Height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. Height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. Height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. Heightslendernessyouthandfacialbeauty. These four elements alchemize into the gold standard of, well, everything. Everything life has to offer is more fun if you’re a model. Truly, everything under the sun: coding, law, elephants. Anything you do, it isn’t just something you do, it becomes an accessory, bathed in the glow of your magnum halo effect. You’re off-duty. Which means you could be on duty, but, again, it’s the negative space that throws everything into relief. Your off-duty state is sort of simultaneous slouch and flex, greening others with envy:
“…to most people, models represent the dream. They represent the elite, trendy world, the high-end world of fashion and beauty. They are the dream. I am not attracted to her, but she is my target. We need those girls.”
Because just like not all clients can’t be Saudi Royals or Jho Low, not all girls can be models. There’s a pecking order to these things:
“She’s hot,” he said casually as we kept walking. “She’s not a model but she’s hot, I’d definitely get with her. That’s what we call a good civilian. There’s models and there’s good civilians. A good civilian is a girl who fits the description of model but is not really a model. Like she’s not as slim or, you know what I mean, she’s not five eleven, but she might be five eight. She’s just a pretty hot girl, something that the clubs will see and say, ‘Ok, she’s pretty hot.’ ” “But you can tell the difference?” I asked him. “Oh, everybody can tell the difference.
Hence why M split us up from the main group, maybe. Away from the good civilians. I ask A, who is showing K and I a TikTok of her cat-cowing I mean that’s like a good cat-cow, I really worked hard on it and K if either actually models. Kinda kinda I receive in a flam. No one just whole-hog hustleporns it like I’m passionate about modeling. Always Yeah, I’m good at this, but I don’t really think about it. It just happens. But it’s not, like, my thing.
Do those fine-grained differences, between models and not-models, really matter? To someone spending oodles of money for the privilege of our company, yes, they do:
“Someone spending $15,000 a night in a nightclub wants the real thing,” he said. “Just the peace of mind that he is now part of that A-list, that social elite. I think that is what the actual difference is.”
Curiously, this pickiness lends some credence to the common promoter refrain I am not a pimp:
Promoters emphasize the visibility of beautiful bodies, not the quantity of sex acts that can be consummated among them. Thibault explained as much, emphasizing that the visible display of high-status femininity, not sex, is of prime importance.
If three inches doth tarnish a halo’s glow, the evolutionary circuits in play might be more sophisticated than Cro-Magnon do copulation (beats chest). Becoming part of the A-list was more subpar as a spread-your-genes-far-and-wide gambit back on the savannahs than it is now. The lizard-brain logic which enables sex sells as the marketing tactic par excellence has a healthy respect for diminishing returns; it’s more noble sorts of compulsion that let femininity facilitate:
While barely discernible as individuals, as a collective the girls played an important role in helping the men talk with each other about their worlds of business….Most clients and promoters simply believe that a room full of men is less comfortable than a room with women.
Did I say noble? I meant oh god please assuage my homoerotic anxieties:
Rudik, a Russian promoter working in Hong Kong and occasionally in New York City, explained that company managers entertaining clients hire him to bring girls to the after-hours entertainment. “Because it’s five guys, with a fucking magnum of champagne, and they look like fucking faggots
Look how straight we all are, we have our own fucking harem for chrissakes! It’s…certainly one use case of wielding femininity en masse. Still, pretty based. You certainly can use The Collected Works of William Shakespeare as a doorstop. Or, you can use it for its intended purpose:
Women were conduits of men’s power, Rubin argued, because men control the exchange systems through which women circulate as gifts….
There we go, conduits of power, sounds like a band from the eightie. That’s more like it. Do away with the Wildeian middleman altogether, yeah, now everything’s just about power.
…women are largely cut out from the value that their exchange generates…
Wai-
The unequal ability of one person to capitalize on another is a classic measure of exploitation in Marx’s terms.
…oh…
Men’s surplus value from girl capital goes largely unseen, since girls’ participation in the clubs is assumed to be fun, leisure, and not work.
Hey…
It would be too easy to say that promoters and clubs exploit girls for monetary gain; we would miss a crucial insight into how relations of exploitation operate. In short, promoters show us that exploitation works best when it feels good.
I…guess. The most surreal aspect to me throughout these nights was, despite never having modeled or otherwise directly made money off my physical appearance, I could nonetheless viscerally six-sense the cash fluttering about my invisible slipstream. Hear soft little cha-chings. Picture the little pile of bills that would accumulate at my feet if I stood in one place for a while. I’m actually being literal here, it’s a pretty easy game to play, during the more boring stretches spent around promoters’ tables. Twenty dollars, I’d think, for existing in this space, for my contributions to the revelry, over the next fifteen minutes. Is that a reasonable guess for how much Tao Group Hospitality might attribute to me? Divide annual revenue of the entire company by however many clubs they own by days in a year by hours in a day by six, take out whatever five percent the alcohol actually costs, divide by number of women in the room, don’t bother weighting out models from good civilians or whatever, is that twenty dollars? Or If I whipped around and demanded twenty dollars or I’m leaving from the client behind me who’s very clearly enjoying my company, wou-
We double-park it on Ninth, time to go. Yeah, TAO’s definitely more clubby, like it’s an actual nightclub. It’s not like a bar that’s really loud with music, like some places we go to are K is telling me as we three slide out of the backseat and step onto pavement and bound down Sixteenth like we’re chained together, past the terminus of the line of people snaking towards the club’s entrance, squeeze our way through the tiny patch of open sidewalk between people in line and a hotdog stand, and step over the velvet perimeter of the entrance to join V, and T, another promoter in the outfit, apparently.
I notice that V instantly does not like me. I instantly dislike in kind. I had a psychiatrist once, one who frequently featured in the society pages, an off-brand Christopher Nolan making an admirable attempt at accessorizing his blazer-over-unbuttoned-shirt with a thin scarf. I showed my mom, and she pegged him as He’s cuter than he thinks he is. Same for V. Later, I looked up his insta, one recent post is a clip from the reboot of Mean Girls, in…which he’s…walking down some red carpet affair with a woman on each arm. Absurd levels of consistency there. I often wonder if he was the single live player I encountered in the course of my nights out.
Is that dress Zara? K asks me about the black slip I’m wearing, under a cropped leather jacket in a dark green roughly the same vibe as a banker’s lamp. It is! Thought so! I remember seeing it online a few months ago. The hem falls six inches past my knee, and I suspect it was my original sin for V.
Sampson kept a simple tight black American Apparel dress and high heels in his SUV, and he was ready to tell a girl to change into this outfit or go home.
Too modest, too elegant, too regal, too stuck-up, too frigid, too cold and unapproachable. Even with a considerable slit up the left leg, terminating at my upper thigh, and four-inch heels. We advance to the front of the line. VaxcardsandIDs, VaxcardsandIDs a white, efficient-looking man in all-blacks chants, seems he’s the head bouncer or something. The face of face control.
One by one by one by one by one we comply. Purses, purses crowed the bouncer manning the next station, awkwardly situated right up against the bottom step of the steep stairs that lead down into the sunken entryway, one by one by one we comply, V and T look on, and then hold the doors for us as we enter. A very dark, stubby hallway later, I behold the main floor, which ups the ante on the sunkenness considerably. Vaguely Compactor 3263827-feeling, with the rough brick walls that glow reddish-orangish in the lights scattered about. And the monster down below.
Up until this exact moment, participation was nowhere on my radar. This is because I read a sociology book about something no normal person would get themselves involved with because they read a sociology book about it. Really, I believed I could get away scot-free as a student of humanity, eager to behold facets brought to the fore by alcohol, by cocaine, by marijuana, by ecstasy, by short skirts, by red-soled shoes, by flashing lights and sizzling sparklers, by house music, by trap music, by subwoofers, by testosterone, by peacocking, by status games, by outrageous parties, by heavenly bills.
But now the threat of it is everywhere. I am an active inhabitant of a world I’ve grown accustomed to opening and shutting at will. That all eyes are on me sensation starts roaring in my ears, no longer am I concealed behind my one-way mirror. We descend down into the activity, pushing through people like they’re the undergrowth of a jungle. Crowds are really, really not my thing. The volume of the music, the lights, both hit you like Bergeronian handicaps dialed to the max. And the continued chill from V, and not really knowing anybody here, and perhaps residual transference from talking my friend down earlier, the whole feedback loop runaways me into something like a fugue state.
I vaguely remember: Being introduced to another girl, maybe a good civilian because she seemed a bit older. Accepting an empty flute glass from someone, and them pouring Prosecco into it. V, gripping a half-empty bottle of champagne by the base, holding it out to A, tipping periodically so she can guzzle. Typing observations into my phone, locking it, and then unlocking it and deleting them. Tequila, then a little while later more Prosecco. A Bitcoin-themed bottle train thundering by, what if Satoshi cashed out all his holdings and went on like a giga-Jho Low bender. K, showing me a single, tiny, blue music note tattooed on the underside of her wrist, It’s a reminder to me, that the difficulty of letting go doesn’t have to be that bad, you know? I have a difficulty of holding on in the first place I tell her Which is why I don’t have any tattoos. T, offering up an unsolicited You look a little pissed to be here.
As the evening trances on for me, as my blood-Prosecco content gradually dulls away the agitation into a sleepiness, until about two-thirty, when a burst of reflexual anxiety oh shit I haven’t been watching my drink that’s what They tell you always gets girls kidnapped into sex slavery jolts me back to my senses. Oh. I look around for a while, take it all in. In not too long I decide to leave, it doesn’t seem like another six-a-m spa trip is in the cards anyways. I shout my goodbyes to M, K, and T, not V, and push through the hordes to the stairs.
Outside, I wind my way around the Google building, to the sidewalk on the far side of Fifteenth. I sit down on a stoop to change into my flats, and am almost instantly splattered by a deluge of chemically-white bird shit. It’s the most I’ve ever seen come out of one bird. On my green jacket, it looks a bit like a Twombly blackboard; everywhere else, my hair, my shoes, it’s just gross. I stand up again, my feet newly stumbly as they deacclimatize after hours spent in high heels. My ears are ringing ferociously. This feels like a setup for enlightenment I think. I continue home.
The nuance Mears renders plenty unsubtle is that girls, their youth and beauty, are to nightlife economics what gold was to the Bretton Woods agreements: the value to which status is pegged, and pegged to that, all other in- and outbound vectors of this world, like clients' piles of money, promoters' hours of labor beneath the surface, social media-fueled lifestyle envy, beds at rehab clinics. Pop sociology book sales.
Yet, of the four personas Very Important People studies⏤girls, promoters, clients, club owners⏤it renders girls most obliquely. In terms of aggregate airplay, we hear more from promoters, clients, and club owners about girls, and from girls who either are themselves promoters or the girlfriends of promoters, than girls qua girls. Most we do hear from are models, or, sorry,
…in the morning, it’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Oh, hello.’ ‘Uh, what do you do?’ ”— the client here took on a high-pitched voice and pretended to be the imaginary girl in bed next to him—“ ‘I’m a model!’ …
Mears peppers in a few exceptions. A girlboss with an MBA! A philosophy grad student! The exceptions belie a rule, implicitly argued: a girl is nothing if her looks. Melt this gold down, shape it whichever way you wish, it’s still only worth its weight. To be beautiful is to be a present tense, to bind specific points in space and time together in holy infatumony. What is it like, to be a present tense?
What Very Important People is, is a book about promoters. Full stop. It introduces, I would argue successfully, what must be a novel archetype to her core audience of academic-adjacents: the lives of precocious charmers, for whom vocation finds them; careers of brokers for whom the Faustian gives way to the Cosasian, whose labors hide so acutely in plain sight; desperations of dreamweavers, for whom a sort of gradual whiplash sets in, when it becomes all too obvious, all too late, that it is themselves they have hemmed in, that the affliction of a Midas Touch is something aspiration alone cannot inoculate against.
You’ll see though, her book's cover isn't this model-minority promoter. It isn’t some sleazy-snazzy client or a crusty club owner, either. It’s a girl. Nevermind that, how that meeting went, We loved your book about how sex sells, now, how do we go about marketing it…?, authors have little say in those matters. Rather, her cover, what gave her access to this world, her only vantage point, was that of a girl’s. But it's just that⏤a cover, for Mears-the-detached-observer. The full extent of her introspection follows:
It is difficult to convey just how incredibly seductive and thrilling these nights could be…
and after that, several glossy, disassociated paragraphs that read right out of a Become A Girl brochure:
…Moments of delight may build up over an evening, beginning with a lavish dinner in an upscale restaurant with beautiful people who don’t have to contemplate paying the bill, followed by being whisked past the velvet rope, ahead of everyone waiting outside in line…
…These intoxicants are consumed amid elaborate light and sound systems with famous DJs delivering beloved house and hip-hop beats, which inspire friends and strangers alike to lose their inhibitions…
Beloved. Mears-the-girl is left in search of an author, as Very Important People’s is totally uninterested in interrogating the qualia of one who embodies the elemental component of nightlife, like an economist studying America's role as global financial hegemon in the twentieth century is indifferent to the oxidation states of 79Au. Says so right on the tin, if you can consider the second half of paragraph two, of footnote number thirty-nine, of chapter four to be the tin:
By considering appropriation and ownership, sociologists can move away from analyses of [bodily] capital as a personal advantage, to consider how systems of power relations enable value accumulation from bodily resources that are not one’s own.
Given the faculties of Departments of Systems of Power Relations that Enable Value Accumulation from Bodily Resources that Aren’t One’s Own Studies are made up of people, who are human, like everyone else, she was no doubt keen on avoiding even a whiff of racy-New-York-diary-
of-a-socialite, since
Using sex appeal and “erotic capital” may in fact exacerbate women’s exclusion from masculine realms, which tend to be more authoritative, higher status, and better paid.
And I can’t fault her. As-is, nightclubs, today’s certainly, are almost too perfect a subject to observe under the sociologist’s microscope; catering to so many lowest-common-denominator pleasures, naturally they are ripe with delicious contradictions and just sos. A definitive, general treatment was needed, and long-overdue because we’re just nerds. We had no hope of ever infiltrating Studio 54, or the 90s scene in general, which is why polatches and other rituals of the indigenous remain our most up-to-date touchpoints on human nature. And of course I know first-hand the first-initial trick just works.
However. An economist who wields alchemy is no longer an economist, nor an alchemist. They are a mutant of some kind. Perhaps this is not so outlandish, a few could be considered among us already. What of other subjects? Where are other openings for the interplay of insight and fiat? By definition, any such investigation proceeds against the grain of orthodox sociology, away from systems of power relations, and towards analyzing individuals’ idiosyncratic accumulations of bodily or mental, or emotional capital. From powers that be to be your own powers.
For those closely tracking, no, I’m not a mutant. Endowed with mint’s worth of sex appeal, bodily capital, reality privilege, fatal attraction, feminine mystique, and a looks gap to rival my thigh gap, maybe, paired with whatever tic compelled me to spill this much ink over the sociology of the sociology of nightclubs. However, I’m still very much learning how to go brr. But I can't wrestle with Friston or stat-check Georgism, so I go with what’s readily available to me. Enjoy the next seventy pages’ worth of it.
Hey do you wanna join us at the lavo nightclub tonight? We have an 11:30pm walk-in let me know brightens my lockscreen while I’m at work the following Thursday. I let it sit for hours, then come back with a lame tiebreaker: is bird poop really good luck?
“The widespread belief of bird droppings as good luck is based on how uncommon it is to be pooped on by one. With countless birds in the sky and numerous people, getting pooped on by one is extremely unlikely — in fact, it is said to be even more unlikely than winning the lottery ticket, but the bird chose you.”
The bird chose me. hey yeah sure i can make it! I scroll up some, past last Thursday, past several times he asked and I was busy, until I rubber-band at the top.
hi it's [REDACTED] |
so i just read ashely mears’s |
book on your kind of thing, & i’m
kinda wanting to try it out
| Lmao I read her article
| When you come out with me you’ll
realize most promoters are normal
chill people 😂
yay yay |
ha i work in tech & honestly |
from the book ya’ll seem wayy
more down to earth than some
people in my world
| I feel like tech / stem people
can lack social skills sometimes
and they just end up being unpleasant
Lol
| I was on the robotics team all
4 years of highschool so I saw
enough haha
| All brilliant kids but my god
you wouldn't want to bring them
to a party
| A lot of them work for like
Amazon and google now they're
doing well
I swipe out and over to another app to schedule my cab for the night in advance, which sometimes saves me a few dollars. I'm in "Uber jail," I heard someone call it that, because I forgot my mask last week on the ride I took to Brasa, and the driver happened to be a stickler. I put my phone down, rummage through my tote, pull out my mask, put on my mask, open my camera, take the damn selfie to verify I'm masked up for my ride in eight hours, and curse whichever of R’s former teammates is at Uber now and doing well.
Later, at home, buried in my wardrobe’s banish pile, is a little black shirtdress, about two-hundred dollars' worth of polyester and markup. Models, especially, were considered so beautiful that they could wear a basic dress out and still be considered top quality. I scoop out the pile from the back corner of my closet and sift until I find it. It was my go-to first-date outfit of the summer, until, already running late for yet another date, I almost tore myself out of it after spending ten claustrophobic minutes tangled up in this sort of Mobius loop-fold it does at the waist. But it’s short, so short, they don’t even bother with the -dress, and I'm tall enough people argue with me about what sports I played in high school. It’ll turn heads. It’ll do. I grab a sort of floral Jacquard thing I just bought which I can wrap myself in to pretend I'm not naked from hips on down, should a need for sudden modesty arise, some heels, and a bag which I hope is J.Crew-looking enough to not attract any thieving hands.
Allowing a generous amount of time for potentially more fingertrappery, I still have a few hours to fill. Hannah, nineteen, claimed it took her five minutes to get ready, as she never fussed with her hair and she wore the same clothes to the club at night as to her castings during the day. But eventually, the time I scheduled my ride for arrives. Hop in car, shut door, pull-down-dress-pull-up-mask, check phone. *What’s your ETA?* R asks. For once I opt not to be the sort who screenshots Uber and hits send as if it's more utilitarian. The sort that can lack social skills sometimes and just end up being unpleasant. 11:28! Ok I'm outside wearing a blue hoodie. I stuff my phone back in my bag.
Twenty-three twenty-eight, 58th and Madison. Prompt punctual partygoer. Some gawks and remarks from two men leaning in a recessed doorway as soon as my feet hit the pavement. This time, the girl understood the assignment. Four feet of legs high-heels-to-hips amble their way towards a nightclub. It mists, such that umbrellas are beside the point. A blue hoodie under LAVO's bluer awning. He's younger than I expected, from photos. Shorter. Hey.
A look. Hey R says, glad you made it.
Yeah. Glad we could meet finally.
Yeah, sorry about the other night, I had to handle something that came up. How was it?
Maybe his...associates?...didn't say anything? Oh no worries. It was good!..Different. My first time, it was kind of what I was expecting, from the book at least, some parts.
Oh, yeah, that. I remember reading an article about that when it came out. There's...not really that..much?...though? Like...not for a whole book to write about.
Yeah it's repetitive, it could've been better as, like, a New Yorker article, and focused more on the stories of people. But it was a sociology book, and academics really get off on voyeurism, so it probably worked for her audience.
So you're a writer?
Ha. No, sometimes, but not things like this...like...I work in fashion, on the tech side of things at a startup in the indu-
Do you model, too? You could model, you definitely look like one. Yeah, you don't model, though?
I, just… ...it never really came up...never got into it. You?
Yeah I do some. I’m talking with an agency in Brazil, to do some work for there. I don’t know though…I feel like there’s a lot of money in modeling, but not really for the models, you know?
For sure. You’re Brazilian?
Laughs. No, I’m not, but that’s what people think all the time about me, when they’re trying to guess my ethnicity.
Me too! I get that I’m German a lot, or Russian. Had a guy stop me on the High Line the other day insisting, like wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Like, ‘Sorry, comrade, lemme through.’
Yeah, you look like you could be either of those…Hm. If I were guessing, I’d say you look Croatian, though, you could be.
That’s a new pin on my map. Wow, really? I didn’t know they had a look like that, a distinctive enough one…I’m white bread from Texas!...‘Croatian’...
Now guess me, for real.
…Columbian? Maybe?
Nah, but I get that all the time, too. I’m Indian.
Oh…hence the robotics.
Oooohohhh…oh my god, I forgot that we talked about that. I haven't told anyone since high school I did that! Yeah, my school used to go to competitions, and we'd get killed by the Brazilian and the Korean teams...I was majoring in engineering, at CUNY, until I dropped out at the beginning of this year.
If you can’t beat ‘em, model underwear for ‘em. So you’re promoting now? And modeling?
No, we just started doing that over the summer. You should've run with us then, it was warmer, we had some fun nights. Modeling, but I do marketing for some clubs and restaurants here. Like there's a club called Etiquette, that's another one you should go to with me sometime.
He pauses, and pushes his hood back some, then again a beat later, like it’s a dial of a kitchen timer he's tracking his monologue with.
They offered me like six figures to work for them, but I didn't want it, since I'd have to give up my other clients. I still run their social for them, though. Helping get their accounts verified has been a big thing for me, getting references in articles and things for them.
Oh no way, hey get me verified, Wall Street Journal covered an app I made a few months ago! Shit.
Thaaaat’s… impressive. A second genuine reaction from R, but I wish I hadn’t mentioned that, it kind of destabilizes things, because either way I come off as being disingenuous about something, I’m either lying about that, which is just a weird thing to lie about, or lying about other, unmentioned things, because what girl who could model but doesn’t picks up that sort of accolade only to casually brag about it to a promoter who recruited her off the street on her second ever night out clubbing.
You went to school for that? Still in college I say at NYU, I started out studying literature, but I’m in one of those programs that lets you design your own major, so I’ve kind of switched into mostly computer science things now.
Oh, nice, my mom was going to the dentistry school there. But she dropped out when my dad got her pregnant. And then I came along nine months later. The last sentence he says with a kind of pop! goes the weasel affect. I went to study engineering at [one of the city or state colleges in New York, I can never keep those straight and forget which he told me he attended], but I haven’t been there in a while.
Six figures out of two consecutive dropouts. Not the norm—it’s surreal, how much R is like some character a neural network would’ve regurgitated had you fed it Mears’s depictions of promoters.
The majority of them come from lower-middle- and middle-class backgrounds, yet they earn six figures, drink high-priced champagne, and share social space with the superrich. Given the limits to class mobility in the United States, this is a remarkable accomplishment.
Hey R says to V as he walks up to us, ending our conversation. Hey. A furtive glance my direction, but it doesn’t seem to be for R’s benefit. I keep my own Hey behind my teeth. Charming individuals are like pulsars, you notice this when you find yourself perpendicular to one’s pole. But there’s no denying the beacon draws people in.
...of the thirty-nine male promoters I interviewed, only one sought out the job on his own initiative. Rather, the job had a way of finding them. It’s easy to see why: they are charming men, flirtatious, stylish, and persistent…
It has to—otherwise, it’s coercion. Or, worse yet, blatantly transactional.
When I asked a club owner why he doesn't just pay girls directly to attend his club, he told me, "That would ruin the fun."
Fun is putting it loadbearingly. As is typical, the dignity and efficiency of an individual are inversely proportional to one another. Status
…cannot be bought outright without, of course, a loss of status. VIP clubs have to construct the potlatch in a way that suspends the deliberateness of status-seeking, primarily by making it fun and seemingly spontaneous. Clubs are spaces designed to sublimate people’s criticism of clients’ wasteful displays and refashion them as play.
Ambiguous transactions give more surface area to least-worst interpretations. Thus, if we take Occam’s Razor to it, what we find is not the system apparatusing out parcels of status like they’re widgets, but the individual manifesting, overflowing with, his own élan vital.
Most people, including Veblen, imagined ostentation was an inherent trait of the rich. I found, however, that it takes considerable coordinated effort to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.
Of course, this demographic, they’re not exactly the BYOG type…
For “someone like me”—not for himself personally, [the client] clarified—who “went to MIT,” he began. “You’ve seen the girls on that campus? Okay, so you know what I mean. In finance, these guys come to New York after four years of being in schools like this, and they start working at Goldman Sachs making tons of money, and they can go out and get bottle service and you get to hang out with models. So the club scene is basically giving them something that was never attainable for them.”
…but that part, the hordes of women like me, is sort of the stone in the soup, so to speak. So:
The tables inside a VIP club are carefully curated and controlled. Even though this scene looks like the life of the party, it is the outcome of tremendous backstage labors—the unseen work that makes conspicuous consumption possible.
Promoters’ tremendous backstage labors, that is. Of course, nothing is stopping clubs from putting promoters out of their jobs by holding their own casting calls, but the obvious:
Hiring a broker is a common means of obfuscating a stigmatized exchange...Clubs do not want to hire girls directly because it moves them out of the business of nightlife and into the business of brothels. The broker alleviates this stigma, but then he bears the moral burden of the suspicious transaction.
R is talking with M, who just appeared at some point, I guess. Two girls with us tonight are underage. Ok, we’ll just be careful and see how things go. We all get in line now, me, R, V, M, and fourish other girls. None four-out-of-fours, objectively. R introduces a pair to me, I cran my neck down. They’re French, visiting the city for the first time I learn. He has a huge count of Instagram followers, which I assume is his primary avenue of recruitment.
…such a person “need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function … His main qualification is that he is public…
Maybe Etiquette had offered him a-dollar-per. R, along with M and V, all seem a generation younger than the promoters Mears followed, greener, their identities less wrapped up in their careers. Less lengthy lengths they’re willing to go for their livelihoods. Not like the promoters Mears followed during her research, who go so far as to start model apartments, to expedite the exploitation and all that:
The apartment required a hefty deposit of $50,000, but within six months, Vanna said, they had already made it back. Girls living there were required to go out at least four nights a week with them between Monday and Saturday, for a minimum of three hours, from 12:00 to 3:00 a.m…Promoters could make serious money with a model apartment, which guaranteed a reliable quantity of high-quality girls at their tables every night…
V maybe would, just for the power trip that must come along with being a shady, capricious landlord like that. Side note, the rest of the paragraph offers resounding evidence in favor of the Hot Girl Messy Room theorem:
…Vanna and Pablo hired a housekeeper to come once a week, but in the meantime, trash piled up everywhere: garbage bags near the front door, cans of Four Loko energy drinks and full ashtrays in the living room, dried-out contact lenses stuck to the kitchen counter. Food didn’t stay long in the pantry. One girl hid a set of clean dishes, since her roommates were always leaving their dirty dishes in the sink for days.
Expedite the exploitation. Entire eons have come and gone within the realm of social media in the decade that’s elapsed since Mears’s fieldwork took place. Cruising around in your Porsche, flagging down pretty pedestrians, when you could just be dmming away in your jammies. Cultivate deep ties with the bitches? Over time, involving gifts that cost financial money, involving intermittent emotional labor? Thank u, next.
Have social media aptitude, will travel. Like twenty-two-year-old R’s sixer marketing job offer. Whether the goods you’re moving are Hims or hers, makes no difference. To them, the promoter propper is obsolete, a sort of relic with a decadence we ascribe to all the mechanical turks of bygone, like clockwinders or pinsetters. Humans in the loop. Below the API before there was even an API one could unwittingly find oneself below. This is the irony of the promoter who specializes as such: what it takes, truly doing the job with verve, is to mask your implementation details so well, that you yourself can no longer discern the seams:
How one acquires social capital has an effect on the perceived legitimacy of its holder...Interactive services are typically characterized by clear asymmetries...But the promoter, in an effort to craft an "authentic" consumption experience, cultivates and performs a relationship of equality with clients...They believe [they can] convert their connections into profit—in part because they see their job not as conducting a service relationship, but as leisure time spent with friends.
The book’s emotional peak is a brutally understated few pages of For sale: glittering deals, never materialized:
Every night it seemed [Dre] spun a different tale about his music career just about to blow up, his hip-hop album about to drop, his car company, or his import company. “...All the people that make money in this world, it’s a question of relationships. It doesn’t happen any other way. No other way. You introduce them and you take your cut…”
Dre’s partner was supposedly negotiating in Europe to sign a contract to secure their broker’s fee, and, rather ambiguously, Dre spoke of his impending “30 percent for the next ten fifteen twenty years. I just got the text message.” He quickly added, “This is one of twenty deals.” Ostensibly, as Dre told it, because he brought the girls to help make the business dinner a success, he was to be paid a cut from the deal.
When asked about how the telecommunications coverage would expand from the Balkans and to which parts of Europe, Dre did not know the details; he’d have to check with his partners. The deal never materialized.
R, V, M, they seem to harbor no illusions about their positions vis-à-vis clients, owing to the more mercenary posture operators savvy at adopting and incorporating new technologies have. Relational to transactional, that’s what happens when the API comes to town.
And now, after steeping myself in the scene for a while, Very Important People reads less like a timely sociological treatment of the troubling realities behind moneyed leisure, and more like a poignant chronicle-of-the-plight-of everymen chewed up and spat out by an idiosyncratic service sector job. Born too late throw debaucherous polatches, born to early to wirehead it with our sexbots, the role of a promoter was spun up by neoliberalism as a scapegoat, whose sacrifice would shoo away the tsks of those self-appointed policemen of invconvenient social moores we had to violate in order to have our fun.
They had a good run, from the mid-nineties to the late-tens. A lot of things did. Shoulder pad-free blazers. The end of history. I whip out my umbrella, the mist is heavier now and is obeying gravity. Now you take that out from R. Not worth trying to explain the nonlinearities of ambient moisture to someone with a crew cut. Not a minute later I have to whip it back in because we’re headed inside. Down the stairs. Can’t these places just be on the ground floor, or do they like seeing us giraffes teeter like that much? Coatcheck runs the length of the landing’s right-hand wall. I guess I could shed this rug. I slip out of the jacquard coat, pass it to the attendant, This I say.
Five dollars. What? Coatcheck is five dollars.
I have to pay for something? Mutter This wasn’t in the book to myself as I open my purse, open my billfold. Two dollars, in ones. Least I can rub them together. Venmo? She hints in a helpfully exasperated tone. Oh. Phone out. Venmo open. She gives me the username handle. Declined. Shit. Months ago my purse was stolen, along with all my cards, I hadn’t used the app since. I explain this unhelpfully as my eyes dart between my left hand feeling around the insides of my billfold for my current card and my right thumb bouncing around submenus. Minutes have passed now. How undignified of you to nickel and dime your royals li-
Suddenly a hand squeezes my right shoulder while another passes the attendant a five. Thanks I say It’s good R says. She slides over an orange stub with black text. 06117. I try to Ramanujan-taxicab it on the spot, 06117, 06117, nothing, can’t even intuit if the thing’s prime. Take a picture of it. What? Take a picture of it. With your phone, in case you lose it. Oh.
Finally I turn around, pretend to be oblivious to the queue that’s formed, and we walk towards the action. LAVO is much cozier than TAO, the dance floor is sunken, too, but less subterranean cavern, more 70s den. We push through to our table, it’s crowded already. A few introductions to people already around the table. R offers me a drink. Just tequila, please. Just tequila? Just tequila. He pours.
Gregarious me tries to introduce myself to a newcomer: Hi! Hi! I hear Where are you from? so I answer
I’m from Texas! and receive an enthusiastic Happy birthday!.
Almost as soon as it’s begun, the evening wears on. R tries to include me in some shot-taking ritual. I gulp down the vodka, bleh, but veer out of range before he can capture me in an insta story he’s filming. M offers to take my purse and store it in one of the cubbys in the seat of the booths. Wait, one sec I tell him and pound some few digits into my calculator app. Our group seems to occupy both the table I’m standing at as well as one more to our immediate right, which is wedged into the back right corner of the room. To our left is a table of people who work in finance. They just do. To the right of our other table is a pair of older men, fifties probably, surrounded by people they didn’t know before tonight, and then the stairs leading down to the floor from the mezzanine.
I'm kind of wedged in a weird spot. I’m facing away from the dance floor, facing the people at our table who are facing towards the dance floor, and past them, the wall. There aren’t any ads on the wall to stare at like there are in subway cars, which seems like a missed opportunity. And I stupidly put my phone in my purse. I’ll spend the whole night like this, awkwardly avoiding staring at the people in front of me but also trying to avoid looking like I’m looking at a blank wall with great interest I think to myself.
I am an incredibly, highly sensitive person in this way. Not really in the socioemotional sense–call me names to my face, I don’t care. I was an ugly duckling, believe it or not, I’ve dealt with my share. No, the sensitivity is geared towards some long-gone threat that’s anticipated to happen before a face-to-face confrontation occurs. Some ancient tripwire strung taut to sense confrontation as it’s inbound, indifferent to those already happening. Don’t be seen, and you won’t attract any attention.
A former lover called my body an “early warning radar,” for being so tightly wound so as to sense some threat that sends me tightening even more. My muscles and tendons are always vigilant, vigilant, vi-gi-lant. He would try to massage me and find more knots than not. Like I’m so knotty, Santa misheard, and gave me coal in my Christmas stocking. Mountain was and still is the hardest yoga pose for me for this reason, especially when I can see myself in the mirror, which I usually can’t because I keep my eyes closed throughout the class, but sometimes the instructor asks that you keep your eyes open, and I’m nothing if not the obliging sort. Meanwhile my shavasana is just peachy, the lights are always off for that one.
I can’t seem to bear the prospect of being seen moving without some airtight alibi. At TAO, beneath the sensory overload, and feeling like I just fell through the looking glass, was this. And here now. My little spandrel state of petrified modesty. Don’t look me in the eye, I’ll turn to stone. A modeling career was never on the table, What do I do with my hands? They won’t stop hiding my face. I had to ctrl+f in at least a dozen places while editing this, I slipped up nearly every time in typing out good civilian as model citizen. That’s me, a model citizen–a girl who fits the description of model but is not really a model. Like, she has the ‘up,’ but she’s still waiting on the ‘-glow.’ Has a fucking license to kill, with her looks, but she’s fucking vegetarian. She just enjoys playing dead fish too much because she can get away with it. It’s just the truth, she don’t know she’s beautiful.
You know how serious I am, linking you to that. Vibe energy chutzpah moxie, that’s the fifth thing a girl needs, but that’s a metis you can’t hope to measure. Thank god promoters see like a state, for the sake of this exercise. Just an innocent civilian nerdsniped into this wretched Valhalla. Through the looking glass, ind–Everyone's asking us where we found our model!
*...*
He shouts again for my benefit, Everybody is asking us where we got our model!
Really? Hearing this sparks a little something. My usual dead-fishness was transmuted into what probably came off as some ethereal detachment, an arresting bitch face. Like I said, just get me straight to confrontation, I can handle myself there. Collapse that superimposition, tell me what I already know so it means something to me. Get up here, you’re our prettiest girl! M bends down and shouts into my ear a minute or two later, grabbing my wrist to help me up onto the booth, and then the back of the booth.
Now I’m ten feet tall. My muscles relax just enough for them to become slightly entangled with the music pulsating through the room. I song I actually know comes on: Just a a-pol-lo-linian gi-rl…livin’ in a dio-nes-ian wo-o-orld. I play a game of Mook or Mogul, looking around the room at the clients and bucketing them into either of the dichotomy Very Important People identifies:
Duke, a former club owner and now a real estate magnate in downtown New York, calls these people mooks: “You know, a mook. Someone who doesn’t know what’s going on … It’s the dentists that come in and buy the tables, thinking they’re in the company of the cool people, and the beautiful people.”
Mook is often used interchangeably with lettuce, the carb-free term for "bread-and-butter":
“It’s like making a salad,” continued the club owner. “What’s the most important ingredient, the biggest ingredient in a salad? Lettuce. That’s our affluent New Yorkers, guys with small bills of three to five thousand…” [They are] your run-of-the-mill banker, tech developer, or other upper-class professional with a disposable income. While on the lower end of importance compared to whales and celebrities, they are central to the VIP scene; in fact, they bankroll it.
Whales are what lie at the other end of the customer continuum:
…most valuable in this hierarchy of men is the whale, a term you might know from casinos and speculative finance. Whales can drop huge sums of money from their vast riches, sometimes over a hundred thousand dollars in a single night. Their reputation is legendary in nightlife. The biggest whale at the time of my fieldwork was a Malaysian financier known as Jho Low…
…and a few pages detailing his exploits that rekindled my ire over the world’s largest experiment with liquid reserves of cash coming up a complete bust because that lucky yokel possessed an imagination inversely proportional to his hoardings.
Of course, I saw a few celebrities too, but no one who clashed at all with the context. Joe Jonas. Fetty Wrap. I don’t see any looking out over the crowd at LAVO, nor many whale-looking types. At one point I notice both the older men a few tables over raise their glasses at me. I gamley reciprocate, hopefully enough gamely that they’re bowled over by how politely uninterested I wanted them to know I am. They look like, like exactly like, the mobster caricatures in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Bridge and tunnel, I think of them, I’ve never used that term before. Feels uncouth. Me, I’m more South of West 110th & East 96th. Call me that to my face, I don’t care.
All meaning, this place isn’t very hip. I used to work at a place in the Tunnel, of Psycho nightclub-
scene fame, and the ancient spirits of the night were no doubt calling me bridge and tunnel as I scurried across their hallowed ground from La Columbe back to the office. I still felt cooler there than here. Cool. If you can bottle it up, it’s not real. You can’t bottle up the other side of the pillow., for instance. I always wonder what it was like to be a hip person in like 2004 or 2011. You know, have a few thousand Instagram followers, when that was something. You know something’s become nothing if you can bottle it up, someone said that once, and people have been bottling it up ever since. Such is life, such is nightlife:
The cool people don’t stay in one place for long, and club owners can both spend and earn a lot of money in pursuit of them. Each club follows a similar life cycle. First it attracts high-status guests and excludes everyone else. Over time, as the VIPs gravitate to other, newer clubs in the city, the club opens its doors to the lower-status masses and the crowd gets less exclusive. “If you put it in New York terms,” explained a banker and club regular, “it just gets a lot more bridge and tunnel … They’re just happy to be there …
The very idea of there being a “hottest place in town” seems a little quaint these days, in a post-Covid, ghost-kitchened world. You know cool isn’t cool anymore, given one of the more recent Schelling points for coolest place in town was somewhere you could hear everyone and see noone.
I’ve had enough, the only cool I’m hankering for now is the side-pillow-other kind, and I hop down, boothback-booth-booth-floor. I refill my glass myself for a change. In the next fifteen minutes, M offers me a blunt, asks me to take a selfie with him, and shows me a middleschoolish picture of him holding a koala bear. No, thanks, no, thanks, wow, you look so…proud?… R isn’t anywhere. My birthday well-wisher isn't anywhere. Bridge and his pal, Tunnel, are still over there, a few tables rightward. Do they charge tolls after midnight? How 'bout I'll hit and then blow the smoke into your mouth?
In short order I do the thing where you discover it's wild, really!, how much you have in common with another girl from a group in your vicinity that's making like they're making like they're about to leave, you spot it by a particular way everyone cocks their heads at their phones in close succession. And the script is just Yes, and. Oh, wow, my brother went to Fordham for law school! I break the news to M, I mean, they're my ride or die, what can you do.
You have NO Instagram? M yells into my ear as he's leaning over while I'm leaning over while I'm up to my shoulder socket blindly casting about the boothback cubby for my purse. Yeah, my name was taken already, not gonna add random numbers like I'm some band from the aughts. Sleight of hand, shmeight of hand, they all just feed into some giant hopper under the dance floor. Finally, I feel a shaggy golfball charm and extract my bag like it's a claw game prize. Someone like y-
‘Someone like me’ should what, have an Instagram, like it’s some mechanical cause-effect sequence, like ‘You’re hot, so you then have an Insta’ is the same as some bowling ball rolling across the room and bumping into a pool cue which falls across the kitchen table and hits little spoon catapults that launch a bunch of marbles off to god knows where? ‘Someone like me’, who can point to yearlong gaps where not even a single photo of me exists, like I thought living as dark matter for a while would be or something?
‘Someone like me’ was someone who was pulled out of eighth-grade algebra class to a meeting with the vice principle and school counselor and to–
…and he’s paying no attention whatsoever, he's been waiting for me to finish my spiel, he passes me his phone wordlessly, keyboard up, cursor blinking in the First Name field. I tap my number out, hand it back to him, feel a buzz a few seconds later in my purse. Fieldwork, I think to myself in 3-D-rendered in blocky light-gray type on a black background and rotating slightly, sparkles glittering off of it. Meanwhile, my squad's Uber is here. We say our goodbyes and skirt around the dance floor toward the stairs that lead up to the entrance.
I peel off as we pass coatcheck. Did none of them- Same attendant. She has to remember me. She still has to see my ticket. 06117. I can hardly contain my numberphilia as I pass it to her. If only math was as cool as this place is to Bridge and Tunnel. It's not prime. I know, it totally looks like it though. It's also a zipcode in Con-
Everything good? I turn around. V. Yeah no what do I have to do to earn my fucking facial at one of these things, get up on the tabl- just headed home. I lack social skills sometimes and just end up being unpleasant, like when I half-shove an iPhone blazing a light-mode Uber app in his face in the darkened club to bolster my point.
Zero dark-thirty, 58th and Madison. Passive piscine partyleaver. Four feet of legs high-heels-to-hips stumble away from a nightclub. Dead fish walking. There's no longer any precipitation of any form, such that umbrellas are beside the point. A Gray Honda Sienna driven by someone named Pei. What I expected, from the app. Hop in car, shut door, pull down dress, check phone. Pull up mask. I scroll past Maybe M's message from earlier, scroll back, open it.
| Everything’s bigger in Texas 🤠
Hhm.
💬
bigger than in germany, at least |