To be authentically middle-class is to forever live in a prison of one’s own making. It means trying to make good choices in school and trying to marry the person you’re supposed to marry and trying to live in a manner that would bear intimate inspection by another authentic middle-class person at any moment. It means delaying gratification and avoiding passion, paddling desperately to keep up with the financial and totemic accomplishments of one’s peers while at the same time never flying too high above the flock.
We inmates of the middle class envy the rich for obvious reasons but we also envy the poor, because they have freedom. Case in point: the eternally brilliant song “Tangled Up In Blue”.
Readers who are familiar with my views on authenticity in music won’t be surprised at my admiration for “Tangled”. It’s the perfect distillation of freedom and its discontents, of people who are truly itinerant, meeting from time to time in a manner that seems directed by Fate because there’s certainly no middle-class ambition or guilt directing the steps that each of them take. Imagine being a married man mowing a suburban lawn and considering some of the lyrics:
We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out West…I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans…I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind
And then you have the masterstroke verse:
She was workin’ in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer
I just kept lookin’ at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s just about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me, “Don’t I know your name?”
I muttered somethin’ underneath my breath
She studied the lines on my face
If you tell me how you personally react to that paragraph, I’ll know almost everything I need to know about your upbringing. For me, it’s thrilling and terrifying all at once. The unselfconscious way in which our protagonist and the object of his desire swim in that dirty sea, the lowbrow world of sex work and itinerant existence and apathy and alcohol use. They aren’t playing at being “those people” the way that kids from good schools do when they go to the Cheetah on a Friday night or to Vegas for a weekend. They aren’t constrained by guilt or expectation; they don’t even feel the weight of such things on their shoulders, because nobody ever bothered to lay it there.
Yet it took a nice Jewish boy like Bobby Z, an inmate of the middle class himself, to draw that picture for us. The people who really live like that don’t bother to write or sing about it. They simply exist. It’s no big deal to the hero of “Tangled” that his woman is stripping, the same way the narrator of the Grateful Dead’s “Operator” blithely tells us
She could be hangin’ ’round the steel mill,
Working in a house of blue lights.
Riding a getaway bus out of Portland, talking to the night.
I don’t know where she’s going, I don’t care where she’s been,
Long as she’s been doin’ it right.
Every middle-class kid who ever heard those lyrics shivered a bit. My woman could be anywhere. She could even be turning tricks. She could literally be getting plowed by a bunch of mill workers RIGHT NOW. But my love for her is strong enough to let that go. What a delicious thing to contemplate for people brought up on the idea that at any moment one unforgivable thing, like failing to graduate with honors or permitting the grass behind the house to grow above the acceptable height, could be cause for permanent banishment from society.
Compare the blithe assurance of the fellow on the phone in “Operator” with the central character in John Cheever’s The Swimmer, who finds himself estranged from reality itself by a career mistake. To be in the middle class is to perennially be under threat. But to be the main character of a Dylan or Grateful Dead song is to be poorer, and lower, and free.
It’s not necessarily a criminal world, or an outlaw one. It’s merely one where the gravity of expectation pulls at a Martian, or perhaps a lunar, level. It means that you can spend a weekend on a pontoon boat or a summer working casual labor in Mississippi. You can get in the car without any fixed idea of the arrival time at your destination; indeed, without a fixed idea of the destination itself. Most enticingly, it’s a world where nobody brays at you about your potential or your talent or your gifts. To be among the untouchables is to have no potential worth noticing and therefore to be free from the necessity of servicing that potential.
The advent of “social media”, which is to say, media created by and for the proles, has given all of us frustrated middle-classers additional insight into how the other half lives. The most fascinating thing right now on “Black Twitter” is the story of Zola. From the moment the narrator starts talking about “hoeism”, you know it’s going to be good — but it becomes absolutely epic. It’s an Elmore Leonard novel mashed-up with a Robert Beck story and a Rihanna beat.
If you start reading the Storify I bet you finish it. The reason is simple: you won’t be able to believe that these people are getting away with it. Any one of the various misdeeds described by Zola would be enough to destroy a middle-class life, but these people take it all in stride! They’re operated purely by their emotions of the instant. Alliances form and disintegrate. Zola “fucks her man quiet” so she can go on a stripping trip. At one point, one woman forces another woman to perform oral sex on her fiance so the situation can calm down.
Is it real? I have no idea. It feels authentic because it is so senseless. Any middle-class person who cooked the thing up would give it more narrative drive and less prole-ish screwing around. But the thing about poor people is that they are not narrative driven. They are moment-driven. It’s their curse and their blessing. It’s why one of my best friends, who has millions of dollars in the bank, stays awake all night after a minor market adjustment yet I used to watch people in the county jail sleep like children up until the very moment they were pulled out for their murder trial.
Most interestingly of all, because it’s not a Dylan song, the fact that some of the people involved in the story are sex workers does affect their relationships. Just not like you’d expect, unless you, too, grew up beneath the underdog. So here’s to you, Zola: may you remain tangled up in the green stuff.
Wow, Bob Dylan and Pigpen era Grateful Dead. From someone who’s driven around Minnesota looking for Abe Zimmerman’s grave, with the Dead playing on the Magic Bus’ stereo system, I thank you.
You’re the guy with the degree in EngLit. Didn’t Genet and Burroughs and their contemporaries introduce the genre of the edges of society autobiography, the author as protagonist on an epic journey through sex and drugs? Were Genet and Burroughs just tourists?
Elmore Leonard told a great story, but I don’t know how many actual criminals the advertising writer personally knew.
Also, “long as she been doin’ it right” is a bit of staple theme in the blues. For every ‘nother mule kickin’ in my stall, there’s a honeybee coming home after she’s been buzzin’ round the world. It reflects a subculture where fooling around by both parties was almost expected (see also, On The Outskirts of Town). Some songs are about betrayal never forgiven, others about baby, I’ll take you back, someday baby (Live At The Regal really is that good).
And just how many black women were bald? Taking back the wig he bought her is another staple.
Genet and Burroughs were early examples, but of course, there was also Kerouac, and in the gay subculture, John Rechy with his City of Night, which supposedly gave the Doors the name of the song.
And if you want to stretch the point, and foster a literary argument, you could also argue back to Woody Guthrie, or even Walt Whitman and/or Thoreau.
All on the road, searching for the Dharma, by whatever name.
And I have probably left a few names off that could go on here, as well.
I think edge-of-society stories in English go back at least as far as the Canterbury Tales, though yeah, I’m sure every second generation rediscovers the idea. I’m not sure Chaucer was unfamiliar with his subjects: it doesn’t really have that unfamiliar vibe if you know what I mean.
“A Wild Weekend in Florida”…that some people live like this is not a shock (so yeah, there’s my socioeconomic stratum defined) but how many do? That story was bonkers from end to end. Entertaining and horrifying.
Reads like the backstory to a First 48 episode. Gotta be true.
I agree with the gist of your piece, and always thought Tangled Up In Blue is brilliant (and I’ve been in that topless bar scene myself a few times) but I got halfway through that Storify and ran out of fucks to give. It was every bad stereotype and 90s gangsta movie in 140-character snippets.
I think it’d make a decent screenplay but then I also liked Dr. Detroit. Speaking of which, I did notice that she was from the Motor City. The cuckolding of Jess’ boyfriend in front of him was a nice touch, sort of like the “rape” during the jewelry store robbery in Once Upon A Time In America.
Speaking of which, my great uncle was living with my ex and I at the time. We started renting my late grandparents’ house and inherited him as a tenant. He was in his late 70s or early 80s. Once Upon A Time in America was on cable and he started watching it with us because it’s about Jewish gangsters in the first half of the 20th century. After that scene, Uncle Rufke (a nickname for Reuven) said to us, “Hoo boy! Those weren’t very nice boys.”
I was visiting my Grandma back in the early 90s and “Bugsy” happened to be on the tv. She looks up and says “I knew him!” Her mother’s landlord was
Hyman RothMeyer Lansky.I would lay two to one odds the whole story was pure fiction, if you can use pure in apposition to that tall tail.
I know stuff like that happens, but this one just doesn’t ring true, on several counts. Not the least of which being the deus ex machina of the BF trying to kill himself but getting caught by the seat of his pants, so that he will be alive to help finish the story.
Puh-leeze. Jack, you are a wise and worldly-wise man. And I realize that this gave you a hook to hang an article on. But I think PT Barnum would count you among the masses on this one.
Seems like a clearcut case of someone stepping up to claim their fifteen minutes of fame to me. Not the six o’clock news version…the cheap porno school of writing version.
I also doubt seriously that if they were up in the dreadlock dude’s pad and went up side his head, that his crew would be guarding the front exit, but would have left the back wide open for the protagonists to make their convenient escape, scot free.
Or, to put it in their vernacular, the B be lyin’.
I’m not saying that every single Tweet in the thread is a perfectly accurate relation of the events. But the general mindset and choices detailed through the story ring true to me.
Hi Jack, I don’t disagree that the overall style of writing indicates an intimate first hand experience with the lifestyle, as opposed to a “from a distance’ attempt at creating a storyline. But it does seem to be more fiction built up from building blocks of real life experience, and less of a true narrative from beginning to end.
I would suspect that if one had the right contacts in Vegas, it should be possible to find out if there really was a Nigerian who got life for imprisoning 15 underage girls, plus what was it, a dozen murder one raps?
But like I said, there were too many convenient turns of events to ring true to the way the world really works.
One other quibble, for example…when Z shows up at the dread’s door, first the chick lets out a yell, and then she is found unconscious…maybe she got clocked after she screamed, so I won’t build my whole argument on that, but the BS detector didn’t stay pegged on zero on that either.
But leaping off a balcony only to be saved by some miraculous hook to the seat of the pants? Come on…
And like I also said, Dreadlock’s place is supposedly heavily guarded in the front, yet Z walks in, and then escapes out the back with no one to meet him and no one chasing him even though there was gunfire?
It was good fiction, but I still say two to one, it was fiction, not true life adventures.
Still, that fact, if it is a fact, in no way detracts from your observations about the relatively loose and rootless lifestyle in that world, compared to the mundane routine of middle class lives.
But the other side of the coin is the relatively short life span of most such players. One econ professor did an analysis of the wages of dealing, and found out that the average “clocker”, the street corner dealers supposedly turning thousands of dollars a day, were actually making little more than they would have working in a McDonalds. It was just that they didn’t need to get hired, didn’t have to clock in, and got to stand around. But they aren’t called clockers for nothing.
For every retirement age Iceberg Slim, there are probably fifty to hundred guys either doing long bids, or planted in a box at an early age.
But the adrenaline rush must be fantastic, while it lasts.
Not that I would have ever done anything like that. And of course, if I had, I wouldn’t say anything anyway. Omerta…it’s a way of life.
Like I said, though, your points are good points, independent of the veracity of the twitter story. But on a parting note, the BF may have been crazy, but I have never known anyone that crazy that also remained in a situation like his for any length of time, though I suppose he might have derived a sense of security and family from having Z to do the driving and the heavy lifting, metaphorically speaking. But unstable jealous crazy dudes tend not to continue in said environment for long periods of time…something usually gives.
Well, Jack, it looks like Baconator’s research has shown that your BS detector is functioning perfectly well, and that mine was tuned to too high a setting, so I owe you an apology for concluding that you had been deceived. looks like you nailed it.
Which only proves that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but that truth often exceeds our ability to imagine wild things.
Hey Jack, having read the story Baconator linked to, it seems like the truth lies somewhere in between.
It was in part an attempt to exploit some involvement by “Zola” with the pimp and the other girl, to turn it into a viral Internet money-raising scheme. And the pimp did go down in Vegas, only for prostitution related charges, not murder.
The protagonist admitted, however, that both the jump from the balcony and the shooting in the face never occurred, so perhaps my BS detector doesn’t need THAT much adjustment.
So the story was a true story that was filled with lies, but built around an actual adventure that supposedly wasn’t quite as wild as Zola reported.
What can you call a story that actually is based on events that occurred, but that is filled with lies and exaggerations in order to embellish and “sell” the story? Is it a true story? Not really. Is it fiction? Not really, it is partially true.
Is it just an extension of a scamming lifestyle? I would say that that is closest to the truth-taking a case of life dealing you a lemon, and squeezing some lemon juice, but not actually lemonade, out of it.
Perhaps you should hire Baconater and me as investigators/fact checkers for the wild adventures you uncover. Between us, we should be able to figure out where the truth lies, and where the bogus parts were stirred in.
In the end, it sounds a lot like what it is, a BS story that is partly true, and that is spun by a scheming stripper in order to further her always-running, but poorly planned, con.
Not so much a long con or a short con…more of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along con.
FWIW, I have an ex- who danced in the 2001 joint for a while, when she moved down to FL to hang out with me for a while. We had met in TX while I was on my way to SF, though she was originally from Brooklyn, and had graduated from Brooklyn U. She wanted the most amount of money she could make with the least amount of work, short of ho’-ing, so I ended up following what bball40dtw later suggested on TTAC a couple of months back.
“If you are going to date a stripper, date one who has just started stripping.” Or something to that effect. Good advice…they aren’t tangled up in a lot of other people’s BS at that stage, though I suppose I was part of the BS she got tangled up in.
We lasted for about two or three more years after that, even moving to NYC together.
But my “stripper ed” also includes having been a close friend of a guy in VA who owned a “gentelmen’s club” that was relatively cleanly run, and which had a clientele that ranged from roofers to local TV announcers and college administrators, and a lot in between.
Turns out that about 70% of dancers are only in it for the money, and only date women. The other 30% range from college girls taking a walk on the wild side, like my ex-, to some down and dirty types for whom stripping was just the “cleaner” part of their lives.
But most of the guys “made it rain” like they were the girls of their dreams…which they probably were. But for me, it was more like another part of my education outside of formal institutions…a day life more like the TV announcers and college admins, a night life modelled in part on Kerouac/Dean Moriarty, part on Dylan tangled up in blues, part Burroughs, part HST, etc., trying to cram all the life experience into my life that I could.
Then I met the love of my life, and I literally ended up in a different universe. But it was an education that was priceless, though it was far from being without its costs. In the process, some magic was revealed to be smoke and mirrors, while other magic believed to be imaginary turned out to be real.
In the end, life has been very good to me.
And yes, I understand why you roll the way you do…collecting life experiences and sorting them out as you go along. And I hope the end of your journey will be for you as good as mine has been for me…something beyond what I thought was real or attainable, and it just happened one day…I thought I would just gradually grow old and go downhill. Instead, I got a whole new life, just when I thought the young and exciting part of mine was winding down. I’m glad I was wrong about that part…
As a PS don’t let people discourage you from writing about your life adventures…they are both entertaining and enlightening. If some people don’t like them, let them not read them, or let them just complain about your motives…I find them enjoyable as well as insightful. Please “keep those cards and letters coming” as the saying goes.
“What can you call a story that actually is based on events that occurred, but that is filled with lies and exaggerations in order to embellish and “sell” the story? Is it a true story? Not really. Is it fiction? Not really, it is partially true.”
You’ve just described everything from “Walden” to “All The President’s Men”. Not to mention the Bible, at least for those people who don’t view it as a divinely inspired document.
You were right, I started reading it and I did finish it, but I think that’s more related to my own personal stubbornness than any compelling storytelling. Without letting my middle-class WASP upbringing show through too much, I was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — by what I read. Not so much by the content (OK, at least a little by the content) but by the totality of disregard (disdain? disrespect? outright contempt?) for commonly accepted rules of grammar and punctuation, even the lax, casual variant prevalent today.
It was truly challenging to read, in the same way The Canterbury Tales would be in original middle english, or akin to reading a novel in a language that one only studied for two years in high school and barely passed. I understood most of the words used, but maybe not quite in that order or context.
Back to the content, about the only thing my white-bread suburban worker-bee lifestyle could relate to would be the impromptu trip with a new friend. It does make me wonder where I’d be (geographically and socially) if the wanderlust/mortgage ratio were skewed in the opposite direction, and would I (or anyone else in my life) be better off that way..
I think it’s largely credible. I’m sure some details have been embellished, but on the whole probably largely accurate. Every guy I know that worked dope UC has stories that would make that stuff look tame.
Meanwhile, this happened in Florida:
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/naked-woman-covered-in-ketchup-arrested-for-inciting-a-riot-in-miami-beach-8015728
I didn’t have the patience to flip thru that whole Hoe escapade, but the Dylan song is one of my all time faves.
I suspect it was originally called “tangled up and blue” and he made the title change? Kind of like inna-gadda-davida. But I could be wrong? Only Bob knows for sure. But it appears Bob knew some Hoes!
Turns out the story is mostly true, with the exception of the shooting and attempted suicide part. The pimp is a real person under real indictment for trafficking. The girls involved are actually attractive, but, well, not in a middle-class way.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11/02/the-true-story-behind-zola-the-epic-twitter-story-too-crazy-to-be-real/?tid=pm_lifestyle_pop_b
“What can you call a story that actually is based on events that occurred, but that is filled with lies and exaggerations in order to embellish and “sell” the story? Is it a true story? Not really. Is it fiction? Not really, it is partially true.” [by me]
You’ve just described everything from “Walden” to “All The President’s Men”. Not to mention the Bible, at least for those people who don’t view it as a divinely inspired document. [by Jack]
Touché, Jack.
Score one for that comment. Though if those are garden variety examples of this, Zola is the psychedelic, meth-fueled exponentially greater version.
But though I cannot offer any formal proof, experience and close analysis have led me to believe that there is at least a good chance that the Bible might escape that charge, though some of it may be allegorical. Or at least in its KJV version, carefully translated by scholars with language skills that would put most modern educated people to shame. Some of the translators new ten or twelve languages in depth, including both modern and ancient languages.
So, though I cannot offer up any formal proof, I am more and more struck by the deep wisdom in that book, when read and studied closely. And that is something that I doubt can be said of the other examples you give.
But I am willing to concede that Zola is quite the clever liar and bender of the truth. Perhaps with enough encouragement and a good editor, she might even be able to crank out a novel or two.
For better or worse, though, it was good that you put the story up, as food for thought for all of us.