Samantha Peloquin 11/21/24 Samantha Peloquin 11/21/24

Love in LA: Sugar Daddy Boasting and Bored Housewives, Part II

Swimming in simultaneous sociological considerations kineographing through my mind, I lifted the one eyebrow I can and said, "Hmm... indoor/outdoor. 'Summertime Sadness.'" Bill looked quizzically at me, and I put my finger on my chin. I thought as a self-proclaimed sugar daddy he would have at least a cursory understanding of Lana Del Rey's oeuvre. "Maybe she could expand into popsicles. To go with the tables?" A flashbulb memory of Crayola Magic Scent crayons in dirt and pine and "fresh air." The faux grass itself seemed to trounce any attempt at creativity that veered out of pure camp. "Or, ooh, what about carbonated ones? Call it... ummm... Fizzickle." I tucked my chin, smirking.

Bill looked at me like I imagined he might regard child on the precipice of a grand and whimsical discovery. But then in a small voice: "Is there a K?"

I considered this. "Originally I thought yes but now maybe no. The 'ick' presents obvious problems. Or implies something to do with pickles."

Bill grimaced performatively and nodded gravely. "I would just be worried about the Popsicle brand coming after us. So, I-C-L-E is probably out."

I was astounded. "So, to be inspired by the word 'icicle' is illegal. America." I swished my hair disdainfully.

"I'm afraid so." Bill was chuckling and I blew sharp breath through my nostrils.

I pulled up Popsicle parent Unilever's market cap: $120B, so chances were they had counsel. I shrugged off my facetious brainstorming sessions when I remembered that the lady of the manor had no strict need or possibly even desire to succeed in the capitalistic sense. Such a situation had historically proven to be an ideal matrix for artistic innovation, which I internally conceded could very well be an emergent trait.

After a few drinks, things went a bit swimmy. Bill was half-muttering about redoing the liability waivers for his kids' pool parties when I spotted a zipline suspended over the softly glowing sapphire expanse. Drunk and dramatic, I pointed at it accusingly. "What is that?"

Bill squinted; I think he first thought I was referring to the miniature Bellagio fountain that was spilling intersecting plumes and sheets of neon-lighted water into the pool, but he quickly caught on. The child within me, nursed with the wine, burst forth from its bucking chute and I heedlessly clopped across the perfect grass in my Frye ankle boots, sensible black pants and navy blazer. I heard muffled words of encouragement (or warning?) from the direction of the turf table as I clambered up the wooden stairs to the zipline platform. Although could see the relatively slack line curving alarmingly close to the surface, I forged on, flush with the cascading nervous confidence of overstimulation. Across the hazy lawn I could make out a thumbs-up and that was all the encouragement I needed to take the plunge. Instead of moving forward hooked to a taut line, I dropped in the manner of an acrobat swinging off a trapeze platform—a bad sign, to be sure, but I was somehow still mercifully above water. My objective quickly switched from carefree fun to a madcap attempt at preserving my attire and self-esteem. Confusion fused with very LA insecurities of the "I must be heavier than I look" kind even as my doomed footwear and outstretched and futilely upheld slacks-clad legs crested the glowing aquamarine surface.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeee," I whined helplessly. In seconds I was submerged and fighting against physics to at least keep my coiffed hair dry. I watched Bill bolt across the grass, almost pole-vaulting over his cane multiple times. Shakily I swam to the edge of the pool but couldn't locate a ladder or stairs. The seemingly interminable floundering was making my case to redeem my Frye warranty grow flimsier and I more embarrassed, both of which (along with the cold water) heightened my panic. From the rim of the world Bill reached for me but, scared to pull him in and unsure whether my week of lifeguard training at age 15 would bear fruit here, I instead swung one leg over the edge, basically mounting the coping (I know) and trying to use the strength of one inner thigh to lever myself onto dry land. After several mortifying attempts in which I clawed frantically at the pool deck before crashing back into the water, I was victorious. Panting mightily, I stayed dazed on the ground like a sopping pile of clothes, which I partially was.

Bill's face was ashen, and he trembled. "I... am... so... sorry," he spluttered. He did not strike me as someone who apologized on a daily basis.

Waterlogged and spent, I smiled wanly up at him and issued a few amiable mutterings before shucking off my soaked shoes and scrambling to stand. Bill bravely offered the other half of his cane's handle for me to grab on to, but again I thought better of turning the interaction into this Carol Burnett sketch. When I got to my feet, we were face to face. Pale, stricken and wide-eyed, Bill stammered to speak first, to be the doting Hollywood host and not the daredevilish sexual glutton (I regarded him as at least a voyeur in Babylon, not unlike myself). I shivered. Behind water-spattered glasses, his eyes were fascinators: at the fanciful confluence of icy predator and cowering prey, faintly darting and flecked with flinty gray shards.

"I shouldn't have let you do that," he said. I winced. For all the body positivity I afforded others, I was chagrined at the prospect of being the LA equivalent of the mother in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape."

"Let me get you... something to wear and we can dry your clothes." Bill beckoned me back inside, over the luxuriant lawn and under the gray cloud cover charged with light pollution.

Bill gestured with what appeared to be momentary jazz hands when we reached the doors and tapped a cork doormat with his cane. "Dry your feet," he said, with a not unkind edge to his voice that portended his next statement. "My wife's girlfriend slipped" -- a barely perceptible flinch -- "when they came in from the hot tub with wet feet. I ordered some rugs for the floor, but..." He seemed to be on the brim of launching into what I was coming to consider a convergently evolved chestnut of the insufferable affluent: the de rigueur mild but drawn-out rant about the house manager or interior designer or jet pilot or contractor or other career servitor of opulence who had failed to go "That's So Raven" on the global supply chain and thereby prevent the given wretched inconvenience. We passed through the glass wall and over said hazardous uncarpeted marble until a right, where a short hallway ended at a bathroom. Bill ducked into a room I hadn't yet noticed: a large children's playroom with games and toys strewn over brightly colored foam puzzle mats.

"Oh... so, how many kids do you have?" I softened my voice to dull my candor. Bill shifted uncomfortably and I got the sense that he rarely if ever brought dates or even guests here: I watched his eyes pinball from one out-of-place thing to the next, and I believed I saw him swallow his urge to gather and put away. Despite the museumlike lighting and materials congruent with the rest of the home, this space was warm and loud and lived in, with abundant trinkets and photos uninhibitedly divulging snapshots of the inhabitants' stories. Growing up I had always known these to be conversation pieces, used in gatherings to recall and recite raucous or poignant stories and memories. Later I discovered this was not always so in the hermetic, high-stakes and high-flying world of optics permanence.

"My son, Chase... and the twins. Jesse and Scarlet." Bill seemed to relax into the interaction; he moved across the room to the sleek light-wood wall of built-in, picture-frame-lined shelves and cupboards. I imagined that his mind had previously been struggling to categorize the nature of the evening. Perhaps opening a bottle of wine alone with a young woman rarely occurred outside of his extramarital hookups. I tried to keep an open mind—people can have friends of any age and gender, I thought, nearly careening into a low-stakes paradox-of-tolerance conundrum—but low expectations of men kept me healthily wary.

I showered in the luxuriant guest bath with Aesop geranium leaf body wash, then dried off with an impossibly fluffy towel, pulled on the grayish-white Free City sweatsuit that Bill had left rolled up on the counter and padded back into the playroom. Bill was sitting rigidly on a cozy aniline leather sofa that would be wildly out of place in the formal living room I'd passed earlier in the evening. I considered whether to sit next to him and if so, how far apart? I played it off with a giggle and perched beside him with an approximately ten-inch gap between us.

Bill closed his eyes and we sat in silence, neither touching nor perceptibly drawn to each other but rather sharing a "breathing the same air" intimacy that I think we both found refreshing for superficially different but ultimately similar reasons. He suddenly laid down, put his head on my lap and curled into the fetal position. As during the rest of the evening, his vibe was chaste, but he clearly felt he could be vulnerable on some level, which I found transfixing. I finally felt I understood why the absurd, listicle-ready title—but arguably important service—of "professional cuddler" exists. Physically weakened, awkward and dysfunctional, Bill prompted a flush of empathy that brought bemusement given that I was at least subconsciously repulsed by his attitudes toward women, sex, relationships, eyewear and undoubtedly multitudinous other things. I felt on some level he felt safe behind his masks—Hollywood executive; self-styled sugar daddy—the way I acknowledged to myself that now and then I hid behind silence or quiet wit (to say nothing of dissociative diversions), alternately eavesdropping and brandishing intellect like a glinting palmed knife while keen interest in and consuming fear of the world shocked me hot and cold. The you who observes, and the you who experiences, both fumbling for weightlessness...

I was gently but definitively snapped out of my reverie when Bill sighed, his head still on my thigh.

"I'm so tired." I could have predicted him saying it, written the cliche line, filled it in during a subliminal retcon session. I thought of the Beatles song, which had never been more relatable, though I was not yet clear on what exactly Bill would give me in exchange for a little peace of mind. When he spoke, his voice was tinged with a new fragility, an exhalation of tension that was nonetheless tinny and dissonant with insecurity. I didn't say anything and watched him flick his eyes up at me; he very slightly shrank away. His chestnut-dyed hair was feathery in the desiccated manner of a much older person, and I gently ran my fingertips over a small area of it, feeling the thin skin beneath the wisps. I was in uncharted territory and felt a paraphilic thrill as my senses struggled to understand the thin straddled line between playing embalmer and ingenue in this somehow extra-ephemeral scene.

"You're an interesting guy." I shrugged almost imperceptibly. I could have been lying, but to a voracious observer of the world, predictability doesn’t necessarily preclude interest.

Bill chuckled. "I hear that a lot... on first dates but I can tell you mean something different."

"Mmm..." I turned my head slightly and took in the sleek beige window treatments. "Wait. What?" I realized I had assumed I understood.

Bill sucked in air. "Well, it's the same word, but I can't recall ever hearing it..." -- his hands slowly crept to cover his face -- "...both warm and clinical... like you'd be interested in a subject in school. Architecture. Art history."

"Philosophy," I added, then: "That's...kind of accurate." I kept brushing my fingers on the same tiny square of his temple with bas-relief blue veins. "I don't mean to offend you," I said, taking my hand from its spiderlike position and lightly rubbing my chest below my collarbone. I felt awkwardness like magma rising in my trachea and yet somehow also a growing dreamlike ease, and Bill seemed to be experiencing a version of the same. He shook his head, silently refuting that I had crossed him.

I inhaled. "I used to only be able to talk to adults. As a kid, I mean. I wanted someone to take care of me, and other kids couldn’t... nor should they have tried... but this flipped once I got to be a young adult at boarding school, and I looked at people my age... I wanted to make up for lost time with peers but also." I breathed in, held it. "I was stuck on finding someone to care for me. Like a parent. To believe they'll be there tomorrow. To believe that them being there will affect how I feel for the better. It can be... it's exhausting." I reached for my wine glass; realized my mouth was beyond parched; reconsidered.

*SRP and Martin, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, 2019*

Bill jerked his gaze up at me, seeming to study my face for a moment and to maybe relax further although his furrowed brow telegraphed worry (anger?). "I didn't realize that someone... that you 've ever felt so..." He swallowed and then composed himself. "I'm glad you feel like you can talk to me."

At that moment Bill soundlessly sat up. He smoothed his shirt and stood.

"Please, I..." he reached for me to help me stand up. I could tell he was trying like hell to muster another apology, so I quickly said, "It's funny. I didn't think I would, um, talk about myself. Or fall into the pool, for that matter. But I thought you would feel better to know I'm not j-- to know I have empathy. For you." I watched his face relax into a natural sadness. Once again I thought this simply could not be Vice's profiled Priapus, but then I had the insight that I had neither seen him really be an asshole nor a non-asshole—that is to say, I was likely mistaking an apparent absence of vice for virtue. I'm sure I was subconsciously elated that the man I was currently alone with seemed harmless, even if only in the manner of a fearsome killer who, aged and long confined, could no longer feasibly offend even if freed (not quite Grandpa Sawyer from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but definitely in that wheelhouse.)

Bill offered his hand to help me up from the couch; I gingerly grasped it but again took pains not to rely on his frame and risk the both of us collapsing onto the unsympathetically hard and utterly expensive floor below. When I stood up, first slowly and then all at once, I was again at eye level with him and looked away, bashful. A chance glance at my watch let me know that it was 2:26 a.m., when nothing good ever happens in Beverly Hills.

"Ahm." I chose to tear myself away, to not delve deeper into feeding alongside him from the trough of nihilistic hedonism so rote that it paradoxically verged on austerity. "Bill, I um... I should be going." Of course, I half-wanted to stay in the liminality of the evening, to watch it unfold as though I really were just watching. "I'm sure you've... got... meetings." I shrugged and scoffed at the same time in the universal gesture of playing it cool.

Bill's frowned. "Oh, I'm terribly... thank you for coming." He ran a cupped hand over his faintly liver-spotted pate. "You know I, I, I, understand that the pool was probably... I really understand if you're not. Interested." There were shades of ambiguity in whether he was talking about the job or our budding friendship (for lack of a better term). The confident braggart I had met at Sushi Roku (formerly Hamburger Hamlet, as one LA-native elder millennial friend told me after I published Part 1) seemed a distant alter ego.

I felt the hangover like a storm's first thunderclap: still questionable (was it a garbage truck clanging a metal bin?) but understood to be inevitable (OK, might as well bring in the outdoor furniture cushions). My eyes shuttered and I pushed out a platitude, some salve for the situation. My sober eyes on the evening were far too sharp and I continued to squint.

"Oh!" He perked up. "I have something. For you."

I looked askance as he shuffled off, across the great white expanse of the open plan floor and up a sweeping staircase. He seemed a bit healthier than before, but not so much to suggest he had been malingering.

I must have dissociated because it felt like seconds later that Bill was standing beside me and pressing a dainty pale-pink envelope into my palm. I blinked, eased the card out. It felt a bit bumpy and thick for all its paper delicacy, and I quickly uncovered why when a paper Ferris wheel sprang up from the page. Beneath it, a message: "Dearest Samantha—Thank you for sharing the adventure." Puzzlingly sweet, I thought; apropos. Although we hadn't even kissed and it was still nighttime, I felt the penitence of daylight on an ill-conceived sexual encounter. After all, I had seen him curl into the fetal position and assume the posture of a pet or a baby on my lap. I had brushed my fingertips against his thinned skin and felt there is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.

"Could you um... Do you have Venmo? I remember I didn't order your Uber." He seemed to flit into the mental space he may have entered (assuming his sugar-rush stories were all true) at the end of the night, when post-coital clarity would collide with necessary logistics and lean on fast-forward button in his mind's eye.

I opened the app the double-check my username. "How are you feeling?" I asked as I was walloped by another hangover pang. "I don't think I drank enough water," I moaned, at once morose and joking.

"Hmm." Again, a question Bill was unprepared for. "I feel great." He said it so nonchalantly that I nearly believed him.

I showed him my phone screen, chewed my lip and, almost never too hungover to make a pithy statement, piped up: "You know I really think we're all the most striking mix of hardy and delicate." Wild fennel's fernlike spring shoots and late-season woody stems leapt to mind. The very comparison introduced a cluster of common fallacies: that a bamboolike husk on the brink of desiccation is "hardy"; that time always begets toughening.

Bill looked down at me with curious admiration as my fingers tapped and swiped on glass to summon another stranger to take me home. When it was done, I quickly looked up at him from my seated position and could almost see it: the viper in any given denizen of Hollywood, ever fated to hunt for survival.

When I arrived home, I saw Bill had Venmoed me way too much money for new shoes after his pool claimed mine. Well, he sent enough for Louboutins, but I try not to go over $200 (Quelle surprise -- because of incidents like this). Surprisingly I felt precious little awkwardness after our bemusing encounter, and what there was surrounded the zipline gaffe (he'd assured me, potentially for my pride, that it wasn't broken and the carabiner had merely gotten off track). I went on to edit some of his book, but it never got picked up by a publisher he found satisfactory and he decided to scrap the whole thing and stay on the DL. (Also, the #MeToo movement gained magnificent traction a year after I met him in 2016, just as his agent was shopping it. While Bill never confessed anything to me, he was part of some inner circles that were suddenly attracting what even P.T. Barnum might have considered "bad publicity.") In her '90s memoir, "Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory," Mary Woronov wrote "Even I knew this was not the way to Hollywood." Stripped of its context the phrase encapsulates what I walked away from this episode with, but as foremost an insatiable student of human folly I found the conclusion sufficiently satisfying.

Samantha Peloquin 4/28/24 Samantha Peloquin 4/28/24

Love in LA: Sugar Daddy Boasting and Bored Housewives, Part I

When I moved to California in 2016, I was reeling from family trauma and (therefore?) determined to satisfy a latent, dark curiosity by observing grotesqueness in a bid to discern the aura of sordid depravity that seemed to define sunny Los Angeles. I was especially fascinated by the rich coterie who can and do buy and sell others, somehow without the icky connotations of human trafficking. The impoverished and middle-class manipulators and narcissists I had already encountered during my life were more predictable in a way, all financially thwarted in their quest for believable grandiosity. They yanked on whatever levers of power their fingers could grasp, sure, but it was never enough to produce a truly absurd spectacle. I thought of it like Broadway versus community theatre: the smaller shows I'd seen often had more heart, while big-budget productions were well-designed to wow with no expense spared. Additionally, my studies of history had illuminated for me the incredible heights of sadism and degeneracy among humanity's richest: Caligula, Genghis Khan, the literal Marquis de Sade ("No Ordinary Love" here), Vlad the Impaler; the list goes on... and on... and on. I knew—also from experience—that people sporting sizable wealth and egos often fixated on verbally lionizing themselves before an audience of any size, so they might paradoxically be willing to tell me things more down-to-earth and sensible folk would not. However, I wasn't clear on how to follow hints of strange, leering overfamiliarity in pursuit of a good story without leaping into the proverbial lion's den.

Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, I had networked my way into a few writing and editing gigs, and one of these surprisingly produced a referral to an entertainment exec, Bill, who was looking for a rising editor to help him develop a nonfiction manuscript. I was 22 and had years of reading backstopping my ability to use the tool of language with some precision, but my professional experience at that point was sparse: internships and obscurely published poems while in school. I was eager to expand my portfolio and/or enjoy a zany distraction or two by dipping my toes in LA's suspicious yet seductive swimming pool.

Samantha and Martin, 2016 by Hannah Marshall @uncertainnoise

Bill and I spoke briefly on the phone, and I immediately noted a reedy, tremulous quality to his voice that made me wonder if he was getting over a cold. He suggested lunch at Roku in West Hollywood, and I asked if I could bring a tape recorder; he seemed charmed by my nostalgic technophilia, but I quickly clarified that I meant recording on my phone. He laughed nervously and confirmed our reservation time.

During the ride up Sunset from Brentwood through Beverly Flats, I glimpsed spindly leaning palm trees and flashes of a patchwork of grand homes while the summer of '16 anthem whose entire musical structure disturbed every atom in my body ("Closer" by the Chainsmokers) blared from the Chevy Volt's blessedly anemic sound system. I felt a flash of hipsterish panic at the vulgar vagaries of "mainstream culture" that was followed by the curiously warm and fuzzy embrace of apathy. I got out of my Uber a block away from the buzzy spot and walked over in my sensible outfit: a plaid bateau dress with corduroy blazer, tights and low-heeled boots. I gave Bill's name at the front desk and the hostess said something like "Right this way"; I felt a small adrenaline rush of anticipation and tried to mentally bet with myself on how bizarre this guy would be. If anything, that rush was what I'd been looking for anyway, so turning on my heel and leaving would still leave me satisfied. However, I wanted to know what Bill looked like and what made him think he needed an editor. When we reached the table, I was surprised to see a late-middle-aged man who was wiry, stooped and frail, with a bald spot and big, thick '80s glasses. He used his cane to laboriously unfurl his body, stand up and shake my hand; his magnified eyes gleamed.

"Samantha." He seemed to taste my name and smiled weakly. "It's so nice to..." He trailed off but I filled in the rest. Wow, this dude even needs a ghostwriter for basic pleasantries, I thought, taking his quaking hand in mine. "I'm Bill Apel," he said in a slightly deeper and stronger voice. "You've never heard of me, but you've seen my work." He told me a few movies he'd executive-produced, and I was genuinely impressed. I knew then that he would be a perfect case study of one of the many elements of LA considered disagreeable by many: producers.

We sat down and he waved his cane to summon the waiter, which made me anxious as it was a step closer to the cringe-inducing douchebaggery of impatient finger-snapping. He asked for only water while I, perhaps unwisely, ordered a cocktail with the faint thought of writing off the meal and booze. When the waiter disappeared, I studied Bill for a moment. His Hermes silk tie was navy blue with rows of tiny white origami horses. His face had been handsome and now conveyed a plaintive, lost expression at rest. On his ring finger, he wore a class ring, chunky gold with a blue stone. Yale? I thought absently.

"It's wonderful to meet a young person who wants to take a look at it." He folded his spindly hands in front of him. "At what I wrote."

"I'm really glad to get the opportunity to meet you," I said truthfully. "So, what's your story?"

Samantha in Los Angeles, 2016 by Hannah Marshall @uncertainnoise

Bemused at directness in a young woman, Bill launched into a dissection of his success as a Hollywood suit. I listened intently, then jumped, remembered I wasn't recording and pulled out my phone. My phone case had a photo of my dog and me, which prompted more boring tales of family life that I inferred to be compensatory. As a messy person, I was intrigued about the state of Bill's marriage (which I presumed to be abysmal). Bill seemed to come alive at the mention of his unsatisfying relationship, and told me with pride that HE was the one who had been interviewed for a Vice story about LA "sugar daddies"—older men in age-gap sexual relationships naughtily replete with many trappings of parent-child rituals, from allowances to fatherly advice and even "discipline." As an aspiring underbelly observer, I had actually read said interview and was shocked that this nebbish, enfeebled and somehow endearing man was the profiled guy who boasted callously about models and their keeping, crowing about the huge monthly allowances he paid to access a wonderland of women who to him functioned more like interchangeable living toys than even the most casual of girlfriends.

I was floored and immediately more transfixed by this than his general Hollywood sleaze. While May/December relationships are tales as old as time, such erotic subversion of familial roles and norms has more recently emerged from the shadows and into the mainstream, manifested in phenomena from the fauxcest porn trend to brazen "sugar dating" website billboards, media portrayals and frank online discussions. Bill was exactly the kind of odd creature I expected to find in a world city with a cartoonishly large, borderline Third World wealth gap. I couldn't believe my luck at finding someone who would shamelessly put their own private life on blast so readily. I tried not to appear too excited (or like I wanted to be one of his concubines—my curiosity fortunately had a limit). He was surprisingly meek and taciturn given his success in entertainment; I suspected the illness or circumstance that sapped his body also had had a hand in plucking his pluck. Given that the 2017 #MeToo reckoning was still a year away at this point, the unsexed harmlessness I sensed was reassuring.

We made a date to meet at his home in Beverly Hills, a single-story modern affair at the base of a tree-lined road that meandered miles upward to culminate in Bel-Air's rarified air. The interaction was to be a liminal no-man's-land between getting to know each other for some indefinable reason and me actually editing his A-for-effort manuscript, a tell-all by a relatively banal big shot (I presumed he saved the more explicit tales for pseudonymous material). At that time, I was Ubering often due to unpredictable intoxication. As the Uber pulled up to Bill's house, I felt a warm excitement. I sensed at lunch that he was not all that sexually interested in 5'3" me, which made sense given his fixation on gazelle-like models. I wasn't discernibly attracted to him either, but I think Bill and I both sensed that we shared an implied affinity for using bouts of frantic and ultimately affected hypersexuality to assuage some internal pining, a gnawing lack. After I rang the doorbell, I heard him hobbling to the door, luxe soles lightly tapping against a hard floor. Some part of me couldn't believe what I was doing, and I felt glad I had let a friend know where I would be (even though she was 3,000 miles away... close enough).

Bill stood in the doorway, his half-smiling face wan but inviting. He stuck his hand out and I took it gingerly. Behind him was the white vastness of a gleaming floor. The home was all glossy light-colored stone, with de-rigeur recessed lighting softly illuminating marble, travertine and onyx surfaces.

"Thanks for coming. I'm really glad you could make it. Come in," he motioned. "My housekeeper's here, just so you know."

The home flowed smoothly through the almost mausoleum-like interior to a turfed, lush poolscape (no view, though). One could see the entire backyard from almost anywhere in the house through the home's all-glass rear wall. My gaze was drawn to a heavy marble table upon which was an out-of-place patch of scattered papers. They were among the only signs of life in the house, and I sat down in a chair next to them. Bill followed my eyes. "My son's homework," he said almost sheepishly. I sensed that he was nervous to sit down in the chair across from me lest he lose his balance and faceplant in front of an honored guest. Surely the Vice portrayal of Bill as a pillar of virility was embellished; it also occurred to me that he could've been lying about being the man in the article, but even if true, that would be almost more bizarre than the situation as I understood it. Regardless of its veracity, the very claim had cemented in my mind that he was the kind of person who was casually proud and indiscreet about paying for companionship, and I wanted to know more.

"Where does he go to school?" I asked, standing up myself and being nearly at eye level with Bill. (He must have had sex at least once to have a kid, I mused, before it dawned that not only was I myself the product of artificial insemination, but IVF also was and is ubiquitous. Hmmm...)

"Oh! Harvard-Westlake," Bill said with a small, warm smile. "He started... He's really doing well. Lately."

"Do you like helping with his homework?" Maybe this wannabe rake was more wholesome than I'd thought.

His eyes brightened and their corners crinkled. "You know, I used to want to be a college professor," he croaked with an air of pride. "Until I got a taste of the real world, that is." He was silent for a moment, then: "I try to sit with him every day, to be with him. The divorce wasn't... didn't help with school. Really." My brows knitted until I recalled that his current wife was his son's stepmother. He eyed me and seemed to compulsively continue. "When I sold my company, I, you know, I had all this time..." He wavered, seeming to forget what he had hired me for. My innate yearning and curiosity seemed to gently tease confessions out of him, like a magician pulling a concealed strand of silk scarves out of his sleeve. I expected him to say something about a meet-cute with the current bearer of his last name, but instead: "That's when I sort of found the sugar world."

I raised an eyebrow. They should call it “Seeking Estrangement.” I felt a little bad for thinking it.

"Well, there were girlfriends before. But after a while I became obsessed with variety, and I found multiple sugar babies satisfied that... need to have a rotating cast of beautiful women. Blonde, brunette, Black, Asian." Bill blurted this out and it seemed to relieve and energize him. He shrugged a little.

"Like scanning the menu at Spago, I'm sure," I said affably while cringing internally at the matter-of-fact objectification and commodification. This man's hobby and his sugar partners' trade was both the oldest profession (well, one of them, anyway) and a living artifact of a strain of avowed feminism that somehow caters to men’s' interests in an over-the-top, "Mad-Men"-meets-bimbofication expression of the exaggerated gender roles many feminists have worked to make optional. The subset of online "female empowerment" content that framed sex work as getting one over on men, "getting the bag," always seemed a little sad to me. To the extent it brings positive feelings to those who have embraced it, I support it, but I also empathize with the individuals who feel social pressure to change who they are to match others' expectations after internalizing the notion that doing so leads to happiness. I have seen individual posters online who question whether hookup culture/sex work is universally empowering—without stooping to vilify sex workers or participants in hookup culture—called out as anti-feminist in the comments. It's a nuanced and fraught topic of discourse that I personally find equally harrowing and captivating to engage with.

Bill cracked a smile. "You're a good listener," he told me with admiration. "I'm not looking right now, but... otherwise..." He trailed off and looked away.

My eyes widened a bit, but I smiled. "Well, this is enough for me. Oh, not to say... I'm sure your—sugar... babies get the royal treatment, though." I shuddered momentarily at the way the word "babies" seemed so out of place, like a lost child in the supermarket. After an awkward pause that felt like it was 15 minutes long, I asked bluntly, "So, how's your marriage? I mean... how does that fit into this, uh, pursuit?"

"Well, that's not really the yardstick I use to measure how I'm feeling anymore. It kind of loses its meaning." His eyes darted a bit as he tried to make what he was saying as vague as possible. He seemed to have been brought to a peak of alertness by his inherent discomfort.

"How'd you meet?" I started picking at the charcuterie plate his housekeeper had brought over.

I could tell he hadn't thought about it for quite some time.

"Do you want a drink?" Bill levered himself to his feet and shuffled across the room to a credenza that evidently had a wine fridge nested inside because he pulled out a frost-kissed bottle of Pascal Cotat and began to open it with a practiced dexterity that contrasted with his feeble fuselage of flesh. He beckoned me to come over and produced two Waterford Lismore goblets, icy themselves with dramatic crystal facets evoking snowflakes. I saw the wine's vintage (1998) and quickly made assumptions about the structural integrity of the cork, but it slid effortlessly from the neck of the bottle and emerged with a muted pop.

"Cheers," I said lightly, and raised my glass.

Bill raised a bony hand. "Don't clink."

I rolled my eyes playfully. "Do you honestly think I was raised in a barn?" I tittered and took a sip.

"You'd really be surprised. I had a girl here, really smart, USC law student, everything. Just so beautiful..." He smiled but then got back on track. "She clinked, and it really did break. Just a little up the side, but... I was OK with it, I mean, a 400-dollar glass, but really, if a sugar daddy's so worried about that, he should stick to Match.com and dates at Red Lobster," he deadpanned. "But my wife wasn't all right with it." His eyes flicked over to mine, then back down at his glass, and he continued. "She couldn't believe there were only seven left in a set of eight." He looked worried for a second and then scoffed, playing it off.

"Maybe it was more than a glass," I said, making eye contact and raising my eyebrows.

"We did get them for our wedding," he admitted, to which I nodded knowingly. I felt revulsion and fascination—two of my favorite sensations—as I contemplated Bill's interpretation and expression of love and relationships, detached as it seemed from the worried, emotionally fraught approach I was used to. I longed to emulate the ability to slip into denial as though it were a bubbling hot tub that could soothe away the tightness of obligation and guilt.

Bill turned on his heel and wandered out of the gap in the wall of windows, looking behind to see that I was following.

When we got outside, I clapped a hand over my mouth upon seeing something that seemed eager to shatter my conception of the world and what I thought were the borderlines between sanity and chaos, order and entropy, faith and disbelief.

The long dining table outside, which had escaped my hungry eyes while we were indoors, had every inch of its surface covered by artificial turf with blades at least an inch high. It looked like this but rectangular and bigger. I felt uneasy about perching the goblet on the unstable-at-best surface, but I thought Bill would give me some sort of coaster or charger if he had reason to think my glass would tip. I set it down carefully and it promptly toppled, soaking the fake grass with cold delicious wine; luckily, the uncannily lush green carpet stopped the glass from rolling. We both stared down at it, nestled and glinting in the expansive ersatz grass.

"Oh God, I'm sorry," Bill whined before speed-limping over to the travertine outdoor kitchen and back with a plush white towel in hand. "It's my wife's job. Well, business." The distress behind his eyes clashed with his warm smile; I thought he was hiding irritation about the spilled wine. "She had the idea, and... made it happen," he said with plain uncertainty. The dubious objet d'art, astonishingly atrocious and economically unviable, stood defiant as a monument to all that grows in a garden tended by someone with neither financial pressure/incentive nor any sense of practicality. Ultimately, despite the spilled Sancerre, I was more drawn in than repelled by the object's frivolity; like an architectural folly or an ancient emperor's excesses, its existence was a testament to human whimsy that must be the product of removal from a natural world of kill-or-be-killed necessity. It evoked a memory of hearing tidbits about Marie Antoinette's alleged peasant roleplaying on her Versailles hobby farm, the accuracy of which is disputed. Taken at face value, a ruler imitating a worker, peasant or other so-called commoner could prove upsetting to the reader or observer, who might interpret the behavior as mocking cruelty or, at best, a callous waste of time and resources that seem better used to help the many people actually living in non-pantomimed poverty. I have written on this *gestures broadly* a bit before, and the sociological causes and effects of human behavior with regard to power (to include wealth) continue to be what I think about when I can't sleep at 2 a.m. My Roman Empire, if you will (a meme I have never accepted and is in fact not real and cannot hurt me).

Stay tuned for Part II, in which I make a sudden splash and become a spiritual healer.

Samantha Peloquin 3/3/24 Samantha Peloquin 3/3/24

“The Holdovers”: Or, How I Used Grief to Get Ahead

Left behind on a now-empty, snow-encrusted campus, Professor Hunham's charges exemplify a peculiar passive abandonment I observed in my own school days.

Full disclosure: I’m inserting a story about my own life into the Trojan Horse of a pseudo-review of a relevant period piece, partly due to self-obsession and partly because I’m kind of over movie reviews lately. I realized what I was really looking for was the synopsis on Wikipedia, not the coitus-interruptus sensation of reading a spoiler-free editorialized teaser. I’m not here to gush about a groovy soundtrack or artful cinematographic choices, nor to beguile the reader into sufficient curiosity so that they too will take the two-hour journey into a world foreign to most of us outside the transcultural stratosphere of global wealth and privilege. If that's the result, though, I'm OK with that; the movie was good, in my dubiously trustworthy estimation (a 97% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes definitely says more). "The Holdovers," promoted on Peacock ahead of Oscar season, intrigued me, as does everything prep school since my tenure at Phillips Academy Andover. In the movie, Paul Giamatti plays a hardass prof, Paul Hunham, with several chips on his shoulders who's been tasked with minding the adolescent boys stuck on campus at a New England prep school (the fictional Barton Academy) during winter break, chiefly due to their absent, idle-rich families dropping the ball. Left behind on a now-empty, snow-encrusted campus, Professor Hunham's charges exemplify a peculiar passive abandonment I observed in my own school days. One, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), steals the show as the lone holdover whose parents prove unreachable to give permission to fly off on an impromptu holdover ski trip in a classmate's father's helicopter -- compounding his sense of abandonment but cementing the film's main plot structure as a "Good Will Hunting"-adjacent duet between Giamatti and Sessa. Suddenly, I'm reminded of reading "Harry Potter" as a young child (paperback, please) and identifying with another (fictional) pseudo-orphan (little did I know I would later attend a legendary boarding school myself). I recall Harry's turns as a holiday holdover and the peace of on-campus solitude standing in stark relief against the background of an abusive home. Anyway, let's get into it.

While recovering from mononucleosis this winter, the exhaustion and existential depression I felt engendered a quasi-tranquil twilight state that called for absurd, non-demanding early 2000s reality shows to always be playing in the background. After bearing witness to the infamous “dookie bubble” episode of Bravo’s very own “Being Bobby Brown” (2005), I admittedly needed a palate cleanser upon realizing that Whitney, Bobbi Kristina and Bobby Jr. had all passed tragically, leaving Bobby Brown to stand tall, or be dust in the wind... (did I mention the fever dream aspect yet?)

I don’t like to get into talking about my childhood, because then I feel like I have to answer the inevitable numerous questions that logically come to the minds of most people I’ve mentioned things to. Each thing to explain is a hot point on a connect-the-dots picture of my trauma. “Where’s your mom?” I was removed from her care at the age of 2 when her schizophrenic symptoms overwhelmed her ability to care for me. “What about your dad?” My mom was in a lesbian relationship and used a sperm donor she found in a local newspaper. Then I bounced around foster homes before articulating, precociously at age 3, in a phone call to my grandmother: “I want to be with my biological family.” So, my grandmother took my mom and her still-psychotic, folie-a-deux partner to court and won guardianship. What I didn’t know was that scleroderma would kill my newfound protector, for whom I remember feeling constant, severe separation anxiety, ten years later, a month before my first period. I channeled my grief into the orderly process of paper applications to boarding schools, which my mom's brothers suggested for me (due to my intellect, they assured, not because there was now no one in my immediate family able or interested enough to take me in). It was the first year Andover's admission process was need-blind, and my tearjerking essay earned me a full scholarship, already more fruit than most people's trauma will bear. The trouble for me was holding on to that fruit, never mind tasting it.

I didn't set out to be engrossed in this movie, but the character of the school's kitchen manager, Mary (Da'Vine Joy), was too compelling, with her primal heartbreak resulting from the banality of evil in the form of race and class divides: her husband killed in an industrial accident, her son in Vietnam after attending Barton free as the child of an employee, highlighting the apparent disposability of working-class bodies against a backdrop of knowing, massive and impassive wealth. The confusion people sometimes display when confronted with my parentage stems from its incongruity with the role I was assigned upon matriculation: Andover student, white, privileged, “normal.” And compared to those society assigns and considers “below” me, I am all those things, but not so much in comparison to my own assigned cohort. We crave to fit in, and as usual I felt I did not by virtue of not fitting into a neat stereotype: the scrappy kid from a low-income urban-dwelling family, the impeccably starched scion of an industrialist, or even the middle-class kid like me who had just one or two sympathy-generating plot twists in their lives -- a dead parent or a standalone traumatic event. I've since accepted my alienation was a product of a fear of rejection that started when I was a toddler in foster care (if not before), and that all of these so-called "neat" narratives are masks that hide each of our nuanced emotional milieus, and that we can all relate to one another outside of the boxes we and others place us into for convenience and conservation of mental bandwidth.

Family who couldn’t have cared less when I was in foster care as a toddler or living with a dying guardian as a preteen popped back into my life upon newly seeing me as a source of blue-blooded clout. Namely, my uncle and his now-husband, who I presented to classmates as my parents — gay dads from New York City; what could be hipper? They dropped me off in August of my freshman year and picked me up a month or two later when I was placed on an involuntary leave of absence after spending much of my time in my room, self-harming in a dissociative state and hypnotically watching the blood blot tissues that I then stuffed in my dorm desk. My uncles made much of how discovering these tissues affected them before dropping me off at the psych ward the school had recommended. In the ensuing "school" year, I developed a trauma bond with these "dads" in worthless family therapy, spent hours wandering the streets of New York alone, and visited family friends' apartments for lessons in math and literature. I was in a crisis and isolated from kids my age, which was a kind of comfort zone of bleak familiarity. The next fall, I went back to Andover as a lower ("sophomore" in less pretentiously esoteric parlance). My uncles' status as "Andover parents" was thus reinstated, which was surely a massive relief.

I tried to imagine watching the film as someone who hadn’t gone to a boarding school that strongly resembled the movie's filming locations. I tried to imagine looking at the grand chapel, the wood paneled walls and halls, the formal classrooms, green glass lamps lining study tables in a lavish library without feeling twin sensations of homey warmth and fraught anxiety rising in my chest. But while these settings form an important substrate for my formative teenage memories, the decades — centuries — of Andover’s history more closely resemble the 1970s world of “The Holdovers,” from legacies and gentleman’s Cs to the particular culture of elite, all-boys education: ball-busting pubescent cruelty and biding time to take over a bloated family business (including the presidency in the case of Bush Jr., ‘64). The boys in the movie wore wool suits and neckties emblazoned with the school shield to class; by the time I reached Andover, which went coed in 1973, dress codes had been done away with in the name of freedom of expression and trust in the student body's upper-crust collective taste to win out over the exposed midriffs and profane T-shirts universally reviled by public and private school staff.

To feel accepted and/or rejected by a universally respected institution while having no soft place to land familially is an emotionally hardscrabble existence. My wealthy friends’ abandonment was genteel yet real: dropped off at ultra-luxe child repositories like Le Rosey as young as 8 after navigating early life under the watchful paid eyes of maids and nannies, my peers’ nihilism was attractive for its peek into the vacuous pain that can bloom within privilege, beneath wealth's veneer as a cure-all (an understandable perspective for any given member of an eternally squeezed underclass, for whom money would indeed solve many immediate problems). Andover as an institution sought to undertake a process of transformation from a fairly homogenous stop on the journeys of the children of the elite into a melting pot of the kind that purports to create global citizens. In the movie, in a bar in the school's Boston-area town: the contrast of Hunham and Tully's automatic erudition with the left-behind townies’ aggressive incomprehension exemplified a divide. At Andover, townies would pass, leaning out of cars and yelling "Catboner!" upon seeing a Phillips Academy student or gaggle thereof. "Apply again next year!" was the cutting retort from on high as we so astutely recognized sour grapes when we saw them.

The film’s final reveal was sickeningly relatable to me: Angus' father isn’t dead after all, but rather haunts the halls of a sanitarium. The son visits him and excitedly, hopefully fills him in on the latest goings-on at Barton, only for his father to respond with a schizophrenic delusion: “I think they’re putting something in my food.” Like Angus, I lived in fear of my mother’s schizophrenia taking me over too, rendering me pitiable and lost in a nightmare. My stint in the mental hospital after my self-harm episode seemed to corroborate this bitter pill. I too lied when people asked about my mother, preferring to say she was dead rather than get into the messy truth. It all came to the same: She’s not in my life, kind of like a dead person, but is institutionalized, not buried. It felt somehow worse than her really being dead, the layers of shame and feeling I must lie, simplify, edit my life. I wanted to turn my story into something others could digest, rather than the pockmarked, disjointed history that burned to tell the truth of. Internalized cultural attitudes -- mental illness is trashy; being relatively poor in a given setting is shameful -- pile invisible weight atop the already-heavy burdens many trauma survivors bear. In short, it's very difficult for me to be honest about my childhood without self-consciously feeling I'm "trauma dumping," even though I tend to take an apologetic, giggly tone during, no doubt in an attempt to preserve the other party's comfort.

“No one is entitled to my story. I am,” Professor Hunham exclaims after his unwilling sidekick Angus aids him in lying about his nonexistent success to a former Harvard classmate, who remembers Hunham's expulsion for hitting his wealthy roommate in response to said roommate falsely accusing his poorer counterpart of plagiarism. The commonly understood but arguably unnecessary anguish of clawing your way to an elite school/job/situation only to be kicked out for not being rich enough, stable enough, well-behaved enough, for not counting your blessings and keeping your head down, for being too sick or sad or socially inept, is a profound narrative akin to a tale of climbing a mountain only to slip and tumble back down. It's not quite Sisyphean, because at least that myth has a proscribed arc: the slogging misery is inescapable. Cruelest is not knowing, but hoping, that this next ascent will bear fruit. The best cure for this narrative that births enduring suffering is, as I see it, reframing my core beliefs that perpetuate the shame and self-loathing that infects my memories and experiences with negative confirmation bias and all but guarantees retraumatization. The movie ends, like many coming-of-age stories, with a cozy, subtly hopeful vibe that left me glad that, for my life and all our lives, "the rest is still unwritten." (I had to end with an early 2000s reference. Special shoutout if you remember Natasha Bedingfield's earworm -- and America Ferrera -- from "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.")