When a man has joined a party, he is likely to stay in it. If he changes his opinion – his feeling, I mean, his sentiment – he is likely to stay, anyway; his friends are of that party, and he will keep his altered sentiment to himself, and talk the privately discarded one. On those terms he can exercise his American privilege of free speech, but not on any others. These unfortunates are in both parties, but in what proportions we cannot guess.
- The Privilege of the Grave, Mark Twain

Bennett, of course, ignored my request. His tiny apartment was filled with ten or so of our college friends, passing around two fifths of Beam and attacking a single case of Dos Equis – woefully inadequate provisions.
“What the fuck? I asked you to grab at least another bottle.”
“That’s right, you asked.”
“That’ll never be enough. We’ll get like, four, five shots out of that with all these people.” The aim with downing bottles of Beam was drinking the whiskey fast. The rule was the person who cracked the seal had to “pull” from it, preferably down to the label. Then he passed it along with a shot-glass, every person in the chain pouring a shot for the next person in line until the thing was empty. And to ensure the speed of the process, the bottle was never allowed to rest on any surface. You took your poison, poured for the person next door and moved “the works” along immediately. In a crowd of ten or so veterans, two bottles wouldn’t last twenty minutes, and nobody’d have enough. To get a quick, starter blast from a bottle of eighty proof liquor you needed to hit it hard – eight shots in a half an hour, ten if you wanted to be certain. Then you wait a little while, until it hits you like a haymaker twenty minutes later.
“You should get a faster car.”
“I had to pick up Hen–”
“A convertible… BMW. You’d look good in that. Tanned, wearing your Vaurnets. You could blast Crash at stoplights, score mad betties.”
“And you last got laid — Let’s see… Jerry Garcia was still alive?”
“‘All the lit-tle ants are marrrrching…’ Hey ladies, you all headed to the Big Todd show?”
“Big ‘Head’ Todd, ass.”
“My friends call me ‘Hollywood.’”
“‘Hollywood’? Really? Resurrecting that?”
“This is my boy, Chad, here in the passenger seat. People call him ‘Marley.’ Hey, uh, any of you ladies got a Marlboro Light I could bum?”
I gave up trying to reply. Just smiled and sucked back a shot. In the corner of the kitchen I could see Henry filling a tumbler with Bennett’s oldest, most expensive bottle of Bushmills, and promptly soiling it with tonic water. Seemed an adequate karmic brush-back.
That and I’d been here before, and didn’t have a decent response. The crux of Bennett’s joke was the fount of an endless dispute, an argument we’d had since college: Was I more ‘Keith’ or ‘Mick’?

Sounds silly, I know – an impossibly simple reduction. But generally speaking it’s true. It holds and everybody’s have seen it. In every person you’ve met, in every collection of bodies – from your work to your social circles, from grade school to high school to college… If there’s one way to split us as types, to sketch out the two biggest groups, or at least what they appear on the surface, you have to go with something like this: There are ‘Mick’ People, and there are ‘Keith’ People.
The analogy isn’t tough. Keith’s the core of the band – the blues, the soul, the riffs. Mick’s the preening ego, chicken walking in the Klieg lights, getting snapped at Studio 54, showing up at art openings and movie premiers. Clearly, the pairing’s symbiotic, and one would have failed miserably without the other. Mick would’ve flopped as a pop star, Keith played in bars unknown. But when you look at who gets respect – who’s considered “real” – Keith’s got that in spades, while Mick’s just a prima donna. And though in order to succeed in this world, everybody needs to be both, or shift from one to another based on the circumstances, people natively tend to be a lot more of one than the other, enough so that you can assign them the easy distinction.
And this isn’t a little known fact. People identify with one of the two types, and each has a level of suspicion and disdain for the other. They’re civil in their interactions, but there’s always an undercurrent, a barely contained disdain and subtle but palpable antagonism between these adverse factions. The operations guy envies the salesman’s commissions, thinks he’s getting something for nothing – for taking leads to lunch and glad-handing established clients. The salesman thinks the operations guy is getting a free ride on the revenue streams he creates – another overpaid cog, eating away at the margin. I saw it a lot in law firms, with the service partners grumbling about the rainmakers’ bigger salaries, and the rainmakers complaining about why the service partners didn’t bring in any business. Each group seems to forget that neither can live by itself.
But back in our college days, where the issue Bennett raised had emerged, there was only one group that mattered, at least in the circles I traveled. In a place and a time where you didn’t have to think of survival, to find a way to pay the mortgage, you were in the Keith camp or you were shit. Sure, there were loads of Micks all over the place, but they were the “Pretty Boys” or “Face Guys” – the fringe players the Keith crowd tolerated, but never really trusted or was comfortable having around. It was really cheesy shit – a lazy, reverse snobbery that allowed people who sat on the couch baking all day or stayed far too loaded to even attempt social interaction to assume a posture of superiority, and label anybody who presented common, superficial charm as somehow deeply corrupt.¹
Still, there’s always this fact… When you’re wearing your Mick persona, you’re acting your venal self, the weaker, insecure side. You use it to pick up stupid chicks, kiss your boss’s ass or make a sale to some mark. And in the world I was coming out of, the world where Bennett knew me, I’d always been a hybrid – one who didn’t quite fit. On an overt, immediate level, almost entirely self-promotion. A loudmouth, an ego… a vain, ridiculous sort. The kind who never met a mirror he didn’t like. A person who went to the gym religiously not because he was into fitness, but solely to keep up appearances. A clownish disaster inside, wearing a contrived, collected façade, getting lucky every now and again when he was too drunk to open his mouth and doom his every chance. But the people who looked like me, the “face guys” you’d think I’d like? I’ve never wanted to know them, never sought out their kind. I was only stealing an image, for what it appeared to be worth – the accepted, attractive appearance, scoring me a fuck here and there. But deep under all that acting, I’d always been drawn to the Keiths – the people who were what they were, or at least seemed that way.
And the Keiths seemed to know I was torn. That as much as I had their genetics, I wanted to play the fence. “Keeping it real” in the Chappellian sense, while marketing a different me. Getting the benefits that come with being a clean cut, quasi-pretty boy while indulging a degenerate Id. To the people who didn’t give a damn anymore, who couldn’t bother playing the games, this was a sign of weakness – fear of committing to a side. They roasted me day and night. Called me “Whitey,” “Frat Guy” and, lamentably, as Bennett still did, “Hollywood.” And it irked me, I had to admit. Not because the insults wounded, or that Bennett was a kindred fraud, a hypocrite for calling me out… It was the general, inherent dumbness of whole line of criticism, even as a harmless joke. The narrow, childish perceptions and their “in or out” zero sum structure. The inability to admit that everybody’s bullshitting each other – that it’s part of the human condition and though you’d like to think you’re beyond it, better than the posers and frauds and above the realm of the phonies, that “cred” you’re trying to attain is the biggest of booby prizes. A failure to understand that as technically right as he might have been and as honest as the ethos seems, practically speaking – and practical reality being the only one that matters here, there or anywhere else sensible sorts discuss these sorts of things – Holden Caulfield was as much a punch-line as he was ever a hero.
Unless you’re born a Rockefeller, whether you’ve prostituted yourself isn’t an issue in question. The debate’s merely one of degree. Did you dip your foot in the water when you had to or dive in head first? And on the issue of being “Keith” or “Mick,” the choice is pure illusion. Align yourself as you like, as long as you’re milking the Grid, the only answer is “Both.”
“Son of a motherfucking–”
“What?”
“It’s dead.” Martin poured the last dribble of whiskey into a shot glass, barely filling it halfway. “The bottles are both kicked.”
Predictably, the bourbon in Bennett’s place ran dry about a half hour after we arrived. We piled in cabs out front and headed to his then favorite tavern. “It’s a great bar. They make the drinks incredibly strong.”
The place was horrible – technically Western-themed, which was bad enough done right, but in this case all the worse because they’d barely made an effort. The walls were covered in faux cowboy saddles, Native American rugs and every variety of Southwestern tchotchky one could buy in a restaurant supply or costume store. But the tables, the chairs, the layout – the smooth, lacquered bar – it all betrayed a half-assed, half-hearted conversion. The place had clearly been a nightclub, Italian restaurant or sushi bar a few months before. Somebody’d lost his ass, gone bust and left the landlord hanging. In walked another dreamer, with a lot more vision than cash. Some Eastern European immigrant, betting a pile of money borrowed from his uncle with the dry cleaning business in Jersey. We’ll do a real, authentic-like Western bar. Serve lots of whiskey… and huge hamburgers. Clint Eastwood style! Like in a Sergio Valente movie.
“Hey. Hey.” Karen cornered me at the bar. “Can you get Henry away from me?”
“Away from you?”
“He’s hitting on me. He was all over my shit at Bennett’s.”
“He’s loaded. He’s hitting on everyone.” Well, not exactly. At that moment, he was right behind Karen, screaming at the bartender for a menu through a half-lit cigarette dangling from his lip. In a much different place and time – standing on stage with a guitar as Axl Rose ran around in front of you, screeching through the end of “Rocket Queen” – that’d be a smooth, roguish posture. Get a man laid till he couldn’t feel his legs, let alone his dick. Not so much when you’re a slurring yuppie liquor-sponge, trying to fit in his seventh meal of the day.
“It’s annoying. He can’t expect– He can’t just hit on me.”
“Tell him you have a boyfriend.”
“But even if I didn’t, he can’t hit on me now. Not after that ride. It’s like a violation of, you know…”
I didn’t have a name for the rule, but I knew what Karen was saying. Once you’ve offended or disgusted a woman – telling a rude joke she doesn’t find amusing, getting busted picking a huge, stringy mucous slug from your nose when you thought no one was watching or, say, trying to use an empty soda can as a urinal – any chance you had with the woman that evening is Done. You can try again another day and under different circumstances, she might take the bait. But not in the same night. You’ve blown your trip to the plate. You’ll get another chance, but you’re going to have to wait to until it’s your turn in the order again. Next week, next month – long enough for her to forget.
I can’t explain why, and I’ll never understand. If a woman’s hot enough, she can all but shit her pants and the offense will be forgiven by most men. But it’s not the same with chicks, and I’ve seen it first hand, felt the pain of the error – making a dicey joke at the outset of dinner and having her respond with something like, “You know my stepbrother has Down’s Syndrome” – and realizing right then and there, the chance of that condom in your wallet seeing the light of day in the next twelve hours just dropped to zero point zero. Karen was annoyed for good reason. Henry knew the rule, and as drunk and wired as he was, he also should have known that ignoring it was basically telling a chick you didn’t think she worthy enough to enforce it. That she was one of those unfortunate women who had to take whatever winked (or drooled, farted and slurred) in her direction.
“Just blown him off. He’s on so much ephedrine he doesn’t even know his name.”
“He’s right next to me.”
“Not any more.” Over her left shoulder, I could see Henry striding across what I assume was the dance floor, over toward what looked like a food staging area on the other side of the place. For a moment I had concern. He was marching like a man on a mission. What the fuck’s he doing?
“Hey, Henry!” He never turned around. Just waved his smoke through the air, acknowledging he’d been called, but wasn’t too keen on responding.
“Is he going into the kitchen?” I tapped Martin on the shoulder.
“Who?” He turned from a conversation with Samantha, another friend from school.
“Henry.”
“Fuck Henry.” Martin shot a “Can’t you see I’m working this chick?” look in my direction. “He’s God’s problem now.”
“So what’s up?” As I turned back toward the bar, an old friend, Victoria appeared in the breach. “You didn’t say hello at Bennett’s.”
“I, uh, got caught up.” Untrue. I’d actually been avoiding her, assuming I was on her shit list. Victoria and I had been pretty close through school, drunkards who’d lived on the same block and were frequently two of the last handful of people left at the end of any party. When I started my first job in Philly, I played a few pranks on her, figuring she’d find it amusing… a shot across the bow from an old friend.
Like a lot of people I fucked with on the Internet in those days, she didn’t respond as expected. As amusing a gag as it was, Victoria didn’t find it all that funny. It’s easy to blame that on age, on friends getting old and sour, losing their edge and wit. But I think it was more the medium – that as much the Internet invites stuffed shirts to act out their libertine fantasies under the cloak of anonymity, it also allows freaks to indulge their inner, self-righteous stiffs.
One of the first things I’d learned about the internet was it’s sewer of plastic emotion. The kind of place where a lot of people with easy, turmoil-free lives can feign a sense of depth or gratify a penchant for drama by writing how appalled they are about thawing polar ice caps, the endless war crimes of the Bush Administration or the Chinese repression in Tibet. All while ignoring the homeless begging at the stoplights they pass driving their Mercedes SUVs to work in the morning.
Most of these people are so caught up in earnestness – so eager to be a chain in the link of “awareness” or indignation – they’ll accept as ironclad truth just about anything anyone sends them fitting their narrative of injustice rampant in society. From disingenuous statistics on wealth disparity to hysterical warnings on the imminent extinction of honeybees from industrial pollution, if you pick a pop culture morality issue and write about it in terms approaching the prose equivalent of that Youtube video of the guy balling and begging the media to leave Britney Spears alone, these people will take it as truth. Forward it to all their friends with some overwrought, frothing message: “Can you believe this? I just don’t know what to say. Our government’s in clear violation of Geneva… Kyoto… Elementary etiquette of modern ballroom dance! Who will prosecute Bush? Who will think of the children? …Of. The. Children?!”
In fairness, Victoria wasn’t a “Movement Lemming.” But I knew she had a thing for animal rights issues, and a particular interest in dogs. So in response to a group email she sent, I shot back a “Yahoo News” story about barbaric practices in Chinese chicken farming with an “AP International, Beijing” byline, modified, of course, to assert that the ranchers were raising St. Bernards for slaughter – fattening them like foie gras geese, to be used in an exotic form of stew made from their jowls. She apparently believed the story and sent it around to a bunch of people, registering her shock and disgust. When they wrote her back laughing, attaching a copy of the actual AP release, she sent me an irritated missive:
To: XXXXXXX
From: Vlmoran@ftjptnrs.com

FWD: RE: FWD: RE: Chinese Farmers Raising St. Bernards in Veal Pens
You know what? I’d like it if you would remove me from your address book.
Oh, and while you’re at it, grow the fuck up.
>To: Vlmoran@ftjptnrs.com
>From: dmaloney@pellicanllc.com
>RE: FWD: Chinese Farmers Raising St. Bernards in Veal Pens
>You realize that’s a joke. Look at this:
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/1998511/ap_on_re_cn_an/chinese
>_chicken_farmers_accused_of_maintaining_cruel_conditions
>To: dmaloney@pellicanllc.com
>From: Vlmoran@ftjptnrs.com
>FWD: Chinese Farmers Raising St. Bernards in Veal Pens
>I don’t know to even say about this. It’s sickening. I can’t even
>visualize it! *What* the is the matter with these people?
This confused me because, as I recalled, Victoria was one of the more ridiculous individuals I’d known. One of the select few of dozens of people in my extended social circle who lacked even the minimal, if not imperceptible level of gravitas necessary to pass judgment on my lack of maturity.
And as far as I’d seen that evening, she didn’t appear to making strides on the whole “acting like a grown-up” thing. Demanding Bennett turn off the Hot Tuna disc we were listening to so she could play a Phish bootleg nobody wanted to hear, save this goateed, cloth-bracelet wearing pseudo-hippie in the corner of the room, was hardly demonstrating a progression of one’s tastes from the days of grain punch and gravity-bong hits. I’ve nothing against Phish musically, but generally, the kind of people who’ll rabidly follow a band that plays vacuum cleaner solos in concert and sings lyrics like “The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road/The car is the thing on the road that takes you back to your abode” over and over for ten minutes at a clip in what I can only assume is a testament to the just how far irony can sink while still sounding clever to a certain lowest common denominator aren’t exactly racing into adulthood.
“This is my boyfriend, Andrew.”
“Call me Drew, dude.” He stuffed his smoke in his mouth and extended his hand.
This explained Victoria’s sudden interest in Phish. You could spot that boyfriend was a white-bread tour head in an instant – one of those fairly well-heeled, directionless sorts who gets a job teaching or selling something from home so he can take a few months off every year to follow his religion. It’s not a terrible life. Dad’s a developer or plastic surgeon and all they have to do is find a way to bring in enough cash to survive decently to middle age, until the folks croak and gift them a retirement. Not enough cash to pick up any serious hobbies like skiing or traveling, but more than enough to afford a season’s worth of tickets to follow a jam band on a leg of its annual tour. Hang out in concert parking lots, get high, suck up nitrous balloons and Dance, Dance, Dance. “Fee was a Buddhist prodigy, long past the age of maturity… Sing it with me, dude!”
. . .
If I were telling this story to “Norm” back the office, this where I’d start making the connections that occasionally cause me to lose all faith in humanity. There’d be no way to describe this Phish-head to Norm without immediately realizing how aligned the two of them were. How the difference between the consummate “man’s man” telling you strip club tales at the office and the guy drooling over his Camel light and gushing about “this fucking awesome Halloween show” where the band “covered like, all of Quadrophenia… like, every song” is nothing but chance and environment. How really, truly, deep down inside, these seemingly disparate people are an awful lot alike.
You realize that in a different world, with different folks, different schooling, growing up in a different state or of a different religion or social class, the kid who turns into Norm might just as easily follow jam bands, become a Goth kid, or instead of being a frustrated caricature of an alpha male in a law firm, have become some huge mogul – the kind of person who hires and fires lawyers, makes them work late and tells them what to do. And the converse is as possible as well. The Phish-head could just as easily have turned into a creepy Young Republican, FBI agent or Mormon missionary. The defining characteristic of these types has nothing to do with what they wear or the postures they assume. It’s their need to join a tribe.
If you’ve ever looked at hippies, white kids dressed in gangsta attire, mall rats dressed like Paris Hilton, grungy protestors outside WTO meetings, “paycheck-to-paycheck wealthy” members of the Country Club who dress their kids in madras and seersucker, dimwit hipsters in trucker hats, “Emo” kids, metalheads, Guidos with fake tans and four inch spiked hair or overleveraged junior partners wearing second-hand two-tone diving watches and Brioni shirts they picked up at Filene’s basement and felt a strange, deep sense of revulsion, you probably wondered why. It’s hardly a crime to posture. No harm in somebody making a fool of himself. That’s where you’d be missing the point, or cause, as it were. The ugliness isn’t in the badges, but the fact that they’re used at all. That rather than cherry-picking the better pieces of all the groups around – being a part hippie, part liberal, part conservative, part salesman, part paper cruncher, part religious, part atheist, part capitalist, part anarchist, part careerist, part existentialist, part corporate, part-entrepreneurial human – so many of us would rather join a clan. Dive in head first and embrace a group’s positions. Wear its uniform, repeat its slogans and run with its edicts.
Frost’s overrated. Taking an unknown path’s as easy as following the known. It’s trying to walk both, and dozens more beyond them all at the same time that’s really fucking tricky. The world pays a lot of lip service to the glory of the Renaissance Man, but that doesn’t mean Corporate America wants him on the payroll. He isn’t Serious, Committed. Talented as he might be, he’s not sure where he’s going. God only knows what whim he’ll chase tomorrow.
To be continued.
__________________________
¹ I say “something like this” to accommodate the non-Stones fans, the people who might better recognize the groups as “Gilmore and Waters,” “Lennon and McCartney” or “Jerry and Bobby” people.

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