What If This Were Enough? Page 9

  Of course, the top priority of Entourage was always to keep Vince likable enough that the show’s vicarious celebrity thrills might remain intact. Daring to make Vince needy or self-involved or occasionally bombastic, daring to make him legitimately resentful of the so-called compadres who latched onto him, socially and financially, with the tenacity of a stubborn fungal infection, would go against the show’s lighthearted, “it’s all good” tone.

  Against a backdrop of endlessly thumping beats and endlessly circling babes, all of which felt pretty meh by the end of the show’s run, a day of reckoning would’ve made perfect sense. But no day of reckoning ever came. In the show’s final season, we rejoined a clean and sober Vince cheerfully attending N.A. meetings, and his boys were soon back to sipping from bottles of Budweiser. Instead of serving as either cautionary tale (All About Eve) or upper-class urban fairy tale (Sex and the City), Entourage was just a story about some guys with a knack for making sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll look remarkably lackluster, as their repetitive banter blended into a muddled white noise of macho, mutual white-people ribbing.

  Each supporting character got to have exactly one emotional state: Drama’s insecurity; Eric’s lukewarm interest in marrying his girlfriend, Sloan; and Turtle’s vague desire to build a career (preferably one that involves lots of deal-making on private jets). Beyond that, the guys rarely rose a few heartbeats above flatlining. It’s no wonder that the only character on the show who truly engaged its audience was the superagent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven). Ari was part mastermind and part buffoon—aggressive, offensive, and constantly ashamed. In other words, he was the sort of conflicted character who would feel perfectly at home in a classic tale of Hollywood corruption like The Bad and the Beautiful. Unlike Vince and his cadre of fools, Ari thought big thoughts, felt big feelings, and made one big mistake after another, while the others—Vince, Drama, Turtle, Eric—shuffled across polished floors with the superficial self-assurance of men so insulated from the real world that they couldn’t really remember what mediocre sushi tasted like.

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  When you watch a few episodes of Entourage in a row, with its relentless quips between bromantic heroes, gazing blankly at strippers rotating endlessly like fatted calves on spits, you start to feel a bit like Johnny Marco, the disaffected hero of a very different snapshot of the celebrity life: Sofia Coppola’s transfixing film Somewhere. Living in the Chateau Marmont’s celebrity playpen, escorted from one promotional appearance to the next, Johnny (Stephen Dorff) slowly loses his ability to feel any semblance of joy or excitement. Johnny—and Vince, in his own breezy way—represented a modern analog to the classic Hollywood parable about the corrupting influence of stardom. But instead of clinging to his fame and fortune like those divas of yore, Johnny relinquished his humanity to it. In the film’s most haunting scene, Johnny’s head is encased in white plaster for a role. We sit for several uncomfortable minutes in a quiet room with this faceless Nowhere Man, listening to him struggle to control his breathing. Even as his true self is erased for the sake of commodity, those thoughts and feelings still pound inside his rib cage, demanding to be heard. Of course, you have to have thoughts and feelings for that to happen. The boys of Entourage never convinced us that they do.

  That’s because Entourage was purposefully designed as an extreme male fantasy of ignorant bliss—a state that, in real life, can be tough to attain without the aid of narcotics. Even though these four men were demeaned repeatedly—Turtle by Vince’s hot leftovers, Drama by the industry, Vince by women who were always smarter than he was, and Eric by pretty much everyone—somehow they always managed to shrug it off over a few cold ones. Like Iris Owens’s dimpled darlings, they congratulated themselves (and each other) with high-fives and backslaps every time one of them returned to what they saw as their one true calling: mindless hanging out. And it’s true, their talent for maintaining such a void of thoughts and feelings was pretty exceptional. But it also explains why there is no Entourage-themed corollary to that game where you name which Sex and the City character you are. The answer is always “Vince.” Because no one wants to be those other guys.

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  Escapist fantasies have changed venues since the peak of Entourage: The posh life has migrated from the relative remove of TV shows and glossy celebrity lifestyle magazines to the intimacy of Instagram accounts. A window into the unimaginable lifestyles of the super-rich now lives in our pockets. Luxury feels more immediate and more attainable than it ever has before—and this makes it all the more unnerving.

  There is also less acknowledgment now that these glimpses into rarefied worlds constitute escapist indulgences. No longer framed as guilty pleasures aimed at distracting us momentarily, the luxury of Instagram is so integrated into our lives that it’s hard not to experience a regular, low-level sensation of injustice from it. Instagram feels designed to incite dissatisfaction. But not only that: We all feel like we deserve luxury now.

  In fact, images of other people’s experiences dominate so much of our own lives that we sometimes forget to wonder how it actually feels to live inside of those images. We are trained to care only about how good they look. Each shiny photograph holds the same message: “This woman looks better than you and she #wokeuplikethis.” Or: “This guy’s world is more beautiful and expensive than your world.” Like Vince and his friends, we are not invited to peruse other people’s real thoughts or feelings. We are invited to imagine a beautiful, blissful place where thoughts or feelings no longer exist.

  This state of nothingness is the ultimate luxury. Freed from the cages of our minds and our physical desires, we might finally take in the glory of that sparkling pool, those circling girls. We might finally attain Vince’s ideal of effortless, easygoing emptiness.

  But these kinds of desires can only live in images. Because we can’t be at the center of the party, listening to the hottest track, surrounded by slow-motion dancing babes. In real life, someone is always yelling over the music and ruining the whole song. The track skips just when it was getting good. Someone has cilantro stuck in her teeth. Reality is, by nature, disappointing. Thoughts and feelings almost always get in the way of pure luxury, as it is currently understood. Because luxury is at once intimate (via Chrissy Teigen’s Instagram feed) and hard to feel these days. You can’t live there. But somehow you can’t stop peeking in the window like a stalker, either.

  The other day, I found myself getting lost in a photo of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. The picture was taken on Sunday morning. They were wearing the Kardashian-Kanye version of their Sunday Best, standing next to a white wall, on a pristine beige floor. I found myself wondering what kind of unholy army of stylists and maids and nannies and fluffers it took to paint and smooth and primp them into this flawless, serene state. Were the kids screaming right before the photo was taken, because the maids and the stylists and the nannies were circling too quickly and it was jacking with their nerves? Did the kids pull Kim’s hair out of place? Was Kanye complaining about this need to photograph every minute of their lives? “It’s Easter,” Kanye tells Kim. “This is what I do,” Kim replies. “This is my brand. Why do I have to justify it every few minutes? This is what keeps the lights on. This is what waters the enormous lawn outside.”

  Kanye sighs. Why does she have to mention the lawn? All of that beautiful grass makes him feel lonely for some reason, as if he lives in Central Park but everyone else is dead. His throat hurts. He’s catching another cold. Too much flying. “I want us to be normal for a second,” he tells her. “Is that—can you just…?”

  “What’s normal?” Kim asks.

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  The Fyre Festival in the spring of 2017 marked the crowning disaster of mass-marketed luxury, exemplifying the growing gap between image and reality. Trailers circulated online to promote the festival showed the requisite overtanned, plump-assed model
s in butt floss, swimming through crystal blue waters of the Caribbean, riding on Jet Skis, interspersed with shadowy footage of a crowded concert where everyone is feeling the love, feeling the beat, feeling the liquor, just feeling it. Imagine feeling the same thing that everyone else is feeling. No thinking is involved; you are perfectly in sync with the music and the crowd.

  But this was footage of feeling it, which is different from actually feeling it. And as ticket holders to the Fyre Festival discovered when they arrived in the Bahamas, having been promised great music, luxury accommodations, and five-star chefs, previews of the Fyre Festival turned out to be a universe apart from the actual Fyre Festival. What they found, instead of supermodels frolicking to sick beats in paradise, were falling-over disaster relief tents and biting flies and cold cheese sandwiches, served on a scrubby beach.

  And unlike the mythical visions of luxury held up by Instagram, once this new footage emerged it was all too easy to imagine exactly how it felt to attend the real Fyre Festival. Anyone could conjure the feeling of sitting on a folding chair in the sand on an overcast day, surrounded by swirling flies, staring at a slice of processed cheese sweating in the heat. “I paid ten thousand dollars for VIP access,” said a moist-looking young man waiting at an overheated airport in one of the videos. The wavering of his voice told us he was bewildered by his fate. “How do things like this even happen?” his sad eyes beseeched us.

  But this is what the real-life luxury often feels like: disappointment. Why are these luxury towels so scratchy? Why is this luxury sky so gray? Why is this luxury cocktail so overly sweet and devoid of alcohol? Where is my luxury waiter, and why is this luxury steak he brought me so overcooked? Why are these not-very-luxurious, loud-talking people here in paradise with me, acting not all that luxuriously like they own paradise just as much as I do?

  In fact, believing that you belong in paradise—and that paradise will somehow feel as good as a picture of paradise looks—has a way of emptying out the joys of paradise pretty rapidly. That’s why Entourage felt like such a crime against humanity, even on those rare occasions when we were able to savor its vicarious thrills: It was impossible not to recognize how Vinnie and the boys’ entitlement and arrogance only made the tedium of cruising through the same scantily clad crowds at pool parties over and over again all the more insufferable. It was tough not to long for Margo Channing, seething and spitting at the pretense and emptiness of it all.

  Instead of striving for a life that could somehow match the clean beauty of an image from Instagram or the blurry glory of a trailer for an orgiastically great concert that could never happen, imagine striving for a way to encounter the small details of everyday life as if they were unexpectedly delightful. Isn’t that how luxury is supposed to feel, after all? Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this.

  Feeling that way doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require the perfect scenery. All that’s required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: This is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can’t simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable—even divine.

  The sky is gray. A fly lands on your hand. Your cocktail is lukewarm. And still, for some reason, if you slow down and accept reality enough, it starts to feel right. Better than right. You are not comparing reality to some imagined perfect alternative. You are welcoming reality for what it already is.

  And what if you have no cocktail, because you’re sober now? And what if your neck is aching? Maybe you’re running late. Maybe you feel anxious. Still, you pay attention to each little fold, each disappointment, each impatient attempt by mind and body to “fix” what already is. And then surrender to all of it. These details are irreplaceable. They give the moment its value. The chance to soak in this mundane, uneven moment is the purest luxury of all.

  lost treasure

  When I was about ten years old, I sometimes visited an elderly widow named Indye who lived in a little house around the corner from ours. She would serve me some stale vanilla Hydrox cookies and a little Dixie cup of grape juice and then she’d show me her “arrangements,” crafts she’d glued together from mostly natural materials: a smooth piece of driftwood with tiny dried flowers and a curled bit of dried kudzu vine glued to it, or an oblong stone with a patch of moss and a small arching branch over it. She had dozens of these creations to share with me at any given time. She’d spend a solid two or three minutes describing each one to me, how she’d found the driftwood on a beach trip with her sister (who lived next door), how she’d noticed the curled kudzu vine on a recent walk, along with a really beautiful piece of bark with moss growing out of its cracks. “Now, Heathuh,” she’d say in her posh Virginian accent, resting one old hand on my arm and gesturing with her other hand, “what do you think of this one?”

  I was a polite kid, so I would try to sound enthusiastic (“I like it a lot,” “It’s pretty!”), nodding along and asking questions and oooing and ahhing over her discoveries. But the whole exercise was pretty exhausting. The pace was just so slow. Standing for so long like that on her immaculate white carpet, watching her old hands gesture at each conglomeration of twigs and flowers and moss lined up neatly on her credenza—it felt absolutely excruciating to me. She would say a few words (“Now this one, Heathuh…”), then stop to reach for a tissue out of her pocket, to dab at her perpetually watery eyes and her perpetually drippy nose. Then she’d say, “Well, now, my alluhgies are acting up again, isn’t that awwwful?” and I’d nod, but I suspected that old people just leaked all the time. And anyway, it probably didn’t help your allergies to drag so many weedy and twiggy things home with you around the clock. Then my mind would wander to the many, many things I’d rather be doing than standing in this chilly overly air-conditioned house, with its shutters drawn tight against the sunshine, talking about these tiny bits of glued-together junk.

  “One man’s trash is anothuh man’s treashuh!” Indye would exclaim, as if reading my mind. She didn’t have any grandchildren and her husband had died a decade earlier. She told me one day that she was eighty-three years old, whispered it to me after a lot of dramatic fanfare about a “big secret,” and then she made me promise not to tell a soul. Later I found out that she told my sister and my mom the same secret. “One man’s trash is anothuh man’s treashuh!” my mom would sometimes declare out of the blue, and then laugh. But my mom thought Indye was smart and interesting. Indye’s sister and her sister’s husband were nice people, but Indye was eccentric. My mom liked eccentric more than she liked nice.

  I did feel pretty virtuous at the end of each visit, knowing that I’d done my duty and given our lonely neighbor a little company. “Now, Heathuh. Which of my arrangements do you think is your favorite?” she’d ask. I knew she was going to give me whichever one I chose, and I didn’t really want to take anything that she should keep and sell at one of her craft fairs instead, but I didn’t want to insult her by refusing.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have given up one of her best creations to a kid. I probably put it on my shelf and shuffled it around and eventually it might’ve ended up in a toy bin somewhere, falling apart. (One man’s treashuh is anothuh man’s trash.) My mother, at least, put the arrangements Indye gave her behind glass, next to her art books.

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  It all sounds downright exotic to me now, the thought of going on long walks and paying enough attention that you might notice a bit of interesting bark or a slim reed or curled vine. Imagine that kind of slow focus, combing the woods or the beach for something to work with.

  When I go on walks these days, I listen to podcasts and answer texts and make phone calls. I listen to Kendrick Lamar, who is grateful but al
so pissed off. That’s my territory: gratitude and anger, anger and gratitude. It’s an impatient place to live. I don’t silently scan the sidewalk for interesting twigs or leaves or bottle caps. I pick up my dog’s shit and wonder what bad news I’m missing. I cough and sneeze because my allergies are acting up. (Allergies aren’t just an excuse for rheumy old-person eyes, as it turns out.) I read texts that say things like, “Happy Mother’s Day to a bunch of amazing moms!” and I think “I would not personally classify my mothering as amazing.” But I still spend at least a block texting back “Have a great day!” with multiple heart emojis. It’s odd to send heart emojis when your heart feels not particularly warm, when your distracted brain is too preoccupied with the news and allergies and dog shit to focus on love and motherhood and being amazing.

  It’s hard to live in the moment, to exist locally and think locally and emote locally. Something in my pocket is always buzzing. People far away expect quick answers to every passing question. Why do we live this way?