In the early 1970s, my friend Carlos and I taught at a new community college, condescendingly known as “Safeway Tech” because its library occupied a decommissioned grocery store. Carlos and I had hit it off immediately. We both loved music – his father was a prominent symphony conductor – and wrote poetry. We translated each others’ poems into our respective tongues. We both loved teaching the kinds of students the community college had been designed for, people of all ages and backgrounds who’d never expected to be allowed access to a higher education.
When Carlos fell in love with a nurse at a local hospital and proposed marriage, all his friends were united in disapproval and generous with dire warnings. Carlos, himself, admitted for a while that the marriage was a bad idea. His prospective bride was the rebellious daughter of an Eastern family with so much money that no one had ever heard their names. Carlos was a community college teacher and hIspanic. Carlos knew such a union was one hell of a long shot, but within weeks of his proposal, the wedding machine had sprung into relentless action, and he committed himself to carry the folly through. Though I was among the skeptics, when Carlos asked me to be his best man, I couldn’t say no.
The wedding was to take place at the bride’s brother’s home outside Washington, D.C. As a young instructor, I had no money for cross-country auto trips or plane flights. I packed a bag and my guitar (to accompany Carlos as he sang a wedding song to his bride) and boarded The Dog for the nearly three-day trip to D.C.
It was a long trip with no breaks but for meals snatched at the various bus-stop eateries. In one of them – somewhere in Missouri, I think – the quality of bus station food had been nicely summed up by a couple of previous travelers. The first had carved in the bathroom window frame, “The food here sucks.” Someone had later added, in thick pen strokes, “It’s not very good in the restaurant, either.”
When the bus finally pulled into D.C. and I dismounted, I was surrounded by a nearly visible effluvium of cigarette smoke, three days in the same clothes, and bus food. The bride’s sister-in-law, who was there to pick me up, greeted me with what appeared to be supressed horror. I’d already discovered that the Dog had lost my suitcase, but I still had my guitar, so I was okay, and she was nice enough to drive me back into town the next day to retrieve my bag. It contained the rest of my wardrobe, which came exclusively from thrift stores.
The brother and his wife lived in a house that recalled Frank Lloyd Wright – low, long planes, many right angles, many windows – along the banks of the Potomac, well outside the city. I spent the next few days there, before and after the wedding. The bride’s brother, who worked in some capacity at the State Department – I believe he was what used to be known as a “dollar a year man,” working for the sake of public service and turning his salary back to the government – took it on himself to entertain me in the evenings.
“You’re a musician,” he said, “you’ll appreciate this” – he conducted me into a big room with a big cabinet on the wall full of stereo equipment. I made an appreciative sound. He poured me out a couple of fingers of The Best Scotch Procurable. I made another appreciative sound. He showed me a copy of Consumer Reports. That bible of quality consumption had rated his equipment as top notch. “The turntable gave me the most trouble to find,” he said. “Darned if I could find it anywhere in this country. I had to send off to the Continent to get one.” I had come up in the days of 78 and 45 rpm records, and early grown used to listening beyond the scratches and skips and pops those records soon acquired, so flawless fidelity wasn’t high on my list of musical values, but I tried to look interested as he recounted the saga of obtaining this technological masterpiece. The scotch helped.
Finally he felt the time had arrived to demonstrate The System, and he pulled the only lp
in the cabinet out of its cover and sleeve and placed it reverently on the exotic turntable. I don’t recall exactly now what that album was – something along the lines of Montovani Plays the Greatest Hits of Frank Chacksfield. As my brother Dan Todd wrote of a different album, “it was like a marketing scheme to sell music to the deaf.” I felt sure it was being reproduced as faithfully as possible. The basses boomed, the flutes trilled thrillingly. But there was the music itself, which made me think of an old radio line – “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” The Best System Procurable seemed to me sort of like a Maserati purchased for the purpose of picking up cases of Alpo from the 7-11. I did my best to feign enthusiasm, but I fear my best was none too good. After Mantovani petered out, we said polite goodnigths.
The brother and his wife were truly gracious people, and genuinely tried to make my stay with them a pleasant one. But I couldn’t avoid feeling that, as they tried, they were perpetually vigilant for any sign that I might have some sort of angle on their dough. They surely never said anything to suggest that – they were far too socially adept and far too nice. But it’s hard not to notice when the people around you are always on some kind of subconscious high alert.
The more I felt this in the atmosphere, the more I thought about it, and I came to realize that they couldn’t, unless they were fools, be any other way. If you’re sitting on a big pile of money, of course people are going to be coming after it all the time. And not all of them will be crude thugs. Some will likely be close to as slick as you are, so you’d better be alert. You’d better learn that you can’t truly trust anyone who isn’t as rich as you, or, after a while, you likely won’t be rich no more.
The wedding went off uncomfortably but smoothly. Carlos and his bride took off in her car for a honeymoon in Texas, where she could meet his family. I’m not sure if they got that far. All I know is that by the time I got off the Greyhound back in Colorado, their marriage had ended. Carlos and I never talked about what had brought about the wreck – we were of a generation that still considered private life private – and we’ve both careened on until reaching our respective angles of repose, so that strange adventure didn’t turn out to be a permanent disaster, at least for Carlos.
On the long trip back home, I had a lot of time to think about my brief encounter with the Big Rich. I couldn’t imagine wanting to live as they did, spending inordinate amounts of my time trying to triumph at Conspicuous Consumption, viewing every new person I met with suspicion, always having to be thinking about money because you never had to think about money.
I thought about a story another colleague, Sister Reginald, had told me. She’d grown up on a Kansas farm during the Depression, and one day a man from the bank came driving up their dirt road to make her father an offer on the farm, which was squeaking by, though barely. The banker painted extravagant pictures for her father of all the wondrous new things he could buy with the price he’d get for his farm. Her father sat listening quietly until the man ran out of sales pitch, then he responded in one sentence. “That wouldn’t make a happy man,” he said, and sent the banker back to town.
And now, so many years later, I’m reminded of a story my sister’s husband Park told her about his time in the Vietnamese Central Highlands. In a village there he met a very old cabinet maker, a man revered in his village for his expert work. Park asked him why he didn’t move into a large city, where he could be more generously remunerated. “Why would I need more than enough?” the old man replied. That feeling seems to me, as it did to Park, to signify true wealth.
