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joking, then produced a two-inch piece of straw from the breast pocket of his jacket and snorted everything that was left, right from the plastic. He thumbed his nose and sniffed a few times, gave a small shrug of disdain, and settled, half sitting, on the front of the desk. “That coke sucks, but I’ll tell you anyway,” he said. “Here’s what I was going to say: Stop giving a shit.”
    We blinked at him. “What do you mean?” I said. I love that you can ask people what they mean right after they’ve said the most obvious things and almost invariably they’ll think they are the ones who’ve failed to be clear and go to elaborate lengths to make themselves understood.
    Wagner looked at me, then turned to Eli. “Is your friend retarded?” he said. “What I mean is, look, if you care about something, like horses, go raise horses. Go ride them and fuck them, or whatever people do with horses. Sell them to Arabs, I’d guess. But if you’re going to stay in this crappy business, and they’re all crappy, stop giving a shit. Because you’re here for one reason and you should know what that reason is. Do you?”
    He looked from one of us to the other, then barked “Sonia!” and we jumped, but Sonia didn’t. She just walked over and spanked us each insanely hard on the ass with the riding crop.
    â€œThe reason you’re here,” Wagner said, “is that you already have the nice cars”—I didn’t, but I went along with the spirit of his admonition—“and girlfriends with that taut skin, and decent rentals in the hills. Or maybe you own?” He looked at us doubtfully. “But you don’t have the good stuff, do you, the really hard-to-come-by shit? You know what I’m talking about: Envy . Grade-A, un-stepped-on, Augusta-green … Serious, irrefutable reasons for people to envy you. And not just any sort of people of course. You need people well enough informed to understand just how enviable you are. And people clever enough to know how to show their envy without being sycophants. And worldly enough to be charming company while they’re envying you … You need courtiers , see? And right now you are courtiers, that’s why we pay you shit to hang around us. But if you play your cards right, one day you’ll have your own. Oh, they’re better and worse than friends. They don’t care about you, sure, but they understand the terms of your success far better than a friend ever could. And so at last, when you forget why you did the shit you did, all you have to do is look at their greedy, envious, unlined faces and say, Ah, yes. That’s why.”
    He stared out the sliding glass doors for a minute while Sonia cracked walnuts on a teak coffee table with the blunt end of a bowie knife, then he continued more softly. “And here’s the really fucked-up thing,” he said. “When you’ve bloated yourself on all the envy a person can take and you’re still not satisfied, you’ll see there’s only one place left to go. You have everything that can be bought, all the blow jobs the people who covet your power can give, but what you don’t have, you’ll see, is pain . And that’s where Sonia comes in. Sure, I pay her. But she would hate me just as much if I didn’t. And that’s real.” He sipped his drink contemplatively. “It’s the realest thing in the world.”
    He shook his head, as though to clear the cobwebs of this sentimentality, and it must have worked because he started again in a livelier tone. “It reminds me of when Nietzsche and I had our falling-out.”
    â€œWait,” I said. “Hold on. You’re the real Wagner?”
    He looked at me with what I think was hatred. “There is really something wrong with your friend,” he said to Eli. “Of course I’m not the real Wagner. How much