In my novel The Substance of God, scientist Lenny Miller says that he believes in only one thing: eternal movement. Things have to keep moving aggressively, consciously, pushing out, merging or advancing, stopping then squeezing forward; eventually redefining boundaries. Money is that way. Money (and the power behind it) drives politics, art, culture, religion, and much of what we call "spirituality," which the German writer Robert Musil said, regarding the year 1913, was becoming "only anemic romanticism." Money now coats, coaxes, and coaches the language of our time: the need for constant, meaningless vapid style change; the grabbing for security in a world both materially glutted and starved, where sales trump substance. Money is the language, and if you don’t speak it you feel deaf, deprived, blind and at the mercy of those grabbing it around you.

I felt that way as a kid growing up in a public housing project in Savannah, Georgia, where we were the only Jewish family and I was beaten up about once a week. I was a queer and knew it and could not walk around the block without fear. I also learned, from age sixteen, that the further you went up on the economic scale, the less it hurt to be gay: if you could just speak the language rich people did. In that language, it did not make a difference whom you went to bed with, as long as the sheets still looked good for the maid in the morning.

By the time I was seventeen and on my own, hitchhiking across the country, first sleeping between parked cars, eating out of garbage cans, then later getting taken out for dinner by rich men, acquiring several stylish "uncles" who were charmed by a cute, fairly talented Southern boy whose accent and ways could mix gentility with gutter talk, I knew a couple of things about the rich.

They were always nice. They rarely used dirty words. They did not get violently angry. And when they were tired of you, they could get rid of you in about a minute, if that long. It was important to keep them amused, diverted, not too slimily flattered (generally they weren’t stupid, but some were), and engaged in a way that made them feel that you were not presenting a problem of any sort. Everything had to be kept at a level of comfortable banality, with some obeisance to their own paralyzing, "unique" feelings that, at a deeper level, existed to be recognized, but not brought up.

When the feelings of the rich were brought up, they were given an honor and distinction that infuriated me, but of course I couldn’t reveal this. You were never supposed to react authentically, only appear concerned. Later when I became employed in the "glamour" industries of advertising, the arts, publicity and promotion, dealing with rich clients and power men in the media, I quickly understood that despite all their power and money, how deeply these people were affected by their sad childhoods, their deprivations, and the stress and harm they faced. The attention it all demanded and deserved: the armies of doctors and therapists who skillfully patched them back together so they could fight that good fight on Madison Avenue; the spiritual advisors who soothed their souls; the calming influences of kindly financial counselors and lawyers who opened their hearts and offices to them; the attentions and ministrations of wives, husbands, lovers, and friends waiting to lunch.

I was not prone to resentment; resentment was something I didn’t feel entitled to. In fact, "entitlement" as a concept, as part of the shiny currency of money, had not yet been minted. I just saw all of the sad, powerful sensitivities of the rich to be only another part of that constant, life-giving movement of moolah; of credit; of the impatiently waiting possibilities always involving…plain old-fashioned money.

Then, at a certain point, maybe when I got to see what was really going on (I was a slow learner, most kids at fourteen in this consumer-bulimic MTV era could probably have told me this), I realized that the feelings of the rich, and of their runner-up stand-ins, the middle and upper-middle classes, are taken to be infinitely more important, more worthy, than any of the feelings of those who, like myself, were left outside the language of money, who evidently had been born congenitally deaf and blind to it. (Or, as one of my Southern friends so aptly put it, "Perry, if you hadn’t been born Jewish, you would’ve been poor white trash!")

I realized that I saw men sleeping on sidewalks and in subways whose lives had been marked by heartbreak, pain, loss, disappointment, unfathomable angers and sadness. Yet their feelings were held as negligible, their aesthetic value invisible, unless money recognized it. Neither would they be considered handsome or attractive, or worthy of the distinction "artist," unless a little gilt frame of attention was put around them; and this little gilt frame, for the most part, can no longer find them.

In turn, the little gilt frame is deaf and blind to them.

Perhaps it’s because they’re not really going anyplace; they are standing still and are not a part of the spiteful energy that is the essence of the deeper money language, the one that knows how to sacrifice anything, as long as, as George Bush puts it, it’s "for the sake of the country’s good."



I think this is something that most people from the more polite middle-classes lose sight of. In the real struggle for survival, how much of the beauty of men, of all people, really, is lost—and when you get down to the lower levels of the struggle, how many people can see this, unless you are down there with them? Part of my own struggle with money, my struggle to survive, was realizing that sleeping between parked cars and eating out of garbage cans easily makes you forget what love is, or even know it when it comes along. The idea that I could actually be loved, how difficult that was to see. It’s like you invent a snarl of your own to keep yourself alive, and that blocks out most of the voices that want to find you.

The terror of this. The everyday torments of homophobia that kids from poverty have to walk through: when you are better off and queer you want to forget these. They make us extremely uncomfortable. They threaten your very existence. My partner, a therapist, was talking to a gay teenager in the Bronx. The boy wanted to know what it was like being older and gay. My partner said, "It’s very nice if you’re with the right person."

The boy, a prisoner of fear himself in a high-rise housing project, said, "I think it’d be all right if you lived in a good neighborhood. Do you live in a good neighborhood?"

We try to build the "good neighborhood" around ourselves, usually quickly trying to forget what’s behind it. That we will have to speak the language of money to stay in it, and now America is trying very hard to make sure that is the only language spoken. We could blame that on George Bush’s "ownership society," but I feel that this is only a code for things more insidious under it. A vast illusion that grips us, that says "success" is only a choice, like "salvation," and if we stay blind enough to everything that’s not a part of this "choice," we will find it.

Here the Mel Gibson fundamentalists meet the always merry Wall Street capitalists, shake hands, and with their teeth gritted, smile. With me (and I’m sure a lot of people reading this) caught in the middle.

Oh, those "choices"! If you’d just made them, if you could just get your Harvard MBA, then a JD from Yale, then ingest the Wall Street Journal cover to cover, take Donald Trump’s humanitarian lessons seriously, and cannibalize everything in your way, you can have the "lifestyle" you deserve: an endless bathing in the finer, deeper aspects of yourself, which will finally be in your reach.

Of course any Greek philosopher could have told you that all of this was yours: if you only knew how to look for it. You didn’t need a dime. But it’s very important for you, to stay in the race, to be cut off from your own "philosophy," and only money will give you the "luxury" of finding it: your own, true, real self.

The ultimate real "choice." But you are struggling so hard, how can you know it? To have that moment, transforming, it’s what life should be for; still, money waits. It will have its time. Coke? Pepsi? The important choices; but how about clean water? "Do you live in a good neighborhood?" How scary and hard it is to answer that. I’m not sure. No one is, anymore.

So money is eternal. We have to work around it, if we’re lucky. Otherwise, it skewers us, starves us, tempts us, pummels us with its own relentless Twenty First Century energy. "It’s only a means of exchange. You shouldn’t be bothered or intimidated by it," a young broker at Payne Webber told me once over lunch.

But then, after not making enough of it, he was fired.