Suburbia cocktails: The nouveau-riche deadfall
MUHAMMAD AMIR THE PEAK, (SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY)
BURNABY, B.C. — I’m rich, bitch. I’m the only child to a self-made millionaire who owns the means of production and I am milking the perks harder than a gold digger’s nipples at the sight of a wad of crisp twenties (get down, girl, go ahead, get down).
In my culture, being a male from a rich family affords you privileges independent of anything you’ve earned for yourself. Within the institutional framework of arranged marriage, parents courting their daughter with random penises look for one thing: the girth and size of the wallet. Any abusive, adulterous, idiotic, or simply ugly tendencies of a brown man can be amortised when buttressed by a tasty portion of affluence. Even values coagulate to the greenbacks: being from a good family means being from a rich family.
Thanks to Dad, I could walk into a room full of my parents’ Muslim friends with a coke-powdered nose, wearing a pink thong out of which the next scion’s vessels hang out for all to see, with a vibrator in one hand, a hooker’s ass in the other, and a tube of the KY in my mouth. I could do this and the men would still revel in my “handsomeness,” while the women would fetch me dessert and throw their virgin daughters at me. Hymens beware. And it’s not just my people.
When we arrived in Canada circa 1989, bankers, stock brokers, lawyers, and even retail sales people wouldn’t give my father the time of day — now they suck on his kneecaps despite his bad grammar and poor pronunciation.
Until I was 13, I shared a cramped bedroom with two of dad’s younger siblings. Now my exclusive basement suite consists of all hardwood floors, a home theatre, a home gym, a Jacuzzi bathroom, and a king-sized bed. Was a poverty-stricken pre-pubescence that lacked any sort of privacy worth it? You bet your destitute ass it was.
Live in a million-dollar house, park three cars in a garage, have two dogs worth over $1,500 apiece, and it doesn’t matter that both of your grandfathers were polygamists, or that your family name was changed to “Amir” (for undisclosed reasons), or that ascetics (including a few fauxjihadists here and there) interlard with several branches of your family tree. Money transcends an embarrassing family history.
But herein lies a predicament exclusive to nouveau riches. Suddenly, I’m the heir apparent to a mini-empire that has elevated this family out of the gutter: “Don’t fuck it up, junior!”
Blowback: I am severely restricted by communal and familial pressures to take over the family business and do nothing else that detracts from the enterprise. In their eyes, rejecting the family business is worse than emancipating myself from the family: why else would your father have worked so hard but to make the transition into your professional life easier and immediately lucrative? But, in doing me this incredible favour, my own liberty and autonomy are being throttled to the point where even I am worried that in diverting my pursuits away from the family business, I might be forsaking the bourgeois lifestyle to which I am not only accustomed, but own a protective affection towards.
If we were aristocrats, I could pursue any endeavor I so wish. If we were poor, any career choice besides slumming off welfare checks would exceed
expectations. Being rich enough for a comfortable living, but not wealthy enough to be immune from blowing the family fortune on a bad night at the craps table or a good night at the strip club, we suffer from a paralytic middleclass condition: the state of being unoriginal and riskadverse.
Every alternative career I’ve sought has been discouraged as if the family fortune itself is at stake in my absurd ambitions.
Oh, you wanna be a politician? In the era of privatization — are you stupid? Plus, no self-respecting WASP will vote for you. You wanna be a lawyer? Lawyers are like butlers: you want good ones around, but you don’t actually strive to become one. You wanna be a writer? Bitch, please.
The unfortunate reality is that my father, in spite of his paternal instincts, cannot draw a parallel between his entrepreneurial spirit and mine. He slaved to start his own company, amidst everyone (including family) advising him against it, to become successful where no one in his known family had done so before. Now, he’s buying them hundred-dollar dinners and making their fucking Lexus payments.
But, by obliging me to his success, he’s not favouring me with the same independence from which he found his wealth. Certainly, I don’t want to be poor, but I also want to make something of myself (not just maintain something handed to me) . . . if only in tribute to my dad and maybe for my enfranchisement from humdrum suburbia.
