The White Lotus Sapphire: an Elite Convention

“ . . . for he who always hopes for the best becomes old, deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst becomes old prematurely; but he who has faith, retains eternal youth.”

– Soren Kierkegaard

Dear Elite,

Sometimes the randomness of the universe hatches a series of events that seem to indicate a sort of special meaning to life reserved just for us, the select few. Much as God chose the Israelites and Jesus saved the Christians, Randomness smiles on us and illuminates our lofty position in the grand (lack of a) scheme. This past Friday, the 13th, sitting at a stoplight on the outskirts of Brevard, the eternal void presented me with proof of the specialness of my particular existence, my own personal burning bush. I don’t know if it was elite extrasensory perception, peripheral vision, or just good driving habits, but as I sat there in the Odyssey waiting on the light to change, my eyes were drawn to the rearview mirror. There, a bearded man in an orange vest driving a small SUV had his phone out. He was hanging it up and taking pictures of my license plate. He saw me watching and pointed his right index finger to his temple, making small circles, and with eyes wide he mouthed excitedly, “Are you crazy?” I shrugged, and answered, “What happened?” From there an entire conversation proceeded, half sign language, half lip reading, all through the little rectangular mirror hanging from my windshield. The would be vigilante let me know that I was “doing 60!” and that he was “calling the cops.” My anger rising, I sneered, turned up my palms and said “are you serious?” He then held his hand palm side down at waist height to indicate that I have kids and started vigorously stroking one index finger with the other, puckering his face and shaking it side to side: “Shame on you.” I only wish I could have been more prepared, because the best response I could give him was a very unsatisfying middle finger and some silently mouthed fuck you’s. Alas, Randomness’s messenger had caught me in a moment of introspection and taken me by surprise. A few minutes before I had been careening around the gentle bends of hwy 280, keeping a watchful eye for the law and reminiscing about my old man once bragging that he had never gotten a speeding ticket except on his way to the Master’s or Sapphire, the latter of which was my destination, my wife daydreaming in the passenger seat, the dog asleep in the way back, and the kids on mute wearing headphones and watching Disney’s Aristocats. We were on our way to the family property to meet two other elite families, the Farmers and the Vassallos for MLK weekend. We had tickets for the Clemson/Duke game at Littlejohn on Saturday and reservations for “snow tubing” on Sunday. The odds of such a gathering, centered around a first place, 6-0 in-conference Brad team, are slim enough to cause even the most devout elites to consider the existence of The Divine, and now, here was this bearded messenger with a flip phone, this moronic face contorting like an acrobat in my rearview.

The night before, Danyelle and I had come within an episode and a half of finishing season 2 of HBO’s The White Lotus. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a show about rich people who go on vacation at an exclusive resort. Over the course of the season, the glue holding together their fragile egos dissolves, and through the resulting struggle with their darker natures, the characters emerge changed following their vacation experiences. Season two features a newly rich Asian American tech nerd and his liberal, holier-than-thou wife played by Aubrey Plaza, the nerd’s banker bro college roommate and his nebulous hottie wife, a horny grandfather-son-grandson trio of Sicilian roots, a couple of Italian hookers who prey on all of the above men, and a blond idiot played by Stiffler’s mom who falls in with the gay mafia. Deceit and betrayal abound, as do sex scenes, and there is even (spoiler alert) a murder plot. Coincidentally, our little elite weekend escapade had a lot of the surface ingredients of a White Lotus setup: Privilege? Check. College roommates and their wives going on vacation together? Double check. Exclusive resort? Triple check. Were we about to be tested by the fates in a twisted, wife-swapping, mind-bending ordeal? Surely not, because, you see, we elites are not like these HBO characters that are trotted out for our entertainment. We laugh at their inability to see what we see so clearly, namely, our true selves (we’re elite), where we are (exactly where we meant to be all along), and where we’re going (to an elite version of the afterlife that is precisely nonexistent). In the show Aubrey Plaza’s attempts to validate her marriage by favorably comparing herself to the apparently vapid couple she and nerd boy are vacationing with are pathetic, but in reality similar comparisons on our part would be understandable, because, after all, we elites are actually better than the rest. Would we compare ourselves to our fellow elites, though? Ha! Of course not! We laugh in the face of such insecurity! And yet, somehow beardo and his castigation had struck a nerve. No, I wasn’t about to be tempted by Italian hookers, and I wasn’t about to be abducted by homosexual mobsters. This much was certain, but I was heading into a situation that involved shared living space and socialization with my elite peers and their children (each family was bringing two kids, between 4 and 8 years old), and now, I was being asked the question repeated in some fashion to so many of the Lotus characters throughout their vacation trial: Are you crazy?

The first test of my sanity took the form of wet firewood. Friday night promised the arrival of my college roommate Dan and his family, Dan with whom I have consumed more alcohol than any other; Dan, who once slapped me in the face when I disputed his professed score in a game of ping pong (he slapped me, I punched a hole in the wall like Andy Bernard, and I made a speech about it at his wedding); Dan, my good friend, who actually reads my blog and whose Danisms were the closing argument of my senior linguistics thesis when we lived together in Thornhill Village (our next door neighbor, the left tackle on the football team, said we talked in code). As my youngest begged his older brother to play with him, and my oldest politely informed him that he “didn’t want to play that boring game” and gazed longingly out the door at the lightly falling snow, eagerly anticipating the arrival of more kids, particularly Dan’s 7-year-old Hiller, I was busy making sure that a roaring fire would greet my friend and his family, thereby establishing my elite competence and setting the tone for a successful weekend. Instead, I was flabbergasted when I repositioned the logs and rather than finding glowing embers, the logs were merely charred on the outside like a burnt lasagna with a frozen core, and the flame that had been so promising was all but snuffed out. I prodded, I turned, I blew; Cartter started delivering Kleenexes to use for starting the flame again, and while I at first refused him, suddenly, I found myself taking one of the Kleenexes he had brought and weakly offering it to the smoking pile. Now my back, in chronic pain presumably from injury and scoliosis, was starting to ache from all the bending and lifting, and the latent vertigo that a doctor suggested was a symptom of vestibular migraines the week prior was starting to flare. This was the opposite of what I wanted to project. This was not a competent elite woodsman providing for his friends, ready to partake in a weekend of revelry. No, this was an invalid mired in sickness choking on the smoke of his own failure. When Dan did arrive and tried his hand, meeting with similar difficulty, I let him know that his own struggle somewhat restored my sense of manhood.

Later that night it was time for the second wrestling match, this time with a demon that I hate perhaps above all others: insomnia. After hours and hours of rolling around in the bed and fantasizing, dreaming while still awake, I heard the faint sound of footsteps on the stairs outside our second story bedroom. I rolled out of bed and tapped the screen on my phone to see the time: 4:55 a.m. In the bathroom I peered through the blinds and saw another van in the driveway. The Vassallos had arrived. Matt, Dan’s roommate in Surfside post Clemson, a fellow tiger alum, had loaded his family into the Pacifica at 11 p.m. in Pawley’s Island and driven them 6 hours in the dark, the last hour twisting around mountain roads with a fresh, thin layer of snow on top. Why the late arrival? Matt is the coach of the Waccamaw Warriors varsity girls basketball team and was fresh off maybe the biggest win of his coaching career over rival Loris, so he made his heroic (or foolhardy?) trek after a full day of teaching and a coaching-fueled adrenaline surge. An old acquaintance of a bygone time of early twenties late night partying, after two recent bachelor parties – one in Sapphire – and two friends’ weddings – one the epic Stratton and Meredith blowout in New Orleans – Matt has developed into the rarest of elite birds; he is what you might call a new friend. Even better he is the husband to a wonderful woman named Liz (no White Lotus), whom my wife adores, and the father to two lovely young girls, the addition of whom made our little party perfectly split gender-wise for both generations. Again, Randomness smiles on the elite, but if you are a sniveling weakling prone to insomnia, bouts of vertigo and back pain, maybe not so much. A subelite such as he might risk a fall from grace in his friends’ esteem, or perhaps even beg the question, are you crazy? Well, if insomnia produced by excitement and fear of nonperformance makes a person crazy, then maybe I am. Such was my resignation as I stood in the bathroom glimpsing the Vassallo’s Pacifica in the drive, but along with it was another feeling, equal in magnitude, the expectation of success and a good time had by all. You might call it the elite equivalent of Kierkegaard’s faith, that which sets me apart from the pathetic, bitching, cheating Aubrey Plaza and her nerd husband, a belief on the strength of the absurd that my weekend would be everything I wished despite my apparent insanity and self-inflicted exhaustion that would seemingly render my desires impossible.¹

Sure enough I did finally fall asleep, and the sun did rise the next morning, but not before the stomping of little feet on the stairs and the high pitched shrieks emanating from the first floor woke me up. That morning as all the adults made conversation and the children ran through the house practicing noisemaking of all kinds, as I fought through a headache and seared 4 batches of pork medallions for sandwiches, the knowledge that come 2:45 everything would change carried me. It was game day. Soon, all I would have to do was drive, walk to the stadium, and deal with concessions and public restrooms. Not only that, but the Tigers had a real shot at beating Duke and going to 7-0. So it was with great relief and anticipation that I saddled back up in the Odyssey, Matt riding shotgun, the boys in the middle row, and Danyelle taking Sammy’s spot in the way back, and twisted down the mountain headed towards Clemson to see a game in Littlejohn for the first time in 15 years, my boys’ first Clemson game of any kind, a game that by some miracle had turned into maybe the biggest home game of my adult life. For the next four hours, my juices were flowing. Lack of sleep was no matter. The Tigers put on a show to remember, surging in the closing minutes after trailing for most of the second half and putting Duke away, finally winning by 8. After some early first half changes to our elite seating arrangements, the Scott Hog ended up on the aisle next to his mommy. He went with her to the bathroom and took a dump early in the second half. I ended up at the other end of our row, in between Hiller and Cartter, whose engagement with the goings on was easily the most enjoyable aspect of the entire experience. Cartter was clenching his fists and giving the yes pump at appropriate moments, periodically turning around and inspecting the fans behind us who were cheering for the wrong team, and slowly waving a dirty tattered napkin to conjure good juju. He housed two hot dogs with ketchup and sipped a coke, no fussy bullshit like cotton candy or pizza or whatever, not even nachos. Late in the game, Dan told me Hiller wanted to switch seats with me to sit next to Cartter. Reluctantly, I obliged; however, after the tide turned for the worse in the game, I feigned superstition as an excuse to switch back and sit next to my boy. Wouldn’t you know it worked? After the seat switch, the Tigers went on a run that sealed the deal. As Clemson was icing the game, Cartter, who had switched from the napkin to the free t-shirt that all the fans got that day, turned to me and said, “See? I told you. It’s working, because they’re distracted.” Like father like son I guess. Later that night, once we had scaled the mountain and arrived at the house again, while Matt and Dan stayed up late watching Trevor Lawrence engineer an epic comeback in the wildcard round against the Chargers, no amount of self doubt could keep me awake. For one thing, I was really, really tired, and beneath that thick coat of exhaustion was the knowledge that my ultimate goal had been satisfied: my boy had enjoyed himself.

“Are you crazy?” asked the Beard of Randomness. If I’d been more on my toes, I would have told him “I don’t know.” This would have been honest. Sometimes I worry that I’ll let my friends down, that they don’t or won’t really like me. You see, I don’t know what they’re thinking. Am I reading the signals right? Are my own thoughts true? Which ones? I don’t know. Am I being a good father and husband? I don’t know. This not knowing does indeed drive me a little crazy at times, so much so that I roll around in bed awake, suffer a weakened immune system, and end up getting Covid from the game (yep, got fucking Covid), but it’s also the engine that keeps life moving forward. In the season finale of The White Lotus, nerd boy spirals out of control in a jealous rage, unsatisfied with Aubrey Plaza’s insistence that she did not, in fact, bang his banker bro college roommate in their hotel room. After nearly murdering the guy in a fist fight/wrestling match in the ocean, he happens across the nebulous hottie on the beach. Upon telling her his concerns about their spouses’ possible infidelity, she has a message for him: we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s heads. Heck, we don’t even know what’s going on in a big chunk of ours, but it’s not worth getting bent out of shape about. It’s the mystery that makes it “sexy.” Now, when it comes to my boy and my male friends, I don’t find the mystery particularly sexy (no offense, Dan and Matt), but it is at least more fun than the lack of mystery would be. What would we do if we possessed total self-knowledge and clairvoyance? Probably, it would be a little boring. Certainly, I wouldn’t feel the same excitement I did witnessing Cartter’s enjoyment of the basketball game. It’s the possibility that he won’t enjoy, the mystery, that lends the moment the element of satisfaction. Absent the mystery would the game of salad bowl on Sunday night have been as fun? No, it’s the hinting around the edges of clairvoyance that makes the game great, the glimpse into Dan’s mind you get when you pull a slip of paper from the bowl and see the words “frustrating logs,” the potential for failure exemplified by Matt’s frantic gesturing as he futilely attempts to airdrop the right words into his partner’s cerebral hard drive. If we all knew what each other was thinking, there would be no game. Am I crazy? I don’t know, Asshole of Randomness. Is that a real question? Do you really want to know? Do you have a very small penis? Because my clairvoyance is telling me that you do. Also, I was going 70, bitch. Ah, if only I’d had my wits about me. Oh well, better to save them for the people I care about impressing anyway, you know, the elites. When it was all said and done, and we started down the mountain again on Monday morning, I was too tired to feel anything. I asked Danyelle, “Do you think everyone had a good time?” She said, “I think so,” an honest if only partly satisfying answer, and then, something that put me at ease, a whimpering sound from the seat behind me. Again, my eyes looked to the rearview mirror to receive a message, this time a much gentler one: the Scott Hog was crying. He’d had fun and was sad to be leaving. Call me crazy, but that’s good enough for me.