$EGIRL: Part 1/4

New Money

Photo by Nick Dove

Part 1 of 4

First thing that happens when I get to Meg Spectre’s neo-vaudeville variety show at KGB is Gasda asking if I saw the latest news, that his ex Cassidy and her gang of idiots are all rich now that their Solana memecoin $EGIRL is blowing up after the announcement that Elon Musk is backing their fellow $EGIRL dev/promoter Bronze Age Shawty in a wrongful termination lawsuit against her former employer, the fintech conglomerate Block, which had fired her for problematic tweets she had posted on pseudonymous accounts.

I already heard the news, I tell him. Cassidy et al. are probably at Charley’s apartment in Chinatown at this very moment, dancing in a conga line to “Golden Years” on repeat, ready to stay up for the next 72 hours. Cassidy couldn’t have picked a better time to begin her daytrading arc—one week you’re jumping turnstiles and asking for a comped Crumpstack subscription and the next you’re flush in the new South Sea Mermaid stock you just invented.

As for Bronze Age Shawty’s lawsuit, it’s probably safe to say that it’ll get laughed out of court, unless there’s some sudden seismic shift in labor law that takes it to the Supreme Court or whatever. But it doesn’t matter. All the $EGIRL developers really want is to sustain their fledgling speculative bubble, and what that takes is prolonged hype—so having the richest man in the world back you in a farcical culture-war court case is the best press you could ask for. And to Elon, Bronze Age Shawty is a vessel for trolling. He’s got petty beef with former–Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who owns Block. And Elon is deeply invested in “free speech,” or at least a conception of free speech that privileges his distinct brand of unpleasant nerd humor.

One of the tweets mentioned in the Bronze Age Shawty lawsuit goes: “Looking fear in the eye as I am using the gender neutral restroom in the office and a retarded tranny in a wheelchair knocks on the door.” There’s a joke in there somewhere, but the parts don’t quite elegantly fit together. The joke wants to be liberated from its awkward form. It wants to be understood and loved. Then you, dear reader, meet Bronze Age Shawty IRL at Sovereign House and she’s friendly and cute. She introduces herself as Chloe and blushes when someone else says that she’s a niche internet microcelebrity. Her Twitter avatar used to be that famous self-portrait by Zinaida Serebriakova, which does sort of look like her. She even seems to think you’re funny. Maybe you have a chance with her. Maybe you can be the “wigger boyfriend” she posts about longing for. You have a better chance than the tens of thousands of maladjusted simps in her replies. You’re not like the other crypto bros. You’ve got some cool tattoos. You’re a sensitive bad boy who just gets her. You’re like if Nick Mullen were six feet tall and heterosexual. You got this, king.

Anyway—back at KGB with Gasda and several of the theater kids who act in his plays. The Meg Spectre Spectacular. Our lovely friend Meg. Dressed in her pastel pink coquette dress, she sings a couple song parodies and is then followed by some standup acts. Meg tells us that the show is dedicated to Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who had escaped from Central Park Zoo last year, won the adoration of local-interest journalists, lived freely among the spires of Manhattan, hooted in search of a mate he’d never find, and then died in the courtyard behind Meg’s parents’ apartment in the Upper West Side.

The haute bourgeois co-producer of Meg’s show, Elliot, has his mom here with him tonight, and one of the standup routines involves bringing her on stage. Elliot’s mom tells the story of how she met his late publishing bigshot father who made a career profiting off the industry’s decline, the adulterous workplace affair they had at Simon & Schuster, and how the first time he fucked her was at Jeffrey Epstein’s apartment. He’s even in the notorious black book. Then after the show middle-class Gasda asks me about my dollar estimates of Cassidy’s newfound shitcoin wealth. For Cassidy, tens of thousands, at the moment, at least? Then there are the seasoned crypto bros like Keegan and Mark who actually set up the coin and had more to invest in the first place. Those two are the whales of the project and together they own like 30 percent of the total tokens. They’re up hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million. It could change any minute. And I think I remember Cassidy’s boyfriend Adrian saying that he had sold a Milady NFT and put that into $EGIRL, so he’s also up a lot.

Good for them, Gasda says, but I can tell he’s a little envious. Stupid Cassidy with her stupid fascist parasite shitcoin… all the while Gasda thanklessly toils away, selling Substack subscriptions, selling tickets to his theater… countless hours in the trenches of literature… Sure, maybe he missed an opportunity, but it’s not like there ever really was an opportunity. He was never going to just drop several thousand dollars into his ex’s crypto venture in the first place. But alas, so many problems could’ve been so easily solved had he had the foresight… No, don’t think like that. It’s all insider trading, we needn’t defile our writerly hands with this… Our money, my friend, our destiny will be earned through the honest literary hustle and grind. We have a different sort of cartel, though it’s based on the same self-aggrandizing drive for clout and relevance. But ours will be a just reward for our service to American literature. Proper and tasteful. Our only dishonesty will be in overstating the relevance and allure of this little world so that we can get bigger deals for the books we write about it. Six figures at least, from the start. Easily. That’s what everyone else is getting and they aren’t any better than us…

***

It's a week before $EGIRL blows up and I was tentatively maybe going to get drinks with Gasda but instead I’m hanging out with Cassidy’s gang. We meet up at this photography exhibition gallery opening on Canal Street. Most of the photographs in the exhibition are of familiar scenesters drunk at parties. Some of the photos were taken at fat cokehead bastard Charley’s apartment, including one of Peter Vack sensuously lifting his shirt to expose his abs in the doorway of Charley’s bedroom. When Peter shows up to the gallery Charley tells him that he looks like a rapey substitute teacher, and then they start pretend-fondling each other. Soon Charley and Cassidy and Adrian and I leave the gallery opening and go back to Charley’s apartment a few blocks away and start doing drugs and then a bunch of other people show up, including the other $EGIRL crypto bros, some fashion designers that hang out at Sovereign House sometimes, and the Dutch visitors Tarik and Ruth (Tarik’s lovely girlfriend who vaguely resembles Denise Richards), along with their filmmaker colleague John Pelech. John is their camera guy. For some reason Cassidy is involved in Tarik’s film project. At around midnight we all go into Charley’s bedroom to film a scene featuring Tarik, Ruth, and Cassidy. The three of them sit on Charley’s bed talking some vapid philosophical shit while John films them. Charley keeps going in and out of the room, “these guys are making a porno, they’re making another damn porno on my bed,” and it does look like that’s about to happen. Along the wall on the opposite side of the room are the men observing them, me and Adrian and Keegan and some others, and we’re smoking cigarettes and haphazardly ashing all over the place. I watch the scene from the same perspective as the shot of Peter in the doorway from the gallery opening. Then Tarik gets off the bed and starts directing the shoot from behind John. In the next part, it’s just Cassidy and Ruth on the bed together. Brunette Cassidy is playing Anne Frank and blonde Ruth is playing Eva Braun and they’re supposed to be in the Secret Annex riffing about nothing, saccharine improv flirting. Maybe they’ll start touching each other. In one moment of erotic intensity Tarik’s directing interrupts Ruth, she starts going off on him in Dutch, and he backs off. Then they go on. Tarik starts making knocking noises. “Now, who is that knocking?” Cassidy asks, “Who's knocking at my chamber door?” The knocking continues. “Now could it be the police? They come and take me for a ride-ride…” The rest of us are still lined up along the opposite wall. The room is full of smoke. “Excellent, this is just like a Warhol movie,” Tarik says to me. John films the smoke of a cigarette butt wafting up from an ashtray. Afterwards Tarik and I talk more, and he speaks highly of my writing and says it reminds him of Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. He had been closely observing me while I was observing the filming, and he says that I, too, am a movie camera, but of a more discreet type. Soon we’re all sitting on Charley’s bed, John is no longer filming, and Cassidy’s going on and on about the global elites and how the Jews don’t actually rule the world, but if they did it wouldn’t really matter anyway, she’s ostensibly trying to make some non-antisemitic point that’s getting completely lost in counterfactual coke ramblings about Weltjudentum, and the normally “based” Adrian says that the whole issue doesn’t matter and isn’t very interesting to dwell on, the elites are simply the elites, Jewish or otherwise, and they act in their class interest (Adrian has Colombian-Sephardic ancestry that includes some communist activists, but he also was born on the same day as Hitler and grew up in Staten Island), and Cassidy takes offense for a moment, um actually it’s very interesting to talk about power, “concentrations of power,” and who is he to challenge her, it’s a very relevant and interesting subject, power is highly erotic after all, but soon she quickly forgets her disagreement and the conversation moves on to more practical issues—namely, how to use their scene clout to make the most money possible. Old man Beckett is there and he’s telling them to move their Confessions readings series at Sovereign House from Sunday to Friday nights. (Every other Sunday Cassidy is the host of a party where people read short stories inspired by “confessions” that people submit. Some influencer made a TikTok about it, including it in a list of “fun things to do in New York City,” so random normies have started showing up lately.) They don’t sell tickets for Confessions, but Beckett thinks they should: more readings more parties more tickets more money. Cassidy starts responding to the imagined leftist critics who object to her affiliation with such a rightist space as Sovereign House. Sovereign House is just brick and mortar and a bar with beers and a backed-up toilet and a wall full of books about psyops and conspiracies, and that doesn’t make her regular reading series there right-wing. “Walls don’t have politics,” she repeats several times. Her gang is just a bunch of hedonist aesthetes, after all. She talks about the time a guy was wearing a MAGA hat at one of the Confessions readings, and how Nick Allen told him to take it off, which suggests some hard limit to open right-wing speech there. Reactionary occultism is fun but talk too much about voting for Trump and you’re scaring the hoes. Ironically, it’s also a decision Cassidy disagrees with. “I mean, it’s called Sovereign House, shouldn’t that mean free speech?” Someone says that since Nick is the “sovereign” of the “sovereign house” by virtue of owning the place, his rule is absolute and her liberal preconceptions of constitutional rights are irrelevant. Tarik asks me if I want to go with him and Ruth and John the next day to check out this mutual jerkoff club where they’re planning to look for gooners to interview, and I tell them I’m interested.

To be continued