Bro’s and Ho’s
I was at my local coffeehouse today and a woman came who turned a lot of heads. She was young, very tan, with one of those spectacularly unrealistic Barbie bodies. Her face was a bit worn from sun and partying. She was on the arm of a spiky-haired and also very tan guy in his 30s who exuded money and oily charm. He had on one of those longish “club shirts” and expensive-looking shoes, and was dangling a BMW key chain.
In short, they were a “bro” and a “ho”.
There are a lot of these people in my part of Orange County, California. The subprime mortgage industry, as it feeds off the desperation of strapped hicks all over the country, has created a lot of high-wage jobs for business school graduates with connections. For some reason a particular kind of person flourishes in this environment. The men are simultaneously degenerate and athletic, and spend money with abandon. The women are simultaneously degenerate and athletic, and are sexually available without much trouble. The result is a seaside Las Vegas dream of wealth, sex, and endless leisure that can be neatly summed up in the use of “party” as a verb.
As long as interest rates are low and the nation’s struggling classes are refinancing their mortgages for extra cash, this predatory class of surfer bankers can pull in very good money, as much as $30,000 to $60,000 a month in some cases. They’re almost all male, and they and their girlfriends share a set of values in which paying for sex is not a problem as long as the fees are high enough to make it look like the high life instead of a prostitution racket. Strip clubs, beach house weekends, Lake Havasu houseboat parties, and hot tub group sex fill their time.
The gods of these modern Beau Brummels are P. Diddy, Dennis Rodman, Kid Rock, and the rest of the MTV “bling bling” crew. Floating on a raft of money, eternally youthful, they ride in their Escalades from party to party, accompanied by a series of anonymous young women with spectacular bodies. Every bro has his ho, everything is for sale, and the cocaine and Dom Perignon can flow all night as long as everyone can show up to work the next day and screw a few more rural homeowners out of a few more points on the re-fi.
There’s another group of people I see at this coffeehouse regularly. On Thursday and Saturday nights, a similar group of sunburnt, slightly aging Hawaiian shirt-wearing men and leathery but curvaceous women shows up. They cluster outside the door of the coffeehouse drinking root beer and smoking. There’s lots of hugging and high-fiving. These are the local 12-step groups for drug and alcohol addicts. At some point, someone lost control of the BMW after a long night of Veuve-Clicquot, or stopped showing up at the mortgage office, or woke up covered in his own blood, and the party ended. Whether the judge told them to go or the doctor did, here they are.
And inevitably, interest rates will rise again, the money will move, and the easy money will leave the subprime mortgage business. A lot of those $30,000 a month jobs for well-connected partiers will vanish, as will the leased supercars and the beach houses. I hope the bro’s and their ho’s have a plan for that day, or we’ll be seeing a lot more of them on Thursdays and Saturdays.
October 12th, 2003 at 8:26 pm
The problem is that we still let logic make decisions for us, even though our emotions are telling us otherwise. Our existence has come to be ruled by logical, rational decision makers, by business models and accountants with
no room for emotion. Keep your seat in your local coffeehouse.