NEVER get too proud, son, to share water with a plant

21. Shopping in a “discount” clothes warehouse across the street from the World Trade Center with two Brazilian twins calling themselves Faster and Harder, finding, on the disheveled racks, traffic cone-orange Italian T-shirts reduced from $199.95 to $129.95, razor-frayed French jeans slashed from $499.99 to $279.99, Turkish army sweaters discounted from $1999.95 to $1299.95. Realizing, though I’d grown up in Jay Gatsby’s back yard, that I’d entered some new stratum, that money in this New York was incidental and arbitrary, that exchange value was here usurped by some mysterious symbolic value whose terms could be known only to a seraphic few whose bodily functions only superficially resemble yours and mine.