everyone there was white

Tonight I went to a book party with L., at the Four Seasons in shitty Midtown. The hors d'oevres were delicious but everyone there was white. The book was about the wacky adventures of an investment bank that recently nearly destroyed the U.S. economy.

There were crab cakes and tuna with caviar dressing on potato chips and caviar by itself in little open pouches of dough. There were white bean crackers and spring rolls and shrimp curled into a defensive crouch. Strips of chicken on wooden sticks. All of the servers were white, too.

There were cheese poppers and roast beef crackers and youngish professionals eyeing each other in mating clothes, a group you could picture dashing from the Mayflower with the maddening scent of American money on their noses, pausing only to populate New England.

The guy who turned on the water for you in the bathroom seemed like he might be olive-skinned, maybe from a country near the Mediterranean. But it was dim in there and he turned out to be white too. A guy from a catty website made sincere pleasant smalltalk. Someone complained: "They've declared war on the rich."

We took the V down to 34th and walked over to Penn. There was an altercation at the Sbarro on the corner of 32nd and 7th. Actually, people had set it on fire. Everybody in the crowd outside the burning restaurant was white, too. Eventually the fire was really raging and the crowd had to back away. Their shadows extended far into the sky, arms waving, hands searching out dim stars.