same as Sunday on the radio. I’m trying to rid myself of the delusion that either type belongs to me. The sense of something is not its substance. It isn’t love, trying to make two things interchangeable, when they are not. In Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich describes sin as “behovely,” which translates as “advantageous,” even “expedient.” “It is no shame to them that they have sinned,” she wrote, “any more than it is in the bliss of heaven, for there, the badge of their sin is changed into glory.” But then, at the end of the book, she warns the reader that her work “must not remain with anyone that is in thrall to sin and the devil. And beware that you do not take one thing according to your taste and fancy and leave another, for that is what heretics do.”
In the fall of 2000, DJ Screw was found dead, fully dressed, on the bathroom floor at his studio. He was twenty-nine. He had an ice-cream wrapper in his hand. In the autopsy, coroners found that his body was full of codeine; his blood flowed with Valium and PCP. His heart was engorged, enormous. At his funeral in Smithville, writes Michael Hall in Texas Monthly, the old folks sang gospel and the rappers nodded quietly along with the hymns. People lined up outside the church the way they’d done outside Screw’s house to pick up their tapes, mourning the man the way they had always gotten his music—that sound he’d created that approximated the feel of a drug binge, no matter what Screw told reporters; the sound that mimicked the flow of all these substances, darkening the wide, anonymous, looping highways, a secret and sublime desecration that seeped through the heart and the veins of a city, that set the pace and the rhythm of its people slipping past one another in their cars.
The year of Screw’s death, I got on a bus and drove east toward Alabama with a thousand other kids. On a middle-of-nowhere beach, we participated in mass baptisms, put our hands up in huge services where everyone cried in the darkness. We groped one another on the bus afterward and talked all day about being saved. Later on, it was one of the boys from that trip who chopped lines on my friend’s kitchen table as I waded through her pool, drunk on sweet syrup, staring at the stars. There are some institutions—drugs, church, and money—that aligned the superstructure of white wealth in Houston with the heart of black and brown culture beneath it. There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold on to it, to remember certain overpasses, sudden angles above and under the cold and heartless curves of that industrial landscape, a slow river of lights blinking white and red into the distance, and the debauched sky gleaming over the houses and hospitals and stadium churches, and your blood thrumming with drugs or music or sanctity. It can all feel like a mirage of wholeness: the ten thousand square miles around you teeming with millions of people who do the same things, drive under the same influences, respect the same Sundays, with the music that sounds like their version of religion. “Our life is impossibility, absurdity,” wrote Simone Weil. “Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than God.”
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
Billy McFarland started scamming at the age of twenty-two. Born in 1991, to parents who were real estate developers, he spent nine months at Bucknell before getting accepted to a startup accelerator and then dropping out to found a nonsense company called Spling. (Crunchbase describes it as a “tech-driven ad platform helping brands increase media engagement and marketing revenue by optimizing their content presentation.” This was 2011, when it was still possible to say that sort of thing straight-faced; it was the year that Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist and Facebook founding board member who once wrote that women’s suffrage had compromised democracy, started offering $100,000 fellowships to dropout entrepreneurs.) In 2013, McFarland founded Magnises, a company that charged upwardly mobile millennials a suspiciously modest $250 a year for VIP event tickets and access to a clubhouse. Magnises gave members a “signature” black card, which duplicated the magnetic strip of an existing credit