The Billionaires in my Hands

my year working for the 0.000001%

It’s mid-November, and I’ve just finished another two months touring with my best friend’s band. Another two months of driving around the country and getting a hefty dose “the real and irregular news of how others around [us] think and feel,” as Eileen Myles once put it. This country of ours is hurtling towards recession, as I’m reminded by the thousands of foreclosed store fronts we pass on the road. One of my closest friends has had their hometown washed away in yet another climate-change induced disaster. Everywhere we go, there are billboards calling out for salvation from a God who must be kinder than this, who must surely hold the salvation of the meek in close hand. I come back to the city I live in, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and am again faced with the financial uncertainty that my on-and-off line of work has presented me with. I’m sitting in my kitchen applying for government assistance when my roommate sends me a cryptic instagram story from a friend of a friend: looking for someone with experience in photography to help with an ongoing project, $30/hr, must be based in NYC, DM for more info.

This is how I find myself sitting on a bright teal couch in the Greenwich village across from a stranger, doing my best to present as put-together and not-queer as possible. I had been reciting my lines as the elevator clicked upwards with every floor, doing my best to stretch my sometimes-hobby of film photography into work experience that would qualify me for whatever I was about to walk into.

We didn’t talk much. The woman across from me had seemingly already decided that she was going to hire whoever could put in the hours. As she swiveled lackadaisically in her office chair, dressed in head to toe athleisure, she only asked me a handful of questions, including “Can you start tomorrow?” She was talking to a person who was financially strapped and prone to doing anything for the bit, so of course she had a willing employee to undertake her unspecified archival project.

I was brought into another room filled with stacks of cardboard boxes, some dated and some not, all with sharpie scrawlings on their sides with an unfamiliar name that would come to fill many of my waking hours and even reverberate in my dreams. I was told that my assignment was to date and categorize all of these boxes of miscellaneous photographs, to memorize the faces and names of the key family members, and to eventually sort them all into a collection of photo albums that the client would keep as a family heirloom. I was given a key to the apartment and told that the residence’s owners wouldn’t often be there, and that this was largely self-directed work. There would be a girl who would drift in and out to help on days that she was able to, and otherwise I would be alone in this room of boxes, and I would write my hours and notes on what I’d done on a piece of paper left on one of the shelves.

Thus began a very odd chapter of my life— watching Youtube videos on alchemy and practicing handstands in this room, chatting with the doormen about the most recent Knicks games, exchanging pleasantries in the elevator with residents who came to recognize me as an anonymous and nondescript fixture, a passing shadow the same as the repairmen who wandered in and out. Occasionally there would be a package left for me at the main desk, sent from places including Florida, Indonesia, and Serbia. In these packages were more photos, sometimes with sticky notes pressed to them, “October 1980?” These sticky notes were never compatible with my meticulous cataloging– I had become more familiar with the timeline of this family’s existence than the people who had actually lived it, in spite of myself and the inconsistency of my efforts.

From the beginning it was clear that this project was an odd one. I began with the earliest photos I could find, which were daguerrotypes from the 1800s. From what I could discern, this was an immigrant family with stories consistent with many around the turn of the century. As I worked my way from the beginnings through the 1970s, I was charmed by the daily lives of these people. I felt the pangs of emotion when I realized that one of my favorite characters stopped appearing in the photos after a certain number of years, knowing that it was the child who’s baptism I had sorted just last week who must have died already and too soon. It was a meditative process, watching the lives of so many strangers pass under my anonymous eyes, often finding myself uttering platitudes common to a family reunion, “they grow up so fast,” “he’s the spitting image of his grandfather.” When I wasn’t using this liminal time to study tarot cards or watch documentaries on various archaeological sites, I oscillated between feeling my environment was a comfortable nest one day and a strange and unorthodox sort of prison the next. Sometimes it felt like a violation– who commissioned this project? Did they even know their most intimate moments were being passed through my hands, that the labor had eventually been contracted out?

There was a layer to this experience that remains irrefutably comedic, which most of my acquaintances remarked upon when I told them about the nature of my newest odd job. I was watching Hole’s 1999 Glastonbury set religiously while casually throwing away stacks of pictures when I got frustrated with the work’s tedium. When I told my friend Brian about the job, he broke into a resounding belly laugh, “Oh, you gotta milk that shit! Do they have a printer?” Most of my days were spent trying to entertain myself and commit as much wage theft as possible.

I wasn’t ignorant to the fact that I was in a practically unused apartment in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, it was obvious these people had a substantial amount of money. Enough that they could hire a small team to undertake this passion project, but then again, I figured there were plenty of folks in New York City who had tons of money and nothing to do with it. Afterall, I hadn’t signed an NDA or anything that would have indicated to me that this project was somehow meant to be treated with a certain level of discretion. Afterall, they sent me, or at least this address, flash drives with their entire downloaded iPhone photo libraries. But then it became undeniable– photos of private jets and private islands and celebrity entourages and MET Gala attendances and regular White House visitations. That’s when I googled the name that had been scrawled on the boxes for all that time, and realized I had been given access to the complete photographic archives of one of America’s wealthiest families, with an estimated net worth of 25 billion dollars.

To be clear, I will never meet these people— I don’t think they realize I exist. I was one of what I can only assume are hundreds of employees indirectly bankrolled by their unimaginable financial reserves. I often sit back and try to do the math— one million dollars, multiply that by one hundred, do that ten times, step back and look at the resulting abstraction of one thousand millions, and then do that twenty five more times. And that’s what Forbes estimates, likely a conservative number that doesn’t take into account the various unknown investments and assets I’m sure there must be. Twenty five billion. There’s a certain amount of dissociation that’s requisite to being in proximity to those numbers. Numbers that don’t even feel real, that make my head feel dense with implications the second I start to consider them.