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"Where do I begin?"

"With the money," he said cryptically, as he pressed my hair down on either side of my face and peered at the both of us in the rab his scissors

"Then the sex," he continued, estures in the empty air

"Then the love," he finished, as he dove toward my head and I nearly fainted

Sheets, torrents, floods of hair began to circulate in the air around ood place to start," Grizzie conceded, obviously gathering herself to erand narrative

"I was not born any of the women you know, Jane Neither Grizzie, nor Dusty I was born Arandmother’s name on led, because of what Grizzie was tellingin a sea ofate relations secretly considered thear Nouveau riche and not all that wealthy After all, the Bathgates put the ‘pure’ in ‘Puritan’ They were at the helm of the Mayflower They supplied the coal that blackened the faces at the Boston Tea Party The ink that signed the Declaration of Independence The lamp oil that lit Paul Revere’s ride"

I knewfor all sorts of shocking things to pop out of Grizzie’s usually shocking hter of the Anored"When Boston society becao in order to start afresh in a city whose social milieu they could hand select They did, and they controlled it with an iron fist until the city grew to a size even they couldn’t control But by then the Bathgates were Chicago, at least behind the scenes"

"How?" I asked simply What I meant was, how had she left? Why had she left? Especially when she’d been born into a fao society and politics that even I, who lived in the farthest corner of the East Coast, had heard of theate wasn’t all it was cracked up to be I was born into a world of pure privilege And total ignorance Don’t get ; I had the best schools, the best tutors, all of that" Grizzie grinned, but the sranted I never questioned the way I was raised--the benefits I enjoyed--versus the way other people lived If I thought about the fact that others had less than I, it was merely as a way to determine whether or not they were present to serve me or play with me ‘Friends’ were people whose mothers and fathers inhabited the same tax bracket asforon Salim’s forehead as he pranced around h the air like corpulent hubirds

"That’s how I lived for the first sixteen years of s up under her so she didn’t trip the whirling dervish currently shearing ht about it at all, that I deserved everything I had and that people who didn’t have everything I did deserved to have less Which is called, what? Classism? And then there’s the racism, sexism, and homophobia Oh, and the hypocrisy My peers found it perfectly acceptable to bugger their poor, black, or Hispanic gay lovers, but God forbid soreed with affirest that rounds deserved access to soave us access"

"So what happened when you were sixteen?" I asked, ut as he leaned overto the back of my head that involved a seriously scary nuirl Which, as you can iine, went down really ith the establishment"

"Ha!" Salim ejaculated, as he whirled my chair around to face Grizzie "Went down!"

Grizzie shot hiirl as also merely middle class I don’t knohich orse in rinned "They banned us fro one another, of course Put me into therapy for ‘inversion,’ since in my parents’ world it’s still the irlfriend and I did what any star-crossed lovers worth their salt do We emptied my bank account, stole a bunch of my e of my seat at this point, partly because I rapped up in Grizzie’s story but also because ed forward as my hair self-consciously atte it I nearly died when Sali up the blow-dryer I blanched as I realized that noas the tiot "cut dry"