“Marin 1980”

“To us, fresh from a small bedroom in a Midwest tract house, their living space and lifestyle came straight off the pages of a contemporary magazine aimed at the affluent-young-adult demographic. Their male friends were wealthy property developers and importers of fine Italian footwear for men. The men’s girlfriends were exotic-faced Asian women with burgeoning careers in the photographic arts or full-breasted, post-hippy, Marin-goddess types who somehow managed to position their fatty flesh high up rather than on their waists and hips and lived off trust funds whose oil-baron origins they sought to obscure. This young fashionable set converged in a swank of BMWs, Porsches, and Mercedes roadsters at Perry’s for drinks or at the Washington Square Bar and Grill for dinner.  They scored great seats for the ballet or symphony and appeared at the venues like peacocks and hens, attired in Brioni silk tuxedoes and lacy sleeveless Ungaro gowns.   Young, handsome, sexy and stylish, with folded fifty-dollar bills in their pockets and gold cards in their wallets, they swaggered and wiggled down the streets, inciting jealousy in those slower, older, fatter or poorer souls forced out of the way to let them pass. Drinking single malt scotch or oaky Napa chardonnays, they dined on just-caught salmon or radicchio-and-endive salads; half-drunk, they raced their sports cars across the Golden Gate bridge, made love with indulgence, and sometimes snorted flakey, pure cocaine through the funnels of hundred-dollar bills.”