T A B L E_.T A L K

Pulling the plug on the Greaseman. Discuss how much shock a jock can get away with in the Media area of Table Talk.

------------. . . . B i l l  l e t t r e $ . . . .
WRITE ABOUT SCREWING YOUR FATHER? HO-HUM. ADMIT A YOUTHFUL MURDER? BEEN THERE, DONE THAT. BUT CONFESS IN PRINT HOW MUCH MONEY YOU MAKE, AND ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

If one judges literature by the intensity of the hate mail it generates, Vince Passaro has had a whup-ass year. His August 1998 essay in Harper's generated pages on pages of angry letters in the November issue. It generated letters in response to the letters. The current Harper's (March) features three letters in response to the letters in response to the letters, in one of which a writer of one of the original round of letters compares herself to "a surgeon, [who] must ... make an aggressive cut and cause pain" to excise the vile tumor of Passaro's prose.

Passaro's offense? He bravely and perhaps naively decided to open up his wallet to the readers -- specifically, to write an essay about his inability to live within a $100,000 household income. In "Who'll Stop the Drain?" Passaro (a past Salon contributor) tells how he and his wife racked up $63,000 in debt to credit cards, friends and relatives despite two jobs, freelance proceeds and a heaven-sent $900 rent deal on a Manhattan apartment. "This is not a story about conspicuous consumption," Passaro opens, contending that he leads a fairly frugal life -- with the major exception of $36,250 in educational expenses to keep his three kids out of New York's public schools. He details at length his debts, his run-ins with collectors and his longtime casual, Catholic-influenced attitude toward money (he burned a $100 pile of cash in his college dorm in an argument about the "inherent value" of money).

A half year later, Passaro -- who by day is director of communications at Adelphi University -- still seems puzzled that anybody would think his admission was such a big deal. A Harper's contributing editor who usually writes deep literary review essays, he expected the typical response -- 10 letters or so, half positive, half negative. He got a vicious torrent. He was "untrustworthy at best and offensive at worst." "A free-spending baby boomer with a staggering sense of entitlement." "A complete idiot." The essay generated snippy comments in the press and God knows how much Schadenfreudesprache in New York's ever-bitter journalism circles. He even became a traveling fiscal curiosity, interviewed on Public Radio International's "Marketplace" and brought on "Nightline" Dec. 29 "as the national poster child for the overspent American." (Not all the attention was negative, mind you: Two concerned readers sent Passaro $50 and $100 checks, which -- after repeated attempts to return to the insistent contributors -- he cashed.)

"People are hysterical about the subject of money," Passaro says. In particular, he argues, his piece touched off class sentiments that Americans feel passionately yet refuse to recognize: "You're not supposed to approve of class distinctions, nor are you supposed to aspire to a class above your own, nor are you supposed to even acknowledge the idea of class." The article, suggests Harper's deputy editor Colin Harrison, violated taboos -- you don't reveal your finances and you don't run up debt without showing appropriate guilt. "The typical way to write about debt is to pile up a bunch of numbers and have a raised eyebrow and shaking finger and wrap the whole thing in kind of a Puritan sermon. The power of the piece is ... that he's willing not to be cowed by the question of debt."

That it came from a guy getting a hundred large a year, of course, hardly helped. "I took pains not to complain," Passaro says. "I was saying, 'Here's my life. How's yours?'" This message apparently translated widely, though, as "I make more money than you do. And yet, for the sake of my children, I really should have even more" (a common refrain, by the way, to any resident of a white-collar urban nesting neighborhood). By most people's measure, announcing you're $63,000 in the hole is complaining. And though he tries to tie his woes to a larger middle-class crisis ("there is a big problem out there, and not just with the Passaros"), Passaro -- an atypical earner in a city with atypical economics -- is not that representative. But he was probably painting a bull's-eye on himself regardless, simply by writing about his own finances.

N E X T_ P A G E | Tell us how much you make, so we can despise you