The fate of the friendless

by David Benjamin

“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” — Muhammad Ali

MADISON, Wis.—According to journalist Michael Wolff, sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein boasted that he was, for a period of ten years, Donald Trump’s “closest friend.”

He was lying.

In all his life, Jeffrey Epstein never had an actual friend. Like Trump, he was incapable of friendship. Proof of this desolation came after he died, squalidly, in a prison cell. No one came to Epstein’s funeral. Friends go to funerals. They mourn the people they love. Nobody loved Epstein.

Likewise, no one has ever chosen to love Donald Trump, nor will anyone ever do so. Oh yes, he’s worshipped, by folks who’ve never met him, whom he keeps safely at a distant remove. Unlike Epstein, there will be people—throngs and queues—at Trump’s funeral. Most will be drawn to his bier by obligation, delusion or morbid curiosity. If I go, it will be to make sure he’s dead.

While he’s still among us, however, he’s surrounded by acolytes and enablers whom he breezily refers to as friends, The same mirage was true of Epstein, who accumulated an astounding circle of cronies, celebrities, admirers and mendicants—every one eager to curry his oily favor and overlook his monstrosity.

The appeal of such unappealing specimens as Epstein and Trump begs a question. How does a guy so manifestly repulsive assemble a legion of hangers-on whose fealty is profoundly incongruous and—almost inevitably—self destructive?

I had the answer when I was twelve years old. My experience with this Epstein-Trump syndrome was my acquaintance with fellow pupil at St. Mary’s School who ended up as a character, called Fat Vinny, in two of my books.

The real-life Fat Vinny was by several orders of magnitude the most loathsome kid in town and, quite possibly, the most disgusting minor in the history of Tomah, Wisconsin. In my novel, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, I described Vinny with as much restraint as my memory would permit.

“The first time you saw Fat Vinny, you wondered who’d let this middle-aged degenerate into the building to mingle with first-grade tots and eight-year-old virgins. Vinny wasn’t fat from being too short for his weight (he stood six feet tall by eighth grade), or from his parents’ genes (his father was a mystery, his mother a stork-shaped spook), or from too many potato chips in front of Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob. Vinny’s fat was urban and somehow ill-gotten. Vinny’s fat was frightening. Vinny was fat like Sydney Greenstreet, slope-shouldered and sagging, droopy-eyed and jowly, wanton and self-indulgent. Moisture oozed from somewhere inside him, imparting a dull sheen to his skin.”

Fat Vinny was so universally despised that other kids were prone gather spontaneously in his vicinity and break into a mob, cursing and reviling him until in their mounting frenzy, they would attack him with sticks and stones. Once, while walking home from school with Fat Vinny, I stopped to watch a few minutes of a baseball game at the Miller School playground. Some kid I didn’t know was pitching to another kid I didn’t know. The pitcher looked our way.

“Shit,” he announced suddenly to every kid on both teams, who reacted by looking our way, “it’s that ugly tub of shit Fat Vinny.”

The pitcher bent over, found a large smooth rock at his feet, straightened and flung the rock. It missed Fat Vinny, but not by much. The kid had a good arm. The rock hit me in the forehead, staggering me backward and almost rendering me unconscious. I hadn’t ducked because I didn’t expect such violence to explode from so normal a scene. Indeed, normalcy resumed immediately. The pitcher, having cast his stone, returned to the game. None of the players on the field paid us any more notice. I walked home dizzy, with an enormous lump on my face.

But what was I doing, hanging around with Fat Vinny?

This is complicated. Other kids hated Vinny for many reasons but mostly because he was rich. But there was the paradox. Because he had more money than all the other kids at St. Mary’s School rolled together, some worked for him. He hired kids as bodyguards, to protect him from the revulsion and jealously of his grade-school peers.

I chose not to hate Vinny, or envy his wealth. Recognizing his friendless isolation—and identifying with it—I took pity, approached him one day in the Red Owl store, expressed my empathy. This seemed like the right thing to do because, at the time, I was a literal interpreter of Jesus’ example. In my misty, water-colored vision of Christlike benevolence, Vinny appeared before me as a sort of leper in need of healing love. He was the sinners and tax collectors disdained by the Pharisees. He was a morbidly obese drag-queen version of Mary Magdalene.

Vinny, of course, could spot a sucker from a thousand yards. He glommed onto me and inveigled me into the pattern of deceit, greed, connivance and petty crime that was destined to become his life’s work. Vinny had cornered the market in downtown Tomah on shoveling snow from storefronts and delivering flyers for the grocery, hardware, clothing and notions stores all up and down Superior Avenue. The trick was that he didn’t do much of the shoveling or delivering. He subcontracted the heavy lifting to gullible kids who hated Vinny but were eager to glean a quarter from him for a job that had earned him five bucks.

And then, usually, he stiffed the kid for the quarter.

Vinny was vulgar, violent and bereft of a moral compass. The only flicker of affection I ever saw in Vinny was an intimate moment at home, as he caressed a .38-caliber revolver. He was both poles of a magnet, repulsive on one end but attractive on the end where he carried, flashed and flaunted his ill-gotten treasure.

After a few months in Vinny’s orbit, dancing to his tune for a pittance of his wealth, I had him figured out. I had posed to him the possibility of friendship. But I saw that Vinny’s predatory, zero-sum psyche allowed no conception of a relationship in which the least relevant element was “what’s in it for me.” I posed for Vinny the prospect of a selfless bond that would last a lifetime. But he could perceive in it no grift for him.

Vinny, before any other kid in town, learned how to leverage “the art of the deal.” But it was clear for me, observing Vinny’s inch-deep charm and casual backstabbing that his dealing was not an art but a pathology. Buying and selling, cheating and stealing, lying and trickery were the limits of his ethos. Every human contact was a transaction, and he had to—had to—win every deal.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art … It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Vinny would have had no idea what Lewis was getting at.

So, I got away from Vinny, somewhat after the fashion that Donald Trump got away from Jeffrey Epstein, and how a lot of erstwhile “friends”—like Michael Cohen, Mike Pence and two ex-wives—got away from Trump.

Even when Fat Vinny lost, he could not lose. He simply denied there had ever been a deal. Vinny had groomed me as his acolyte. But when I wearied of him, he tried to neither lure me back or wreak retribution. I simply ceased to exist.

In that sense, Vinny was a better dealmaker than Trump. He had no romance with himself. He entertained no illusion that the kids he had bought were pals. He knew that friendship carries a price he could not afford. Fat Vinny might have bandied the word, “friend,” but he was too wise, unlike Epstein and Trump, to believe that anyone on earth who actually got to know him would—without being paid for it—trust him.