Free Wake Up Happy Every Day by Stephen May

vintage Dansette and classic 45s. A car with soul where modern cars just have the tinny functionality of an iPod dock.
    And fuck ashtrays. This car has handcrafted spittoons. It also does fewer mpg than your average airliner. A modern limo is an eco-friendly dickless geek using swanky design to cover embarrassment at its very existence. Modern cars – all modern cars, not just limos – have shame as standard. This car, on the other hand, is a living embodiment of an older, better, more sensual, less craven time. Yup. The only thing green and good and wholesome about this car is the driver’s livery.
    Ah yes. The driver.
    Jesus Rodriguez. A twenty-three-year-old Guatemalan business studies grad student earning some extra Yankee dollars driving for the masters of the universe. Jesus is a chauffeur; he wears a chauffeur’s cap but he somehow makes his uniform look like a creation from the fashion avant-garde – he has a catwalk strut. Really we should close the partition between driver and the car’s stateroom and not even glance at him. He’s no one. A random civilian in our new world order. But we are new to wealth. Don’t know the rules. Haven’t begun to speak the elevated body language of the billionaire tribe. We don’t know about the shields and force fields that money can give you.
    We are babes lost in the dark woods of money and looking to kindly strangers for help. And of course, there are no kindly strangers anywhere ever. And certainly not in the woods, as any fairy tale will tell you.
    We should just tell Jesus to shut up and drive, to give us a thousand bucks’ worth of Bay Area trunk road. We should draw the drapes, dim the lights and make out in the back like teenagers. We should rub and fumble, tug and stroke, lick, nibble and suck. I’m being buried in a week or so after all.
    We should set the tone for our new wealth in that way. By properly enjoying the fun anyone can have – rich or poor.
    Instead we leave the itinerary to Jesus. We put ourselves in his hands and let his power move us.
    ‘You English?’ Jesus says.
    ‘Yeah,’ Sarah says.
    ‘My cousin is in England. London. Place called Plumstead. Do you know it? Martina’s her name.’
    ‘Martina from Plumstead, right. I’ll look out for her.’
    ‘She’s hot. I mean I know she’s my cousin and all, but I’m telling you, I wouldn’t mind.’
    ‘Hot Martina from Plumstead,’ I say. ‘Got it. I’m sure our paths will cross one day. Bound to in a tiny place like London, England.’
    And he probably starts hating us right then. And where did it come from that weary sarcasm? The proper rich would never stoop to it. But then, as I say, they wouldn’t ever be suckered into actual small talk with the help.
    We try to row back from it of course. But rowing back from it is actually the worst thing to do. Once you’ve chosen assholery as your route of choice you have to stick with it all the way. You have to stay committed. Retreat looks like weakness. Looks like weakness, because it is weakness.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah says. ‘We’re a bit stressed. An old friend has just died. Very suddenly. No offence.’
    ‘No problem, ma’am.’
    But there is a problem. We just don’t know it yet. And maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference if we had been super-nice to him from the start.
    ‘Just take us to the places the rich, the beautiful and the damned hang out,’ I say.
    He doesn’t even have to think.
    ‘You got it.’
    So it’s Krug in the car, dirty Martinis at Romans in Castro, back through Nob Hill for a 1945 Mouton-Rothschild with dinner at Fleur de Lys. Brazilian chicken for Sarah. Fillet of sea bass for me. Roasted quail with Swiss chard and pine nuts with a red wine and thyme reduction for our driver.
    Then back in the limo for Aberlour scotch while gawking at the trannies on Lower Polk and then, suddenly, somehow, we are in Oakland blinking in the strobes of somewhere called the Starlight disco, watching dead-eyed