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About this episode

http://timbarrus.tumblr.comTim Barrus: Off the MapPeople ask me where I'm from.

 "Bone Island Canyon," I tell them. Normal people frown and walk away. I shrug.

Bone Island Canyon's location is a secret. We all grow marijuana there.

Several years ago, I was sitting in a European cafe getting ripped to my tits with a group of my friends.

 Our little group of misfits is so far off the map, we fell to the bottom of Bone Island Canyon where we live to this very day.

 None of us have jobs. Real jobs. You know, slave jobs.

I have a job but it's a job I made up (I keep changing the job description) so it doesn't count.

 The fundamental difference between myself and the rest of the misfits is that they are what we call trustfunders and I am a hanger-on of trustfunders.

Trustfunders can be very bright people. Often, they're very bright (if troubled) people who are seriously aversive to work. I wish I could join their little clique of privilege, but I lack one basic requirement -- the trust fund.

I do not know how it is that so many trustfunders end up being so anti-status-quo. You can find little groups of them in places like Santa Fe, Taos, Paris, Aspen, Key West, Maui, Humboltd County, Amsterdam, Cape Town, the South of France, Big Sur, Portofino, and Tangiers.

 Trustfunders have great drugs, make a lot of art, and have never worked a day in their lives.

Some of them arrive wet behind the ears and new to Trustfundland from private collages with a fair amount of guilt at being rich enough to do nothing which is a term they chafe at.It gives them a rash.

"I do not DO NOTHING," my friend, Regine maintains, "I travel the world."

Regine has been traveling the world for some time now. She's the trustfunder who formed our little group. We are all friends of Regine (FOR) and we tend to meet in places where we can sit in cafes and smoke dope and solve the problems of the universe.

We do good deeds. Most of which involve a fair amount of plotting.

None of our good deeds are cheap.

Trustfunders love to plot against the system which is why I love them. That and they give me money.

FOR consists of eleven trustfunders and one wanna-be trustfunder (moi).

Regine had a friend who had a friend who was sleeping with a friend who knew one of her friends whose family was caught up in the jaws of a bitter dispute involving lawyers, the mafia, the city of Beverly Hills, and a court in South Africa which had jurisdiction over a diamond mine. Most trustfunder family entanglements are so entangled that to ask the trustfunder to please explain is like asking a physicist to explain the big bang in detail. Trustfunder family disputes are a way of life among trustfunders. They will swear to you they are traveling the world because they are nomadic souls (who from time to time check into the Ritz for a month or two), but the truth is that many trustfunders travel the world to escape the messes their families make and often live in.

"You'll love Georges," Regine assured me. "He won't be a problem."

This is a huge red flag. Never trust a trustfunder.Georges' family was embroiled in a real mess. Usually these people, who are like people everywhere, fight over money. Sometimes there are peripheral disputes to the fighting over money. Like custody.

 Then there are issues like who is sleeping with who. Trustfunders have this unseemly habit of only sleeping with other trustfunders.

Georges was a fourteen-year-old whose father and grandfather (the father's father) were fighting over money, a diamond mine, the city of Beverly Hills (or rather a mansion in it), and Georges.

Georges came to me with money. Most groups of people, most subcultures, protect their own.

It seems there was a very basic disagreement about how to raise Georges. 

These feuds can go on for decades. What does this mean. It means Georges was raising himself.

Georges' mother's body (trustfunders have Big Girl dramas in their lives) had been found in a bathtub in a suite in the Four Seasons, Paris, where she had consumed several bottles of pills and several bottles of champagne. Accidental overdose. Trustfunder families often have a real dislike of the truth. The truth is usually a disease. One of many.

There's a backstory here where Georges had been infected with HIV from a blood transfusion in some strange foreign country (trustfunder fictions often make no sense whatsoever). There was no sane explanation as to why he had been in this strange country (trustfunders never question this because they're always in some strange foreign country) or as to why he had contracted HIV twenty years after no one but Romanians were being infected with HIV from blood transfusions.

I just nod.

 Whatever.

If you probe too much or too hard, a trustfunder will just go blank. They blame the dope.

I suspected that Georges was probably just another little whore. I was right. HIV is just not all that difficult to get infected with anywhere in Africa. Especially when you try hard enough.

But to bring this subject up with trustfunders is to invite very long and very grim discussions about the nature of their sexuality, their lack of committed relationships, their ambivalence toward life, prostitution in general, drugs, and trustfunders often have no idea what they're talking about which leads to Nowhereville which is a village with banks and cafes and masseuses in Trustfunderland.

Trustfunders like countries where the maids are cheap.

Apparently, the appearance of HIV in Georges' family was cause for some shame and scandal.

 I do not know why. I do not care to know why. Knowing why is more often than not a great way to not only reinvent the wheel, but to spin a few in a great muck somewhere you will be stuck in for some time. I have neither the time nor the inclination. WHY will get you exactly nowhere.

Regine was now sleeping with Tyne who was a dyke from the Upper West Side of New York whose family owned a diamond mine in South Africa who now lived in a quaint bungalow in Morocco. Between the two of them they could have bought Morocco.

In order to get me to take in a kid who I really don't want to take in you need to get me three things. 1.) Really ripped. 2.) A guarantee the family will not interfere no matter what. 3.) A lot of money.

I didn't have a take on why Regine was so invested. Rich little boys are a dime a dozen. Maybe she was fucking him.

I was pretty sure Regine was related to someone who was related to someone who knew someone who was sleeping with someone who had been in recovery with someone who lived next door to Tyne who had been sleeping with the father or maybe even both the father and the grandfather who owned a railroad somewhere.

I was right on all of this except for the railroad which was a bank. The diamond mine is ephemeral. Stupid me.

"He's a photographer who takes pictures with that stupid camera he always has around his neck," Tyne informs me.

I nod a lot when I'm ripped sitting in some cafe with the lesbian trustfunders.

I'm thinking: that camera is probably the only thing he has that keeps people from getting too close.

 "I have to meet him before I can agree to do this."

Everyone nods.

The misfits are more ripped than I am.

They're always taking classes but don't ask me where.

Tyne had been a model for about a week and had posed for Interview magazine. At the end of the week, she was addicted to cocaine and had to be thrown into Betty Ford where she met Regine who was studying film in Palm Springs.

 Yes. At Betty Ford.

 Don't ask.

 Why did this take nine other trustfunders, some of whom had travelled ten thousand miles to this very cafe.

Easy. Money.

They all knew Georges. A couple of them have HIV themselves. Bone Island Canyon is what it is. There are solutions to most problems. One solution is to just throw money at whatever the problem is.

 "I will need a minimum of a year of his tuition and fees up front and in advance," I explained.We have a sliding tuition scale. The rich pay and pay. The poor (like me) just suck it up.

I can't imagine the guilt these people would feel if it weren't for people like me.

 They always want to write checks. I only take cash. There were banks galore all around the plaza we were sitting to the side of. Regine and I stayed at the cafe while everyone else crawled off to various banks who knew all of them.

They would "help" Georges. Apparently, the sight of him was pathetic, and in time he'd be one of their group. FOR just keeps growing and growing.

"So I assume you've stashed him somewhere, I said."

"The father doesn't want the grandfather to get the grandfather's hands on the boy."

This is code for: Georges would be the grandfather's chance to make Georges' father eat shit.

"And you can hide him."

This sort of abrogated my noninterference policy.

But I was raking in a lot of money on this one. Whore that I am.

It's really not all that hard to hide a kid if you can afford to do it. Like many things in life, it just takes money.

I didn't think I would like him much. Rich brats can be really arrogant.

I met the kid in a hotel Regine had him stashed in. They changed hotel rooms daily. 

Blond pretty boy. Speaks four languages.

They were all going to want to fuck him.

"If you disclose your location, I'll just send you back to your grandfather," I explained. 

He nods.

I look out the window at the ocean which is as green as Georges' eyes. "We travel a lot."

"I speak Japanese."

 I believed it.Trustfunder in training.

The father was going to have to sign him off to me. He did.

Getting rid of the kid solved the problem.

 The father and the grandfather reconciled. They usually do. The diamond mine continues to be productive.

What HIV.

Georges is sixteen now. Everyone he knows falls in love with him.

Neither the father or the grandfather really care where he is.

Yet I am very secretive about exactly where Georges can be found. Old disputes often flare up again. No one trusts anyone.

The grandfather married Regine who now lives in Capetown. 

I thought FOR might be disbanded but it's still going strong as ever. What do I know. How does a lesbian become a trophy wife.

 And people wonder why the rich are different. The rich are fucked up.

Last week, I received an email from Regine. "I've been contacted by some guy who calls himself a journalist," she wrote.My eyes to the sky."Which means he's freelancing. He wants an interview because he's writing a story about you, Tim. He wants to know if the boys are real. I am refusing to speak to him."

In the final analysis, trustfunders only trust themselves. And me. As for me, I trust that any journalist who wants to find me is quite capable of fucking me in the ass and more than happy to print any conglomeration of lies he has been told by the conglomerations out there who would enjoy the charade of seeing me squirm.

 I only squirm hard if you're fucking me hard. I have yet to find a way to keep their cocks out of my asshole but I haven't given up on that particular quest.

FOR is meeting around the first of the year in Amsterdam. Our annual misfits conference. I'm taking Georges and we'll all get ripped in some cafe.

He has hundreds of thousands of photographs. Collectively they are telling a story about loneliness and fatigue.

 He has never been a problem. He's a loner and keeps people away. Who can blame him. The kid has knocked around the planet all his life.

Last year, he had a real battle changing HIV meds. But his old ones weren't working anymore.

 People wonder how we are able to lie about the HIV so much.

"Do you have a communicable disease."

"No."

It does intrigue me how kids like Georges will carve a place for themselves.

He's a friendly kid, but he's always set apart, and he can be surprisingly formal with you if he feels unsure, although he does from time to time display moments of camaraderie. In a very weird way (I have never seen this in a kid before) he's never settled on which language he wants to primarily speak.

What does this mean. It means he has no home.

People are always asking him where he's from. Sometimes he tells them South Africa. Other times he tells them Bone Island Canyon. Normal people frown and walk away. Boys his age just high-five Georges and call him Dude.

I might help him with that.The kid needs a place where he can simply be. A little removed. A little lonely. A little life. Among the minions.

"I'm impotent," he tells me. I nod. I lie and tell him it's okay.

His Japanese is flawless. His hubris is affected. If left to his own devices, the kid would crawl into a hole and disappear. We share one Big Thing and even like to do it together. We love to get lost inside a moving crowd.There's an island in the Pacific where he would fit right in. -- Tim Barrus

• Release Date

  Sep 14, 2009

• Runtime

  01:11