Metabolizing Child Boss

a conversation between Andrew Felsher and Nicole Maloof

Nicole Maloof: With each new reading of Child Boss, I get pulled into the simplicity of its structure. It allows a lot of breathing room for different themes (desire, power, masculinity, labor, capital, debt, etc.) to emerge and reveal their relationships to one another. I think the reason the themes come together so well is that the narrative is told from a child's point of view. It makes me think about how observant children are. I live with two children, and I watch them observe the world around them and then play it out, just like your protagonist, Andrew. Can you talk more about why you chose this point of view?

Andrew Felsher: Child Boss began with my thinking through the inherent antagonistic relationship between workers and bosses under late-stage capitalism. I wanted to break this relationship open, de-familiarize and reconfigure certain associations and dynamics. Having a child worker felt like a good starting point. And what’s an even more antagonistic dynamic than a child worker subordinate to an adult? A child who wants to work and throws himself into precarious work on the weekends for adults and that work involves willfully serving the leisure of the upper class. That’s exponentially more antagonistic, anti-human, and violent. To realize this vision, I decided to place it at a private golf course. The job was caddying.

I don't view the young boy, Andrew, at the center of Child Boss necessarily as the protagonist even though I share his name and the terrains of his boyhood. Instead, I was re-engaging with this formative period of my life. It was an attempt to locate an aspect of my being that has not been completely infiltrated by capital. Basketball surfaced. It has been a love of mine for more than two decades and yet I don’t expect to gain any social or economic power by playing, nor does basketball cover my rent, and I don’t eat and convert basketballs into energy so that I can function in this world as a worker, lover, friend, writer, editor, and so on. The book deliberately opens with the simple lines, “By eleven, I wanted to ball. I wanted to ball badly.” Many children of the 1990s and early 2000s wanted to be ballers like me and were under the spell of Michael Jordan’s global stardom. Placing this common desire at the outset was also a way of isolating the boy’s desire to ball and testing it through a progression of different themes and encounters, until it gets pushed toward its logical endpoint.

NM: In “Desire,” the opening chapter, Andrew shares with the reader what he has become accustomed to and processes what it means to be a caddy and a worker. He observes: “Caddies were forbidden from entering the clubhouse, just like my grandfather forbade his dogs from entering the kitchen while he cooked fish.” That's a really effective way of talking about power relations and who has control over what. That comparison helps take something that feels so normalized—kind of a boss-like figure telling an underling to do or not do something—and then, when you compare it to a human and a dog, the brutality of it gets conjured.

AF: I often weaponize many of these associative transplants. I like to displace something familiar (not allowing a dog to have access to human food) and force it into, and estrange, the troubling logic of another normalized place (being a worker). It can demonstrate and evoke, as you suggested, an imbalance of power or contradiction. Here, it’s a way of witnessing the contours of the boy’s pain, agency, the precarity of his job, and some of the ways he becomes humiliated.

The boy is observing the world and in the early stages of understanding his structural position. He’s situating himself. It can be viewed as a coping mechanism too. Regardless, a class consciousness is naturally born. The critique becomes increasingly embodied. It's not coming from a wise, polyphonic, and intellectual voice wielding their facility in critical theoretical studies. I’m interested in witnessing how the boy responds to what he learns, inviting the reader into this space to engage with me. I’m experimenting with the boy and the flows in and out of his world, documenting how he translates his knowledge from labor and its pain and from his home. This kind of narrative needs to feel easy and natural with a smooth logical progression. At any point if it feels like I'm jamming a theoretical textbook down the throats of my characters or future readers, then I’m failing as the writer of this kind of book. I’m failing to recognize the reality of this boy and the possibilities orbiting his context.

NM: You also set up these pairs of opposites throughout the book: adult and child, public and private, and golf versus basketball, which in terms of accessibility occupy totally different ends of the spectrum. This extends to his idea of agency of what he can control and all of the things that he can't control. Then there’s him trying to control people. He actually wants to gain control of these really complicated social processes and yet he can't even control the athlete's foot he has, which is this tiny little microbe, right? It just plagues him throughout the book. It's unstoppable.

AF: What’s really unstoppable is the implications and damage of working on the weekends at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. In one section, Andrew has spent the entire weekend working and doesn’t have enough time to study for an exam. The fungus (caused by the dampness of the golf course) on his feet has spread up his ankles and to his hands. It’s colonizing his flesh. The itchiness is overbearing. He's at school and because he didn't have time to study over the weekend, he plans to cheat on an exam. Even though he actually doesn’t cheat and merely finishes early to scratch his concealed, embarrassing hands, the teacher accuses him of cheating. Here, I was very interested in demonstrating that his body has become guilty–a body that is a repository for his class position. His class position, and the work involved there, manufactures the guilty body.

NM: When observing Andrew, I kept thinking of Kurt Vonnegut's ice-nine from Cat's Cradle. It’s a deviant structure of water that turns solid at room temperature. When it comes into contact with normal liquid water, the liquid water changes into ice-nine, creating a disastrous effect on Earth. It makes me think about how all it takes is contact with certain kinds of social relations for them to immediately get reproduced. Andrew is repeatedly processing his world and trying things out. For instance, he observes how the golfers get more serious about golf when money's involved, so he decides to apply that to a pickup basketball tournament he organizes among his friends because he’s disappointed in them for not playing hard and taking the game seriously. Then through applying this “theory,” Andrew realizes that money does make people take things more seriously. He learns through experimentation.

AF: Throughout the book, I purposefully set up various encounters (experiments) where he is playing with what he has taken in and metabolized. He's trying to harness the small power he has. When he organizes a basketball tournament to play for money amongst his friends, Andrew is not only disappointed in his friends and trying to entice them to play harder but he is convinced that he is not like them. He doesn’t need money to play hard. There’s a critical simultaneity there. 

NM: It's more fun if his friends try harder.

AF: To this day, I still want all my friends to play hard if they’re on the court with me. The book just problematizes the familiarity of this fun and the damaging implications.

NM: In the same scene, he also discovers that he can control his friends and how they play through the use of debt.

AF: The experiment here was to introduce a friend with no money who wants to play. I also added another condition: Andrew doesn’t like the way this friend plays. How does Andrew respond? He recruits the friend to join his team and covers his portion, figuring if the friend owes money, then he might play in a more ideal manner.  What’s more, the friend offers to pay him back $6 instead of $5, which is just how banks and lending institutions operate and punish the poor and marginalized people while also controlling their behavior in certain ways. A lot of the thinking behind shaping this scene was very much in conversation with some critical theoretical work by Jackie Wang in Carceral Capitalism and Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man.

The boy is realizing firsthand the power, effectiveness, and devastation of financial capitalism’s weapons. Again, he thinks he’s resisting the physics of money and capital but he is actually using money to control others and their behavior, thereby reproducing a brutal and anti-human system.

NM: He learns so much through these moments. Explicit theoretical references are not needed. You just watch the child in real time learn from the world around him and come to certain conclusions, and then try it in his world, the kid version, which brings parallel consequences to the adult world. That contact and the impulse to learn demonstrate how children are just little learning machines.  That's what makes it feel so natural and familiar for me. Watching the kid helps us look at and engage with the real structure that we experience. It allows the reader to think about these things that we take for granted, these things that we witness in our daily lives as adults. And then seeing it reproduced in a child helps you realize just how awful it really is.

AF: In arranging this narrative, it was important for me to probe how the boy reproduces these forces. Again and again, I asked myself, what has the boy taken in and where did that come from? What are the forces that he's metabolizing and seep into him? What are his early relations and associations with boyhood and manhood, money and debt, labor and precarity, friendship and love and intimacy, race and law and surveillance, public and private? How does his life become structured by, and interact, and mutate in response to these themes? How does he convert what he digests into his own thinking and actions?

The first site to question in a critique like this should be the home. That's the primary place where most people will begin to cultivate their interpretation of the world and relate to others. The home is a very strong engine that can propel us into reproducing, resisting, or subverting social, cultural, and economic rituals of domination. When we look at the opening of Child Boss, the mother actually tells the boy that she’s proud of him for looking for a job. Why is she proud? He’s twelve. Is it because the father is highly educated and fixated on patented inventions that he fails to monetize, while also failing to align his routines and resources with ideal patriarchal manhood?

The boy does not open with I want to be a man and get a head start on climbing to seize the throne of patriarchy where a thousand concubines are eternally waiting. The boy wants to compete against the best ballers, but his family cannot afford AAU. The boy’s environment has communicated to him: “You don’t have enough money to nourish your desire.” To address this dilemma, he looks for a job, which is a common formulation for people. The mother also positively reinforces this naïve desire for the boy to earn money. She drives him and his brother around from golf course to golf course. The boy initially gets rejected by two golf courses. Even though the mother is overworked and is essentially the sole provider for a house of four people, she is still capable of reinforcing patriarchal notions of manhood that say men are tough. They endure and earn. They should provide resources. In developing this thread, I was deeply influenced by bell hooks' cultural criticism in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.

And in another section, before the basketball tournament, the boy has extra money and thinks, “What should I do with my money?” And what do kids or young boys want to buy?

NM: Fun things.

AF: For Andrew, this translates to a new basketball hoop, a speed punching bag, splitting the cost of a good ping pong table with his brother, setting aside some money to save for a cool car, and fireworks. He and his brother and cousin convince their uncle to drive them to New Hampshire to buy the fun kind that explode in the air, which are illegal in Connecticut. Due to an unexpected discount, they come back with an extra supply.

I wanted the boy’s initial instinct to be that he would give a portion of the extra supply to a couple friends for free, but his older brother questions him before giving a lesson in supply and demand and market pricing. The brother says, “If I were you, I would never give mine away for free.” He teaches Andrew about formulating a price determined by the market and about how a little money now can grow into lots of money in the future. Welcome to capitalism.

Even though bringing fireworks to a middle school is illegal and obviously against school policy, I wanted to sneak in and provoke some very basic questions about what we do with extra stuff. It’s a small indictment of capitalist surplus. Despite initial reluctance, Andrew ends up selling them to a couple friends, which is a betrayal of his instinct, thereby demonstrating how seamlessly capital and capitalist ideology can corrupt people. It’s corrosive.

NM: Then Andrew gets caught by a teacher before he’s taken to the principal's office by a security guard. The school calls the police. Technically, he gets arrested. However, Andrew’s family knows a lawyer. They have a personal contact who can help. That is a resource. If you're a working-class family and your parents aren't working among professionals, they may not have that same kind of access to a friend who has a certain skill they can utilize without having to pay the full price to have strong legal representation.

AF: Exactly. But what ends up saving the boy is that the school administrators and those with whom the attorney is negotiating all have a soft spot for Andrew because they are avid golfers and recognize that he spends his weekends on the golf course. They become lenient because of his proximity to the backbone of their world, which as bell hooks would say is, “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

NM: Andrew’s image reflects the people making the decision. The people in charge see some of themselves in Andrew. They're the people in charge who get to make these decisions and have power over people's fate to a large extent. They see him as a part of their world. And because of that apparent closeness, they're like, “We’re good people, so you must be a good person too.” Of course, if he were bona fide working class and not white, they wouldn't have seen themselves reflected in his work at the golf course, this child for whom they're figuring out the proper punishment. They probably would not have been as lenient.

The people in charge tend to be wealthier and white, at least in this country. They are looking to see themselves reflected in the people that they're encountering. Again, that's how contact and reproduction happen. At the end of the day, this comes down to the class aspect, which is not just about income or social status, but one's relationship to the labor that society requires to keep going on. This idea of class mobility then, as if you can change your relationship to that social labor, creates the illusion that it's possible or desirable. But it really means playing into the very system even more intensely. Andrew shows that this thinking actually reproduces the very things that keep the system in equilibrium. It creates even more inertia against change.

AF: That inertia leads Andrew eventually to saving up to buy an old BMW M3. At some point, he shows off to a friend and destroys the engine. Without enough money to pay a qualified mechanic to fix it, he buys a repair manual, studies, and then rebuilds and fixes the engine himself. He’s proud of himself and carries that pride back to the golf course, where there’s a critical moment. The whole narrative and its embedded critique converge on this scene where Andrew helps this golfer make a highly improbable shot. Who doesn’t want to witness a miraculous shot, just like OG Anunoby’s tip-in during the Knicks’ improbable comeback on last season’s championship run? When the golfer makes this shot, the guy is euphoric and, on the surface, genuinely appreciative of Andrew’s advice. Andrew confesses to feeling some excitement too. The golfer feels indebted to Andrew, gets on his knees and bows, and then asks how he can repay Andrew. Andrew responds, “Would you like to work for me?”

It was important for me to ensure that Andrew knows it’s funny and perfectly timed. Many workers understand their circumstance and its absurdity. They might have fantasies. Humor is often born from pain and anguish. Still, this crosses the implicit boundary set between workers and those for whom workers work. Most bosses don’t want a subordinate to puncture a moment of shared joy by suddenly saying, “Would you like to work for me?” That is a major threat to sustaining this antagonistic relationship, which is both structural and psychological.

As the boy realizes that it isn’t perceived as funny, he tries to correct his joke by pushing it further through the calculation of a hypothetical wage, which would make it even funnier. I actually placed the calculation in the text as a very basic way of thinking about proportionality.

NM: Andrew offers to pay the guy sixty cents a day. In his mind it’s fair.

AF: It’s a flawed calculation but demonstrates the boy beginning to become more fluent in understanding the enormous gap between them and a mounting inclination to balance the power relationship. This is not a revolutionary moment by any means, but the boy has been grappling with his limited yet growing knowledge. He’s actively translating his physical and emotional experience and beginning in his own way to push back. He's not stupid. He's not a genius either. He just makes a quick intuitive calculation. Deep down, he wants to humiliate the man, get some minor revenge, and disempower him. But the reader sees that this cannot be a place of shared joy. The narrator even alludes to “the improbability of joy bleeding into workers and those for whom workers work at the same time in the same place.”

In drafting and rewriting, there were many iterations of the fallout from this moment. I was thinking through all the conceivable possibilities and asking myself how I could most honestly evoke the essence of this dynamic. Well, Andrew gets reprimanded. The golfer doesn’t want to pay to get “humiliated by a fucking caddy.” Later, the caddy master even confesses to Andrew that he recognizes it's funny and wishes he had said something like that himself, but the caddy master is also in a subordinate role to the members. He's just a notch above the caddies and maintenance workers in relation to the elite. He wants to keep his job and won’t side with the caddy, even though he also found it funny and knows that most people would laugh. The rich golfer, who is a guest of a member, threatens to pull his application to be a member if the boy is not fired.

NM: Andrew is coming up against real limits. I’ve seen this firsthand with my experience in labor organizing. The minute workers challenge the boss's authority, like when they declare that they are forming a union, the real relationship between those workers and bosses becomes clear. No more pizza parties. No more pretending we're family. Those are mostly just used to keep peace between the two sets of people and their opposing interests. But as soon as that power gets challenged, the boss will take it personally and exert the real power they have over their workers: the ability to fire them, which means that they have control over whether a worker can pay rent and feed their kids. So, seeing that in the book felt very real to me. The boy doesn't know any better because he's just young and lacks experience. But, man, he stepped on that landmine and suddenly things got real serious real fast. And he didn't even realize or mean to do it. He was trying to be funny, but the humor crossed an important boundary. It wasn’t funny to the rich man. The idea that someone as lowly as their caddy could suggest they are above them, even in the most absurd kind of joke, invokes the thought, “Hmmm, this deviates from our rules of nature.” This is an exaggerated moment that mirrors what happens in real life where real jobs are at stake. I really appreciated that moment.

AF: I want to add one important thing I didn’t mention. Before the miraculous shot, Andrew overhears the golfer boast about all his possessions, the cars he bought and sold or workers he hired and let go. He attempts to interject in the rich man’s conversation, because he figures the rich man probably used to own his car. Andrew asks, “Have you ever taken apart a car engine?” The man responds, “I have a guy, a worker who does it for me.” He doesn’t need to get his hands dirty. He doesn't need to be involved in understanding how the materials he owns function. That was the first step toward him realizing that there is no mutuality between them, nothing shared between the boss and the subordinate.

NM: This reminds me of how Marx quotes Goethe: “Six stallions, say, I can afford, / Is not their strength my property? / I tear along, a sporting lord, / As if their legs belonged to me.” From the boy's perspective, he's like, I learned how to rebuild this engine. Look at this, I have this power. But then he encounters this rich guy who can buy twenty mechanics to do this for him. Through the man's wealth, he can control other people and essentially own the expertise that they have. He doesn't have to learn it himself. In the same way, Elon Musk doesn't have to know how to build a rocket himself. He just has the money to purchase people who can do that. In Child Boss, the boy comes into contact with the reality of how this really works. There are these moments in the book that feel very relatable. I think everyone has had that experience as a child where you're coming in with your low data set and then suddenly you encounter a situation and you realize like, my God, I didn't know anything. And it's such a rupture in one's understanding of reality. I feel like he has those ruptures throughout the book. Those ruptures tend to point to him learning about the rules of our capitalist class society, that you can't just logic your way through things.

AF: That rupture where he’s forced to recognize the enormous gap between himself and the wealthy man eventually leads to the final movement where he confides in Mia who shows him empathy and thinks it’s really funny. Then they go on a car ride and she encourages him to push the car harder. She wants a thrill ride. He ends up bringing the car up to just over 160 miles per hour on the highway, having bolted it when he passed a parked state trooper while going 100 mph. It’s exhilarating and erotic. They escape. They’re terrified. Later, the story turns to Mia asking Andrew to imagine the man actually worked for him. Even though Andrew imagines the man willfully being dropped off by his mother at his small, rented home (to fix the leaking ceiling and fix other common household things) instead of the golf course, he still encounters extreme humiliation while taking the “boss” role. the man corrects him and effectively says, this is the wrong calculation.  It was important for Andrew to feel smaller than he has ever felt before. Andrew needs to recognize that a simple role reversal won’t solve anything. Of course, this imagined scene escalates into catastrophe. Andrew becomes guilty. He’s in prison, imagining that the only thing that he has left is his money that will need to grow into a sun.

NM: Even with that ending, I don't think the book holds a pessimistic view. I think the story is a reality check against thinking that if we just reimagine things, we would not be in the mess that we’re in. The story points to the fact that our world is in big trouble and it's not an easy problem to solve. I think we have to accept that it is a complex problem that requires a lot of work and a lot of people to think through it–not just one person imagining a new world. This ending sets us on a better path to figuring things out. It's not easy.

AF: I hope Child Boss creates openings for dialogues. I hope it starts to demonstrate that there are myriad forces that make these structures and norms of domination and subordination seemingly impenetrable. There needs to be an increased awareness that there are multiple layers involved and each one of them needs to be addressed. An intervention can start in your living room and at an early age. It’s important to refuse to think with a hero mindset and emphasize collective methods possibilities. Also, at the very minimum, if we don't address the extreme wealth inequality, then wealth will function in a way that absorbs some small pockets of incremental progress. It can negate a lot of humanistic interventions. That’s the gravitational pull of money.