S2E3 Ramon and Paola: A Fool and His Money
How much is your fantasy worth?
“A fool and his money is soone parted.”
Dr. John Bridges, Defence of the Government of the Church of England, 1587
“A fool and his money is one big party.”
Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad, 1997
Normalize taking three-year breaks from your Substack and then returning to it.
Is there any artistic reason to explain what has changed since I last recapped a thirteen-year-old episode of MTV’s Catfish, that I am a completely New Woman now? That is the worst part of any nonfiction book, the author’s note, the tedious context: “When I first began work on this book, I was living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, embarrassed to even call myself a writer.” Reader: the apartment was never that tiny, they were never that embarrassed.
Look: life picks up speed sometimes. I had to wrap up my twenties in a hurry, shove some things in bags, throw the rest out. All of a sudden I had a step goal to meet.
Never mind. Some of you are new here, anyway. If you are, welcome. I dedicate the sordid tale of Ramon and Paola to you.
The Episode
I made notes for this episode several months ago, the first time I thought I’d return to Friends on the Internet after a sustained absence. At the top of my bullet-point list of things that happen in the episode, I wrote this:
When you skydive you reach terminal velocity and it has the sensation of floating on a cushion of air even as you are hurtling towards the earth which is also the sensation of being delusional about the viability of a relationship
Mystifying. I don’t know where “terminal velocity” came from, other than that it is the kind of phrase that my Tumblr-poet’s heart finds inspiring and therefore would have retained. I hoped, as I watched this episode again, that past Hannah’s thoughts would fit themselves naturally into a new post (waste not, want not). But you have to kill your darlings. This metaphor, about a sensation I have never and would never actually experience (vertigo, general chicken-shit-ness) applies less to “Ramon and Paola” than it does to nearly every other episode of Catfish. These two people know they’re hurtling. Their legs stretch out in eagerness to absorb the shock of the hard ground.
The first shot of the episode is of a knife splitting a green apple down the middle. The two halves of the apple teeter to opposite sides on the waxen-wood hotel desk, flesh already starting to brown. The next moment, Max and Nev are chewing. “This apple is so good,” says Max, his mouth full. The relish with which the boys share the apple reminds me of survival stories I’ve read. Passengers of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, reaching civilization after 72 days stranded on the snowy peaks of the Andes, were offered bread and cheese by their rescuers. Bread, cheese, a crisp green apple: can we ever imagine how these simple things would taste after certain harsh circumstances? Max and Nev have been on the road a long time. For some reason, as they eat, I imagine they consume the whole apple, seeds, stem, and all.
This week’s email is from a 19-year-old man named Ramon, subject line: “Who did I really fall in love with?” Ramon lives in one of the Bluth Company’s model homes in a place called Bullhead City, Arizona. Bullhead City, Arizona is the largest city by land mass in Mohave County, Arizona, in the northwestern part of the state, along the Colorado River. It is home to fewer than 200,000 residents, and is the “reddest” county in the state, with over 77% of residents voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Mohave County is also notable for containing a “large polygamous sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” per Wikipedia. Bullhead City’s casinos drive the majority of its economic activity. In summertime, temperatures have reached as high as 126 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius, for my non-American friends). In Bullhead City, it is illegal to give food to the homeless.
One of the things I like to do in this newsletter is offer a sense of place. Before this episode, I did not know anything about Bullhead City, Arizona. Perhaps neither did you.
Ramon works in the kitchen at a nearby casino, 10 pm to 6 am shift. He doesn’t have his own car, so he relies on his father for rides, to and from work, anywhere else. His footprints are light on this earth: when others are awake, living their lives under the relentless Arizona sun, he sleeps; as the lights buzz and flicker and the day’s cigarette smoke begins to settle into the casino’s worn carpets, he wakes, drifting towards the smell of soapy water and cold peanut oil. Or so I infer from his words: “I really hate my job, and where I live,” says Ramon. “At the end of the day, she’s the only person I look forward to talking to.”
She. She is Paola, a pretty, dark-haired teenager with a glossy pink smile and feather earrings, who Ramon saw posting on a Facebook friend’s wall one day. He messaged her, and since then, they have talked every day. Paola lives in Florida, as far from desert as a climate can be, Volusia County, the land of NASCAR and waterslides. Ramon has never video-chatted Paola, well, not exactly. They tried once, through the dark, pixelated image, Ramon could make out a completely different girl. The call dropped. Paola explained the experience by saying that she’d had her cousin call Ramon, as a test of his affection for her.
(For a moment, imagine if this were true: pretty Paola, approaching her plain, solid cousin. “Would you mind Skyping my boyfriend?” Paola asks. “I want to test if he likes me for me, and not my looks.” Good grief.)
They moved past the incident and never spoke of it. “I love the girl,” says Ramon, over and over again, a curious turn of phrase. The girl. I get that it’s something people say, but it’s so impersonal. Max and Nev hit the road. “Ramon lives down there,” says Max from the plane, pointing down at a ripple of hard brown hills.
They arrive. New details begin to emerge, troubling ones. Ramon, it turns out, has spent quite a bit of money on Paola. She’d tell him her phone was about to get cut off, that she needed money to pay her bills, that kind of thing. He also gave her his bank information (sharp inhale from me, “DUDE!” from Max and Nev). It amounts to a few thousand dollars, says Ramon. This is too much. “Jesus, man, that’s crazy,” says Nev. “You could have a car right now.”
Ramon is hard to read, his resting face sort of set and downcast, but there’s a flicker at these words, like the thought had not occurred to him.
I want to freeze these three men here for a moment, with a blurry photo of Paola’s “cousin,” Loyda, pulled up on the computer screen, Ramon holding his arms stiff at his sides. Let’s go into the other room and chat.
“You could have a car”
We, the viewer, are not privy to a holistic view of Ramon’s financial situation. The house he lives in with his father is spacious, yet sparsely furnished, with high ceilings and rugless floors (one imagines the acoustics were terrible). Perhaps they own the house. Perhaps they rent. If they rent, perhaps Ramon’s father pays it out of his wages. Or perhaps they both contribute. In 2012, annual rent in Mohave County represented 27.59% of household income, and the median rent was $843 a month, or $10,116 a year. If we guess that Ramon and his father’s rent represents a quarter of their annual household income, that means that together their wages earn $40,464 a year, a bit shy of Arizona’s median annual household income in 2012, $47,044.
Let’s say Ramon, at the casino, makes minimum wage. In Arizona in 2012, the minimum wage was $7.65 per hour. Do we think he works full-time? Browsing a few recent job listings for kitchen support staff in casinos in Arizona, it seems possible. 40 hours a week, at $7.65 an hour, means $306 a week, $15,912 a year, above Arizona’s poverty line ($11,170 for a single person, in 2012) but not by much.
We don’t know for sure, of course. But I have watched a lot of Catfish, and if patterns hold, and my back-of-the-envelope math is anywhere close to accurate, Ramon and his father are getting by okay, but only if nothing bad happens.
Most Americans live with this level of precariousness. Their long-term financial plan is hope. I have never lived this way, and neither, I should say, have Max and Nev, as far as I can tell from their biographies. Financial advice offered by the comfortable is always abstract at best and hostile at worst. “You could have a car right now,” says Nev. At $7.65 an hour, how long would it take Ramon to save up for a car? Months? Years? Next, they’ll be asking Ramon how much he spends on Redbox DVD rentals, on bottles of Diet Dr. Pepper from the work vending machine. I have never known real financial instability, but I have made very little money before, and one of the hardest things to do is not spend what you have. On necessities, sure, but also on little things, the things that make you feel like a person and not an automaton.
The expression goes that a fool and his money are soon parted. For Ramon, spending what money he had on Paola must have felt like the most natural thing in the world. Foolish? Maybe. Realistically: what better investment? A $145 cell phone bill here, a $130 Wii there, not too steep a price to pay for love and affection during his lonely hours (nobody ever thinks about money they spend in the aggregate, until it’s too late).
Regardless: Ramon at last seems to have reached an inflection point. He is looking for returns. Let’s go back and check on him.
The Episode, again
By now, you know where this is going. Max and Nev find and call Paola, the pretty girl from the photos. Nev tells Paola that they’re helping a man named Ramon who has been talking to a girl named Paola for eight months, a girl using her photos. “Awesome,” Paola deadpans. They have her record a video message for Ramon saying that she’s not the girl he’s been talking to. When they show him, his face withers, like a brown, rotting apple.
Nev goes outside to call “Paola,” the number Ramon has been texting. She is furious that Ramon gave him her number. She is hesitant about meeting, saying that she has two jobs, and it would be complicated to find time. Nev thinks this is bullshit. (I wonder if he has ever worked two jobs at the same time. Possibly he did in 2007, when he was both a ballet photographer and the star of a documentary his brother was making.) As Max and Nev discuss what to do, the camera repeatedly cuts back to Ramon, sitting in the empty cafe, watching and re-watching the video message from the real Paola, his nose and cheeks flushed a hot red.
Okay, so they go to Florida. Loyda, the girl on the video call, “Paola’s,” “cousin,” from Facebook, answers the door with a massive ‘tude. “Hi Ramon,” she huffs.
“I have a lot to say to you,” says Ramon. “You basically took advantage of me.”
Loyda’s jaw is set. She offers her answers in short sentences. She made the profile because she was bored. She wasn’t trying to meet anyone off it. Etc.
“All that money I spent on you, you gonna pay me back?” says Ramon. He is oddly calm. “Are you going to give back the stuff?”
“You want the stuff?” Loyda asks, and jerks an arm back at the blue front door of her home, as if to say “go take it.”
The weirdest thing about this episode is that Ramon and Loyda are so…familiar with each other. It is as if they have talked all this over already, and are recreating a previous fight for the cameras. “There’s a lot more to the story,” Loyda had said to Nev on the phone. Here is what she meant:
Loyda had tried to come clean to Ramon on at least one occasion prior to him contacting Catfish. In addition to the video call, she had sent him a photo of her drivers license, admitted that the photos she was using were fake. “He knew this was what he was going to get,” says Loyda. Max and Nev turn to Ramon.
“That did happen,” he says, haltingly. “I barely remember it.”
“DUDE!” say Max and Nev, astonished.
Butchering
Ramon paid Loyda to continue performing the Paola routine. He may not want to admit it, but that’s what happened. He is not deluded, floating on a cushion of air at terminal velocity; he has called Max and Nev to perform some kind of intervention on himself, called upon them to help him kick a compulsion that is hurting him, and to an extent, hurting the girl he’s employed. It is, quite simply, the only explanation.
The question here is when Ramon realized that the money he spent on Paola, or “Paola,” was not a gift, but rather payment, for services rendered. From their botched video call, Ramon has suspected - even, in some not-too-buried part of his mind, known - that the girl he is talking to is not the girl in the photos. But what she represents (the mental escape from his daily grind, the thrilling possibility of physical escape, for good) is so important, so diverting, that he is willing to continue paying for it. At what point did his view of the relationship change, or rather, come into focus?
There is some benefit to recognizing that many relationships are transactional. That many people find paying for companionship to be simpler than seeking it out organically comes as a surprise only to the naive, and, it must be said, to the creators of Catfish. The role of money in relationships, the degree to which the giving or taking of it can influence the giving or taking of affection, is to Max and Nev a distasteful, seedy thing, not to be looked at. In the world of Catfish, there is no place for commerce in romance. It is a dire blind spot in a show that is helplessly, unavoidably about the material and emotional conditions of America’s middle and working classes.
I have placed us, for the most part, in 2012, when this episode was likely filmed. These days, 12% or more of Americans1 using dating apps are exposed to romance scammers conducting what are known as “pig-butchering” schemes. I don’t know why they’re called that, though the mind reels. Scammers form relationships with their marks and convince them to make a series of (often, increasing) contributions in the form of cryptocurrency, using fake investment opportunities, or introducing possible obstacles to the continuation of the relationship (“my phone is going to get cut off”). The difference is that often these schemes originate in so-called “fraud factories,” operating in parts of Asia. Catfishing has gone corporate.
The durability of romantic scamming as an income stream is interesting to me. Sometimes I think the root cause is a uniquely American strain of insane optimism; or maybe, hatred of women, real women, who argue and fart and move in three dimensions. Is this country really as full of idiots as it seems?
I don’t think so. I don’t think these scammers are all that sophisticated, the emotional connection all that genuine. I just think that we have somehow, accidentally or on purpose, created a society in which being duped is a more pleasurable alternative to the mundane or difficult trappings of their lives. After all: to butcher a pig, do you really need to earn its trust? Of course not. You just need an electric fence.
As of 2023.