The Proximity Celebrity

The Proximity Celebrity isn’t buying a spirit; he’s buying adjacency. Every pour is a tiny screening of a movie in which he and the famous owner are friends — the kind who don’t need to talk, which is convenient, because they never have.

He organizes the annual golf trip with the rigor of a lunar mission, brings his own bottle to the resort (which the resort loves), and gets it into conversation within the first nine holes, always through the same door: “You know George still drinks this every day.” Not Clooney. George. Then the sale price — “billion, with a B” — delivered as though he’d advised on the deal.

The tell: there’s a guy at his office who does an impression of him, and the impression is just the phrase “billion, with a B,” and he has seen the impression, and he loves the impression.

The affectionate part: look at what he built with the parasocial nonsense. The trip is nineteen years running. The foursome survived two bypasses, a divorce, and a bankruptcy — and he held it together, one smooth conflict-free pour at a time. The famous man made a tequila about friendship and sold it; this guy actually ran the friendship, at retail, for two decades.

“You know George still drinks this every day. So do I.”

Which makes him either the mark of the century or the only person who used the product exactly as directed.