The Financial Lives of the Poets (14 page)

Maybe we are drawn to our own destruction, pulled into our own 7/11s.

Where is she? The clock on the kitchen wall says five minutes to ten. I look out the window, past my tiny reflection, into the black backyard. I knew two years ago that this would be a difficult time for Lisa, watching me quit my job to venture into something as unlikely as a financial poetry website. But how could I know the economy would go this far south, that I’d get laid off from the job I scurried back to, or that our house would lose nearly half its value. Or maybe I didn’t care (…we
are
drawn to our destruction). I recall once watching Teddy, when he thought no one was looking, staring at a cup of milk on the edge of the counter. Inexplicably, he gave the cup a little nudge. Or it wasn’t inexplicable…these cups sit on the edges of counters and sometimes you just can’t help yourself.

Finally, a few minutes after ten, headlights come down the alley. I watch the garage light come on. And three minutes later, my cheating wife comes in the back door.

She’s wearing a plaid skirt, too…must be in style. And even if her legs lack some of the tone of Ms. Bishop’s, they are great legs, and they are the legs I’m married to, legs I’d wrap around my waist if they’d have me. She’s also wearing a red, wool beret. The cap is not something I’ve ever seen Lisa wear and the sight of it breaks me a little, as if she’s on her way to becoming someone else, top-down. A gift from Chuck, maybe? As if reading my thoughts, she sets the cap on the counter.

“Thanks for putting the boys to bed.” Lisa looks through the mail: But she seems too nonchalant, even as she flips through the catalogues, as if even they have no power any more (in love maybe?) her good mood pissing me off. “Any news from school?” she asks.

And I realize this is exactly what I’ve been lying in wait for, and I try not to sound too pleased with myself as I lay out the whole while-you-were-out-doing-God-knows-what-I-had-to-deal-with-keeping-this-family-together clacker incident, and maybe it goes on thick, maybe even embellished—the ferocity of Franklin’s attack, severity of the school’s reaction, passion of Franklin’s crying afterward—but I’m feeling desperate and I hope that ten logs of pure-grade guilt will shock Lisa out of this thing that she’s on her way to doing to our family. Indeed, she covers her mouth and shakes her head as I tell the story.

“My God, Matt. Why didn’t you call me?”

I shrug. “You said you had plans tonight.”

“And…you didn’t think I could take a phone call?”

I give another passive, wounded shrug. “I didn’t know what you were doing. I didn’t want to interrupt if it was something important to you.”

It is this
to you
that I hope will sting. I look down at the table.

“Interrupt…what…what do you…
interrupt?”
She stares at me in disbelief. “You knew what I was doing. I told you a week ago. I was at Karen’s candle party!”

Candle party? And now that she mentions it, I do remember something about candles…I quickly look for refuge from my own guilt, something to be mad about: those candle parties always start at seven, which doesn’t explain why she wasn’t home for dinner. “All night?” I ask desperately.

Lisa turns away. Hands shaking, she pours herself a cup of coffee, but throws it in the sink, cup cracking in the basin. “It was a fucking candle party, Matt!” She turns to me, eyes red and teary. “You want me to feel shitty about going to a candle party?”

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes.

“Because I do! Okay? Happy? I feel awful. I felt awful sitting there with all those women ordering candles and drinking wine and talking about where they were going for the holidays. I could feel their pity, Matt! They were sitting there feeling sorry for me. And do you know why? Because they know I can’t even buy a
fucking candle,
because…because—” She covers her mouth and cries silently. I sit at the table, staring into my coffee.

We both know why she can’t buy a fucking candle.

My mom used to describe Lisa with the best praise she could ever heap on another person. Matty’s wife, she would say, now there’s a woman who is
put together.
To my mother, the best men were “real gentlemen” and the best women were “put together.” Oprah Winfrey? “Put together.” Hillary Clinton? “Really put together.” My oldest sister’s mother-in-law? “Likes to
think
she’s put together.” And while my dad would scoff (his stripper friend Charity, now there’s a woman
put together,
surgically so), Mom merely meant by the phrase that a certain woman was successful, sure-of-herself, composed. All those things Mom believed she wasn’t; all those things she wanted to be.

When Lisa went back to work and couldn’t find a job, I thought about Mom’s pet phrase. And I thought about it again almost a year ago, when—in the fog of
poetfolio.com
—I happened to get the mail and saw a bill from MasterCard. It wasn’t the URGENT stamp on the bill that got my attention; while I paid the mortgage, Lisa took care of the monthly bills, and I knew she sometimes mugged Peter to pay Paul. It was the fact that we
didn’t have a MasterCard.
We had Visa. As it turned out, we had both now, and Discover, too, and all three were maxed out. I went out to the garage, where the boxes had been piling up—investments, Lisa called them—and I started opening them, porcelain dolls and commemorative plates and limited edition plush toys. After five or six, I stopped. None of this was secret. I’d seen the boxes. And she’d tried to tell me about the online “business” she’d read about—buying collectibles on eBay, holding them for a few years as their value increased, then reselling them on craigslist (or maybe it was vice versa). Deep in my own delusions, I’d only
pretended
to listen, so I missed the desperation and envy in the way she described people who made a living buying and selling such crap online, and I completely missed the fact that my wife—who, an hour later stood in front of me, weeping
(it just got away from me, Matt)
—was suffering deeply, unsure of her place in the world, of her value, pathologically afraid that the solid man she’d married was morphing into her irresponsible father—and that she felt she needed to do something immediately to take care of herself.

Here’s the thing: if you’re put together, you can also come apart.

Now Lisa stands in our kitchen, leaning on the sink. She sets her face, shakes her head without looking at me and leaves the room. In the TV room, she offers a flat “Hi Jerry” to Dad, whose voice cracks raspy and urgent, like a man dying of thirst: “I miss chipped beef!”

“I know that, Jerry,” she snaps, and then, softer, “I’m sorry.” And then Lisa goes upstairs, and after a minute, I hear her gentle, sweet voice in Franklin’s room—just a low hum, I can’t make out any words; this goes on for several minutes, punctuated a few times by Franklin’s voice, first frantic and then high, then low, easier—muffled jazz horn of comfort. Lisa won’t make more of this than she should. She’s good that way, good with them, a genius of perspective and calm. I know Franklin must feel better, and I feel another rush of jealousy. I want that comfort, that voice. Then I hear her feet pad across the floor upstairs and the toilet flushes and there’s more padding and the door opens on the office—my eyes tracing her movements in the lines in the ceiling, as if I could see through the floorboards to the world where Lisa lives now, and then I hear the first, faint clacks of computer keys.
(U will never guess what he did now….)

I know I should go up there and talk to her. And what? Apologize? Confront her about Chuck? Wait for her to confront me? What do I say? We’re in a perpetual blind stalemate here; lost. I can see how we got here—after each bad decision, after each failure we quietly logged our blame, our petty resentments; we constructed a case against the other that we never prosecuted. As long as both cases remained unstated, the charges sealed, we had a tacit peace:
you don’t mention this and I won’t mention that,
this and that growing and changing and becoming everything, until the only connection between us was this bridge of quiet guilt and recrimination. I don’t bring up her insistence on remodeling and her online shopping binge and she doesn’t stare across the dinner table and say,
with all due respect, Matt: financial fucking poetry?
And on and on we go, not talking—all the way to the incriminating cheating and weed-dealing mess we’re in now.

We’re not husband and wife right now; we are unindicted coconspirators.

It’s almost as if Lisa and I
deserve this.
Or believe we do. And I don’t think we’re alone. It’s as if the whole country believes we’ve done something to deserve this collapse, this global warming and endless war, this pile of shit we’re in. We’ve lived beyond our means, spent the future, sapped resources, lived on the bubble. Economists pretend they’re studying a social science, and while the economy
is
a machine of hugely complex systems, it’s also organic, the whole a reflection of the cells that make it up, a god made in
our
image, prone to flights of euphoric greed and pride, choking envy, irrational fear, pettiness, stinginess, manic euphoria and senseless depression. And…guilt. Embarrassment. Somewhere a genius economist is factoring the
shame index
into this recession because we want to suffer,
need
to suffer. Like the irritating talk radio host who’s been giddily predicting economic collapse for five years, and now is more than I-told-you-so self-satisfied. He actually seems aroused by the specter of soup kitchens and twenty percent unemployment; I’m telling you, the man has a recession boner. Politicians and TV analysts put on leather stockings and whip their own backs like self-flagellating end-times Christians, slathering for payback for profligate spending, for reliance on debt, for unwise loans and the morons we elected, for the CEOs we overpaid, the unfunded wars we waged. We are kids caught lying and stealing: guilty, beaten children of drunks; give us our punishment so we can feel loved, so we can feel
something.

And Lisa and me? We constructed our trouble, for better or worse, richer poorer, built it out of mistakes and arrogance and yes, at some level, we
deserve
this…bottoming out. No other explanation. She deserves an unemployed pothead husband. I deserve a distant, cheating wife.

I stare at the ceiling separating us. She’s up there.

I hear the low buzz of the TV in the room next door. Dad sighs.

I could still go upstairs. And what will I see? Lisa on the computer? Or lying in bed, texting him? Is there the slightest chance she’ll lift the covers and say,
Matt, don’t go out tonight?
Or the awkward silence, avoiding eyes, me shifting my weight, making my lame excuse and Lisa simply shrugging when I say I’m going out for milk for the third time this week?

There are always moments in which a person can stop, crossroads where you can change course…there are those moments…until there aren’t any more.

I grab my keys.

I
WANT MY DEALERS

To be smarter than they are;

Welcome to Weedland

“Wake up, Slippers,” says a voice I don’t recognize. I snap awake.

“Welcome to Weedland!” Jamie says from the backseat. I look out my window and then over at Dave the Drug Dealer, who is driving.

“You have a nice nap?” asks my sidekick Jamie.

“How long was I out?”

“Half hour.”

It was oddly relaxing, riding in a car with someone else driving, even if that someone was Drug Dealer Dave and his car was disconcertingly just like my own. We met at Bea’s, and since I hadn’t slept in days, I started feeling my head bob as soon as Jamie began a story about “this dude in my math class who wants to get an operation to make himself into a chick, but dude says he ain’t gay and I’m like, what the fuck you mean you ain’t gay, but he insists he ain’t gay, he’s, like, a woman, and I’m like, ‘Dude, until you’re a real woman, you are totally a ram-banger, yo,’ and he’s like: ‘But if I’ve never had sex with a man, how can I be gay?’ and I’m like, Dude, whoa! That is kinda freaky…”

And the next thing I knew Dave was saying, “Wake up, Slippers.”

And I snapped awake here in…

…Weedland, which exists in the last place I would’ve ever guessed, a small farming town an hour from the city, on a little road behind the main street of this endlessly dying wheat and mill town—a town which fell on hard times so long ago the people there are actually nostalgic for the
old hard times.
These new hard times? Boring. Wimpy. Back in the old bad days, they ate dirt. But they were happy!

I don’t tell Dave that I’ve been to this little town at least five times before, back when I was a reporter. Off a nowhere, two-lane highway, this little shitburg is close enough to the city that it was one of five or six trusty small towns that served the newspaper staff whenever we needed “rural reaction” to stories. We came to Weedland fairly often (without knowing it was Weedland, of course) to write about
this
agricultural bill’s failure or
that
wheat embargo, or
this
local politician’s pandering run for office. Sometimes a story just calls for a random quote by some craggy old farmer and there was always a craggy old farmer to quote here, the sons of other craggy old farmers that my newspapers quoted in the hard-times 1970s, the grandsons of old crags we quoted in the hard-times 1930s. Legacies.

Dave parks along a street of plain clapboard houses, just behind the town’s main street, which is, appropriately enough, called Main Street. The house we walk toward is situated behind a couple of unlikely Main Street businesses—a camera and watch shop and small engine repair. There are a dozen houses on this block, six on each side of the street. We park behind a red Camaro
(so much depends on a red Camaro)
and I follow Dave and Jamie between piles of leaves up the sidewalk to a simple two-story with a pitched dormer, a hot tub on the side of the house and an old RV with an electrical cord leading to the back door.

Dave rings the doorbell.

A shortish, roundish, twentyish guy in a backward ball cap answers the door, chattering away on a cell phone (“No way…She did not…Come on…Just my brother’s friend and some cop…No way…Come on…No way…”) and after opening the door he steps back without really acknowledging us; he just keeps talking, into infinity (“No way…Come on…She did not…No way…”) as he pushes through a door and disappears.

“Don’t worry about that guy,” Jamie confides. “Fat fuck thinks everyone’s a cop. I hate that guy.” Jamie is wearing his skullcap again, along with a knee-length black coat and a disarming pair of black glasses (he explained that he’s out of contacts and his mom switched insurance companies to one that has
totally worthless vision benefits).

Jamie says again, “Fuckin’
hate
him.”

And I haven’t known Jamie all that long, but I’m surprised to hear him say he hates anyone. Maybe all skullcaps simply hate all ball caps, some kind of Red America/Blue America, India/Pakistan thing.

I look around the living room of this old house. There are a couple of beer posters and a big map of the world, a bad oil painting of a house in the woods, a couch, two old easy chairs, a TV, a set of World Book encyclopedias and another bookshelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed. The carpet is well-worn beige. But for the beer posters, it could be your grandparents’ house, everything where it should be, yet there’s still something…I don’t know…wrong about it…something forcedly random, as if it’s been put together for a family melodrama by the set designer of a local theater.

Dave the Drug Dealer bounces on the balls of his feet as we wait for the person we’re meeting. Dave’s hair is freshly trimmed and gelled and he’s wearing a beautiful worsted wool overcoat. I have a wool overcoat almost like it and again, something feels off about that—my drug dealer sharing the same car, same coat? A drug dealer should drive a low-rider Monte Carlo, and wear sharkskin or black satin or velour sweats or something. I officially don’t like having a lawyer for a dealer.

We stand a minute longer and, finally, into the room comes the man we’ve been waiting for…and again he’s not at all what I expected—even though I don’t recall expecting anything. This guy is round and heavy, in his thirties, with a baby face and puffball cheeks, thinning blond hair. He’s wearing the largest parka I’ve ever seen, zipped to his tree-stump neck. He’s a walking Quonset hut, this guy. Then Big Parka and Dave do an awkward handshake hug thing—heads tilted back, using the soul-shake as a buffer between them.

“How you doin’, man.”

“Good. You?”

“Oh, you know.”

“So.” Dave backs away from the hug and…presents me. “This is the guy.”

I put out my hand and Big Parka takes it with his squishy wet mitt. He gives me a damp handshake and I look up into his ruddy, gentle face. “Nice to meet you, Guy.”

“Uh…no.” I glance over at Dave. “My name’s not Guy.”

Big Parka looks back at Dave. “You said, ‘This is Guy.’”

“No. I said,
the
guy. ‘This is
the
guy.’ His name’s Matt.”

“Oh.” Big Parka looks sort of horrified at this dealer faux pas. “I thought Guy was like…short for Matt.”

“How could Guy be short for Matt?” Dave asks. “Who shortens a name by going from four letters to three?”

I feel bad for awkward Big Parka, who is in full blush now. I actually think he might cry. “But…it could be a nickname, right?”

“Dude’s nickname is Slippers,” Jamie says.

“Oh,” says Big Parka. “Look, Slippers. Is it okay if Dave and I talk alone for a minute?”

I say that of course it’s fine. Then Jamie and I sit on the couch while Dave and Big Parka rumble off to talk in low voices in the kitchen.

On the couch, Jamie says, quietly, “Dave grew up around here.”

“Really?” It’s not that I’m that surprised Dave is from this town; I’m just surprised that Dave is from any town. Of course he has to be from somewhere, but you don’t expect to end up in the old neighborhood of your drug broker.

Jamie goes on, sotto voce: “Big dude in the coat’s named Monte. He went to high school here with Dave. Played football together. You imagine those dudes playing football? Shit, I should’ve lived in a small town. I’d have been fuckin’ all-state. Definitely wouldn’t have gotten cut in eighth grade. After they graduated, Dave moved away, went to law school. Monte stayed around here. This is his grandpa’s house.”

“Where’s Monte’s grandpa?”

Jamie makes a kind of bug-eyed face that makes me think either Monte’s grandfather has gone crazy and is in an asylum or that Monte and Dave have choked him to death.

“Monte got popped on a possession couple of years ago. Dave got him off and they been workin’ together ever since.” Jamie nods toward the kitchen. “Asshole on the cell phone? Monte’s brother, Chet. Real prick. Leeches off Monte, stupid motherfucker. Me ’n him are gonna go one day. And I can’t wait, yo. I’m gonna lay that punk-ass bitch
out.”

Even though this sounds like empty bluster coming from Jamie, I contemplate giving him my effective four-point nonviolence lecture, a version of which I delivered to Franklin earlier (…(1) Except in rare cases of self-defense involving hand grenades, violence is always wrong, even against stupid motherfucker punk-ass bitches…)

Jamie looks around the living room. “So…you’re like a businessman
and
a writer?”

“I covered business for the newspaper for eighteen years.”

“And you write what, poems and shit?”

“Mostly shit.”

“So how’d you get into that? You get, like…a degree in it?”

I’ve been sitting next to Jamie on the couch, but now I turn to face him—gaunt cheeks, straight, dyed-black hair, a stud through his nose and another through his lip and that tattoo wrapping partway up his neck, and at the top, a pair of downturned eyes. My drug dealer sidekick is like any kid venturing a tentative question. He blushes.

I can’t help smiling. “You want to be a writer, Jamie?”

He chews his lip nervously and looks down—unsure if my smile means I’m making fun of him. He’s embarrassed to aspire to something as low-rent as being a writer.

“I don’t know,” Jamie says. “I’ll probably end up in sales…or law enforcement…or, I don’t know…I might be in a band? I’ll definitely have to do something else to make some coin.” He shrugs. “But yeah, I always thought I’d be a good writer.”

Sadly, our career counseling session is interrupted when Big Parka Monte comes back in the room alone. I don’t know where Dave has gone. “Come on, Slippers,” Monte says. “I want to show you something.”

Jamie and I follow him through a rustic kitchen—an open pizza box with half-a-veggie on the Formica table (stoned stock analyst side-note: Domino’s Pizza’s time-tested delivery platform and low price-point make it a solid recession buy)—to a padlocked basement door. Big Parka produces a janitor’s key ring and unlocks the door and we descend (Jamie: “Watch your head, Slippers.”) into a paneled rec room with two small window-wells. There’s an unlit pellet-burning stove in one corner and a ceiling fan moving the warm air around. It is surprisingly hot down here, stuffy even. On the other side of the room an air hockey table is pushed up against the wall. Big Parka grabs one side of the air hockey table and Jamie grabs the other and they pull the table away. Then Big Parka Monte takes a putty knife and wedges it into a seam in the paneling, pries away a door-sized section, sets the paneling against another wall and steps away to reveal a narrow, yellow-glowing hallway lit with strung Christmas lights along its dirt floor.

“During Prohibition, there was a still down here,” Jamie tells me. “Monte’s great-grandpa was a rum runner.”

I follow Monte down this narrow hallway. It’s warm. No windows. There are three small doors off the hallway, each one padlocked. A slender yellow strip of light burns beneath each door. Monte uses his key to open the first door and steps aside as I look in.

Dave is nowhere to be seen; everything he does seems planned in advance for some later testimony:
Mr. Prior, did you ever see my client in the grow room itself?

I step into the narrow doorway.

I’m not entirely prepared for what I see.

The room is small, maybe ten-by-ten. It’s almost unbearably bright. There’s a low gurgling hum, the sound of water moving through pipes. Hanging from the ceiling are three banks of hooded lights, like a photographer might use, and the walls are papered in reflective Mylar. Space heaters line the bases of the walls, and temperature and barometer gauges are on the wall nearest the door. In the center of the room, beneath the lights, are what we’ve come here for: four rows of chest-high counters, each with a pot and rows of large cubes that look like steel wool, each of these cubes connected by plastic water pipes, and rising from each cube of steel wool, like rows of patients on IV’s, three dozen of the most glorious dark green hydroponic marijuana plants anyone has ever seen, their stems bursting into ferny leaves and sitting on top, like dirty Christmas tree toppers, gorgeous bursts of purple-green, scuddy buds.

“Wow,” I say. There are rows and rows of these top-heavy, budding, dark green plants, and more plants hanging upside down to dry and I recall the old gray ragweed my friend Donnie used to grow and it’s like the difference between thoroughbreds and burros. And even though this is what I’ve come for, there is something vaguely unsettling about this room, like one of those chicken farms where the birds are kept indoors and given steroids to grow their breasts. And the low gurgle of hydroponic tubes connecting the plants makes it seem even creepier, like one of those body-snatcher movies, or the nest of dead bodies in the
Alien
movies. Monte puts a hand on my shoulder. “Come on.”

The next room is similar, but with buzzing sodium lights and what Monte tells me is a carbon dioxide generator. And rather than growing in “rock wool,” as Monte calls the cubes I saw earlier, these stems emerge from a whitish-gray stuff that looks almost like packing material.

“Shredded coconut,” Monte says. “It works great for this kind of plant, but you really have to watch the aphids. I lost a whole crop to aphids one year.”

“I see,” is all I can think to say.

In the next room, the lights are fluorescent and the plants grow out of a mixture of soil and sponges. “This is incredible,” I say. “You must have a botany degree or something.”

From the rec room behind us, Jamie calls: “No way, yo. Monte’s self-taught. Dude’s like a genius, somethin’.”

Monte shrugs shyly.

The short hallway ends at a tiny iron door, like the hatch of an old coal furnace. Monte opens it and I peer into a crawl space leading to another glowing passageway. “This tunnel leads to my neighbor’s basement,” Monte says. He tells me that three basements in this block are connected by these tunnels, that each basement has a secret panel leading to other grow rooms. There are twelve grow rooms in all in his little underground maze.