The Financial Lives of the Poets Read online

  Dave stares at me. I look over at Jamie again but he has picked up a copy of The Sun magazine and is flipping through it.

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “This is what I do,” Dave explains. “It’s the same search you’d get in prison. I do it to make sure people aren’t stealing from me. I might do it any time. You never know.”

  “But…I haven’t even bought anything from you yet.”

  Dave is starting to get a little more threatening. “And you aren’t going to buy anything until you take off your clothes and I get a look up that ass.”

  I look over at Jamie again but he won’t meet my eyes. There’s a twitch in his neck tattoo.

  So I take off my shirt and, for some reason, fold it before setting it on the arm of the couch. I try to remember the last time anyone has looked up my ass, which would be, oh, let’s see: never. I begin to unbutton my pants.

  And that’s when Dave spits laughter. “I’m just fuckin’ with you,” he says.

  My hands are still on the buttons of my pants.

  “Man,” a disappointed Jamie says, “I can’t believe you were actually gonna let him look up your ass. What’s the matter with you? You some kind of ass exhibitionist?”

  My shirt is off and my pants are two buttons down and I am dumbfounded. “You mean you don’t need…I don’t have to get undressed?”

  “It just proves my point,” Dave says. “You can get people to do anything.”

  I put my shirt back on, button my pants and we all sit again.

  Then Dave picks up his briefcase and opens it on his lap. “Jamie says you need some pain relief.”

  “Um, yeah.” I reach for my coat, which has the money in it. “Nine thousand dol—”

  “Bup, bup!” Dave interrupts me. “I didn’t ask how much.” He holds up his hand to stop me. “Wait…. You brought the money with you?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “First—I don’t handle money. And second—” He looks over at Jamie, shakes his head, and then back at me. “You brought nine grand to a meeting with someone you don’t know?”

  “What if we were planning to rob you, Slippers?” Jamie asks.

  I scratch my head, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of that.

  “What if we rolled you? You gonna go to the cops and say you got robbed in a drug deal?” Dave asks. He taps my skull. “You gotta think, man, if you’re gonna work with me.”

  “I…I’m sorry,” I say. I glance over at Jamie, who has the look I sometimes see on Teddy’s face when I take him to school, or roller skating, or anywhere: please don’t embarrass me anymore, Dad. “Look, I don’t usually do this.”

  “That explains why you seem to think you can just go out and buy two pounds.”

  “Look,” I say, “I really am sorry. I’m just trying to make a little money, and I have some friends who I think would buy some—”

  “Bup, bup!” Dave says again, and he puts his hands over his ears. “Don’t ever tell me how much you want or what you’re doing with it. All I wanna know is what condition you got.”

  “Uh.” I nod. “Okay.”

  Jamie leans over and says quietly, “Glaucoma.”

  Dave waits.

  “I’ve got…” I look over at Jamie “…glaucoma?”

  Dave smiles, opens his briefcase. Takes out a tabbed folder marked CONTRACTS. He opens this CONTRACTS folder and sets two short stacks of pages on the coffee table.

  Then he holds out a pen and spins the first contract so I can read it.

  “This,” Dave says, “is a simple agreement between Party A, which is me, and Party B, which is you, obviously…stipulating that you are not a law enforcement officer, that you’re not in any way or manner working with state or federal law enforcement in any investigatory or information-gathering capacity, either as an undercover agent or as a paid or unpaid informant, and that you will not knowingly provide any law enforcement agency with any material information regarding this transaction.”

  Before I can read the language in the first part of the contract, Dave is already on to the second: “This stipulates that you and I have not discussed any intended usage for what will heretofore be known as the medicinal product, that I will introduce you to a grower but if you are planning to use the medicinal product for usage other than medicinal, I have not been made aware of this fact, and thirdly, I have made no promises or guarantees that in any way indemnify you, should you, upon your own actions, outside the basic language of this contract, end up as the subject of any outside investigation for any prosecutable criminal offense. To wit—”

  And he flips to the second, longer set of contracts. “This is a series of riders in which you agree that you will not engage in selling the medicinal product within 400 yards of a school, that you will not sell the medicinal product to minors, nor use weapons in any way connected with the medicinal product, that you will not use the Postal Service to mail it, nor cross any state borders with it, nor in any other way, knowingly or unknowingly, commit any material infraction in connection with the medicinal product which would represent a real and severe breech of this contract in any substantive manner and which might violate any and all state or local statutes, as well as the federal Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C., and all its subsections herewith, nor commit any willful act that can be defined as an extenuating circumstance superseding the standard guidelines as defined by the federal mandatory sentencing laws, which, for the purposes of this contract, shall include any laws now on the books, or any laws passed in the future, in perpetuity, etcetera, in all states and territories, etcetera, etcetera….”

  “You’re a lawyer?” I ask.

  “There appears to be some question with the bar about that,” Dave says. And then he hands me a final, single contract. “This last one simply indemnifies me, and releases me from all liability, all claims both criminal and civil, should you, knowingly or unknowingly, alter the medicinal product in any real and/or material way by cutting it, or crossbreeding it, or enhancing it through the addition of any artificial stimulants or other substances covered by the Controlled Substances Act or by federal sentencing guidelines or by FDA regulations, those substances including but not limited to, cocaine in all its forms, PCP, heroin, methamphetamine, insecticides, fertilizers, artificial sweeteners, etcetera, etcetera.”

  I am staring at this pile of contracts when Jamie holds up the magazine he was reading to reveal an arty black-and-white photo of a nude woman standing in the shade of a doorway. “I like this kind of tits,” Jamie says.

  “Pointy,” Dave says.

  “Artificial sweeteners?” I ask.

  Dave shrugs. “Some people like it sweeter. Most people use honey, but some assholes go cheap and douse it in old liquid sweeteners.”

  Jamie leans in. “That shit causes cancer, yo.”

  I look at Dave, who is still holding the pen out to me, and I picture the real estate agent that Lisa and I used to buy our home, a tool named Thomas Otway, his tanned face set in a constant half-smile. Thomas had a funny Australian accent that always seemed phony.

  “This is all pretty much boilerplate,” Dave says, another thing our real estate agent used to say, except with his Aussie-r-dropping-vowel-twisting accent—bolah-plite.

  I take the pen and begin signing. “Here,” Dave says, removing flagging tape from each section, “and here, here, and here…and one more…here.” Dave puts the signed contracts back in the CONTRACTS folder and then he takes from his briefcase another folder: MENUS.

  He opens the MENUS file, takes out one of the sheets and hands it to me. The menu lists what are apparently various kinds (breeds? brands? makes? models?) of marijuana down the left column: AK-47, Arrow Lakes PB, Haze, Purple, Trainwreck, Snow Cap, OG Kush, Canadian Black, Cambodian Red, Schwag, F-1, ChemDog, Sour Diesel, White Russian, Jumping Jack and Northern Lights. The prices are listed in two columns on the right—the price ranges from $35 to $80 for an eighth and from $250 to $575 for an ounce.

/>   I stare at this sheet, not entirely comprehending it. Jamie points out one of the cheaper middle brands—Arrow Lakes PB—and nods. This must be the B.C.-Bud-Nobel-Frankensteined shit that I’ve been smoking the last few days.

  Dave goes on: “The blends are italicized, and anything with an asterisk is a name brand. I work mainly with a local grower, so what I tend to feature are locally produced versions of these brands—think of them as knock-offs, but every bit as good, sort of like generic prescription drugs. Not everything is going to be available, obviously, and these prices are subject to availability and other market forces.”

  “And you can get me—” I recall I’m not supposed to mention amounts “—enough?”

  “First, I’m not getting you anything. I don’t handle that part of it, because of my allergies—I’m allergic to spending the rest of my life in prison. I introduce you to the grower, help you broker a fair price, that kind of thing, all for an hourly fee, but I don’t want to know how much you’re buying or what you’re doing with it. I assume you have a prescription. After that, you’re responsible for paying for it, and for transporting anything you buy. I don’t ever see dope or dough. I’m simply a lawyer who gets paid for whatever billable hours I spend on various negotiations, contracts and introductions—none of which involves the actual transaction of drugs or money. I am not the person providing you with the product. We’re clear on that?” Dave taps the stack of contracts I’ve signed.

  “Uh. Yes?”

  “Good.” Dave begins packing up his briefcase. “Then take this menu home and read through it and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  When his briefcase is packed, Dave looks me in the eye, smiles and winks, and once again, I think of Thomas, the agent who represented Lisa and me when we bought our house.

  Our house…for another, what…five days and nine hours? Lisa’s inside it right now, bent over the computer keyboard while our boys are nestled in their beds—no idea of the insanity going on around them, foreclosure, affair, dope deal, all that unraveling—and it’s almost as if I can hear our old real estate agent’s phony accent: I’m so bloody ’appy for you, this is the house-a-ya drimes, slick son-of-a-bitch pushing papers like they were made of fine glass, Lisa, Matt, this is the pa’ht I love, papers that chained us to a death ship for thirty years, for the rest of our lives, or until next week, I have a feeling you’re going to be so ’appy heah, and it dawns on me that Drug Dealer Dave’s sales strategy might be a good one for realtors, too, beginning the home-buying process by pretending to want to search your asshole.

  Because, honestly, after that everything goes pretty smoothly.

  CHAPTER 11

  Turns Out There Are Only Four Eskimo Words for Snow, However—

  ACE AUNTIE ATSHIT BAMMY banana bash

  bart bazooka black-mote block (and) blue-bayou

  bobo bone boom brick budda (botanical name:

  Cannabis sativa) charge cherat chips chira

  chronic daga dope funk ganja giggle grass

  grefa hemp jack jane jay jolly juju

  (and the deliriously sweet-sounding) kiff.

  A loaf a log a lid (which is what we called

  an ounce when I was a kid; what they now

  call a can) loco lucas ma mak mary-jane

  marijuana—(which is Mexican

  for something no one can ever agree upon

  and then comes the sweet string of—)

  meggie moocah muggles numba noma paca

  pat pin pot pretendo rat red reefer rye

  sen sez spliff snopp stink straw

  stack thai thumb wollie what yeh

  yen-pop yesca zambi (then back a bit to

  end on my own personal favorite)—weed.

  “Why are you Googling pot slang?” Lisa asks. I didn’t hear her come in the room and now she’s looking over my shoulder. She is dressed in a tight-fitting black shirt and skirt; she looks great. She’s been dressing up more for work the last few weeks. It reminds me of when we were first married, how it used to break my heart a little every morning when she’d make herself so beautiful to go market the sports medicine clinic and I’d think: wait a minute: I’m the guy who married you. Why don’t they get the sleepy woman in the zero-population-growth pajamas and I get the business babe in the hot suit?

  “I think we need to be ready, that’s all,” I say, thinking quickly to explain the list of stoner synonyms on the screen. “Those boys are going to be teenagers soon and when they start sneaking around I don’t want to miss any of the code words.”

  “They’re ten and eight, Matt.”

  “You want to have your head in the sand, go ahead. I’m gonna be ready.”

  Lisa shrugs off the latest sign of what she surely must see as my fatal case of mid-life imbalance. “Curt is supposed to get back to me today about going full time and getting on the benefits package,” she says. When she’s nervous, like now, Lisa bites her bottom lip. It goes white under her teeth. “I’m not optimistic, Matt.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “So what should I say if he says no?”

  “I wouldn’t say anything. I’ve told you before I think you should look for another job, but you probably shouldn’t quit this one until you have another one.”

  “Yeah,” she says, and she looks past me, out the window. She clears her throat and says, “So what do you have today?”

  I list off the day’s chronological indignities: (1) Dad’s doctor’s appointment, in which he will be given a routine dementia exam—SATs of senility—to determine the rate of his decline and the effectiveness of the meds he’s on (2) a meeting about the one job prospect I’ve been tending, with a wealthy developer I used to cover who claims to want to start an online newspaper with me as editor (3) a twice-postponed afternoon appointment at the Unemployment Office with my job counselor, Noreen.

  What I don’t mention is that I’m also: (4) going on day three without sleep (5) desperately trying to “contact my lender” to fend off foreclosure for another month and (6) waiting for Dave my drug-dealing lawyer to call so I can order nine Gs of primo skank—at least two logs of meggie, or two bricks of block (or is it two blocks of brick?). Eight loafs of juju. Thirty-two cans of chronic. Two-hundred fifty-six eighths of zambi. Eight hundred spliffs of bammy. (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Texas Instruments makes a fine calculator for figuring this out.)

  “I’m sorry to ask again, but do you think you could pick up the boys? And feed them dinner? I might be kind of late.”

  “Sure.” I notice that she hasn’t offered an excuse and I don’t ask for one. I just turn back to the computer screen and Lisa exits this little room we call “the office,” to go finish getting our future potheads ready for school.

  What I was actually doing when she came in was trying to figure out the words on Dave’s marijuana menu, but it is like trying to learn Spanish, this pot-language; there are apparently national and regional dialects (how would you ever know where to smoke wollie, or yeh?), native slangs giving way to brands and hybrids, formal and informal constructions, questions of singular and plural (can you have two sez?), an ever-shifting slang meant precisely to exclude creepy old dudes like me. In fact I’m beginning to suspect that every noun is slang for pot, and every verb also means to get high. Raise a flag? Pound a nail? Shoot some hoops? Park the car? Feed the cat? Well…that might just be feeding the cat.

  Voices trickle up the stairs: “Bye, Dad.” “Bye, Dad.” “Bye, Matt.” The house is wrung of its young people and it’s just my dry old man and me, both of us staring into flat, diode screens.

  I call down the stairs. “You okay down there, Dad?”

  “When does Rockford Files come on?” he yells back up.

  “Nineteen-seventy-five.”

  I finish my dope research and check Lisa’s Facebook page, but she’s gone underground. No more public flirtation. Usually when I do recon, I come across a dozen harmless chats back and forth between Lisa and her old college friends—they se
nd each other good karma and E-hugs and online invitations and it’s no different than grade school, folded notes going back and forth. Usually, in a single night, Lisa receives, and responds to, dozens of these passed notes. Last night there were twenty entreaties to her from various “friends” and she didn’t respond to a single one. It’s all Chuck all the time now, and either she’s learned to keep their conversations private or they’ve moved to a safer platform.

  I remember, at a party in college some girls asked me what represented first, second and third base at my high school. These girls were loudly and drunkenly agreeing that first base was kissing and a home run was sex, but second and third were open for debate—everything from booby-outside-the-shirt to heavy petting to making out to blowjobs. I said that at my school, first base was group sex, second base bestiality, third base necrophilia and a home run an elaborate weeklong orgy that ended with a snuff film. The joke, as I recall, fell somewhat flat, ending the usually solid party topic of sex bases. Lisa did always say that my sense of humor was an acquired taste. Like beef heart.

  Anyway, I think there must be a sort of electronic version of those bases now—first base being a simple wall-posting on Facebook or MySpace, second being a private email, third a text message to one’s phone leading to…I don’t know…phone sex or masturbating in front of a computer camera. That’s a pleasant thought for one’s wife and the prince of lumber.

  I push away from the computer, spend ten minutes in mortgage-company automated-phone hell (por español, dos) but my heart’s just not in it. I need to sell some jack. I do push-ups. Sit-ups. Shower. Take a dress shirt from the ignored side of my closet, whisper to the despondent ties: stay alert boys, any day now, any day! Downstairs, Dad has given up ever finding Jim Rockford on TV and is watching news swing back and forth from a plane crash to the recession and back again, until they begin to seem like the same thing. “Look at that,” Dad says of a certain twenty-four-hour news babe. “I’d like to bend her over her anchor desk.”

  As my father fantasizes rough sex with this pert professional on her crisp news set, I run a comb through his wispy gray hair. He pats his chest for a cigarette.