The Financial Lives of the Poets Read online

  Dad follows me to the car, where he rides like a vet-bound dog, facing sideways, the world streaming past like the façade of an old arcade game. There is a for-sale sign in the back passenger seat window of my car. Such new details are always alarming to Dad—they must signify something—so every once in a while he looks back at the sign. “You selling this car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of car is this?”

  “Maxima.”

  He sighs. “Do you know what I miss?”

  “Dan Fouts?”

  “Chipped beef.”

  “I know you do, Dad.” The sky is clear again today, world sharply drawn, trees clear of leaves, their anguished branches rising like clutched fingers. It’s quiet in the car. He first had it in the Army; shit-on-a-shingle, they called it. My mom used to make it for him, too. She preferred the description “chipped beef”—which, now that I think about it, is what he says he misses, not shit-on-a-shingle. Huh. So, he misses Mom’s chipped beef. Maybe he misses Mom.

  “Dad, what do you say we have that for lunch today?”

  “Have what?”

  “Chipped beef.”

  “I miss that.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  He looks back. “You selling this car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What—”

  “Maxima.”

  He is not happy in the doctor’s office waiting room. For the dementia patient, all of life is a waiting room in which you can’t remember what you’re waiting for and your turn never comes. In this actual waiting room are the kinds of people my father would never choose to spend his morning with—whiners, sniffers, the weak, complainers. I think about asking a nurse for something to help me sleep; I got an hour or two last night but I suppose you can’t really complain about not sleeping if you’re not actually going to bed.

  The nurse calls Dad’s name and he looks at me. I nod and we start to the back of the clinic. She takes his blood pressure and weighs him. He’s lost six pounds in six months. She glances over at me. I know. I know. I’m not feeding him enough chipped beef.

  We sit in the doctor’s office. Dad shifts, crinkles the paper-covered table. He stares at a crosscut drawing of the female reproductive parts, trying to figure out what he’s looking at: some kind of plant? map of the Gaza Strip? carburetor? Finally, I think his mind gets around what it is, and he winces and looks away.

  Dad’s doctor always seems grumpy about our appearance, even though she schedules these routine appointments. I always feel guilty that we’ve taken time away from her important life-saving for a routine maintenance check on Dad’s failing mind. She spends a few minutes on his health; she’s glad he’s quit smoking, even though I fear he’s just forgotten it.

  “Okay, Jerry,” she says. “I’m going to ask you a few questions. What year is this?”

  My father looks at me, pissed that I’ve done this to him. Last time he guessed 1997.

  “Nineteen…” He rubs his dry lips. “No.” And he smiles, because he’s not falling for the trap this time. “One thousand eight.”

  “One thousand eight?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “And the month?”

  “November.”

  “So it’s November of one thousand eight?”

  “If you say so.” He smiles at me. One thousand eight? Maybe it’s not terrorists we have to fear, the dudes planning another 7/11. Maybe we should be more worried about the Norman invasion. Or the plague.

  “Where did you work, Jerry?”

  “I worked at the…place.” He looks at me. “Sears,” he says, relieved.

  “And what did you do?”

  He pats himself for a missing smoke. Then he looks at me again. After managing the automotive department at Sears, Dad worked briefly in the Sears insurance offices but I think he missed his coveralls. He says, “What did I do? Hell, I did my job, that’s what.”

  “I’ll bet you did. And what did you have for breakfast today, Jerry?”

  He looks from the doctor to me. Blank. I can’t help him. He is pissed. If this test is the SATs of senility, Dad is headed straight for the Yale of assisted living places. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he tells the doctor.

  While he’s gone the doctor looks at his chart. “He’s lost six pounds.”

  “He’s eating,” I say.

  “Does he have any favorite foods you can make?”

  “Shit-on-a-shingle?”

  Maybe Lisa is right and I do have an inappropriate sense of comic timing; or maybe some people just don’t laugh when they should, this doctor, for instance, who looks down at the chart.

  “He comes in and out, has good days and bad days,” I say, which is pretty much the outlook the doctor predicted six months ago.

  “More bad days, though? More days like today.”

  “Not really,” I lie. “Half and half.”

  “Have you talked with your father any more about assisted living?”

  “A little,” I say. “He’s had some financial trouble…we’re sorting out his insurance now. But honestly…I think he’d rather eat a gun than go live in one of those death warehouses.”

  I’m not sure why I’m doing this—shit-on-a-shingle and eat a gun and death warehouses…as if the rough drug dealer is already emerging. Maybe I’ll whack this doctor.

  Dad comes back in the room. “Two thousand eight,” he tells the doctor. “I think I said it wrong before.” I recall the calendar at the nurse’s station. Dad glances over at me, and smiles, and I don’t think I’ve ever loved the old guy more than I do right now.

  He drifts in and out like this during the remainder of the test, knows some things I wouldn’t guess he’d know but can’t come up with others that seem basic to me, like two of my three sisters’ names. Simple math crushes him, and when he’s asked to repeat a list—wallet, telephone, car keys—thirty seconds later, he’s angry about the trick question. “What list?”

  “I said to repeat those three things,” the doctor said. “Remember?”

  “Well, they must have been stupid things,” Dad says. Right again.

  I drive Dad home and put the TV on financial news, slip into a sports coat and drive back downtown for my meeting with Earl Ruscom. I park ten blocks away to avoid paying for a meter. I’ll buy nine thousand dollars worth of pot, but I won’t pay fifty cents to park.

  Outside the restaurant, I call Dave the Drug Dealer to put in my order. He asks if I’ve read the menu. I say I have and that I’m interested in Arrow Lakes PB. I’m careful not to say how much.

  “Good choice,” Dave says. “Very good for glaucoma. Let me get back to you.”

  He hangs up and I go inside.

  I first met Earl Ruscom in 1997, at a public hearing I covered as a reporter. Earl was there to get the county to waive environmental cleanup for a cluster of houses he wanted to put on the site of an old railroad depot. Somehow, Earl got it in his mind that I was on his side in this dispute, because while my stories described him accurately as a voracious fat-ass developer trying to get around reasonable environmental laws, in the profile I called him “bombastic” and Earl took this as a compliment. “Just glad to have you on my side, Matt,” he used to say, even though I explained that reporters weren’t allowed to take sides, and, were I allowed to take sides, it wouldn’t be with a guy who wanted to build cheap houses on a polluted hillside soggy with oil leeching from old buried tanks. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re fair. I can smell the fair on you.”

  In the late 1990s Earl first approached me with the idea of starting his own newspaper. Earl’s newspaper would be “business friendly,” he said, and would contain none of the “liberal bias” and “anti-growth bullshit” that he believed were choking off development and keeping capitalists like himself from making money and filtering it back into the economy through the companies that made yachts, Jacuzzis and Scotch. I always liked Earl though, and we played golf together a few times. But I always thought he was talkin
g out his ass about owning his own publication. Then he began drawing up a business plan, and one day he called to see if I might want to edit his newspaper—which was going to be called, I kid you not, The Can-Do Times. But I still had a job then, so I was brutally honest with him: “Earl, I can’t take the job, and I have to tell you, I don’t think this is the right climate to be starting a newspaper, anyway.” A third-generation Westerner, Earl wasn’t a tie-and-jacket man as much as an ironed golf-shirt and big belt-buckle guy. He just laughed at me. “So I should take bid’ness advice from a guy makin’, what, fifty grand a year?” It was actually nearly sixty, but I didn’t say so. “Look, Earl,” I said, “I know you can read stock listings. Newspapers are just a bad bet right now. You might as well be starting a railroad. Or a Pony Express station.” This was when media stocks were merely trading down a few points, before “buying media stock” became a synonym for setting your money on fire. But this was also around the time that I was thinking of leaving my job to start a business-poetry website, so I maybe wasn’t the best person in the world to lecture Earl on bad ideas.

  Over the next year, of course, I went back to the newspaper and quickly lost my job, and Earl’s idea began to seem less crazy. So last week, I called and asked if he was still moving forward with his newspaper idea. He said he was, and he was glad to hear from me because he hoped to be up and running in a year and he still didn’t have an editor. And as he talked about his paper, it seemed that he’d been doing his research, because he’d given up the idea of a daily print edition of The Can-Do Times. Now, it would strictly be updated online, and he’d only produce one hard copy a week, a slender Sunday night edition—Sunday nights being the cheapest press run in town. This Monday morning howler would feature only the best columns and pieces that had run online all week, and would sit in the offices of people like Richard, my ganja-reefing broker, allowing savvy local businesspersons to feel like they’re hitting the week running. I asked if Earl was worried by the hard economic times and he said that a recession was the best time to go into business, just as it was the best time to buy real estate, because, “trust me, the big-dicks ain’t hidin’ in their panties, Matt,” and when Earl gets going, you don’t stop to untangle the words, you just go with it; No, Earl added, now was the time to “pull the goddamned trigger, open ’er up like a six-buck whore,” whatever that meant.

  It wasn’t that Earl’s bluster totally convinced me, and the thought of writing developer propaganda for him wasn’t exactly my idea of a dream job, but if he could at least pay me close to what I was making, say, sixty thousand (I’d gladly take fifty) a year, I owed it to myself and my family to see if Earl and I could make a go of it. And maybe the idea would fail, but it wouldn’t be for my lack of trying; I was prepared to give it the best effort I could muster.

  Our meeting is 11:30 lunch at a sushi place, which is not as odd as it sounds for a porterhouse like Earl; as my friend Jamie might say: dude love him some uncooked fish. It’s something to behold, watching Earl in a sushi place. He has a shark-like single-mindedness, eating roll after gourmet roll, gobbling gobs of sashimi, handfuls of edamame, slabs of seared ahi and maki, full paddies of rice. Every time the waiter passes, Earl orders something else. The last time I saw him, almost ten months ago, we were at this same sushi joint; he killed more fish in two hours than a trawler could in a week.

  I walk around the restaurant but don’t see him. The only person here is a thin guy who—

  “Matt!” calls this thin guy, sitting at a table near the door. He stands. He looks like Earl at the end of an old televised movie shot in CinemaScope, when they have to squeeze everything into a skinny frame to make the credits fit.

  “Earl?” I ask.

  He is at least eighty pounds lighter. The suburban sprawl that used to spill over his substantial belt has been zoned out of existence, and standing in front of me is a guy in size 33 Wranglers, craggy, gaunt and gray, like one of those aging Grand Ole Opry stars right before they die of lung cancer.

  In fact, my first self-pitying thought is that the angel of my recovery has gone terminal on me—along with my prospects for the future—but he says, “Fuck no, ain’t never felt better.” He had a heart attack, he explains, and his doctor ordered him to lose the weight. “And I don’t do nothin’ half-assed,” he points out, offering me some unsalted edamame. “Doctor says lose eighty pounds, I lose me eighty pounds.” He fixes me with a hard stare. “And what’s the matter with you? You look ten years older.”

  I explain that I’m not sleeping well. Or at all.

  Another minute of small talk, then Earl says, “Should we get this shit on the table.”

  Here is the shit Earl puts on the table: he is prepared, right now, to offer me the job as editor of The Can-Do Times. At first it will just be me, but eventually he wants a staff of six, made up of three part-time entry-level people, two college interns and possibly one other mid-career person like myself.

  “That’ll all be your call,” he says. “I’m gonna stay outta the kitchen. Not that I won’t give you my opinion, but shoot, you can feed glue to a horse an’ it’ll look like he’s doin’ algebra. No, only thing I ask—” and his skinny index finger points at my nose “—is that you give business in this town a fair shake and a voice for once. But this here’s your deal. I ain’ about to piss in the whiskey barrel.”

  And suddenly I love Earl. I love his belt buckle and I love that country-lisp-whistle in his voice that cuts the ends off words and makes a word like whiskey sound cool and I love a man who can simply will himself to lose eighty pounds and I love his business sense and I love Can-Do and I love this man’s courage, and his balls (metaphorically) and I especially love this homespun way of his, in fact I vow to start using phrases like piss in the whiskey barrel in conversations. I think I’ll have it burned onto a wooden sign for Earl, the kinds of signs people put at their lake cabins, and I can even imagine—although I’m not stupid enough to bring it up right now—that once we’re off the ground and I’ve introduced the extraordinarily popular feature The Fiscal Poet to The Can-Do Times, I’ll write a sonnet in Earl’s honor, fourteen rhyming lines breaking into four heroic couplets featuring Earl’s own homespun wit, ending with his lyric motto:

  …Man who could feed glue to an upright horse

  Make it look like the animal’s talkin’

  Could throw a fastball a hundred-n-four

  Knock down batters even when he’s balkin’

  Earl who can eat bone and drink marrow

  Ain’t gonna piss in the whiskey barrel.

  The business plan calls for one tech person and one advertising person on staff, he says, but this could also take a while. Everything will take a while.

  “Fine,” I say, and my cell phone rings—it is my Drug Dealer Dave—but I click it off because I’m not about to fuck up this meeting and just then the voice in my head starts in, that awful Matt-this-is-all-too-good-to-be-true voice. I don’t want Earl to see that things have been going so badly for me recently that I would distrust his offer, but the voice tells me: distrust his offer and so I start down the mental list of what I might be missing. The obvious thing is pay, but I feel the need to circle around to that: “Benefits?” I ask. “Health insurance?”

  “This is a start-up, Matt,” he says, and shrugs. “I have a plan for the people in my construction and real estate offices, but this here’s more like my restaurants. I could let you buy into the plan at a pretty good discount, certainly better than anything you can get out in the world, but I can’t match or go employer-based. I mean, you can’t give a virgin the biggest bed in the whorehouse, right?”

  Whatever. Still love this guy. I take a deep breath. “And pay?”

  “I gotta pay you?” He smiles, then makes a face. “Nah, this here’s a start-up, Matt. Ain’ no one gettin’ rich. I ’spect my ranch-han’s to put in some sweat equity, ’specially in the first couple-a-years. In exchange, you’d get real ownership shares, which—let’s be hones’,
neither of us knows if they’ll be worth the paper they’re shit on.”

  Yes, this is exactly what I was afraid of. “Look, I understand that, but I can’t work for free, Earl. And I can’t just work for stock. I’ve got a family.”

  “No one expects you to work for free, or jus’ for shares.” He looks genuinely pained. “But this bird, she ain’ gonna fly weighed down by salaries. In the beginnin’, I’m sorry but I could only pay you fifty, Matt.”

  Fifty? I pretend to have to think about it. Fifty!

  Love this guy!

  “Look, I know it’s significantly less than you was makin’,” he continues, “but I’ve crunched the numbers and if we don’t keep payroll at a bare minimum, this thing’s gonna go like the salt block at a slaughterhouse.”

  No idea what that means!

  “You’d have to supplement your income elsewhere…maybe even jus’ do the job part-time at first, but it’s the only way.”

  Fifty grand? Part time? Love this guy! Don’t look too eager, I tell myself. I wish I could call Lisa right now. “Don’t suppose you could go to sixty,” I say.

  He wrinkles his mouth. “Fifty…five?”

  Love! Him! Fifty is what we need to basically support our lives…to tread water…at fifty-five, we can slowly start to chip away at our debt. “How about fifty-eight?”

  “Aw screw it, what’s a few hundred bucks,” Earl says and sticks out his hand. “You got a deal, my friend. Fiftee’ thousan’, eight hunnerd.”

  I laugh. “That’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “It sounded like you just said fifteen thousand eight hundred.”

  He stares. “That is what I said.”

  “But you meant fifty-eight thousand, right?”

  “Fifty?” he says. “You sayin’ fifty? Fu-u-uck.” And then laughs. “Shoot, Matt I can’t pay no fifty. No, I said fiftee’. Fiftee’-eight! Fiftee’ thousand, eight hunnerd.”

  “But…earlier you said fifty. Then I said sixty.”