The Financial Lives of the Poets Read online

  “I said fiftee’. Then you said sixtee’.”

  “Wait. Fifteen thousand dollars? A year?” And now I hate this country shit with his stupid country-lisp-whistle that cuts the last letter off every word so that fifteen actually sounds like fifty. “I can’t live on fifteen thousand a year, Earl.”

  “Well, hell Matt, I don’t know why you took this meeting then. I tol’ you it was gonna be sweat equity early on. That it might even be part time. Hell, you’re the one been telling me for years they ain’ no money in this shit.”

  “But…fifteen?”

  “I got no problem findin’ people will work for that.”

  And the awful thing is that I have no doubt that he does have journalists who will work for fifteen grand a year, for ten dollars an hour, there are so many out of work, and I also have no doubt that I can’t entirely afford to walk away without at least considering this offer.

  “I got people will gimme shit on the Internet for free,” Earl says apologetically. “An’ I ain’ so sure it’s any worse than the crap I’m payin’ for.”

  And I think this is likely true, too. I sigh. Look around the restaurant, then down at my cell phone, which is displaying Dave the Drug Dealer’s text message: “1 hour…”

  “I don’ t…know if I can,” I tell Earl. Deep breath. “I might have to do something else.” I rub my brow. “Look, can I get back to you?”

  “Fine,” he says. “Sixtee’. But that’s as high as I can go, Matt. I want you. We both know I like havin’ you on my side. But I pay any more’n that…I’ll jus’ be shittin’ in my own soup.”

  CHAPTER 12

  You Will Need

  (ALL PRESSURE-TREATED STOCK)

  18 eight-foot four-by-fours

  to build the side walls and

  30 more for the floor,

  6 three-and-a-half footers

  for the fort’s side door

  (Foundation underpinnings

  are 16 four-foot boards)

  and 6 two-footers more, for

  the other fort door

  16 one-footers for top cops

  and spacers for the door

  12 four-foot galvanized spikes

  (although you may need more).

  This list, along with the requisite tools—circular saw, framing square, twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer, measuring tape and heavy-duty drill with various bits—constitutes, according to my new friend Chuck, crowned prince of Lumberland, Duke of cuckolding, Earl of Homewrecker, the basic raw materials for the simplest tree fort I can build, Frontier Fort #2, a tree fort so simple it doesn’t even require a tree.

  “So wait, it just sits on the ground?”

  He looks up from the book? “Hmm? Yeah. It just sits on the four-bys. That’s why you gotta make sure the wood is treated.”

  So…Chuck is a Hmm-er, one of those people who hears you but pretends he doesn’t, says Hmm, and then answers your question. Lisa is going to hate that after a few years. She’s going to say, Why do you say Hmm, if you heard what I said? And he’s going to look up from his newspaper in my living room and say, Hmm?

  It’s only a beginning, but I am starting to find weaknesses in my opponent.

  After the disastrous meeting with Earl I still had an hour to kill before meeting Dave the Drug-Dealing Lawyer. I couldn’t bear taking a meeting with Noreen my unemployment counselor, who would no doubt encourage me to take Earl’s $16,000-a-year job so she could scratch me off her list of unemployables. So I canceled and came once more to the mystical land of lumber for a bit of recon behind enemy lines.

  Chuck stands while he types at a plastic-covered computer. This seems unfair to me. I had really hoped to tower above him. As Chuck goes back and forth from the tree-fort book and his computer, I whistle a song I downloaded earlier today. He doesn’t react to it. My whistling is a bit rusty, so the song may not be immediately recognizable, so I try the chorus, which it pains me to sing: “She’s sweet/and oh-so vulnerable/a man’s wet dream/or his worst nightmare.”

  Chuck doesn’t say anything. He just runs his finger down the list of supplies I need and then switches back to his computer keyboard.

  “You know that song?” I ask.

  His brow is wrinkled up in a difficult math problem. For a second, while he calculates, he looks right at me, but it’s as if he doesn’t recognize me, or is looking through me. There is a low hum of space heaters in Lumberland, as all around us men are gathering the materials to build things; it’s what we do at Lumberland. We come get stuff to build stuff. In this way, over time, men like us built all the stuff in the world. “Hmm?”

  “The song I was just singing? By the band, Blue Eyed Jesus? You know them?”

  Chuck’s lips are still moving as he adds my lumber purchase in his head. When he’s done, he jots down a number. “Hmm? I’m sorry. What?”

  “Oh. This band I heard. Supposed to be coming to town? Blue Eyed Jesus? I really like ’em, but I can’t find anyone who has heard of them. I was just wondering if you knew them.”

  “What was it again?”

  “Blue Eyed Jesus?”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

  This proves, of course…nothing. It could be that the concert is simply a cover story for their rendezvous and so Chuck wouldn’t know the band. It could also be that he’s pretending to not know the band because he’s figured out who I am. Or it could be that Lisa really is going to the Blue Eyed Jesus concert with Dani. It could also be that Jesus really did have dreamy blue eyes, just like Chuck’s. Maybe Chuck is blue eyed Jesus, Prince of Peace and of Lumberland. Maybe Chuck is the emperor of ice-cream. Or maybe life is an illusion, an image shadowed by fire onto a cave wall.

  Chuck hits print and when he bends over to pick up the printout I am finally given a gift, the kind of thing that makes me thank Jesus’ blues, the kind of vision that makes me believe that I can turn around this long losing streak, the first sign of light in a very dark tunnel:

  Chuck has a bald spot!

  The genre calls for me to go coin-size with my estimate—quarter, fifty-cent piece, silver dollar—but it’s hard because Chuck’s bald spot isn’t exactly round. (Who ever heard of an irregular bald spot? Cancer, I think, before the burgeoning Catholic in me scolds with self-directed guilt; after all, the man does have children, and anyway, I’ve never heard of scalp cancer. Okay…how about just an acceleration of this uneven hair loss?)

  And then it comes to me: Chuck’s bald spot is roughly the size and shape of a fried wonton. “I don’t suppose there’s any good Chinese food around here?”

  “Hmm?” Then, still bent over, reading my printout for the treeless tree fort, Chuck tells me the name of a place nearby.

  “They have wontons?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Probably.”

  I have, I should point out, a luscious head of hair. Cut short now, up over my ears, my hair is nonetheless thick and healthy and free of dumpling-shaped islands of skin. The wonton is turning, my friend, decaying Prince of Lumberland, balding boy-wonder of woodwork, male-pattern ninja of wife-thievery. I run my hand through my hair; it bristles like windblown wheat.

  And when Chuck straightens up with the printout, I see that the triangular-shaped hole has two allies I didn’t notice on either side of his head: a couple of little lots just being paved on either side of those dreamy Jesus blue eyes. (This is the thing about dreamy eyes; like red paint on a car, they cause buyers to overlook a lot of other problems.) Looks like some very real hair-care disappointment ahead for the blue-eyed Prince of Pine.

  “Here you go.”

  I look down at the invoice, eyes going straight to the bold number at the bottom of the page…“Eleven hundred bucks! For a kid’s tree fort! Christ on a bike! How much would it cost if it was actually in a tree?”

  “I’m sorry. I said it’s the easiest, not the cheapest,” Chuck says, and he wrinkles his forehead and takes back the estimate and I can see the condescension creep into his face (
this jerk’s wasting my time; he was never going to build a tree fort) and it pisses me off—are you really looking down on me, wife-stealer? You can’t possibly be looking down on me, baldy—and my face flushes, and I ball up my fist to smack this asshole and that’s when I notice the phone is buzzing on my waist and I look down at the number, it’s Dave the Drug Dealer, and instead of punching Chuck, I have what can only be called, in the religious sense, an epiphany—

  More than a good idea, I see, as clearly as if it’s right in front of my sleep-hungry eyes: a stack of boards sitting on my front yard, the Stehne lumber invoice stapled to it, Lisa walking up, bending over, reading, her eyes going wide (What?) looking toward the neighbors (Do they know?) typing furiously on the keypad of her phone (Did U send this wood?) getting his response (That’s UR husband?) and then her typing back (U think he knows?)

  Yes. I know. I can’t control the smile that crosses my face. “I’ll take it.” I snatch the paper back from him. “When can you deliver it?”

  “Monday?”

  “I need it tomorrow.”

  “Our driver’s off tomorrow.”

  “Well, that’s when I need it. My wife’s going to a concert this weekend and I’m apparently going to have a lot of time on my hands.”

  “I could maybe get it there…on Saturday?”

  “That’s too late. Look,” I say. And I hold up my buzzing phone like a time bomb—deliver my lumber or I blow this little wooden kingdom to hell. “I have to take this. Now can you deliver my lumber tomorrow? Or should I go to a different store?”

  “Okay.” He shrugs and gives me one of those idiot-customer-is-always-right sighs that must come from a lifetime of working in the family business. “I may have to deliver it myself, but I’ll get it there.”

  CHAPTER 13

  On the Spiritual Crises of Financial Experts

  THIS ONE ADMITS TO being a lifetime

  proponent of deregulation

  but now, on NPR, he doesn’t know what to think—

  I however, think of Mother Teresa, who at the end of her life

  admitted she’d had a crisis and had stopped hearing God’s voice

  decades earlier, which had to be a bit of a relief, I’d think—

  hard enough to live a perfect life without

  being hectored about it

  —give away everything, feed the poor, don’t forget to love

  the lepers!—but back to this disillusioned expert who says

  you could go to any business school in the country and learn

  the same lousy things he believed during those wasted years

  —those Brooks Brothers days of strippers and Town Cars—

  which is that financial systems are equilibrium-producing

  engines and it takes random or external forces to derail them

  that our entire economy is based on this simple principle—

  that left alone markets will chug mostly in a straight line

  that they will mostly do what is in their own best interest—

  Balance risk with reward.

  Throw out bad paper.

  Make money.

  But this crisis, the broken expert sadly explains

  belies all of that, defies everything everyone ever

  believed because it wasn’t caused by famine or hurricane or

  by war, by OPEC raising prices or by some third-world country

  bailing on billions in loans while its epaulet-happy despot

  bags the humanitarian aid and raids the banks—no

  the ultimate cause of this global crisis

  in our financial system

  is our financial system.

  This problem is endemic to the faulty machine it exposed

  and contrary to the news, it wasn’t caused by poor people

  being allowed to borrow one hundred percent

  of inflated home prices with nothing down, not really—

  and it wasn’t even caused by traders inventing questionable

  derivative side bets against those same bad loans, not really—

  (that’s like saying a cold is caused by a cough

  that your pneumonia came from a sneeze)—

  no, the root cause of this global crisis

  in our financial system

  is our financial system.

  And here is my real issue with financial experts

  the whole time they’re advising you what to do

  with your retirement accounts, or your kids’

  college funds, or when you happen to catch them

  on TV (all fancy cuffs and high collars)—

  they all sound so smart. They all sound so right.

  Their true currency is surety and they’re so sure

  of their surety—but wait, the bull and the bear

  can’t both be right, how can the liquidity position

  and the long-term hold both be sure bets, and yet

  these guys are always so sure—and this sure expert

  says if there’s a flaw in the mechanics, dare I say—

  his voice begins to quaver—there’s surely a flaw in our

  entire system of lightly regulated capital generation

  and investment, which would mean there’s surely a flaw

  in nothing less than humanity itself—and here

  the financial expert’s voice breaks even more

  and he has to clear his throat and—surely he is crying,

  surely we’ve let him down, we humans, and he’s

  sure sobbing, devolving into a socialist, a fiscal atheist

  right before our Dolby-sure-sound public radio ears.

  And that’s when I hear the unsure voice of Mother Teresa

  praying to the God Who So Selfishly Refused To Speak

  To Her (the god of angry middle school girls

  the deity of ladies who get stuck with lunch bills

  the lord of stubborn brothers and jilted lovers

  the petty pouting feuding god of hurt feelings)

  and I say, in Teresa’s rat-infested, leper-loving lilt

  this wise, weary prayer—Dear Father, if you’re out there

  and if you can hear me, protect us from harm and by all means

  comfort the weak and the poor, the wageless and

  homeless, hungry, foreclosed, wandering, woefully

  afflicted, but if you get just a minute after that

  could you please please please

  spite the living fuck out of this asshole—I mean it

  go old-school Job on this rich fat fuck

  this expert who apparently slept through

  history class, through every relationship

  anyone was ever in, and through the entire

  twentieth century, this sure dickhead who

  has only now discovered that there is

  a goddamned flaw in us all.”

  CHAPTER 14

  On the Spiritual Crises of Drug Dealers

  THEN BEA KISSES ME.

  And how did I get here, on this front porch, among strewn leaves and half-hulled chestnuts, endangering fifteen years of mostly solid marriage by accepting a sweet kiss from a tall blond drug dealer’s moll? A quick retrace of my steps doesn’t exactly illuminate (took senile dad to doctor; got soul-crushing job offer for sixteen grand a year; went to Chuck-the-wife-thief’s lumber store; erratically purchased eleven hundred dollars’ worth of wood; got a call from Drug Dealer Dave suggesting I meet him at Bea’s apartment; drove here listening to infuriating financial expert on NPR; rang Bea’s doorbell, small-talked about her cool English major bookshelf; came outside with her so she could smoke; found myself telling her that she shouldn’t go out with Dave the Drug Dealer because, well, he’s a drug dealer; went on to add that she should find a nice sensitive poet boy rather than…)

  Bang. Bea leans over and kisses me.

  She pulls away and touches her mouth. Giggles. “Sorry,” she says. “I kiss people. It’s like…my thing.” Her mout
h is lovely, sitting in a narrow cat-like jaw beneath that roof of blond hair. We’ve just had a short, sweet kiss and I don’t even know if there was anything sexual about it except that it was on the lips and her hand was on my jaw when she delivered it. No, it was definitely an in-between kiss, not exactly mustached-Aunt-Martha-at-the-train-station, but probably not meant to be erotic either; and probably because of that, it’s incredibly erotic, and I flush like a teenager and gulp and swoon and feel in every other way achingly heartbreakingly young—which is all any of us can ever hope to feel from a kiss.

  “You’re sweet,” she says, “Jamie’s right about you.” And then she puts her cigarette out on the stoop and long-strides over to a garbage can to toss the butt. Her skirt swirls as she walks—my god, she’s got to have four feet of legs under there—and when she turns to face me her eyes are red and teary and I can’t imagine what I’ve said that’s made her tear up. “I’m not going out with Dave.”

  “Oh. I assumed—”

  “I know he wants to,” she says, “but we’re just friends. I was having money problems and Jamie introduced us, and he agreed to pay part of my rent if he could have his meetings in my place. Dave’s paranoid. Thinks his house is bugged.”

  “Oh.” And I’m so smitten it’s all I can do to not offer her money right now, to get her out of this arrangement with Dave the paranoid Drug Dealer, but I have no money to give that isn’t already tied up in drug deals or in treated lumber.

  She gives a wry, half-smile. “And there aren’t nearly enough sensitive poet boys.”

  That’s when Dave pulls up, in a Nissan Maxima exactly the year and color of mine. This makes me feel creepy in some way I can’t quite name.

  I wonder for a moment if Dave was parked down the block and saw the kiss, or if he can simply tell from my flushed face that Bea has kissed me. Maybe we’ll go for a drive now and Dave will whack me, or, being a lawyer drug dealer, sue me. Or maybe this was all a setup and Dave has been taking pictures of Bea kissing me and will use them as blackmail. If so, the joke’s on him: I’m not sure my soon-to-be-straying wife will care.