The Financial Lives of the Poets Read online

  But I suppose death comes for tyrants too. Because recently, I’ve heard from my former colleagues that M—is being forced out himself, that the publisher is finally tired of his blustery bristling incompetence, and has given him two months to find another job. Like any delusional dictator looking for asylum, M—is planning to make it look as if he’s fed up with years of laying people off and has decided to fall on his own sword (a weapon profoundly dulled from the heads he’s chopped with it). Then he can go out and seek ingratiating, flattering profiles of himself (One Editor Takes a Stand) in industry publications that should know better. Ah, well. Cheaper than sending out résumés, I suppose.

  And what of the ship that this Queeg of journalism has run aground? My old paper, which I still irrationally love, is half the number of pages it was just a few years ago and one rail narrower. The once plucky staff—my old colleagues and friends—now resembles the nervous crew in one of the Alien movies, their numbers shrinking as they look over their shoulders and wait for one of those mean little pink-slips to burst out of their chests.

  So there’s that.

  On the elevator, M—stares straight ahead. Like any bully, I know that he is driven by his own insecurities, and for a minute I have some sympathy for this awkward, friendless stump, who somehow believes that chinstraps aren’t just for boy bands, and who is, after all, on his way to being out of work himself. But none of that excuses his behavior; only bullies respond to being bullied by being bullies, and all I have to do is recall the way he walked so many good people to the edge of the playground and my sympathy dies.

  Ding. My floor.

  “Have fun mentoring,” I say.

  M—just snuff les.

  The elevator doors close. Why are those snappy things I imagine myself saying so unsatisfying when I actually say them? Then, into HR where I wait in the waiting room, waiting.

  “Matt. How are you?” asks Amber Philips. Amber was the head of the HR department for the newspaper when I worked here. Now, four rounds of layoffs later, Amber pretty much is the HR department. That has to suck, too, the head of HR laying off almost everyone in HR. We shake hands. Though no great beauty, Amber has that slightly-slutty business look just this side of inappropriate, her suits 0–2 fastballs—little high, little tight—her shoes a bit drastic for an office setting. (If Amber ever has to lay herself off, she could always commit suicide by jumping off those pumps.) And she’s a genuinely nice person.

  Perhaps the most pathetic thing about long-married guys like me is the delusional list that each of us keeps in our heads, a list of women we think are secretly attracted to us. Amber was always at the top of my delusional list. Even now, in my beaten-down state, I can’t help but have a kind of muscle-memory that she’s crushing on me a little (ooh, out-of-shape middle-aged unemployed guy, yum)—an assumption for which there is absolutely no evidence.

  “What can I do for you today, Matt?”

  I explain that Lisa and I have an investment opportunity for which we might need some immediate cash; and I need some information on my tiny newspaper pension, and what kinds of options I might have for tapping it early.

  She looks mildly horrified. “How early?”

  “Um. Now?”

  “Wow. Is it that bad out there, Matt?”

  “In the words of Robert E. Lee, ‘you have no idea, Pumpkin.’”

  “Remind me.” She smiles as she looks up my file on her computer. “Who did Robert E. Lee call Pumpkin?”

  “He called all his soldiers either Pumpkin or Sweetie. I know he called Nathan Bedford Forrest Doll-face. At Appomattox he called Grant—General Snuggles.”

  Her smile goes away as her cursor arrives at my dainty little pension, which I’d always counted on to pay for a tee time or two when I turned sixty-five. “I’m glad you still have your sense of humor, Matt.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” I say. “I’m just really stoned.”

  This is true.

  Of course, I wasn’t able to buy nine thousand dollars’ worth of pot last night, but the kid did call my old felon friend Jamie, who drove over to the apartment building and said it would take a few days to get such “significant weight,” a term that should’ve scared me off, but instead made me feel sort of exhilarated. As an act of good faith, I gave Jamie back Skeet’s Starter hat and told him to ask Skeet for my slippers. He said he would. We smoked a little in the apartment of the kid I’d flagged down in the parking lot, whose name turned out to be Larry, and whose apartment was—there is no other word for it—fetid. There were beer cans and pizza crusts all over the place and when I sat on a pizza heel, Larry shrugged and said, “I don’t like the crusts,” which didn’t explain why he needed to throw them all over his apartment. But I was a guest, so I just smiled and told Jamie and Larry that I really did want nine thousand dollars’ worth of pot because I needed some immediate cash and I thought some of my fellow old pothead middle-classers would buy it up. Jamie said that for that much money he could probably get me a couple of pounds. Meantime, he gave me a little taste at a bargain price, an ounce for the three hundred I was able to squeeze from a cash machine.

  We smoked a little last night, and I tucked the rest of my rolled Ziploc into a top dresser drawer and tried to go to bed, but I still couldn’t sleep—Was that a smile on Lisa’s dozing face?—so I got up and watched the sunrise, fed the kids and drove them to school, came home, showered, got Dad settled in front of the round-the-clock-politics-and-economic-crisis-dither-fest on CNN, and immediately took my wares to my baked broker, Richard. I sold Richard half of my deep green stash—what Jamie called four-eighths (and not a half, which is apparently different, or else Jamie is just bad at math)—feeling not even a hint of guilt for charging him three hundred, all I had invested to that point, even though it was an inflated price (and more evidence that Richard is not the financial genius I once thought he was). I also made Richard pay me twenty bucks for the pipe Jamie gave me for free. And I made him light up and give me a hit right there in his office. We blew smoke and stared at one another.

  “What?” Richard asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just wouldn’t have figured you as a pothead—although that might explain your tip on Mexican shipping bonds a few years ago.”

  “In this economy?” He shrugged. “I’d get stoned every day if I could.” Then he smiled wistfully. “I only smoke a couple times a year now. Partly because it’s so hard to find. And Liv hates when I do it.” Liv is Richard’s wife. He hummed some distant memory. “After college, I lived with this painter, Anya. She was wild, nothing like Liv. She liked to wake and bake—a quick bowl in the morning—and then have sex. Something like that sticks with you.” Richard considered the little pipe, and then took another hit, his mustache keeping a lid on his mouth as he fought coughing. He said, through gritted teeth: “God, I miss her.” Then he lost the smoke in a combo sneeze-cough-seizure-laugh. His eyes went wide and he said, “Wow.” The last thing he said when I left was, “I’ll take as much of this as you can get.”

  And now, sitting in the HR office of my old newspaper, Amber leans in, legs crossed, makeup perfect, and smiles rather wickedly. “Are you really high, Matt?”

  “Oh yeah.” I was so sure that I was done being a pot smoker. I was a two-drink, twice-a-week guy. Sober. Straight. Clean. Like a lot of parents, I anticipated the questions my kids would ask when the time came, and had prepared a speech to deliver when I sensed they were at the age temptation might arrive. No, son, my speech went, I did not smoke marijuana. I am proud to say that drugs have never touched this body. Here was my rationale, worthy of a politician eyeing a presidential run: if, as scientists say, every seven years the human body remakes itself with all new cells, then after fifteen years, I was two full People removed from that loser who smoked weed in college. And the truth was: I didn’t miss getting high. Not at all. I could honestly tell my kids that it was bad stuff. It made you stupid. Lethargic. And it was illegal!

  I felt good ab
out spouting this company line, partly because I assumed I actually had company in my line, that the rest of the adult world around me had also stopped getting high.

  But now I’m beginning to feel like the only jerk not invited to a great party, because it appears that while I was repeating my Nancy Reagan mantra, every other responsible adult was smoking bud like reggae musicians. Amber confides that she was a twice-a-weeker until her regular dealer moved six months ago, and her boyfriend, a drywaller whose drywall work has dried up, has been in a funk for months, has even considered moving somewhere where it’s easier to get a medicinal prescription. After some light negotiations, I give Amber a better deal than I gave Richard, because Amber is better-looking, and because she didn’t take a commission off my severance check, which Richard would probably have done. Amber buys the rest of my weed for two hundred, straight profit for me since Richard took care of my nut this morning.

  I’ve only been in the business a few hours and I’m up 66 percent! Amber writes me a check. On the subject line she writes: “lawn care.” We giggle.

  As for my pension, it’s not good news. With penalties, it would only be about twenty-six hundred dollars. Still, I tell her, get the paperwork started. (If I can make sixty-six percent on that twenty-six hundred…)

  “Wait,” says my friend Ike over lunch an hour later. “You’re like…a pot dealer now?”

  Ike and I have skipped our usual how’s-your-family and how-is-Idi-Amin-ruining-the-newspaper-now small talk and gone straight to my new career choice.

  “Yeah, I guess I am,” I say. This is the crux of it, I know. This is what we’re really talking about here. I am apparently buying marijuana and selling it. For profit. This is, I believe, the definition of a drug dealer. “But it’s only temporary.”

  “Wow.” Ike was the music writer at the newspaper for years, and oddly enough, given that position, among the squarest people I know. Married. Three kids. Asthmatic and frail. He was probably the only other adult not getting high the last fifteen years. He’s recently been transferred and is covering politics and city government now. On a shrinking staff, a music writer is an extravagance they can’t afford. I feel bad for Ike, who spent years developing that weird, specific music-writer vocabulary (the thunky wallop of the bass…the womb-like, plangent guitar) only to find it doesn’t quite translate to covering politics (the state Senator’s speech “lumbered along like a fussy cover musician scatting a complex hook”).

  “What about your kids?” Ike asks.

  “I’d rather not sell to them if I can help it, although I probably can’t afford to rule out their friends.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I do know what Ike means. And it is something I’ve tried not to think about—what would happen if my kids found out, if Lisa found out.

  Ike is a pale, skinny enrolled member of one of the California casino Indian bands—I can never remember which one—bifocaled and smart, he’s the best kind of newspaper guy in that he is a chronic underachiever, doomed to spend his life working for people half as intelligent as him. He’s my favorite writer at the newspaper, laid back and modest, one of those natural stylists whose effortless flow seems typed within the genetic code of his sentences, so that when you finish an Isaac Watts story you are unaware of its inherent art. Ike’s talent and intelligence are not without their blind spots, however; he was the one person genuinely excited about poetfolio.com, and in fact was even going to contribute a monthly column on real estate using a pen name: Frost Peltier. Ike and I started at the newspaper at the same time, eighteen years ago. He’s figured he was “safely above the water line” of layoffs, but he keeps watching others he assumed were safe, like me, “get sucked under, thrashing as they drown.” I have to say that, like my financial planner, sometimes Ike’s way with words is, at times, too evocative.

  “I can’t believe it,” he says again. “You are seriously thinking of dealing weed.”

  “I’m not thinking of dealing weed. I’m up two hundred and I just put in a buy order for almost ten thousand dollars.”

  “Is it really called that…a buy order?”

  “How do I know what it’s called,” I say. “I just started. Look. This is a bad idea. I know that. But I’m only gonna do it until I get back on top of my mortgage, or until I get a real job, whichever comes first. But if today’s any indication, it might just work—”

  Ike agrees: “Every other person I know smokes weed.”

  “It’s like prohibition,” I say. “In hard times, people crave the old stuff. Pot is nostalgia for a lot of people our age. Selling weed is like opening a speakeasy in 1933.”

  “I think prohibition ended in ’33,” Ike says.

  “Either way, I’m only going to do this for a few months, just long enough to make some house payments and keep my kids in Catholic school. Then I’ll quit.”

  “Wait.” Ike lowers his head. “You’re selling pot to pay for Catholic school? Drugs for private school? That’s so Iran-Contra.”

  Ike and I are in a favorite old haunt, a lunch place and donut shop on the edge of downtown called The Picnic Basket—the walls painted like a park, picnic benches for tables. The place has great chicken, sandwiches and pies, and transcendent maple bars. It’s owned by an old New York transplant named Marty, who runs it with his wife and adult son and the boy’s hot girlfriends. Marty loves talking politics, and he always corners Ike and me, leans in and asks us, Fellas, what’s really going on, so certain is he that we have inside information that the general public doesn’t know. It’s probably the other reason we come here—aside from the great food—there aren’t many places where the chef makes a big deal out of newspaper reporters. Even now, Marty delivers a half-chicken-in-a-basket to the table next to ours, and gives us a knowing wink.

  And that’s when my cell rings. I pull out my phone…look at the number. It’s Jamie. I look up at Ike, who holds a forkful of potato salad in midair. I mouth: It’s them.

  I look around, then open my phone and clear my throat. “Hey?” I say, which is what I assume drug dealers say into phones.

  “My guy needs to meet you first,” Jamie says. I can hear the announcer for the Madden Football video game in the background. Okay. It’s on, then. They want to meet me.

  “Sure. Sure. Um.” I am aware that we are to be very careful about what we say on cell phones and I speak slowly. “I would like that. To meet your friend.”

  “You okay, Slippers?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’ll come alone.”

  “What?” Jamie says. “What the fuck you talkin’ about. Who else would you bring?”

  “Oh…no one. I don’t know. I just…thought I should say I’ll come alone.”

  “Look, don’t freak out on me, man. These guys can be a little paranoid.”

  “Sure. Sorry. So…should we meet at the 7/11…what, at midnight again?”

  “Do you think we could meet a little earlier? I have a midterm tomorrow.” I shift the cell phone at my ear. (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Nokia’s 6700 is perfect for setting up buys.) We agree to meet at 10 p.m. I click off the call. Ike has had his potato-salad-laden fork at his mouth throughout the call. His eyes are wide.

  “That…” I put my phone away. “…was my contact. The deal goes down tonight.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “I know!” I say.

  “Holy shit,” Ike says again, and leans forward, over his rice. “I can’t believe it. You’re a drug dealer!”

  A woman at the next table looks over.

  “I know,” I say more quietly.

  “Holy shit,” Ike says again.

  “I know!”

  We eat our chicken quietly. Wait. I—am a drug dealer? “Holy shit,” I say.

  “I know,” Ike says. Then he leans in, cocks his head. Something else has occurred to him. “Hey,” he says, “this is…I don’t know, I was thinking about what you said about nostalgia…this is probably crazy, but…” He looks all around Th
e Picnic Basket—people licking fingers and rolling eyes—and then back at me. “Do you think you can get cocaine, too?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Twenty-Four-Hour News, a Haiku

  IT’S SO DISTRACTING

  how sexy the women are

  on the TV news

  Here’s what Dad and I do during the day while the kids are at school and Lisa is at work (at least I pray to the patron saint of pathetic husbands that she is at work): we sit with cups of coffee and flip from channel to channel watching overheated experts argue about the crises in housing and banking and credit. We can’t turn away; it is financial porno.