The Financial Lives of the Poets Page 9

  Upstairs, the typing has stopped.

  Dad sighs. “You know what I really miss?”

  I know this loop; there are six main things that my father misses and they come up a lot now, as if, right before he says, You know what I miss, Dad spins a tiny wheel in his head. And I make a game of trying to guess which of the six things he will land on. The six things my father misses are: (1) chipped beef (2) Angie Dickinson (3) Dandy Don singing at the end of Monday Night Football (4) the old pull tabs on beer cans (5) The Rockford Files and (6) Joe Frazier. It is a good sign, the doctors say, anytime Dad references the past, and so I always ask what he misses, even though it’s mildly disappointing that he never seems to miss my mom, or even my three sisters—scattered across the country by the limited employment opportunities of themselves and their husbands—or his job at Sears, or I don’t know, his bowling ball. Instead, it’s always one of these six inane things, and usually it’s chipped beef. I even made chipped beef for him one night, but he ate it without saying a word, while the boys made faces and Lisa pretended to get a phone call. Two hours later, Dad said, “You know what I miss? Chipped beef.” But I suppose the doctors are right: it is a good sign that he’s remembering at all, connecting images or things to his past, building himself out of the things he no longer has. And so I don’t take it personally, I just lodge my mental guess…I go with the odds: “Chipped beef?”

  “Rockford Files,” Dad says.

  It is garbage night in America, the night I glide room-to-room emptying plastic garbage cans and get the full measure of what’s really going on in my family’s life. No surprises in the kitchen can—except more banana peels than I remember us having. This is the problem with our cultural paranoia: something as harmless as extra banana peels can send the addled mind a-reeling (…playing off the sweet memory of their pet name for his lumber, Chuck sends Lisa a bouquet of bananas to her office…). The bathroom bucket has nail clippings, toilet paper tubes, disposable razors and the forensic clues to that still mysterious world of feminine-parts care; it’s depressing to think of these cycles of male and female hygiene, to imagine landfills full of the shit it takes every day just to keep us all fresh, un-rank, wiped and de-whiskered. In Teddy’s room, the basketball hoop garbage can reveals what I have suspected: dude’s hitting his Halloween candy a little harder than he’s supposed to. It’s a killing field of Reese’s, Sweetarts and Musketeers. Franklin’s garbage can is like the kid himself, heartbreaking—a half-eaten sneaked sucker thrown away in guilt, a pair of crapped underpants he hoped to hide, a scary picture of a monster he’s torn from a book.

  It’s 9:30—thirty minutes until my meeting with Pablo Escobar. Both boys are asleep, sprawled across their beds like window jumpers splayed on a sidewalk. I pull the covers over them. Teddy’s hair is in full revolt on his pillow. I smooth it down.

  In our bedroom the garbage can is empty, and while I’m not above assigning meaning to this fact, in my overheated season of allegorical discontent I can’t quite decide whether an empty can symbolizes a bankrupt marriage or the withheld nature of our relationship, i.e., that we’re not even sharing our garbage with one another.

  Lisa is in bed already, her reading glasses low on her nose as she flips through a magazine. Apparently, there will be no phone texting tonight. Maybe Chuck has his kids. Or maybe there was a band-saw accident at work and he lost his fingers and can never type again.

  “I was thinking…if it’s okay,” Lisa says, without looking up from her magazine, “I might go see a concert with Dani on Saturday.”

  I stand there holding my bag of shit. “With Dani?” And I remember Dani last night: So romantic and Are you going to do it?

  “Yeah.” No eye contact. “She asked if I wanted to.”

  “What concert?” I ask, as if she’d start down this road without a cover story.

  She mentions the name of a band I don’t know: “Blue-Eyed Jesus? Supposed to be good. Kind of alt-country…Wilco-ish.”

  “Oh sure,” I say, pinned. “Blue-Eyed Jesus. Yeah, they’re good. No, you should do that. It sounds fun.” And then, devilishly: “I know how much you love Wilco.”

  Lisa hates Wilco.

  “No, I just thought a concert sounded fun. And since Dani has an extra ticket, it wouldn’t cost us anything.”

  “No, you should go. I’d go if I had the opportunity.”

  “Oh. Did you…did you want to go?” She glances up at me. My God, we change. Arms go flabby, guts grow, hair gets gray; everything changed on those two people whose eyes met at that press conference; everything, that is, but their eyes. Hers look away.

  And I pretend to consider it. “Maybe.”

  “I would have asked you,” she says, “but I know how much you hate concerts.”

  I do hate concerts. I have hated them ever since we went to an outdoor festival once and were nearly trampled to death. I hate paying three times the cost of a CD just to stand in an unruly crowd and think one of two things: (A) this song sounds just like it does on the CD or (B) this song sounds nothing like it does on the CD.

  Lisa closes her magazine. “You want me to look for a sitter, then?”

  Here we are. Our poker hands on the table. Antes in. Time to either bet my bluff or get out of the way. Or…wait…“Can I think about it?” I lug my bag of trash downstairs, happy with myself for my open-ended play. This is what we call a check in poker—the third way.

  I stack the recyclables on top of our wheeled garbage container and push the whole thing through our leafy backyard toward the alley. The truly undesirable part of our undesirable neighborhood begins at the alley behind our big house; our alley is the DMZ of gentrification. Everything in front of the alley, like our house, has come around, owners tidying up lawns, painting, planting and putting on new roofs, parking new cars in driveways. Behind the alley is an unsettling world of chipped-paint, junk-cars and sofas-on-porches, and it’s not uncommon to see police lights strobe the clapboard rentals or to hear loud reports of drunk love—Get your fat ass inside for dinner, Damien!—that make Lisa and me feel pathetically superior about our more-sober parenting style. (And yet, I’ll bet most of those screamers have jobs.)

  I push the garbage into the alley and turn back toward my home—

  My home…

  God, this view is breathtaking. This is the view that sold us on the place. The homes on the front of our block sit on wide lots and I still lose my breath at this angle of my house, from deep in the backyard: a long, gently sloped hill leading to big majestic maple trees on either side of our angular, two-story, 1917 Tudor, a streetlight on the corner, and the mist of late October rain bands the street with fog so that our big brick house glows in soft light like a movie set of Old London. From back here, the money and stress, the lifetime of work it will take to pay for this place (I remember calculating the total we’d pay over thirty years and feeling sick) almost seems worth it. Up close, the clinker brick and uneven roof make our house look like it was drawn by the unsteady hand of a child, but from back here, if you squint, there is the faint line of a country manor. This is the house we fell in love with, Lisa and I—the house that has become, in every way, the third party in our marriage, the very sort of big drafty place we always saw each other in when we imagined our married adult lives.

  I wonder if a house has ever represented as much as it does now, for people like Lisa and me. It has been the full measure and symbol of our wealth and security over the last few years; every cent we threw into it and every cent we took out, seemed so smart, like such a good bet. Every time we got ahead, we borrowed against the thing to remodel, and every time we remodeled the thing we congratulated ourselves on our wisdom, and every time we saw a house go up for sale on our block (They’re asking three-eighty-five and it’s half the size!) we became like derivative-crazed brokers; we stopped thinking of the value of our home as a place of shelter and occupancy and family—or even as the aesthetic triumph witnessed from our alley—but as a kind of faith equation
, theoretical construct, mechanism of wealth-generation, salvation function on a calculator, its value no longer what it’s worth but some compounded value that might exist given the continued upward tick of the market, because this was the only direction housing markets could ever go: up. All the geniuses said so. If housing had survived the dump of the technology bubble and the brief realization after 7/11 that we weren’t alone in the scary, scary world, then what could possibly stop its march? In eighty years, the geniuses told us, actual housing values had only fallen once. One time in eighty years? I can still close my over-leveraged eyes and hear two decades of such party talk: real estate is the only safe bet; real estate can only go up; they aren’t making any more real estate.

  Yesterday, Dad and I watched a news story about half-empty subdivisions in Nevada and California, dead sprig saplings slumped in the rolled seams of sun-fried sod, backyard pools green with neglect, swarming with clouds of malarial mosquitoes visible over cedar fences. Idiots, my father said, and while I wasn’t sure whether he meant the buyers or builders or the bugs, borrowers or banks, Congress or me, or people in general, how could I disagree? Idiots.

  I’d love to go back to a 2004 cocktail party and beat those sure-sounding real estate idiot optimists to death with a For Sale sign. I’d take a good whack at myself, too, because while I suspect that housing prices will eventually bounce back (five years? ten?) I’m also sure of this: I’ll never fall in love again. I’ve lost my innocence. And my disappointment is not that my own home has lost half its value. What disappoints me is me—that I fell for their propaganda when I knew better, that I actually allowed myself to believe that a person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you.

  We’re all just renting.

  And this is how the poets failed us.

  The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem./The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.) and to balance real estate with ethereal states (One need not be a chamber to be haunted,/One need not be a house). Hell, we don’t need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets.

  Yes. Standing behind my own home like this, I imagine letting go of this dream of solvency…let it go…float away into the sky…let someone else live in the big house; I’ll live above the garage, finally get some sleep, spend the rest of my life as a simple servant (Matt? He’s our poet-driver), let the boys forget that I was once their father, now just the kindly old poet-driver who brings the car ’round front. Rest of the time I’ll disappear in my little writer’s garret, grow a goatee, write bad verse and smoke good weed until I can’t recall those people who loved me, or how much I owe on their big house ($485,592). Write during the day, and at night hang out with Skeet and Jamie, read them my poems while we fry our skulls and haunt Rahjiv’s convenience store aisles for Fritos. And this is such a pleasing thought—Fritos!—that of course my mind can’t hold it and it goes the last place I’d like it to go: Lumber-Chuck moving in, taking over the parenting, the payments, the pampering and pleasing of Lisa.

  And that’s what finally snaps me out of my self-pitying funk. Not the thought of Chuck inside my house, but the thought of Chuck rooting around inside my wife snaps me out of this delusional hole, and I run across the backyard, ready to reclaim my house, my wife, my life. I’m suddenly aware again that the air is sharp and cold; winter’s here. A gun has gone off in my head and I know what to say: this is insanity, Lisa, this place we are going! We have to stop: dope dealer? Mistress of the Prince of Lumberland? No, no, no! Is this really who we are?

  Who cares if we lose the fucking house next week? This house isn’t us. We are us. One need not be a house…So what…we default? Declare bankruptcy? Big deal. It doesn’t matter where we go, what we do. Hell, I’ll wash dishes, tend bar. You can clean houses. We can take the kids out of school, walk away from this big house, drift. Go from town to town, see the world, work menial jobs. Live. Let be be finale of seem!

  Through the kitchen, I take the stairs two at a time, fired up to reclaim my life: Damn it, Lisa. Why are we doing this? Come back—

  But she looks up at me from bed and there’s something in her eyes that stops me cold. She closes her phone. She’s seen my earlier check and…she raises the value of the pot: “I called Dani. She doesn’t know if she can get another ticket for the concert.”

  My knees lock. “Oh.”

  “She’s pretty sure she can’t.”

  “Ah.”

  “You could probably still go. You just might not be able to sit with us.” And Lisa shrugs, pretends to go back to her magazine, phony nonchalance. She’s steady, unmoving, but beneath the covers I can see that she’s wiggling her toes nervously. God. She really wants this. That’s what hurts. What’s the last thing I remember her wanting this badly? Oh yeah. The house.

  How do you know when you’ve gone too far? When you can’t go back? I think of my home from the alley again. Sometimes you can’t get back in. You just have to live outside for a while. “You know what? You guys go ahead. I’ll stay home, save us the cost of a babysitter.”

  “Are…Are you sure?”

  “Go. Have fun.”

  I grab my jacket and wallet, trying to keep my hands from shaking.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  I don’t even turn back. “We need milk.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Dave the Drug Dealer Wants to Look Up My Ass

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT I expected—no

  maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface—

  but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino

  at the beginning of The Godfather

  reasonably bemused, untouched by his

  criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton

  whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep

  with the fishes, or like Al Pacino

  from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually,

  now that I think about it, he’s not

  like Al Pacino at all but more like

  Kevin Spacey from that film, and who’s

  ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?

  “Okay, then,” says the drug dealer, whose name is Dave. He’s probably thirty, with short hair and deep acne scars. He wears a sports coat over a button shirt, and I think, Hell, since I took a buyout and stopped showering, I look more like a drug dealer than you. Then Dave stands and I get queasy, thinking: why is Dave the Drug Dealer standing? And it’s clear I should stand, too, when Dave gives a little roll with his hand and says, “Should we get to it?”

  Preceding getting to it, I have so far on this night: (1) left home pretending to get milk again, leaving Lisa alone again so she could presumably scurry to the computer and email the Prince of Lumberland—He fell for the concert story. See you Saturday night and we will have sex (2) hurried to the 7/11 near my house, arriving promptly at 10 p.m. to find Jamie already there, bouncing in the cold drizzle, blowing on his hands, wearing not his silky sweat suit but a pair of dark jeans, a sweatshirt and a watchman’s cap that make him seem just a bit dangerous (3) driven in my car with Jamie to an even older, sadder neighborhood, where the blocks of huge 1890s Victorians have been split into unfortunate apartments—this particular house an old four-story beauty whose original grand floor plan is long gone, replaced by cubby apartments with mismatched numbers and letters hung on the doors, so that we somehow walk past Apartment 5 to get to Apartment G (4) met the owner of this cozy book-and-candle Apt. G, a tall, leggy, striking girl named Bea or maybe just the letter B or maybe the insect Bee, not sure, her long blond hair pulled in a ponytail, her no-doubt banging body effortlessly buried beneath a pile of tights and sweaters and scarves—she is a walking coat rack—and as we shook hands, Bea fixed me with the most alarming blue-eyed stare of my life, the kind of stare in which you think some potent subliminal message is being passed along (Run away with me or maybe just Run away), before Bea said she’d get out of our h
air so we could “get to it” (5) waited about five minutes until Dave the nonthreatening Drug Dealer swept into Bea’s place, shook the rain off his overcoat, and I thought, what kind of drug dealer wears an overcoat, as I also noted that Dave has a key to Bea’s apartment, a fact that broke my pathetic little heart, since I had decided to fall in love with Bea, and as Dave set his briefcase next to the couch, we engaged in a little political small-talk (like everyone I know, we seem to agree on everything) before Dave stood and said, as reported earlier: “Okay then. Should we get to it?”

  And here we are, about to get to it.

  The best part of Apartment G is Bea’s wall-length hot-English-major bookcase, filled with the comfortable spines of all of the books we were supposed to read in college but which we only got a few chapters into, and enough contemporary fiction to make it clear that reading is not just an assignment for lovely Bea. Alarmingly, though, on top of the bookcase there is also a family portrait of Bea with two just-as-striking blond-and-blue-eyed sisters and a pair of handsome proud Nordic parents, whose stares make me aware of the vast age difference between Bea and me, and I am profoundly ashamed to be here buying drugs in this girl’s apartment. What I’d really like to do, I think, is lie down on this couch and take a nap.

  Jamie elbows me. I stand.

  “Okay,” Dave says. “Take off your clothes.”

  “My…”

  “I need to make sure you’re not wearing a wire or anything.” And then he pulls out a small flashlight. “And I need to look up your ass.”

  I turn to Jamie on the couch. He is surprisingly unsurprised, impressively unimpressed.

  “What…would possibly be up my ass?”

  Dave says, “It’s just a precaution I take.”

  “I’m no expert,” I look over at Jamie, “but if I was wearing a wire up my ass, how would the police even be able to hear it? Wouldn’t it be muffled?”