The Financial Lives Of the Poets

CHAPTER 30

BANKRUPTCY TURNS OUT TO be like an outdoor concert Lisa and I went to once. The gates were thrown open suddenly and we sprinted down this hill, way too fast, the crowd out of control, and I squeezed Lisa’s hand and we ran, but we could’ve slipped so easily, fallen, gotten trampled. “Don’t look back,” I just kept saying, “just keep moving forward.”

It turns out they have a Chapter 7 and a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I try not to dwell on the significance of the numbers. After disaster shopping for a while, Lisa and I decide to go with Chapter 13 (all of these prime, odd numbers…alone out there…disconnected from the pack), which is bankruptcy for people who are making some money, but not nearly enough to meet their debts. It’s not a great deal, but it’s certainly a better deal for us than for our creditors. The court takes everything we have, which is not much, and divvies it among the sharks. Anything we were making payments on goes back to the lenders-even our living room furniture, which we were close to paying off, even our dryer. Then we get to start from scratch, only with less stuff and with shitty credit. A few years ago, shitty credit wouldn’t have mattered; we could’ve bought Graceland. Now…the conservator assigned to our case feigns trying to help us keep our house, but there’s no way. When the packet from Providential Equity finally arrives, it turns out we can’t even get into their mortgage modification program. The numbers aren’t even close to penciling out and now that I have a conviction, for possession of narcotics with intent to deliver (I’m out on probation), we are no longer eligible. So, just months after giving me a reprieve, my friends in Benicia-Gilbert and Joy-end up with my house. It doesn’t help my case with Lisa, either, that I withheld not only being a drug dealer, but also the letter about our house being foreclosed. I wish she were angry, but all I get from her now is fatigue…cold, indifferent resignation.

The day before we are officially served with eviction papers by a sympathetic Sheriff’s deputy, we have a big garage sale, and watch people haul away the shit we should’ve gotten rid of years ago. It’s almost cathartic. I think Lisa does pretty well with her compulsive shopping boxes, maybe even turns a profit on the plush toys. I’m happy for her. The boys sell a bunch of their old games and toys, too, and make enough to buy a Wii. I’m happy for them, too.

And then…we move. Or at least I move, with the boys, to a two-bedroom apartment in a shrub-covered 1970s triplex on a busy street twenty blocks from downtown.

Lisa needs some space. Some time. The old me would’ve pointed out that they’re really the same-space and time, on a four-dimensional smooth continuum that theoretically allows for even more dimensions and explains such phenomena as time-dilation (although this relativity doesn’t explain the munchies) and I’d have been halfway to string theory as she was loading up her car. But the new me-quiet, humbled-just says, “Okay.” And, “Take as long as you need.”

She moves in with Dani, although I imagine she spends her

nights at Chuck’s. We agree that I’ll keep the boys in the apartment with me for the time being, until she gets settled. Since my apartment is near her optometrist’s office, Lisa will come by after school every day and stay with them until I get home from work-which is often quite late. When I get home she goes to Dani’s-or to Chuck’s. I don’t ask. This way, we hope, our split will disrupt the boys as little as possible. Sometimes when she’s there I’ll walk to Dad’s nursing home-which is less than a mile away-and watch TV with him. The boys aren’t happy about any of this; we tell them that sometimes Moms and Dads just need a little time apart, but they know. They take turns with self-pity and surliness, like video game controllers they hand back and forth.

I’ve yet to go back to our old house since we lost it…but Lisa confesses that she sometimes drives through our old neighborhood. I wish she wouldn’t torture herself that way. One night, when we’re having pizza in the apartment with the boys-we decide to keep having dinner together once a week, for their sake-Lisa tells me with disdain that our house sold at auction for three-fifty, two thirds of what we owed. “Doesn’t that make you furious?” she asks.

It might make me angry if I drove by the house and saw for myself, but since my car went back to the bank I travel by bus now and it would take at least one transfer and…I don’t know…I guess the truth is that I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be reminded of all that I lost, all that I gave away. I slowly replace the furniture that we lost or sold at our garage sale with second-hand stuff; I hook the boys’ Wii up to an old 19-inch TV. After our second dinner with the boys-fish sticks and fries-Lisa teases me about my latest purchase: an orange couch with cigarette marks on the arms. I explain they were out of moss green, cigarette-burned couches. The apartment’s best feature is a balcony, which is built at tree-level, and when we’re done with dinner we move our chairs

out there and sit. I tell Lisa that I can’t wait for spring, to sit out there and watch the boys ride their bikes. She smiles politely.

On the grass in front of our triplex is the big wooden Frontier Fort, which I had moved over from the house. The boys hardly ever play in it but there are two rotten neighbor boys who are younger (and who swear like teenagers) and they seem to like it. And I like having it there.

Teddy hates sharing a room, but I think Franklin likes it. He sleeps better with someone else in the room. Every morning I walk them to school, and then take the bus to Earl Ruscom’s real estate office building, where he’s opened the little headquarters of Biz-Daily Online (I was able to talk him out of the awful name Can-Do Times) in a little twelve-by-twenty room, consisting of-for now-two desks and a white board. When I accepted the job I had to admit to Earl that I’d been arrested and charged with possessing and intending to deliver marijuana. Earl’s eyes narrowed and I steeled myself for trouble. “No shit? You were dealing weed?” Then he leaned in close. “Can you still get some?” I told him that I couldn’t. He hired me anyway.

My old dying newspaper just keeps laying people off-half the staff is now gone, including Ike, who has gone back to school to be a teacher-so there’s no shortage of writers for me to hire to do upbeat freelance stories for almost no money. In spite of Earl’s mandate that we write “positive business stories,” we find ourselves doing a lot of stories about businesses going under. I think we might last a couple of years ourselves before Earl gets tired of losing money and I have to write a cheerful story about our own demise.

Every time I take the bus to work, I recall how our old house was around the corner from a bus stop, how I used to watch that big bifurcated bus roll past every day without giving it much thought; I certainly never thought I’d be on it. I do remember

seeing people at the stop and sometimes I’d catch their eyes, think vague thoughts about their lives, and get a surge of my old atrophying empathy. What were their lives like? Was it awful to be so poor? I’d see kids sitting with their parents, waiting for the bus, and I’d feel worst about my own pity for them, my passing-by-at-forty-miles-an-hour-in-heated-leather-seat pity.

The first time I waited for the bus I felt self-conscious, as if I were watching myself with that same pitiful detachment. A car went by my stop and I saw myself in a woman’s eyes as she passed: Look at that poor guy in the nice wool coat. What do you suppose happened to him? Could it ever happen to my husband? On the bus that day, I sat next to a large woman reading a pulpy novel. I started to read over her shoulder-I couldn’t help it; it was a sex scene-but she moved the book. It felt as if everyone on the bus saw through me.

At the next stop a woman, maybe nineteen, got on, followed by a little boy no more than four, and a rail-thin man with the gapped smile of a meth-user. The boy had one glove on his right hand and was holding up his left hand-red, bare and cold-while his mother finished a lecture that must have started long before they got on.

“Because I told you not to lose it, that’s why! Gloves ain’t free, TJ. That’s your last pair for the whole winter. You just gonna have to wear that one.”

“I don’t know what happened to it,” the boy said with great wonder. “It was on my hand.”

“Well it ain’t now,” his mother said. They moved down the aisle toward the back of the bus, mother in front, boy in the middle, father behind, and as they passed me, the little boy turned back to his father. They were in this together. “It’s okay, Dad,” said TJ. “Look.” He smiled at his own cleverness. “I got pockets.” And he shoved his bare hand in his pants pocket.

The father put his hand on his son’s head and made eye contact

with me, smiled proudly, and I swear to God I have never felt such shame-such deep, cleansing shame. I put my judgmental face in my spoiled hands and I wept quietly. The woman with the sexy book got up and moved to another seat.

Christ. It is the only unforgivable thing, really…to feel sorry for yourself.

The next day I took a pair of Franklin’s old gloves and put them in my messenger bag. I carry those gloves in my bag every day now, but of course I’ve yet to see TJ or his dad. In the meantime, whenever I feel like a failure-not an uncommon feeling-I take those gloves out of my bag, imagine that father touching his boy’s head and hope I’m half as good a man.

After being assessed by the nursing home, my own good father has been moved to the memory unit. It’s paid for by Medicare and his VA benefits. I’m not going to pretend that he’s happy-but he has his remote and one of the cable networks has begun showing The Rockford Files every day at 11 a.m. Dad has built his day around that. His clear memories come in fainter now…I wonder if he might be better off when they don’t come in at all. One day Lisa offers to pick Dad up and bring him over for dinner. I gladly accept. On Dad’s second visit, she even cooks, makes him chipped beef; but he asks her not to make it anymore. Says he doesn’t like it.

What he does like is the treeless tree fort. He and I sit on the balcony and watch the cursing neighbor boys climb around on it, Dad laughing every time they swear: Fuck you, Travis! Fuck you, Alvin. Dad loves this show; he doubles over like Travis and Alvin are Martin and Lewis, funniest thing he’s ever heard.

Teddy and Franklin go to a little public school four blocks away but I made sure the new apartment was in a better district than the little Sing-Sing school in our old neighborhood. The boys seem okay with their new school. They miss their friends but they

love not wearing uniforms. There’s even a Math-Quest team at the public school.

Biz-Daily exists only online for the first month, but when we finally finish our first print issue, the thing is gorgeous. We sell out of it. I can even imagine the thing making money someday-if companies can ever afford to advertise again. In the back of our first printed edition are two features that I pushed hard for, both of which turn out to be popular, the Stoned Stock Analyst, in which I make random picks under the pseudonym Jay Wollie (he’s already up four percent by pushing fast food stocks), and The Poetfolio, which I write under my own name:

Recovery

We’re like bored ghosts-over our horror

as we wait for dispensation

on the hard wooden pews

of bankruptcy court

and next to me

this old ruddy trader

who’s been reading the paper

whistles at something in the stock pages.

“If only,” he says, “I had about twenty G’s”

and I complete: “you wouldn’t be here?”

but he slaps at the paper, “No, look

don’t you see, it’s already

here-the next thing…” and I’ll be

damned if I can help myself:

“What do you mean?”

Then one by one he lists them

the drugs I already know

“We had tech and pharms

war, biotech and of course housing.”

And now? I say, leading, but he won’t

give it away, he just shrugs

and says it again: “The next thing.”

An hour later we are broke but free

and as we part in the hallway

it’s all I can do to not beg the man

for that last tip, that final stake

like some idiot junkie who

kicks smack by going on crack

kicks crack by going on meth

kicks meth by going on smack-

jonesing for the next thing, because

relapse is what we mean

when we say recovery.

And maybe there’s a sort of bankruptcy for marriages, too. At least, that’s what I tell Lisa one night after we’ve had dinner with the boys, and they’ve gone on to bed, and we’re sitting on that balcony having a glass of wine. “Marital bankruptcy,” she says, and almost smiles.

Sure-I say, unable to look her in the eyes-a new start. No debts, no blame, no punishment: marital bankruptcy. Like we’re new people. (She: hot woman awaiting her divorce papers; me: middle-aged drug dealer on probation.)

Marital bankruptcy isn’t quite the carefree little joke that our old mulligan was; and when I glance up, Lisa looks away sadly. “I’m here,” I say. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

She says, quietly, “Don’t, Matthew.” But we have another glass of wine, and that night, she nestles in behind me in our king-sized

bed; the beds are the only big pieces of furniture I saved, and ours takes up most of the tiny bedroom in this apartment. I know better than to ask what this means-having her next to me like this. I know better than to say anything. I just sleep…my wife’s knees pressed into the backs of mine.

In the morning she’s gone, and for days, she doesn’t say anything about it. But a week later, she stays again, and a week after that, we make love. It’s awkward at first, bumping, apologizing; we turn out to be exactly like new people, tentative, trying to find our way back. But afterward, we sleep.

I usually have some time to think on the bus, and in the drizzling morning after I make love to my wife, I bounce on the curb and light-step my way through sighing split doors, my mood untouchable, even by an especially potent burst of bus-funk (let’s see, I’m getting sweat, diesel fuel and off-brand tobacco, perfectly balanced, with a slight finish of unwashed ass) and I drop into a plastic seat like some grinning fool, and that’s when I happen to catch, out the bus window, a for-sale sign, a little wooden post planted on a weedy strip of sidewalk in front of a shocked bungalow (Price Reduced!), the plywood door of a forced repo where some other poor shit was run over, and my mind starts to race again (how long must you spend in exile) as I begin to calculate the down and monthly on a place like that (can’t be much…doable, no?) and like a kid irrationally looking for a specific song on an old car radio, I spin station to station-maybe get an advance…make a couple of smart investments…qualify for a loan…flip that house-I land on a breathless commercial I heard just the other day featuring my old Aussie real estate agent (Interest rites my neevah be this low ageen. NEEVAH!) and I suppose the devil needs only the tiniest hoof-hold because two stops later I’m actually ginning the numbers, (ponziing myself!) and I’m up to my ears in that peculiar bastard of American calculus, that ol’ bad math, macro-optimistic

flawed formula of Keynesian interventionist Mall-of-the-Americas bliss, endless exponential derivation-the Theory of “UP”-big sloppy bang of perpetual growth, long-view, as the winking brokers used to say, their BMW sedans and Lexus SUVs parked with the wheels car-ad cocked, their view of your future always a step on an endless climb, steeper, steeper, faster and faster in the widening gyre, interim between collapses shrinking-fall…recovery…boom; fall, recovery, boom; fallrecoveryboom; fa-boom-a kids’ carrousel ride gone out-of-control (Get on kid, gotta get on, don’t miss the ride!) and I know better, I swear to God I know better (It’s unsustainable-a kind of mania, a sickness, and yet)-you deserve this, you are a fucking American-because all you want is one more chance-all you want is for your boys to have it better than you did-all you want is what’s there-all you want is-

Untenable. I know. It is untenable. And I feel myself blush. Reach into my bag and find TJ’s warm gloves. When I get off the bus downtown there’s an old man standing there, with a milky eye and a piece of fresh cardboard. He asks if I have a felt pen. I offer him a ballpoint, but he says people won’t be able to see the writing. I give him a dollar.

That night, Lisa says it was a mistake, sleeping together.

I don’t say a word.

But a week later, she stays again. After we make love that night, Lisa suddenly sits up in bed, gasping. She’s had a nightmare and she’s disoriented, unsure where we are. “It’s okay, Lisa,” I whisper. I touch her face lightly. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

She looks around the tiny bedroom of my crap-ass apartment. There’s a long crack in the wall where the stucco on the outside has settled. She stares at that crack, and begins to cry. “I really am trying, Matt.”

“I know you are,” I say. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And all that night it feels like I’m holding my breath; for the first time I let myself

think about her and Chuck. Imagine him holding her. For the first time in a long time, I don’t sleep.

In the morning, I get the boys off to school and take the bus. Write my happy business news (“M-Tronic Laying Off Fewer Than Feared”) and keep my eyes down on the bus. I go home to find Lisa already with the boys, making dinner. That night we sit out on the balcony. Lisa takes a deep breath and says that she feels like I should know “exactly what happened” between her and Chuck.

The past tense thrills me a little. But I say, “It’s okay, Lisa…”

She shakes her head and says, “Maybe it’s not even as bad as you’re thinking.”

I take a deep breath. Choose my words carefully. I tell her that of course she can tell me what happened. She can tell me anything she wants. But she doesn’t have to say a word. With bankruptcy, I tell her, you’re supposed to come out lean and smart and humble, free of the old obligations, the bad habits and weighty contracts that were holding you down. You get a clean break. Start from scratch. There’s a reason they call it forgiving debts, I say. (And the trumpets blare…celebrating the glorious freedom of freedom!) Whatever happened with Chuck, I tell Lisa, it was as much my fault as theirs…more maybe. And whatever happened, it’s okay. It’s okay. I plan to just keep saying this until it feels true: It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s…

She nods slightly, and stares out the window. For a long time, we’re quiet.

And then I lean in gently, whisper: “It was the bald spot, wasn’t it?”

Then one day, I get my biweekly check and see that Earl has padded it a little, so I hit the bank on the way home and I arrive at the apartment to find Lisa playing Yahtzee with the boys. I ask if she wants to take the boys to a movie. I can still only afford two tickets, so Lisa and I sit in the mall and share an ice cream cone

while the boys are in the theater. We can hear muffled explosions coming from one of the theaters.

I reach over for the cone.

“No. You don’t get anymore.” Lisa holds it away from me. “You don’t eat it right.”

“How are you supposed to eat it?”

“You’re supposed to lick it. You gum it like an old man.”

“I’m using my lips. You can’t get enough with just your tongue. You just move the ice cream all around.”

“So I’m just supposed to settle for a dainty little lick while you get a big gummy mouthful? That’s not fair. I should get ten licks for every one of your old Abe Vigoda gums.”

“How about five licks for every Abe Vigoda?”

“Eight.”

I grab the ice cream from her, and hold it away, and she’s wrestling me for it and that’s when I look up to see my old pothead friends, Jamie and Skeet, coming out of the theater.

Skeet’s got my loafers on.

I ended up spending two nights in jail, booked on charges of possession with intent to deliver. I was arraigned, posted bond, and went home. As quickly as I could, I pled guilty; because of my cooperation, the prosecutor agreed to overlook the fact that I tried to buy two pounds and it’s only the three ounces I get credit for trying to sell. Because of my clean record, the fact that I have a job and am supporting two boys, and have a recommendation from Randy and Lt. Reese, I got into a deferral program; if I complete my drug classes and keep pissing clean urine, the charge could eventually disappear entirely from my record.

Monte has also pled guilty, to more serious charges; Lt. Reese tells me he’ll probably get a break in sentencing, too, since he is cooperating fully. Like Monte, I may be called to testify against Dave if his case goes to trial. I’m not looking forward to that, but

all I can do is tell the truth. Lt. Reese tells me not to worry. He thinks Dave will eventually plead out, too, and that he and Monte will end up doing no more than a couple of years each. In the end, I ended up liking Lt. Reese a lot. He’s…I don’t know…genuine. He laughed mercilessly at my story of selling pot to my old editor, speaking into my phony glowing watch. I suppose I originally thought his bad-cop thing was an act, but the guy really is a prick. Just like Randy really is a nice guy. Unfortunately, their task force did lose its funding and they’re back at their old jobs, Randy with the city, Lt. Reese doing school drug presentations for the state patrol (I like to imagine it: “Okay, listen up you little fuck-sticks.”). One day Randy called out of the blue to see if I wanted to go to his church. I thanked him but said no. He told me that Dave was close to accepting Jesus Christ as his personal savior. “That’s great, Randy!” I said. And I really was glad for him; I imagine that saving someone is an incredible feeling. But it was Dave I felt best for. I pictured his many failings going into that salvation garbage can and I was so happy for him I could barely stand it.

As for Jamie, as far as I know, he was never charged with anything. I recall what Randy said about professional CI’s and I wonder if maybe he isn’t doing that. He would be great; certainly the best I ever saw: smart, calm, quick on his feet. Funny how you fail to see people for what they really are-

In the mall now, Skeet doesn’t see me at all, but Jamie does, sees right into me, and knows. He gives a little smile, and then hesitates…I feel the same thing…but what would we say? Finally, Jamie gives me a short nod, looks down, and he and Skeet move on.

“Who was that?” Lisa grabs the ice cream back from me.

“My old weed dealer,” I say.

“Oh.”

And here we are.

Sitting in a mall where I am gently trying to win back my beautiful wife, while our boys see a movie on the twenty bucks it has taken me three months to save, and Lisa and I fight over a single ice cream cone. I think we are supposed to somehow be better off now, out from under all of those middle-class weights and obligations and debts, all the lies that we stacked above our heads like teetering lumber. As Lisa said, we’re trying.

But it’s not easy, realizing how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realization that the edge is so close to where we live. We’re like children after a thunderstorm. It’s okay, I whisper to Lisa on those nights that I convince her to stay with me. It’s okay. Just keep moving forward. Don’t look back. It’s okay.

Maybe we will be happy again-maybe we’ll even come out of this happier. But I can’t help wondering if we couldn’t be happy in our big old house, with our old nice furniture, with our old second car, with enough money for four movie tickets.

For two ice cream cones.

No, we miss our things.

But we have pockets.

And Lisa and me-we’re okay.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Sam Ligon, Jim Lynch, Dan Butterworth, Sherman Alexie, Dan Spalding and Eric Albrecht for various insights, inspirations and encouragements; to Cal Morgan and Warren Frazier; and most of all to Ralph Walter, Danny Westneat, Som Jordan and all of my dismayed and displaced newspaper friends, whose talent and commitment deserve a better world.