The Financial Lives of the Poets (10 page)

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.”

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 hair 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?”

Dave stares at me. I look over at Jamie again but he has picked up a copy of
The Sun
magazine and is flipping through it.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“This is what I do,” Dave explains. “It’s the same search you’d get in prison. I do it to make sure people aren’t stealing from me. I might do it any time. You never know.”

“But…I haven’t even bought anything from you yet.”

Dave is starting to get a little more threatening. “And you aren’t going to buy anything until you take off your clothes and I get a look up that ass.”

I look over at Jamie again but he won’t meet my eyes. There’s a twitch in his neck tattoo.

So I take off my shirt and, for some reason, fold it before setting it on the arm of the couch. I try to remember the last time anyone has looked up my ass, which would be, oh, let’s see: never. I begin to unbutton my pants.

And that’s when Dave spits laughter. “I’m just fuckin’ with you,” he says.

My hands are still on the buttons of my pants.

“Man,” a disappointed Jamie says, “I can’t believe you were actually gonna let him look up your ass. What’s the matter with you? You some kind of ass exhibitionist?”

My shirt is off and my pants are two buttons down and I am dumbfounded. “You mean you don’t need…I don’t have to get undressed?”

“It just proves my point,” Dave says. “You can get people to do anything.”

I put my shirt back on, button my pants and we all sit again.

Then Dave picks up his briefcase and opens it on his lap. “Jamie says you need some pain relief.”

“Um, yeah.” I reach for my coat, which has the money in it. “Nine thousand dol—”

“Bup, bup!” Dave interrupts me. “I didn’t ask how much.” He holds up his hand to stop me. “Wait…. You brought the money
with you?”

“Well…yeah.”

“First—I don’t handle money. And second—” He looks over at Jamie, shakes his head, and then back at me. “You brought nine grand to a meeting with someone you don’t know?”

“What if we were planning to rob you, Slippers?” Jamie asks.

I scratch my head, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of that.

“What if we rolled you? You gonna go to the cops and say you got robbed in a drug deal?” Dave asks. He taps my skull. “You gotta think, man, if you’re gonna work with me.”

“I…I’m sorry,” I say. I glance over at Jamie, who has the look I sometimes see on Teddy’s face when I take him to school, or roller skating, or anywhere:
please don’t embarrass me anymore, Dad.
“Look, I don’t usually do this.”

“That explains why you seem to think you can just go out and buy two pounds.”

“Look,” I say, “I really am sorry. I’m just trying to make a little money, and I have some friends who I think would buy some—”

“Bup, bup!” Dave says again, and he puts his hands over his ears. “Don’t ever tell me how much you want or what you’re doing with it. All I wanna know is what condition you got.”

“Uh.” I nod. “Okay.”

Jamie leans over and says quietly, “Glaucoma.”

Dave waits.

“I’ve got…” I look over at Jamie “…glaucoma?”

Dave smiles, opens his briefcase. Takes out a tabbed folder marked CONTRACTS. He opens this CONTRACTS folder and sets two short stacks of pages on the coffee table.

Then he holds out a pen and spins the first contract so I can read it.

“This,” Dave says, “is a simple agreement between Party A, which is me, and Party B, which is you, obviously…stipulating that you are not a law enforcement officer, that you’re not in any way or manner working with state or federal law enforcement in any investigatory or information-gathering capacity, either as an undercover agent or as a paid or unpaid informant, and that you will not knowingly provide any law enforcement agency with any material information regarding this transaction.”

Before I can read the language in the first part of the contract, Dave is already on to the second: “This stipulates that you and I have not discussed any intended usage for what will heretofore be known as
the medicinal product,
that I will introduce you to a grower but if you are planning to use
the medicinal product
for usage other than medicinal, I have not been made aware of this fact, and thirdly, I have made no promises or guarantees that in any way indemnify you, should you, upon your own actions, outside the basic language of this contract, end up as the subject of any outside investigation for any prosecutable criminal offense. To wit—”

And he flips to the second, longer set of contracts. “This is a series of riders in which you agree that you will not engage in selling
the medicinal product
within 400 yards of a school, that you will not sell
the medicinal product
to minors, nor use weapons in any way connected with
the medicinal product
, that you will not use the Postal Service to mail it, nor cross any state borders with it, nor in any other way, knowingly or unknowingly, commit any material infraction in connection with
the medicinal product
which would represent a real and severe breech of this contract in any substantive manner and which might violate any and all state or local statutes, as well as the federal Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C., and all its subsections herewith, nor commit any willful act that can be defined as an extenuating circumstance superseding the standard guidelines as defined by the federal mandatory sentencing laws, which, for the purposes of this contract, shall include any laws now on the books, or any laws passed in the future, in perpetuity, etcetera, in all states and territories, etcetera, etcetera….”

“You’re a lawyer?” I ask.

“There appears to be some question with the bar about that,” Dave says. And then he hands me a final, single contract. “This last one simply indemnifies me, and releases me from all liability, all claims both criminal and civil, should you, knowingly or unknowingly, alter
the medicinal product
in any real and/or material way by cutting it, or crossbreeding it, or enhancing it through the addition of any artificial stimulants or other substances covered by the Controlled Substances Act or by federal sentencing guidelines or by FDA regulations, those substances including but not limited to, cocaine in all its forms, PCP, heroin, methamphetamine, insecticides, fertilizers, artificial sweeteners, etcetera, etcetera.”

I am staring at this pile of contracts when Jamie holds up the magazine he was reading to reveal an arty black-and-white photo of a nude woman standing in the shade of a doorway. “I like this kind of tits,” Jamie says.

“Pointy,” Dave says.

“Artificial sweeteners?” I ask.

Dave shrugs. “Some people like it sweeter. Most people use honey, but some assholes go cheap and douse it in old liquid sweeteners.”

Jamie leans in. “That shit causes cancer, yo.”

I look at Dave, who is still holding the pen out to me, and I picture the real estate agent that Lisa and I used to buy our home, a tool named Thomas Otway, his tanned face set in a constant half-smile. Thomas had a funny Australian accent that always seemed phony.

“This is all pretty much boilerplate,” Dave says, another thing our real estate agent used to say, except with his Aussie-r-dropping-vowel-twisting accent—bolah-plite.

I take the pen and begin signing. “Here,” Dave says, removing flagging tape from each section, “and here, here, and here…and one more…here.” Dave puts the signed contracts back in the CONTRACTS folder and then he takes from his briefcase another folder: MENUS.

He opens the MENUS file, takes out one of the sheets and hands it to me. The menu lists what are apparently various kinds (breeds? brands? makes? models?) of marijuana down the left column: AK-47, Arrow Lakes PB, Haze, Purple, Trainwreck, Snow Cap, OG Kush, Canadian Black, Cambodian Red, Schwag, F-1, ChemDog, Sour Diesel, White Russian, Jumping Jack and Northern Lights. The prices are listed in two columns on the right—the price ranges from $35 to $80 for an eighth and from $250 to $575 for an ounce.

I stare at this sheet, not entirely comprehending it. Jamie points out one of the cheaper middle brands—Arrow Lakes PB—and nods. This must be the B.C.-Bud-Nobel-Frankensteined shit that I’ve been smoking the last few days.

Dave goes on: “The blends are italicized, and anything with an asterisk is a name brand. I work mainly with a local grower, so what I tend to feature are locally produced versions of these brands—think of them as knock-offs, but every bit as good, sort of like generic prescription drugs. Not everything is going to be available, obviously, and these prices are subject to availability and other market forces.”

“And you can get me—” I recall I’m not supposed to mention amounts “—enough?”

“First, I’m not
getting you
anything. I don’t handle that part of it, because of my allergies—I’m allergic to spending the rest of my life in prison. I introduce you to the grower, help you broker a fair price, that kind of thing, all for an hourly fee, but I don’t want to know how much you’re buying or what you’re doing with it. I assume you have a prescription. After that, you’re responsible for paying for it, and for transporting anything you buy. I don’t ever see dope or dough. I’m simply a lawyer who gets paid for whatever billable hours I spend on various negotiations, contracts and introductions—none of which involves the actual transaction of drugs or money. I am not the person providing you with the product. We’re clear on that?” Dave taps the stack of contracts I’ve signed.