The Financial Lives of the Poets (6 page)

“Sorry, pal.” I pull the covers up over his chest and ruffle his hair.

He grabs my arm. “Don’t leave.”

When I picture those bullies at Baghdad Elementary walking Franklin to the edge of the playground my mouth goes dry. I comfort and kiss him, then check in on the older one; but Teddy’s post-kiss now. Too tough. Squirms when I try. Reading, he waves me off, “’Night Dad,” without looking up. I find a cup on his dresser though; this will work.

At the top of the stairs, I slip off my shoes. Walk quietly downstairs, half a step, half a step, half a step onward. Edge into the kitchen with the cup…and that’s when I hear it.

Leaning in toward one another at the table, Lisa and Dani are clearly
not
talking about children anymore and I only hear a snippet, but it’s more than enough to make me Chuck-spicious. They’re whispering—but I hear the words “
so romantic”
—Dani covering her mouth, shaking her yellow head as Lisa tells her something vitally important…something that causes them to stop talking and straighten up when they see me, causes Dani to look at me like an accident victim, or so I imagine. I can’t say how I know they’re talking about Chuck; I just know. Because the other line I heard, just before I came in here, from my wife’s frothy best friend was this:
Oh my God, are you gonna do it?

My mouth goes dry. “Do what?”

“Nothing.” No eye contact. “We’re just talking about Karen’s candle party.”

“Oh.” I put the cup in the sink and have no choice but to leave again. I sulk into the living room to watch TV with Dad, who watches the box nonstop now, and who is going to be crushed when I tell him we’re canceling cable. It’s quiet from the kitchen. They must be whispering.

And the night speeds up: the back door closes; Dani goes home; the boys fall asleep; Lisa drifts upstairs to retreat into her social-networking life; and here we all are, alone in our dying house—

“You know who else threw a nice ball?” Dad asks me. “Dan Fouts. But I don’t know how he played with that beard. You ever have a beard?”

These are the loops you learn to live with when you live with someone suffering from dementia. Perhaps it’s no different than the rest of our lives, the shit circling back around on us: bearded QBs and recessions and death and blue-eyed Chucks come to take your wife. And weed, which took a long twenty-year swing back into my life.

Dad wields his trusty remote, turning it—to another sports channel, as if on that one, it might be 1970. In the quiet I notice the tapping upstairs has stopped. I guess Lisa and Chuck are done blog-fucking, or whatever it’s called, or else they’ve moved agin to the TM intimacy of their cell phones. It’s surreal, imagining what’s going on up there. I wonder if Chuck wrote anything about the sorry putz who came in to Lumberland today to build a tree fort for his kids. Dad and I watch the top ten plays of the day, and he tells me once more about Dan Fouts’s beard.

“Itchy,” I say.

“Yeah…that’s what I think,” he says, as if I’ve read his mind.

When I finally go upstairs, Lisa’s in bed, just closing her phone. She’s wearing her giant, unsexy, population-control pajamas, made of burlap, fiberglass insulation, razor wire.

“Sorry. Were you on the phone?”

“Just checking my messages.” She picks up a magazine and starts reading. I stare at her dainty little red phone, which sits closed on the nightstand agin. I think about throwing it out the window. I think about going online to check tonight’s browsing history, but hell, I know who she’s chatting with, what she’s browsing for. I think about telling her the truth about the house, but I’m worried it will be the final nudge for her…I think about climbing into bed and begging her to make love—smack-smack—zero-population-growth pajamas be damned. I think of asking her to quit this, whatever it is. It’s all so…shitty. I know it’s shitty. She knows it’s shitty. We both know it’s shitty, going broke, going down the drain. I don’t want
this.
I don’t want to spend every night tailing her online like some Internet P.I. I don’t want to be sneaky and I don’t
want
to catch her cheating or thinking of cheating or wishing she could cheat. And hell, if she does cheat, I’m not even sure I want to know about it. I’d rather be the blithe idiot: get up in the morning, go to a job, come home, help my kids with their homework and go to bed with my wife, clueless. Especially now—with this noose tightening around my neck and the sense that it’s all getting away from me…I only want comfort. Peace. I don’t want to have to work on my marriage; I just want to have it.

But it’s all…broke. We’re broke, Lisa and me—something important cracked in us. And I have no idea how to fix it, any more than I know how to keep from losing our house, or for that matter, how to build a tree fort. All I know is that I have a check in my pocket for less than ten thousand dollars, a check that represents the last threads of the money we always assumed would serve as our safety net, and
that
might be the stupidest thing we did—not starting a poetry-business website or buying shit on eBay or taking the six-month stay of financial execution, not emailing old boyfriends or getting high at a convenience store—no, the truly stupid mistake was believing that when we fell, a net made of money could catch us.

And just like that, I know what to do. “I’m going to the store.”

She doesn’t even roll over to answer. “What for?”

“Milk.”

I drive. Sigh. Park outside the 7/11. Stare at the sign: red stripe, green stripe, orange stripe. I watch people come and go. These are my people—hungry, cold, desperate. No one shops at a convenience store for convenience. They shop there out of desperation. I fiddle with the radio. Find a lunatic radio show where the loons are talking about the United Nations taking over our country—New World Order and Mao suits—and as I listen to the paranoia seep from the Bose speakers, I think we’re all losing it, suffocating in our paranoia—and then I wonder if my fears about Lisa and Chuck are symptomatic of this paranoia pandemic and that’s when I switch over to sport talk, where they’re rating college quarterbacks, and now I’m onto a Dad-loop because I actually think of calling in to ask if there are any quarterbacks now who play with beards and maybe I’m going crazy.

It’s especially crazy to assume that Skeet and Jamie will return to this 7/11, but I don’t know where else to look for them. Finally, after an hour, I give up and drive over to the apartment building where we stood outside last night smoking weed. And I see the tricked Ford Festiva among the rust-buckets in the parking lot, but I don’t know which apartment belongs to the dude who drives it. So I sit in my car agin, waiting, until finally, I see a loping young black kid in huge jeans and a dirty tank top walking toward the building. I don’t recognize him from the other night, but I jump out of my car anyway.

“Hey. I’m trying to find Jamie and Skeet. Or the guy who drives that Festiva.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” the kid says, too fast, and I can see that I’ve spooked him.

“I’m not a police officer or anything. I just…I want to ask them something.”

The kid looks around, shifts in the glow of a streetlight, and then lowers his eyes. “You were here last night. Dude with the slippers.”

But Skeet has my slippers now, and I’m wearing running shoes, so I say, “Yeah, that’s me.” I don’t exactly remember this kid; they all kind of blurred together last night, because I’m so old or because I was so fried. “Look,” I say, and I step in close. “I just want to buy some of the weed we smoked last night.”

“And you’re not a cop?”

Remembering my upcoming Catholic training, I cross myself. “I swear.”

And maybe this kid was raised Catholic because this seems to convince him. He cocks his head and says, “How much you want?”

“Well,” and I take the $9,400 check from my pocket, “how about this much?”

I
DREAMED
I
WAS ON
my bike, delivering the last paper

to the final porch and I tossed that rag at least a mile—

last dream of a democratic press—and the end of papers

fell like a snowflake onto the faded wood planks

of my old man’s porch, and he came out in slippers,

picked it up, slipped off the rubber band—and the thing

exploded with fresh despairs: new Vietnams and

Watergates, Mansons and Patty Hearsts, not to mention

Andy Capp and Hi and Lois, horoscopes, a Crossword puzzle,

box scores—even the obit of my poor mother. And

my old man told me not to cry, that even good things die,

son, and he folded that paper back up and tucked

the only good thing I ever did under his arm, easing back

into the warm house of my dead childhood to take

his morning shit.

M
Y DREAMS TEND TO
be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it’s embarrassing—as if even my hidden depths lack depth. When I was negotiating my severance from the newspaper, I really did dream one night that I’d delivered a paper to my own father, and that it contained my mother’s obituary. Of course, any good Freudian would accuse such a dreamer of ginning up his dream to please his therapist (this kind of behavior has a name like Stockholm Syndrome or Des Moines Disorder or something). But I swear: I really am that shallow.

Sometimes, in the same way one might try to piece together a fading dream in the morning, I’ll try to re-create the stupid chain of events that caused me to quit a solid newspaper job two years ago. The industry decline had already begun, of course, but I didn’t think for a moment that it would be fatal. I’d always assumed that, no matter what, I could just go back to the paper…that I could go home. It never occurred to me that a newspaper could
die,
any more than children think their parents will one day die. In fact, it was right around the time my mother passed away that I first began to feel the urge to leave my job. It felt like
I was dying,
like I was missing some opportunity to do something grand, something meaningful. Destiny. It felt like my creative soul was being suffocated by the cycle of writing for a newspaper, the slumping, slacking, always-behind feeling of being a news reporter. And then the stories themselves even seemed to shrink—pieces about this insurance company laying eighty people off…or that hospital joining a health consortium—as if there was a deflation of journalism’s ambition alongside its news hole.

But I never disliked my job. Worse (and it’s with great shame that I admit this), I took my job for granted. Worse yet, I never believed that my job was worthy of me. I thought of myself as more than a simple newspaper reporter, somehow better than the mean of my colleagues. I offer no excuses for this arrogance, and no rationale, either; I simply felt
bigger
than what I did for a living, like I was slumming, like I deserved more money, more respect and more esteem than any grubby newspaper could offer. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I became a business reporter in the first place. I preferred wearing suits (most reporters tend to dress like substitute teachers) and I liked swimming amid the sorts of fearless executives who made multi-million-dollar decisions the way the rest of us decided on a restaurant for lunch. When it became clear that Lisa and I had higher material aspirations than we could satisfy on the sixty-or-so-grand I could make as a journalist, I considered public relations for a time, but I’d always seen that as a pasture for old glue horses. So I began augmenting my salary freelancing stories to various national business magazines, and more significantly, I applied what I learned as a reporter to my own investing. And, Mexican shipping bonds aside, I did pretty well for a while. In my best move, I managed a nice pivot from technology stocks to financials and media before tech blew up. In some years, I made nearly as much investing in the markets as I did writing about them. I even had a popular investing column for a couple of years, although, in the interest of full disclosure, this
was
during the late 1990s, when you could’ve trained a puppy on the newspaper stock section and made twenty percent a year investing where his turds fell.

It was also during this late ’90s entrepreneurial euphoria that my tumor of discontentment first began to replicate cells, as I sat chained to my desk and watched various friends and colleagues slip into phone booths and emerge as dot.com superheroes. It’s the devil’s taunt—watching people stupider than oneself making fortunes. Even when that bubble burst, I still told myself that my lack of ambition and imagination had cost me a chance at…I don’t know…wealth? Happiness? Some fulfillment of earlier promise?

Over the years, this tumor grew and metastasized until, by 2006, with my mother gone and my dad smoking his life away on a ranch in Oregon somewhere, with my own mortality throbbing, with the Dow climbing to its peak, with our house assessed at fifty percent more than we owed on it and my financials-heavy retirement account looking like an act of genius, with my marriage seemingly steady, the thing broke within me…and…

…I jumped. And landed. On
poetfolio.com.
It wasn’t that I believed I had some great talent as a poet. I knew my poetry was pedestrian and sentimental when I tried, silly and sophomoric when I didn’t. In fact, on top of the FAQ page of my prototype website was this little self-directed zinger by Alexander Pope:

But I jumped anyway. I walked into my evil editor’s office (imagining the zingers I would deliver) and said simply that I was giving my two-week notice. Every working person fantasizes this moment, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying. I packed my desk into two boxes, took some files and…I jumped.

Splat.

Parked in front of the newspaper now, I wonder what would have happened had I not quit two years ago. I likely wouldn’t have been laid off, for one thing. My newspaper had a vague seniority-by-department layoff rule (which the evil editor took joy in manipulating and subverting, by transferring his enemies to departments he would then gut)—
last one in, first one out
—so while I had a total of eighteen years at the place, when the last round of layoffs came, they only counted the four months since I’d come back. But I’m not sure staying would have been much better; those four months were an anxiety-dream version of my old job: there was real fear in the air, a sense that this was more than some kind of business trend, that it was the end. Four years earlier we had complained about too many ads in the paper (less room for our brilliance) and competed for designer beats
(cultural trends reporter);
now we sighed with relief when the slender paper had any ads at all and eagerly accepted pay cuts and broad, hyphenated jobs created by the loss of our colleagues
(courts-cops-schools…).

No, it was clear. The newspaper was sick. Dying. And when the next round of inevitable layoffs came, there I was, at the top of the to-go list, the company not at all unhappy to lose my top-scale salary and four weeks of vacation, my three-plus benefits package. My demise represented a nice chunk of savings. And when they cut me a little fourteen-week pity severance check, the sweet Human Resources minx Amber Philips pointed out with no sense of irony that I was “lucky” to get so much severance because they could have only counted my service from the four months after I returned.

“Lucky,” I said.

Now, as I take the elevator up to the fifth floor and that Gitmo of offices, Human Resources, I pray to God or the Pope, or whichever saint is in charge of humiliation avoidance that the elevator doors will NOT open to the third floor, that old cauldron of a newsroom, but of course the Pope—knowing that I haven’t taken the required classes yet—causes the doors to open
exactly
on the third floor. And, not satisfied with this, the Pope causes to step on my elevator the last person on earth I would want to see, the Idi Amin of journalism, the Pol Pot of my newspaper, he whose name cannot be typed without befouling a keyboard, the very editor who accepted my resignation two years ago and then took me back, only to force me out four months later, the evil M—. With him is one of the young women he likes to hire, unfailingly busty reporters he is tireless in his willingness to…uh, mentor.

“Oh,” says M—as he steps onto the elevator. His back stiffens. He looks like he’s seen a ghost, the ghost of someone he whacked. “Matt. Hello. How are you?”

“Excellent,” I answer. “Much happier, thanks. Taller.”

We ride in silence. M—is an awkward clunk of a man who constantly strokes his pencil-thin chinstrap beard, which due to his substantial girth, is more like a
double-chin
strap. I suppose it’s unfair, blaming this bloated despot for ruining my newspaper, since every paper is similarly suffering, the big-picture decline of my newspaper no different than the decline of newspapers in most towns. Specifically, the timeline looks like this:

Of course, the specific details vary. At my mid-sized newspaper, the soul-disabled publisher scoured the various newspaper chains until he found the perfect budget-hacking delusional jargon-monkey, a man driven out of every crappy newspaper he ever ruined, a man who—in my humble opinion—is at the very least a narcissist, and at worst, a complete sociopath (thus, his in-house nickname, Idi Amin). Like any tyrant worth his sadism, M—’s first move was to force out any managers who might disagree with him, and his second move—right out of the Khmer Rouge playbook—was to target and demote any intelligent people left who might question his propaganda, until before long, he had systematically dumbed down management to a flock of morons whose only qualification was loyalty. Oddly, M—seemed to have no real interest in the city his newspaper was supposed to cover; his only passion was the business itself, a thing he called
newspapering,
and he constantly made us all uncomfortable by professing a creepy, nostalgic love for this made-up word, a love he seemed to mainly show by wearing a ’40s-movie fedora and getting weepy whenever he reflected back on the fourteen months he spent as a libelous reporter waterboarding the English language. “The man loves journalism the way pedophiles love children,” we used to say.

Meanwhile, M—continued to promote his sycophants and to build himself the Taj Mahal of offices, even as he oversaw round after round of layoffs. Like some medieval doctor, this self-aggrandizing bully claimed he was saving the paper every time he bled it, and throughout the long decline, continued to waste a reporter’s full salary each year flying to journalism conferences where he could bloviate alongside the other Saddams about the future of newspapers (whose very death they were ensuring). We dreaded whenever M—went to one of these conferences because he invariably came home with a whole new batch of
bad ideas
, and like a delusional general moving his shrinking forces across fronts that only he could see, he would announce one day the future of newspapers was an entirely online edition. (Advertisers read this proclamation, shrugged and cancelled their ads in the print edition, leading to yet another round of layoffs.) Then, without ever acknowledging a misstep, M—would proclaim the future of newspapers was putting print reporters on television! (Anyone who has ever
seen
a newspaper reporter knows how this turned out…more layoffs.) Then the future was putting the newspaper on radio! (“Radio? My God, we’re going backwards in time,” my colleagues said. “What’s next? Cave-painting?”) In the waves of layoffs that accompanied these paroxysmal death-throes, this bearded shit-in-a-suit whacked the newspaper’s most profitable sections and bureaus and its best writers and shooters, all to protect his ring of beholden pets, a phalanx of talent-challenged ass-sniffers and the cadre of bulbous interns that he hired from his Midwest alma mater and its pretentiously named H—School of Journalism (there are two things that should never be named: j-schools and penises), an equally overrated institution that he hoped to eventually return to in some kind of endowed bean bag chair.

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.