The Financial Lives of the Poets (11 page)

“Uh. Yes?”

“Good.” Dave begins packing up his briefcase. “Then take this menu home and read through it and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

When his briefcase is packed, Dave looks me in the eye, smiles and winks, and once again, I think of Thomas, the agent who represented Lisa and me when we bought our house.

Our house…for another, what…five days and nine hours? Lisa’s inside it right now, bent over the computer keyboard while our boys are nestled in their beds—no idea of the insanity going on around them, foreclosure, affair, dope deal, all that unraveling—and it’s almost as if I can hear our old real estate agent’s phony accent:
I’m so bloody ’appy for you, this is the house-a-ya drimes,
slick son-of-a-bitch pushing papers like they were made of fine glass,
Lisa, Matt, this is the pa’ht I love,
papers that chained us to a death ship for thirty years, for the rest of our lives, or until next week,
I have a feeling you’re going to be so ’appy heah,
and it dawns on me that Drug Dealer Dave’s sales strategy might be a good one for realtors, too, beginning the home-buying process by pretending to want to search your asshole.

Because, honestly, after that everything goes pretty smoothly.

A
CE AUNTIE ATSHIT BAMMY
banana bash

bart bazooka black-mote block (and) blue-bayou

bobo bone boom brick budda (botanical name:

Cannabis sativa) charge cherat chips chira

chronic daga dope funk ganja giggle grass

grefa hemp jack jane jay jolly juju

(and the deliriously sweet-sounding) kiff.

A loaf a log a lid (which is what we called

an ounce when I was a kid; what they now

call a can) loco lucas ma mak mary-jane

marijuana—(which is Mexican

for something no one can ever agree upon

and then comes the sweet string of—)

meggie moocah muggles numba noma paca

pat pin pot pretendo rat red reefer rye

sen sez spliff snopp stink straw

stack thai thumb wollie what yeh

yen-pop yesca zambi (then back a bit to

end on my own personal favorite)—weed.

“Why are you Googling pot slang?” Lisa asks. I didn’t hear her come in the room and now she’s looking over my shoulder. She is dressed in a tight-fitting black shirt and skirt; she looks great. She’s been dressing up more for work the last few weeks. It reminds me of when we were first married, how it used to break my heart a little every morning when she’d make herself so beautiful to go market the sports medicine clinic and I’d think: wait a minute: I’m the guy who married you. Why don’t
they
get the sleepy woman in the zero-population-growth pajamas and
I
get the business babe in the hot suit?

“I think we need to be ready, that’s all,” I say, thinking quickly to explain the list of stoner synonyms on the screen. “Those boys are going to be teenagers soon and when they start sneaking around I don’t want to miss any of the code words.”

“They’re ten and eight, Matt.”

“You want to have your head in the sand, go ahead. I’m gonna be ready.”

Lisa shrugs off the latest sign of what she surely must see as my fatal case of mid-life imbalance. “Curt is supposed to get back to me today about going full time and getting on the benefits package,” she says. When she’s nervous, like now, Lisa bites her bottom lip. It goes white under her teeth. “I’m not optimistic, Matt.”

“I know you’re not.”

“So what should I say if he says no?”

“I wouldn’t say anything. I’ve told you before I think you should look for another job, but you probably shouldn’t quit this one until you have another one.”

“Yeah,” she says, and she looks past me, out the window. She clears her throat and says, “So what do you have today?”

I list off the day’s chronological indignities: (1) Dad’s doctor’s appointment, in which he will be given a routine dementia exam—SATs of senility—to determine the rate of his decline and the effectiveness of the meds he’s on (2) a meeting about the one job prospect I’ve been tending, with a wealthy developer I used to cover who claims to want to start an online newspaper with me as editor (3) a twice-postponed afternoon appointment at the Unemployment Office with my job counselor, Noreen.

What I don’t mention is that I’m also: (4) going on day three without sleep (5) desperately trying to “contact my lender” to fend off foreclosure for another month and (6) waiting for Dave my drug-dealing lawyer to call so I can order nine Gs of primo skank—at least two logs of meggie, or two bricks of block (or is it two blocks of brick?). Eight loafs of juju. Thirty-two cans of chronic. Two-hundred fifty-six eighths of zambi. Eight hundred spliffs of bammy. (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Texas Instruments makes a fine calculator for figuring this out.)

“I’m sorry to ask again, but do you think you could pick up the boys? And feed them dinner? I might be kind of late.”

“Sure.” I notice that she hasn’t offered an excuse and I don’t ask for one. I just turn back to the computer screen and Lisa exits this little room we call “the office,” to go finish getting our future potheads ready for school.

What I was actually doing when she came in was trying to figure out the words on Dave’s marijuana menu, but it is like trying to learn Spanish, this pot-language; there are apparently national and regional dialects (how would you ever know where to smoke wollie, or yeh?), native slangs giving way to brands and hybrids, formal and informal constructions, questions of singular and plural (can you have two sez?), an ever-shifting slang meant precisely to exclude creepy old dudes like me. In fact I’m beginning to suspect that every noun is slang for pot, and every verb also means to get high. Raise a flag? Pound a nail? Shoot some hoops? Park the car? Feed the cat? Well…that might just be feeding the cat.

Voices trickle up the stairs: “Bye, Dad.” “Bye, Dad.” “Bye, Matt.” The house is wrung of its young people and it’s just my dry old man and me, both of us staring into flat, diode screens.

I call down the stairs. “You okay down there, Dad?”

“When does
Rockford Files
come on?” he yells back up.

“Nineteen-seventy-five.”

I finish my dope research and check Lisa’s Facebook page, but she’s gone underground. No more public flirtation. Usually when I do recon, I come across a dozen harmless chats back and forth between Lisa and her old college friends—they send each other good karma and E-hugs and online invitations and it’s no different than grade school, folded notes going back and forth. Usually, in a single night, Lisa receives, and responds to, dozens of these passed notes. Last night there were twenty entreaties to her from various “friends” and she didn’t respond to a single one. It’s all Chuck all the time now, and either she’s learned to keep their conversations private or they’ve moved to a safer platform.

I remember, at a party in college some girls asked me what represented first, second and third base at my high school. These girls were loudly and drunkenly agreeing that first base was kissing and a home run was sex, but second and third were open for debate—everything from booby-outside-the-shirt to heavy petting to making out to blowjobs. I said that at my school, first base was group sex, second base bestiality, third base necrophilia and a home run an elaborate weeklong orgy that ended with a snuff film. The joke, as I recall, fell somewhat flat, ending the usually solid party topic of sex bases. Lisa did always say that my sense of humor was an acquired taste. Like beef heart.

Anyway, I think there must be a sort of electronic version of those bases now—first base being a simple wall-posting on Facebook or MySpace, second being a private email, third a text message to one’s phone leading to…I don’t know…phone sex or masturbating in front of a computer camera. That’s a pleasant thought for one’s wife and the prince of lumber.

I push away from the computer, spend ten minutes in mortgage-company automated-phone hell
(por español, dos)
but my heart’s just not in it. I need to sell some jack. I do push-ups. Sit-ups. Shower. Take a dress shirt from the ignored side of my closet, whisper to the despondent ties: stay alert boys, any day now, any day! Downstairs, Dad has given up ever finding Jim Rockford on TV and is watching news swing back and forth from a plane crash to the recession and back again, until they begin to seem like the same thing. “Look at that,” Dad says of a certain twenty-four-hour news babe. “I’d like to bend her over her anchor desk.”

As my father fantasizes rough sex with this pert professional on her crisp news set, I run a comb through his wispy gray hair. He pats his chest for a cigarette.

Dad follows me to the car, where he rides like a vet-bound dog, facing sideways, the world streaming past like the façade of an old arcade game. There is a for-sale sign in the back passenger seat window of my car. Such new details are always alarming to Dad—they must signify something—so every once in a while he looks back at the sign. “You selling this car?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of car is this?”

“Maxima.”

He sighs. “Do you know what I miss?”

“Dan Fouts?”

“Chipped beef.”

“I know you do, Dad.” The sky is clear again today, world sharply drawn, trees clear of leaves, their anguished branches rising like clutched fingers. It’s quiet in the car. He first had it in the Army; shit-on-a-shingle, they called it. My mom used to make it for him, too. She preferred the description “chipped beef”—which, now that I think about it, is what he says he misses, not shit-on-a-shingle. Huh. So, he misses Mom’s chipped beef. Maybe he misses Mom.

“Dad, what do you say we have that for lunch today?”

“Have what?”

“Chipped beef.”

“I miss that.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

He looks back. “You selling this car?”

“Yeah.”

“What—”

“Maxima.”

He is not happy in the doctor’s office waiting room. For the dementia patient, all of life is a waiting room in which you can’t remember what you’re waiting for and your turn never comes. In this
actual
waiting room are the kinds of people my father would never choose to spend his morning with—whiners, sniffers, the weak, complainers. I think about asking a nurse for something to help me sleep; I got an hour or two last night but I suppose you can’t really complain about not sleeping if you’re not actually going to bed.

The nurse calls Dad’s name and he looks at me. I nod and we start to the back of the clinic. She takes his blood pressure and weighs him. He’s lost six pounds in six months. She glances over at me. I know. I know. I’m not feeding him enough chipped beef.

We sit in the doctor’s office. Dad shifts, crinkles the paper-covered table. He stares at a crosscut drawing of the female reproductive parts, trying to figure out what he’s looking at: some kind of plant? map of the Gaza Strip? carburetor? Finally, I think his mind gets around what it is, and he winces and looks away.

Dad’s doctor always seems grumpy about our appearance, even though she schedules these routine appointments. I always feel guilty that we’ve taken time away from her important life-saving for a routine maintenance check on Dad’s failing mind. She spends a few minutes on his health; she’s glad he’s quit smoking, even though I fear he’s just forgotten it.

“Okay, Jerry,” she says. “I’m going to ask you a few questions. What year is this?”

My father looks at me, pissed that I’ve done this to him. Last time he guessed 1997.

“Nineteen…” He rubs his dry lips. “No.” And he smiles, because he’s not falling for the trap this time. “One thousand eight.”

“One thousand eight?”

“Yes,” he says.

“And the month?”

“November.”

“So it’s November of one thousand eight?”

“If you say so.” He smiles at me. One thousand eight? Maybe it’s not terrorists we have to fear, the dudes planning another 7/11. Maybe we should be more worried about the Norman invasion. Or the plague.

“Where did you work, Jerry?”

“I worked at the…place.” He looks at me. “Sears,” he says, relieved.

“And what did you do?”

He pats himself for a missing smoke. Then he looks at me again. After managing the automotive department at Sears, Dad worked briefly in the Sears insurance offices but I think he missed his coveralls. He says, “What did I do? Hell, I did my job, that’s what.”

“I’ll bet you did. And what did you have for breakfast today, Jerry?”

He looks from the doctor to me. Blank. I can’t help him. He is pissed. If this test is the SATs of senility, Dad is headed straight for the Yale of assisted living places. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he tells the doctor.

While he’s gone the doctor looks at his chart. “He’s lost six pounds.”

“He’s eating,” I say.

“Does he have any favorite foods you can make?”

“Shit-on-a-shingle?”

Maybe Lisa is right and I do have an inappropriate sense of comic timing; or maybe some people just don’t laugh when they should, this doctor, for instance, who looks down at the chart.

“He comes in and out, has good days and bad days,” I say, which is pretty much the outlook the doctor predicted six months ago.

“More bad days, though? More days like today.”

“Not really,” I lie. “Half and half.”

“Have you talked with your father any more about assisted living?”

“A little,” I say. “He’s had some financial trouble…we’re sorting out his insurance now. But honestly…I think he’d rather eat a gun than go live in one of those death warehouses.”

I’m not sure why I’m doing this—shit-on-a-shingle and eat a gun and death warehouses…as if the rough drug dealer is already emerging. Maybe I’ll whack this doctor.

Dad comes back in the room. “Two thousand eight,” he tells the doctor. “I think I said it wrong before.” I recall the calendar at the nurse’s station. Dad glances over at me, and smiles, and I don’t think I’ve ever loved the old guy more than I do right now.

He drifts in and out like this during the remainder of the test, knows some things I wouldn’t guess he’d know but can’t come up with others that seem basic to me, like two of my three sisters’ names. Simple math crushes him, and when he’s asked to repeat a list—wallet, telephone, car keys—thirty seconds later, he’s angry about the trick question. “What list?”

“I said to repeat those three things,” the doctor said. “Remember?”

“Well, they must have been stupid things,” Dad says. Right again.

I drive Dad home and put the TV on financial news, slip into a sports coat and drive back downtown for my meeting with Earl Ruscom. I park ten blocks away to avoid paying for a meter. I’ll buy nine thousand dollars worth of pot, but I won’t pay fifty cents to park.