The Financial Lives of the Poets (12 page)

Outside the restaurant, I call Dave the Drug Dealer to put in my order. He asks if I’ve read the menu. I say I have and that I’m interested in Arrow Lakes PB. I’m careful not to say how much.

“Good choice,” Dave says. “Very good for glaucoma. Let me get back to you.”

He hangs up and I go inside.

I first met Earl Ruscom in 1997, at a public hearing I covered as a reporter. Earl was there to get the county to waive environmental cleanup for a cluster of houses he wanted to put on the site of an old railroad depot. Somehow, Earl got it in his mind that I was
on his side
in this dispute, because while my stories described him accurately as a voracious fat-ass developer trying to get around reasonable environmental laws, in the profile I called him “bombastic” and Earl took this as a compliment. “Just glad to have you on my side, Matt,” he used to say, even though I explained that reporters weren’t allowed to take sides, and, were I allowed to take sides, it wouldn’t be with a guy who wanted to build cheap houses on a polluted hillside soggy with oil leeching from old buried tanks. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re fair. I can smell the fair on you.”

In the late 1990s Earl first approached me with the idea of starting his own newspaper. Earl’s newspaper would be “business friendly,” he said, and would contain none of the “liberal bias” and “anti-growth bullshit” that he believed were choking off development and keeping capitalists like himself from making money and filtering it back into the economy through the companies that made yachts, Jacuzzis and Scotch. I always liked Earl though, and we played golf together a few times. But I always thought he was talking out his ass about owning his own publication. Then he began drawing up a business plan, and one day he called to see if I might want to edit his newspaper—which was going to be called, I kid you not,
The Can-Do Times.
But I still had a job then, so I was brutally honest with him: “Earl, I can’t take the job, and I have to tell you, I don’t think this is the right climate to be starting a newspaper, anyway.” A third-generation Westerner, Earl wasn’t a tie-and-jacket man as much as an ironed golf-shirt and big belt-buckle guy. He just laughed at me. “So I should take bid’ness advice from a guy makin’, what, fifty grand a year?” It was actually nearly sixty, but I didn’t say so. “Look, Earl,” I said, “I know you can read stock listings. Newspapers are just a bad bet right now. You might as well be starting a railroad. Or a Pony Express station.” This was when media stocks were merely trading down a few points, before “buying media stock” became a synonym for setting your money on fire. But this was also around the time that I was thinking of leaving my job to start a business-poetry website, so I maybe wasn’t the best person in the world to lecture Earl on bad ideas.

Over the next year, of course, I went back to the newspaper and quickly lost my job, and Earl’s idea began to seem less crazy. So last week, I called and asked if he was still moving forward with his newspaper idea. He said he was, and he was glad to hear from me because he hoped to be up and running in a year and he still didn’t have an editor. And as he talked about his paper, it seemed that he’d been doing his research, because he’d given up the idea of a daily print edition of
The Can-Do Times.
Now, it would strictly be updated online, and he’d only produce one hard copy a week, a slender Sunday night edition—Sunday nights being the cheapest press run in town. This Monday morning howler would feature only the best columns and pieces that had run online all week, and would sit in the offices of people like Richard, my ganja-reefing broker, allowing savvy local businesspersons to feel like they’re hitting the week running. I asked if Earl was worried by the hard economic times and he said that a recession was the best time to go into business, just as it was the best time to buy real estate, because, “trust me, the big-dicks ain’t hidin’ in their panties, Matt,” and when Earl gets going, you don’t stop to untangle the words, you just go with it; No, Earl added, now was the time to “pull the goddamned trigger, open ’er up like a six-buck whore,” whatever that meant.

It wasn’t that Earl’s bluster totally convinced me, and the thought of writing developer propaganda for him wasn’t exactly my idea of a dream job, but if he could at least pay me close to what I was making, say, sixty thousand (I’d gladly take fifty) a year, I owed it to myself and my family to see if Earl and I could make a go of it. And maybe the idea would fail, but it wouldn’t be for my lack of trying; I was prepared to give it the best effort I could muster.

Our meeting is 11:30 lunch at a sushi place, which is not as odd as it sounds for a porterhouse like Earl; as my friend Jamie might say: dude love him some uncooked fish. It’s something to behold, watching Earl in a sushi place. He has a shark-like single-mindedness, eating roll after gourmet roll, gobbling gobs of sashimi, handfuls of edamame, slabs of seared ahi and maki, full paddies of rice. Every time the waiter passes, Earl orders something else. The last time I saw him, almost ten months ago, we were at this same sushi joint; he killed more fish in two hours than a trawler could in a week.

I walk around the restaurant but don’t see him. The only person here is a thin guy who—

“Matt!” calls this thin guy, sitting at a table near the door. He stands. He looks like Earl at the end of an old televised movie shot in CinemaScope, when they have to squeeze everything into a skinny frame to make the credits fit.

“Earl?” I ask.

He is at least eighty pounds lighter. The suburban sprawl that used to spill over his substantial belt has been zoned out of existence, and standing in front of me is a guy in size 33 Wranglers, craggy, gaunt and gray, like one of those aging Grand Ole Opry stars right before they die of lung cancer.

In fact, my first self-pitying thought is that the angel of my recovery has gone terminal on me—along with my prospects for the future—but he says, “Fuck no, ain’t never felt better.” He had a heart attack, he explains, and his doctor ordered him to lose the weight. “And I don’t do nothin’ half-assed,” he points out, offering me some unsalted edamame. “Doctor says lose eighty pounds, I lose me eighty pounds.” He fixes me with a hard stare. “And what’s the matter with you? You look ten years older.”

I explain that I’m not sleeping well. Or at all.

Another minute of small talk, then Earl says, “Should we get this shit on the table.”

Here is the shit Earl puts on the table: he is prepared, right now, to offer me the job as editor of
The Can-Do Times.
At first it will just be me, but eventually he wants a staff of six, made up of three part-time entry-level people, two college interns and possibly one other mid-career person like myself.

“That’ll all be your call,” he says. “I’m gonna stay outta the kitchen. Not that I won’t give you my opinion, but shoot, you can feed glue to a horse an’ it’ll look like he’s doin’ algebra. No, only thing I ask—” and his skinny index finger points at my nose “—is that you give business in this town a fair shake and a voice for once. But this here’s your deal. I ain’ about to piss in the whiskey barrel.”

And suddenly I love Earl. I love his belt buckle and I love that country-lisp-whistle in his voice that cuts the ends off words and makes a word like
whiskey
sound cool and I love a man who can simply
will himself
to lose eighty pounds and I love his business sense and I love
Can-Do
and I love this man’s courage, and his balls (metaphorically) and I especially love this homespun way of his, in fact I vow to start using phrases like
piss in the whiskey barrel
in conversations. I think I’ll have it burned onto a wooden sign for Earl, the kinds of signs people put at their lake cabins, and I can even imagine—although I’m not stupid enough to bring it up right now—that once we’re off the ground and I’ve introduced the extraordinarily popular feature
The Fiscal Poet
to
The Can-Do Times,
I’ll write a sonnet in Earl’s honor, fourteen rhyming lines breaking into four heroic couplets featuring Earl’s own homespun wit, ending with his lyric motto:

The business plan calls for one tech person and one advertising person on staff, he says, but this could also take a while. Everything will take a while.

“Fine,” I say, and my cell phone rings—it is my Drug Dealer Dave—but I click it off because I’m not about to fuck up this meeting and just then the voice in my head starts in, that awful
Matt-this-is-all-too-good-to-be-true
voice. I don’t want Earl to see that things have been going so badly for me recently that I would distrust his offer, but the voice tells me:
distrust his offer
and so I start down the mental list of what I might be missing. The obvious thing is pay, but I feel the need to circle around to that: “Benefits?” I ask. “Health insurance?”

“This is a start-up, Matt,” he says, and shrugs. “I have a plan for the people in my construction and real estate offices, but this here’s more like my restaurants. I could let you buy into the plan at a pretty good discount, certainly better than anything you can get out in the world, but I can’t match or go employer-based. I mean, you can’t give a virgin the biggest bed in the whorehouse, right?”

Whatever. Still love this guy. I take a deep breath. “And pay?”

“I gotta pay you?” He smiles, then makes a face. “Nah, this here’s a start-up, Matt. Ain’ no one gettin’ rich. I ’spect my ranch-han’s to put in some sweat equity, ’specially in the first couple-a-years. In exchange, you’d get real ownership shares, which—let’s be hones’, neither of us knows if they’ll be worth the paper they’re shit on.”

Yes, this is exactly what I was afraid of. “Look, I understand that, but I can’t work for free, Earl. And I can’t just work for stock. I’ve got a family.”

“No one expects you to work for free, or jus’ for shares.” He looks genuinely pained. “But this bird, she ain’ gonna fly weighed down by salaries. In the beginnin’, I’m sorry but I could only pay you fifty, Matt.”

Fifty? I pretend to have to think about it. Fifty!

Love this guy!

“Look, I know it’s significantly less than you was makin’,” he continues, “but I’ve crunched the numbers and if we don’t keep payroll at a bare minimum, this thing’s gonna go like the salt block at a slaughterhouse.”

No idea what that means!

“You’d have to supplement your income elsewhere…maybe even jus’ do the job part-time at first, but it’s the only way.”

Fifty grand? Part time? Love this guy! Don’t look too eager, I tell myself. I wish I could call Lisa right now. “Don’t suppose you could go to sixty,” I say.

He wrinkles his mouth. “Fifty…five?”

Love! Him! Fifty is what we need to basically support our lives…to tread water…at fifty-five, we can slowly start to chip away at our debt. “How about fifty-eight?”

“Aw screw it, what’s a few hundred bucks,” Earl says and sticks out his hand. “You got a deal, my friend. Fiftee’ thousan’, eight hunnerd.”

I laugh. “That’s funny.”

“What?”

“It sounded like you just said fifteen thousand eight hundred.”

He stares. “That
is
what I said.”

“But you meant fifty-eight thousand, right?”

“Fifty?”
he says. “You sayin’ fifty? Fu-u-uck.” And then laughs. “Shoot, Matt I can’t pay no fifty. No, I said fiftee’.
Fiftee’-eight!
Fiftee’ thousand, eight hunnerd.”

“But…earlier you said fifty. Then I said sixty.”

“I said fiftee’. Then you said sixtee’.”

“Wait. Fifteen thousand dollars? A year?” And now I hate this country shit with his stupid country-lisp-whistle that cuts the last letter off every word so that fifteen actually sounds like fifty. “I can’t live on fifteen thousand a year, Earl.”

“Well, hell Matt, I don’t know why you took this meeting then. I tol’ you it was gonna be sweat equity early on. That it might even be part time. Hell, you’re the one been telling me for years they ain’ no money in this shit.”

“But…fifteen?”

“I got no problem findin’ people will work for that.”

And the awful thing is that I have no doubt that he does have journalists who will work for fifteen grand a year, for ten dollars an hour, there are so many out of work, and I also have no doubt that I can’t entirely afford to walk away without at least considering this offer.

“I got people will gimme shit on the Internet for free,” Earl says apologetically. “An’ I ain’ so sure it’s any worse than the crap I’m payin’ for.”

And I think this is likely true, too. I sigh. Look around the restaurant, then down at my cell phone, which is displaying Dave the Drug Dealer’s text message: “1 hour…”

“I don’ t…know if I can,” I tell Earl. Deep breath. “I might have to do something else.” I rub my brow. “Look, can I get back to you?”

“Fine,” he says. “Sixtee’. But that’s as high as I can go, Matt. I want you. We both know I like havin’ you on my side. But I pay any more’n that…I’ll jus’ be shittin’ in my own soup.”

(A
LL PRESSURE-TREATED STOCK)

18 eight-foot four-by-fours

to build the side walls and

30 more for the floor,

6 three-and-a-half footers

for the fort’s side door

(Foundation underpinnings

are 16 four-foot boards)

and 6 two-footers more, for

the other fort door

16 one-footers for top cops

and spacers for the door

12 four-foot galvanized spikes

(although you may need more).

This list, along with the requisite tools—circular saw, framing square, twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer, measuring tape and heavy-duty drill with various bits—constitutes, according to my new friend Chuck, crowned prince of Lumberland, Duke of cuckolding, Earl of Homewrecker, the basic raw materials for the simplest tree fort I can build, Frontier Fort #2, a tree fort so simple it doesn’t even require a tree.

“So wait, it just sits on the ground?”

He looks up from the book? “Hmm? Yeah. It just sits on the four-bys. That’s why you gotta make sure the wood is treated.”

So…Chuck is a
Hmm-er,
one of those people who hears you but pretends he doesn’t, says Hmm, and then answers your question. Lisa is going to hate that after a few years. She’s going to say,
Why do you say Hmm, if you heard what I said?
And he’s going to look up from his newspaper in
my
living room and say,
Hmm?

It’s only a beginning, but I am starting to find weaknesses in my opponent.

After the disastrous meeting with Earl I still had an hour to kill before meeting Dave the Drug-Dealing Lawyer. I couldn’t bear taking a meeting with Noreen my unemployment counselor, who would no doubt encourage me to take Earl’s $16,000-a-year job so she could scratch me off her list of unemployables. So I canceled and came once more to the mystical land of lumber for a bit of recon behind enemy lines.

Chuck stands while he types at a plastic-covered computer. This seems unfair to me. I had really hoped to tower above him. As Chuck goes back and forth from the tree-fort book and his computer, I whistle a song I downloaded earlier today. He doesn’t react to it. My whistling is a bit rusty, so the song may not be immediately recognizable, so I try the chorus, which it pains me to sing:
“She’s sweet/and oh-so vulnerable/a man’s wet dream/or his worst nightmare.”

Chuck doesn’t say anything. He just runs his finger down the list of supplies I need and then switches back to his computer keyboard.

“You know that song?” I ask.

His brow is wrinkled up in a difficult math problem. For a second, while he calculates, he looks right at me, but it’s as if he doesn’t recognize me, or is looking through me. There is a low hum of space heaters in Lumberland, as all around us men are gathering the materials to build things; it’s what we do at Lumberland.
We come get stuff to build stuff.
In this way, over time, men like us built all the stuff in the world. “Hmm?”

“The song I was just singing? By the band, Blue Eyed Jesus? You know them?”

Chuck’s lips are still moving as he adds my lumber purchase in his head. When he’s done, he jots down a number. “Hmm? I’m sorry. What?”

“Oh. This band I heard. Supposed to be coming to town? Blue Eyed Jesus? I really like ’em, but I can’t find anyone who has heard of them. I was just wondering if you knew them.”

“What was it again?”

“Blue Eyed Jesus?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

This proves, of course…nothing. It could be that the concert is simply a cover story for their rendezvous and so Chuck wouldn’t know the band. It could also be that he’s pretending to not know the band because he’s figured out who I am. Or it could be that Lisa really
is
going to the Blue Eyed Jesus concert with Dani. It could also be that Jesus really did have dreamy blue eyes, just like Chuck’s. Maybe Chuck
is
blue eyed Jesus, Prince of Peace
and
of Lumberland. Maybe Chuck is the emperor of ice-cream. Or maybe life is an illusion, an image shadowed by fire onto a cave wall.

Chuck hits print and when he bends over to pick up the printout I am finally given a gift, the kind of thing that makes me thank Jesus’ blues, the kind of vision that makes me believe that I can turn around this long losing streak, the first sign of light in a very dark tunnel:

Chuck has a bald spot!

The genre calls for me to go coin-size with my estimate—quarter, fifty-cent piece, silver dollar—but it’s hard because Chuck’s bald spot isn’t exactly round. (Who ever heard of an irregular bald spot? Cancer, I think, before the burgeoning Catholic in me scolds with self-directed guilt; after all, the man
does
have children, and anyway, I’ve never heard of scalp cancer. Okay…how about just an acceleration of this uneven hair loss?)

And then it comes to me: Chuck’s bald spot is roughly the size and shape of a fried wonton. “I don’t suppose there’s any good Chinese food around here?”

“Hmm?” Then, still bent over, reading my printout for the treeless tree fort, Chuck tells me the name of a place nearby.

“They have wontons?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Probably.”

I have, I should point out, a luscious head of hair. Cut short now, up over my ears, my hair is nonetheless thick and healthy and free of dumpling-shaped islands of skin. The wonton is turning, my friend, decaying Prince of Lumberland, balding boy-wonder of woodwork, male-pattern ninja of wife-thievery. I run my hand through my hair; it bristles like windblown wheat.

And when Chuck straightens up with the printout, I see that the triangular-shaped hole has two allies I didn’t notice on either side of his head: a couple of little lots just being paved on either side of those dreamy Jesus blue eyes. (This is the thing about dreamy eyes; like red paint on a car, they cause buyers to overlook a lot of other problems.) Looks like some very real hair-care disappointment ahead for the blue-eyed Prince of Pine.

“Here you go.”

I look down at the invoice, eyes going straight to the bold number at the bottom of the page…“Eleven hundred bucks! For a kid’s tree fort! Christ on a bike! How much would it cost if it was actually in a tree?”

“I’m sorry. I said it’s the easiest, not the cheapest,” Chuck says, and he wrinkles his forehead and takes back the estimate and I can see the condescension creep into his face
(this jerk’s wasting my time; he was never going to build a tree fort)
and it pisses me off—are you really looking down on me, wife-stealer? You can’t possibly be looking down on me,
baldy
—and my face flushes, and I ball up my fist to smack this asshole and that’s when I notice the phone is buzzing on my waist and I look down at the number, it’s Dave the Drug Dealer, and instead of punching Chuck, I have what can only be called, in the religious sense, an epiphany—

More than a good idea, I
see,
as clearly as if it’s right in front of my sleep-hungry eyes: a stack of boards sitting on my front yard, the Stehne lumber invoice stapled to it, Lisa walking up, bending over, reading, her eyes going wide
(What?)
looking toward the neighbors
(Do they know?)
typing furiously on the keypad of her phone
(Did U send this wood?)
getting his response
(That’s UR husband?)
and then her typing back
(U think he knows?)

Yes. I know. I can’t control the smile that crosses my face. “I’ll take it.” I snatch the paper back from him. “When can you deliver it?”

“Monday?”

“I need it tomorrow.”

“Our driver’s off tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s when I need it. My wife’s going to a concert this weekend and I’m apparently going to have a lot of time on my hands.”

“I could maybe get it there…on Saturday?”

“That’s too late. Look,” I say. And I hold up my buzzing phone like a time bomb—
deliver my lumber or I blow this little wooden kingdom to hell.
“I have to take this. Now can you deliver my lumber tomorrow? Or should I go to a different store?”

“Okay.” He shrugs and gives me one of those idiot-customer-is-always-right sighs that must come from a lifetime of working in the family business. “I may have to deliver it myself, but I’ll get it there.”