The Financial Lives of the Poets (25 page)

“What’s going to happen to those kids,” I say. “To Jamie?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Lt. Reese says cryptically. I think this confirms what I figured out last night. That if I was OH-2…there had to be a-1. “So Jamie was—”

He just smiles. “Don’t ask me that.”

“None of those guys seemed like criminal masterminds,” I say. “Even Dave wasn’t as bad as you made him out to be. I think he was just caught up in it, like I was, over our heads.”

“Caught up? Over your head?” This is apparently the wrong thing to say to Lt. Reese, who spins on me, his old shitty self. “You were dealing drugs, fuck-nuts! You know the definition of a fucking drug dealer,
Slippers?
Someone who deals drugs!”

My boys have looked up from the tree fort. I hold up my hand to quiet Lt. Reese.

He continues more quietly: “The only difference between you and Dave? Is that you
sucked
at it. You think you’re different ’cause…what? You got kids? “Cause you used to have a job?”

Lt. Reese hands me his coffee cup, sighs. “You know the worst part of what I do: nobody ever deserves it. Nobody ever thinks they’re wrong. You’re all a bunch of assholes walking around crying, ‘It ain’t fair…I didn’t mean it…I got a bad deal.’”

“Amen,” says Dad.

Lt. Reese and I both look over at Dad, who rocks back and forth, staring off into space.

Lt. Reese reaches over and pats my father on the back. Then he stands. “You ready?”

“Can I go in and tell my wife?”

Lt. Reese looks at his empty cup. Sighs. “Get your dad and me some more coffee first.”

I get them each a cup. “Five minutes,” Lt. Reese says.

I nod. I don’t see the boys in the fort, so I walk over. They’re sitting on the floor, cross-legged in opposite corners, like boxers between rounds. They’re playing their Gameboys. Fifteen minutes in their new eleven-hundred-dollar fort and they’re back to playing video games.

“I love you guys.”

They look up, confused. “Okay,” Teddy says. I step into the fort. It really is solidly built. I feel strangely…proud. I bend down and hug them. Even Teddy hugs me back, awkwardly, but I’ll take it. They don’t ask where I’m going.

“Bye Dad,” I say. “I’m going to jail.”

He toasts me with his steaming coffee.

Then I start back toward the house. The stairs creak under my feet. The door to our bedroom is closed. I start to knock—then I grab the knob and open the door. Lisa looks startled. She’s staring out the window, chewing her thumbnail, her phone at her ear. Wearing her heavy coat. She looks back and sees me. Her eyes are red and bleary. “I have to call you back,” she says into the phone. She closes it and turns to face me.

Our big suitcase is open on the bed. Nothing in it. I don’t know what this means. Has she not packed yet? Or changed her mind? Or is she expecting me to go?

She looks up and I catch her eyes—green, frightened.

I look down at the bed underneath that suitcase. “Lisa…I…” What do you say? Where do you start? “I am so sorry.”

B
ANKRUPTCY 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:

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.