Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (19 page)

“I actually might not vote,” Chad said. “I’ve done
a great deal to work for—”

“I’ve done a great deal as well!” John said.

“What!” Jason screamed. “What!” and started
hacking.

“I’ve had a really long couple of weeks,” John
said.

Edward came back from the crazy man. “He told me if
he was going to die tomorrow, if I was going to die tomorrow, my last, like my
dying thing, my last—I have completely lost—” Edward said.

“Maybe you need more Adderall,” Jason said.

“I have completely lost my capacity for language,”
Edward said. “Basically he told me he would take a vial of sulfuric acid and
throw it in the Mayor’s face.”

“If you only have one day, there’s only so much you
can do. You have to find the Mayor, you have to find the sulfuric acid
. . .” Jason said.

“He wouldn’t want to kill him. He just wanted the
Mayor to look in the mirror and see the ugliness inside every day,” Edward
said.

They discussed this for a while.

“And he’s so hideous as it is!” someone said. “Why
hasn’t he had more plastic surgery to make himself more attractive? Or at least
a D enlargement.”

“I bet he has a big dick.”

“No way.”

“Well, he’s so small that at least—”

“Yeah, I bet it looks bigger than it is. Because he
is a big dick.”

“I actually kind of enjoy talking to those crazy
people,” Edward said. “I got a lot of practice with those conversations when
I
used to sneak into bars in high school and would always attract the one oldest,
craziest person in the room. I would always leave happy!”

“Because you were a little less crazy?” John
said.

“No, it was something to do. It was better than
standing in a corner by yourself.”

“I’d rather writhe in the corner quite frankly,”
John said. “Writhing in the corner!”

“Nobody puts Eddie in the corner,” Jason said.

“Many people have put Eddie in the corner over the
years,” Edward said.

Edward was staying in town for the next forty-eight
hours. But that expiration date meant John was sad. “I told him he should just
live in my apartment. He got all happy,” John said. “He wants to. I got mad at
him today because he didn’t stay in my apartment today. He went to Jason’s. He
had to get his laptop. I was like, just stay with me! My cousin doesn’t care.
My
cousin loves Edward. For two weeks! Then he can get his own apartment. I like
the kid around. He’ll just stay for two weeks. Well, he has to get money. I’ll
give him money! I’ll save, I won’t smoke or something. We smoke so much more.
He’s so cute. My God. He looks— I’m so happy. He looks so good right now. He’s
such a loving little guy. It’s good right now. I like the guy a lot.”

THE NEXT DAY,
Election Day, Jason was still so insanely ill. He was downtown at seven
a.m., and the first thing he saw was this man having a total seizure on the
street, convulsing, there was like blood on the street, he fell, ambulances
came. Jason was really superstitious and this seemed to him like a bad omen.
And
then it turned out he had pneumonia. He kept pretending it was allergies and
he
didn’t slow down for a second. Maybe it can’t be good to go out every night,
he
thought.

And over the course of the day, the Mayor had
gotten 585,466 votes.

His challenger had gotten 534,869 votes.

A total of 1,154,802 people’s votes were
counted.

There were 4,095,561 active registered voters in
the City.

So only about 28 out of every 100 people who could
vote did.

The challenger had won a significant majority of
voters in distinct regions of the City. If those regions were like little
cities, the Mayor wouldn’t be the mayor there anymore.

The Mayor’s team had played it like it was an easy
sail to victory. But it wasn’t any such thing. He could have lost quite easily.
That was why he’d spent all that money.

So they’d all been hoodwinked! Or, more accurately,
they’d let themselves be hoodwinked.

JOHN’S COMPANY
DECIDED
to throw a party to announce the hiring of the new boss of
the office.

The party was held at the swank downtown store of a
foreign purse and leather goods maker. It was on the second floor, where they
kept the good stuff. The staff came, all draggy, without much interest. There
is
only so much anxiety or resentment that can be maintained for so long. Sooner
or
later, one develops a tolerance.

Timothy was there. He was all political smiles.
Their old boss Thomas was there too. He’d been talked into introducing the new
boss. Lots of people there hadn’t seen him for a while. It was rather like
running into your father by surprise in a busy airport. He was a mad kind of
gleeful, all glittering, almost frightening.

The new boss swam around the room. He almost looked
the part: a grown-up in a suit. Tall and wooden, he wore a red string around
his
wrist, and his pants didn’t cover his bare ankles. It was impossible not to
think that he hadn’t even started yet and was in over his head.

There was a coin purse for sale in the leather
goods store. It cost 195 dollars. It measured about four inches by three inches
by one inch. Apart from that being two or three days’ worth of salary for some
of the employees present, also you would need 9.75 pounds of quarter-dollar
coins to fill the coin purse with enough money to pay for it.

JOHN’S DESK
OVERSPILLED
with envelopes.

A billing statement for Direct Loans. For this
bill, the total balance due was 40,337.26 dollars.

This bill was due on the seventh of each month. His
monthly payment for this loan was 152.22 dollars.

This particular bill said that it was sixty days
overdue. “We are preparing to report this loan(s) to national credit bureaus,”
it said.

There was also another letter from Direct Loans,
for a bill six months after the last one. In this bill, it said that his total
balance was now 41,319.91 dollars.

That meant that, despite a few payments, and
because of interest and late fees, his total outstanding loan from Direct Loans
was now 982.65 dollars more than it had been six months previous.

There was a letter from “Diversified Collection
Services Inc. a Performant Company.” It was sent on behalf of the creditor
called United Guaranty Commercial Insurance Company of North Carolina. The
balance due, they wrote to say, was 13,827.27 dollars. They would take from
John’s bank account, they wrote, two weeks later, the amount of 165 dollars.

And if he paid them that amount each month for the
next eighty-three months, he would then, seven years later, provided there was
no interest or penalties added, owe them only 132.27 dollars.

It had become impossible to tell from the
statements which bill was for which loan or debt. The Diversified Collection
Services might be servicing a credit card bill, or a student loan.

For instance, there was a statement from FIA Card
Services. FIA was formerly named MBNA but had changed its name four years ago,
after being bought by Bank of America the year previous. At this time, Bank of
America held more than 1 in 10 of each dollar that people in the country put
in
banks.

The letter from FIA Card Services may or may not
have been about the same debt referenced by Diversified Collection Services Inc.
Their note arrived the next month, noting a debt with a balance of 11,930.56
dollars but with a “new balance” of 12,220.23 dollars, as it was “past due.”

Still, much of this debt was student loans,
parceled out to different lenders and now, apparently, one or more collection
agencies as well.

There were his FFELP loans. Those were loans that
were serviced through private companies, but that took subsidies from the
government—and also the government insured much of these loans in case of
default. It was a largely risk-free business, given that.

His Stafford FFELP loans, granted five years ago,
were for 8,500 dollars of subsidized loans and 10,000 dollars of unsubsidized
loans. The difference between the two was actually quite minor; it was that the
“subsidized” loans were for people who fell below a certain income level, and
so
that, while they were in school, or when their loan payments later were
temporarily deferred or defaulted upon, the government would pay for the
interest that accrued.

His Perkins loan request, for professional school,
was for 6,000 dollars. This was also due to a federal program, and only “needy”
applicants could receive money for graduate school.

Also he had a private loan, a CitiAssist loan, for
15,000 dollars, from August of five years ago.

The government had been planning on changing how
student loans were made. What happened with student loans was that the
government actually subsidized the companies that loaned money to people to go
to school, but the lenders got to keep the profits from the loans.

Instead now people thought: Why not give the money
directly to colleges and to students, for tuition?

The loan companies hired more firms to go down to
the Capital and engage in lobbying, the practice of persuading policy
makers.

One firm put out twenty-two billion dollars in
loans just in the year previous, and also spent eight million dollars on these
lobbying efforts—twice what they’d spent the year before. Ten million students
received loans in the year overall.

The government would, if they eliminated or
restructured companies like that one, retain eighty billion dollars over the
next ten years.

Well, maybe it would happen, maybe it wouldn’t.

All told, at the end of this year, John’s debt
added up to about 15,000 dollars for college, 40,000 for professional school
and
about 14,000 in credit card debt during school, almost 70,000 dollars all in,
a
small percentage of which was paid down. Who could even begin to start worrying
about a thing like this? That was what desk drawers were for.

DAYS LATER,
JASON
still had what he described as “total pneumonia.” He went to
the doctor and the doctor said, “Can you breathe really deep please?” And Jason
said, “Well, no?” But he was on the mend, mostly. He was trying to drink through
it. John was in a terrible mood and was pounding beers. It had just gotten dark,
and everyone wanted to huddle inside. They were at a friend’s house, and Sally
had come along after work.

“I apologized both Tuesday night and Wednesday
morning. I will never not vote again,” John said.

“I apologize as well,” Sally said. “Here’s the
situation. I moved three years ago, and I still have not changed where I’m
registered. That was the first time I’d ever not voted. But I actually really
wish I had.”

“Samesies,” John said.

It really had been so close.

“I said this to Chad: If everyone knew how close it
was going to be, and everyone had to revote, everyone would come out—and he’d
still win,” John said.

“It was so crazy at my polling place,” Jason said.
“The Democratic Party guy in Brooklyn? The city councilwoman was his protégé.
She’s like the first Dominican woman elected to everything. They had some
disagreement about some zoning thing. And she was on the side of the community
and he was on the side of the developers. And she’s dead to him now. So he like
hates her, he totally opposes her. And she won the primary against his
handpicked administrative assistant. So she won in the primary, and he, as the
head of what is perhaps the largest Democratic Party organization in the
country, is not supporting the candidate! He’s supporting this ridiculous woman.
She literally was like his assistant. So he really got all the troops out. There
were these warring factions outside my polling place. There were like no voters!
But maybe hundreds of people! It was crazy.

“I almost miss the Bush years in some ways,
personally,” Jason said. “Well, I married well then. Every time I watch
Mad Men
, I’m like, I totally saw this episode but it
was way better when it was on
The Sopranos
. I was
like, this really reminds me of something I really like, but way better, with
Edie Falco. Or
The Simpsons
! Edward was explaining
to me—I mean I watch it and I like it but I don’t know all the backstory—and
he
was explaining to me Don Draper’s identity, and I was like, this is the exact
same story as Principal Skinner. Right? In the war? I was shocked.”

“Oh my God,” Sally said.

“You know what was on like HBO3 or something?
Apollo 13
,” John said.

“Oh my God, I totally met that astronaut once,”
Jason said. “Jim?”

“What was that like?” John asked.

“Oh, it was in high school. So I was like, I don’t
care.”

“Right? ‘Oh, so you went to space,’ ” Sally
said.

“Yeah, like: ‘Fuck you,’ ” Jason said. “He seemed
very nice, I don’t know. He was some old white man.”

“Jason and I both have an unhealthy obsession with
the Oscars?” John said. “What we do is play a game with each other. We have two
different versions. For me, Jason will name a year, and I’ll have to pantomime
a
scene from the movie that won Best Picture. Jason will be like, 1962, then you
have to do a scene. I’m horrible after
Gladiator
, I
don’t know what happened, but tell me 1974 and I’m ready to go.”

“Oh, I know,
Godfather
II
,” Jason said.

“Exactly. I like to do the scene on the ship, where
he’s looking at the Statue of Liberty, little Vito. And Jason is an expert on
Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress—”

“1983,” Sally said.

“Which one?”

“Best Actress.”

“Shirley MacLaine,” Jason said.

“That’s
Terms of
Endearment
?”

“That’s kind of easy. Everyone knows that,” John
said.

“Was Debra Winger Supporting?”