The Financial Lives Of the Poets

That-feels-so-good-we’re-about-to-be-evicted!)

So I step back into the hall; the boys’ rooms are across from

one another, and I stand between them, fists on my hips. Sentry. Superhero. All I want is to keep them safe, healthy, fed. But with no job? No prospects? No money? No house? What did the man say-There is always hope, but not for us. Mouth dry. Head weighs eighty pounds.

I look around at my house-for a while anyway-before it begins its journey back to Providential Equity, or whatever company buys the company that bought the company that bought the bundle of red bills in which ours is bundled. Or is that more melodrama, mere self-pity? (They don’t just take your house. They want you to pay. You’re just the sort of homeowner they want. They’ll do whatever they can to keep you here.) No, all I have to do is liquidate, get some money together, show good faith, get someone from the mortgage lender on the phone and convince them we need a little more time… that’s all…a month…what’s one month…a single month for a journalist in his mid-forties…to find a job…during a recession…with newspapers failing faster than investment banks.

I slump against the wall, played out. Who am I kidding? I can’t save anyone. Maybe Skeet’s right. Maybe they are irradiating us; maybe we’re dead already. Mom knew it, that there would always be another 7/11. And suddenly I understand her fear of terrorism wasn’t fear for herself. She wasn’t flying on any more airplanes. She was afraid for me, afraid for her kids and her grandkids, for all the hungry, lost boys. Afraid for the world she knew she was leaving. As she lay there dying, she must have realized there was nothing she could do anymore to protect the people she loved. Just as there’s nothing I can do for my boys anymore, my boys who will one day freak out alone in the tight warm aisles of a world beyond their understanding. I may as well be dead for all the help I can be to them. (My boys stir, agreeing that it’s their scary world now, their hard, hard world: go on, old man; rest now; sleep.) And in my fraying head

there plays a news medley of war and instability, financial collapse and bad schools; forbearance, foreclosure, eviction; cynicism, climate crisis, 7/11-and the melody switches to my personal theme song (Concerto of Failure and Regret in E minor) as the life bleeds out from my feet and puddles in the hallway…

And this is when the unlikeliest peace comes, and I smile. Because as fucked as the world is, as grim as the future surely seems to be, as grim as it revealed itself to be for my mother as she lay dying of the tumor that kills us all, there is a truth I cannot deny, a thing no creditor can take; even as my doomed boys stir in the cold unknowing of predawn sleep, even as the very life leaches out of me, soaks into the berber, into the cracks of my arid grave, I must grudgingly admit-

– that was one great goddamn burrito.

CHAPTER 2

Giving to Charity

“HEY, THE GUY’S COMING to blow the sprinklers,”

Lisa says as she blows through the kitchen,

in a billowing skirt, and I can barely keep

my head up-something I forgot to do?

Ah, I remember now: sleep. I forgot to sleep, after I got home high from 7/11, spending instead the hour before dawn worrying and flipping between CNN and Cartoon Network-endless politics and the Go Go Gophers, international financial crises and Klondike Kat.

And apparently I’m still stoned-and a huge proponent of today’s weed-big fan. In fact, I wish I could invest in the dude who Frankensteined it up there in B.C. There used to be a cranky old government reporter at my paper named Abe Cowley, who always ranted that “kids now are fucked,” because they’d never be able to afford real estate or find jobs-I couldn’t always follow his rant-but if it ever comes up again I’ll say, Yeah, Abe, you’re right, kids today have no future, but Christ, have you tried their pot? At the table Teddy reaches past me for the milk. I think of the hours and brain cells that went into getting that simple white jug and I feel strangely proud. Lisa blows through the kitchen again-we pass like storm fronts now-this time she has her jacket on and she tells me, “Before you take the kids to school, don’t forget to turn off the water and roll up the hoses.” When I don’t say anything, she asks, “Matt?”

Beneath the table, I click my heels together. “Jawohl, herr commandant.”

Note: for future marriage-enriching banter, avoid Nazi humor.

Smart, round Teddy slides the milk over to wispy little brother Franklin, who teeters it before finally pouring milk on the counter. He diverts the wayward stream toward the bowl, but it hits his upturned spoon and splashes even more on the counter. Today’s milk spill looks like the state of Florida. I grab a dishtowel and sop.

“Hell, I can blow out the sprinklers,” my daft father says. He’s having one of his sharper moments-eyes clear as he stares out the window, gray hair bursting cactus-like off his head. He watches the horizon for something. Grips his spoon over his coffee like a battle knife. Two white pills sit in front of him, right where I left them, Aricept, the medication he takes for his cobwebby memory.

“No you can’t, Dad.” I push Dad’s pills closer, wipe milk off Franklin’s elbow.

Dad pats the pocket where he used to keep his cigarettes. Then he tosses the pills in one side of his mouth and spews anger from the other: “Would you goddamn let me do one thing around here, Matthew!”

“I don’t think you put the swear word in the right place, Grandpa,” Teddy says. When Dad first came here, my boys would look shocked whenever Dad went Old-Faithful-profane, and I began to wonder if Lisa and I shouldn’t swear more so Franklin

and Teddy weren’t so put off by curse words. But they’ve gotten used to Grandpa’s eruptions; they don’t even look up from their cereal unless it’s to correct his grammar.

I try to be patient: “Remember Dad? You can’t blow out the sprinklers because you don’t have an air compressor anymore?”

“Where the hell’s my compressor.” His ears are bright red and he won’t meet my eyes. I think he sometimes knows that he’s forgetting, even if he’s not sure what he can’t remember.

“Look, we’ll talk about this later.”

Sometimes this answer is enough; other times Dad’s creeping dementia makes him angry and frustrated, like now, and he argues with me. “No. Tell me now. Where the hell’s my air compressor. Did you sell it?”

“No, Dad. You gave it to Charity. Remember?”

This is what I say when Dad persists. It is partly true. My father did give everything he owned to a stripper stage-named Charity-a young silicone-peaked girl he met when he went with some old Army buddies to a reunion in Reno that ended at six in the morning with lap dances at a strip club. Dad’s and Charity’s relationship was one of those classic May-December romances, a by-the-numbers affair, those numbers being (1) grind, (2) drunken proposal, (3) taking stripper home, (4) identity theft and (5) disappearance of stripper. After Dad drove her all the way back to his remote house in Oregon, she lived with him for exactly ten days, just enough time to clean out his bank accounts and ruin his credit, and to have her boyfriend drive up from Reno to load most of Dad’s belongings- including his beloved air compressor-into a U-Haul and drive away, Charity waving bye-bye from the truck window.

Dad was so embarrassed he didn’t tell me or my sisters for months, during which time Charity and her boyfriend lived high on Dad’s cratering credit; his power was shut off, his gas cut, phone disconnected, and I arrived at his little fifteen-acre ranch to find

him eating canned corn he cooked in his fireplace. It was too late to untangle him, especially since Dad couldn’t remember the details of his undoing (although I notice he hasn’t forgotten my childhood failings, i.e., the great Little League dropped pop-up of 1977). Now, when I explain-over and over-how a stripper ripped him off, Dad’s biggest disappointment isn’t that he gave everything away, but that he didn’t get Charity’s last name so we might track her down. When I point out that Charity is a phony first name, and that getting a phony last name probably wouldn’t help us find her, Dad says I give up too easily.

“And you’re going to see Richard today?” Lisa asks on her next lap through the kitchen. Richard is our financial planner, which is a bit like being Lido Deck Officer on the Lusitania.