The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“Yeah,” I say. “Just to move some stuff around. Get some advice.”

Lisa doesn’t do financial crises very well-when she was twelve, her father died and she and her mom struggled-so I’ve been sparing her some of the specific details. Obviously, she knows I’m out of work and that we’re in debt (she helped get us there) but she doesn’t know, for example, that today Richard is cashing out what’s left of my retirement so I can make a deferred balloon payment to the mortgage company next week. “After the meeting with Richard,” I tell her, “I’ll go see that employment counselor. Then I’ve scheduled a bank robbery. Then I’m selling my organs to buy food. It’s a glorious day in Matt-topia.”

Lisa has learned to ignore self-pity disguised as humor-my metier. “Don’t forget to pick the kids up and take Franklin to speech therapy and Teddy to Scouts. And can you get over to Costco to pick up our pictures? I have a session after work.” Lisa goes to a therapist every other week for the compulsive shopping binge she went on last winter, or more precisely, for the depressive episode that sparked her shopping binge, the same depressive streak

that is now causing her to act in other mysterious, online ways-a social surfing habit that she doesn’t know I know is getting more social all the time. She puts a hand on my shoulder, and for just a moment my wife is in my port and I put my hand on the lovely notch of her waist and look into those green eyes, but she sniffs the air around me, pushes away from the dock and makes a face. “God, what did you eat, Matt?”

“I had a burrito when I went to get milk last night.” In the language of a fraying marriage, the truth often comes with ellipses. I had a burrito…after I got stoned with some criminals…when I went to get milk last night.

“Meat or fecal?”

“What’s fecal?” asks Franklin as he washes his bowl in the sink.

“It means poop,” says Teddy, who is ten and, left alone, would insert the word poop into every sentence he uttered.

Franklin is a tender, breakable eight. He giggles, as he always does when Teddy says the word poop. Frankie is the world’s greatest audience for poop humor. “Dad ate a poop burrito?”

“I had to try the recipe before I make it for dinner tonight,” I say. Franklin gives me the requisite Eeww, and I beknight him with my coffee spoon. “Now go get dressed for school, my young apprentice.”

“I had a cigar made of donkey shit in Mexico once,” my father says to Franklin as he squeezes past the counter. “It wasn’t bad. Hard to keep lit. I bought it at a little whorehou-”

And as much as I’m glad to see Dad reminiscing, I step in. “That’s enough, Dad.”

“Eeww, Grandpa,” Franklin says. “You smoked cigars? That’s bad for you.” Among the world’s evils-fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation-smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids’ school. At least my new friends

Skeet and Jamie have escaped this indoctrination.

I glance out the window to see Lisa’s ten-year-old Subaru backing out of the driveway. I wave, trying to recall whether she said goodbye. Or said anything. She’s already on her phone. She’s always on her phone now, or the computer. It’s her new life. I make my way upstairs, glance at the computer, but I don’t feel like doing recon on Lisa’s online life right now, so I do a few push-ups, fewer sit-ups, take a shower-fourth in line, I get lukewarm-dress in the same weedy clothes I was wearing last night. Downstairs, Dad is planted in front of the television, where he spends his days, switching from old movies to news and back. He pets his universal remote control like a tiny cat.

Ten minutes later, I’m driving the kids to their little parochial school. When Lisa and I violated the first rule of real estate by buying a big house in a questionable neighborhood, we landed near a low-income public school-and after Lisa investigated (“I heard a first grader call her teacher Ass-face”) we decided to shop around for the best private school we could afford. This turned out to be a little Catholic shop a few miles away-odd since neither Lisa nor I is Catholic. This whole private school thing would baffle my Dad: not that we’re sending our kids to a religious school whose religion we don’t practice, but that I drive the kids to school every morning when a perfectly good squash-colored school bus rolls past our house. It would seem insane to him that I willingly pay tuition beyond my taxes. In fact, Dad would be outraged by the whole idea of being a consumer of schools. My parents never shopped for schools. It would have been like shopping for water, like shopping for air. It wasn’t that Mom and Dad chose to be public-school people; it just would never have occurred to them there was a choice. If a school bus pulled up, whatever children were in the house were expected to file outside and get on the bus. It didn’t matter if the bus was going to the compound of a racist, survivalist,

apocalyptic cult-bus pulls up; kids get on. Of course, the schools I attended were god-awful; that bus took me to a junior high that was more bong and nunchuk factory than school. So maybe education shopping isn’t such a bad idea.

“I love you guys,” I say as we pull up to the old brick school building; uniformed urchins seep from assorted foreign sedans and big Catholic-family Suburbans and Expeditions. “Have a great day learning about the evils of smoking.”

“Whose hat?” Franklin holds up the flat-brimmed, black and silver Raiders cap.

“Skeet’s,” I say.

“Oh,” Franklin says, as if this makes sense.

Teddy grabs the hat and somehow knows exactly how to wear it, cocked a bit sideways and off-center. It’s amazing how this kind of knowledge filters like an aquifer beneath the adult surfaces of the world, how everyone under thirty speaks the same subtle cultural language. Our parents’ parents blamed records, our parents blamed MTV, and we blame MySpace or some other Internet villain, but I suspect it’s the microwaves I was telling Skeet about; maybe they’re not benign…maybe they beam style advice to the young, and on some unseen command the children of the world will one day band together and slit their parents’ collective-

“Take the hat off, Teddy.”

“Jawohl, herr commandant.” He drops the hat in the backseat and the boys jump out, start walking toward the school in their wrinkly blue chinos and white polos, and I think these uniforms wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t make the kids all look like bank tellers on casual Friday or the employees of a discount airline or-like me…

Truly amazing, this pot. I have gone through at least five strata of high since those first hits on Jamie’s blunt: the calm and the paranoia and the weepy displeasure, then the euphoria and rolling

epiphanies, and now I seem to have a hyper-fluent sense of the world, as if I’ve traded in my old vacuum tube eyes for a pair of high-def LCDs. It’s no wonder jazz musicians are so certain they write better stoned.

In fact, maybe there’s something there for me, too. Linking free-verse poetry and financial advice was obviously a bad idea, and thinking my two passions would translate to the larger world was out-of-control hubris, even in the epoch of hubris we are passing out of…but this new idea forming in my mind makes some real sense-

I will be the baked financial journalist, Moneydude, Stoned Stock Analyst. I’ll start a blog, get high every morning and give stock tips with the clarity I’ve achieved from deep- frying my skull in B.C. bud: Tip 1. Time to take a flyer on Frito-Lay stock. Why? Because, man…that queso cheese dip? Damn!…Tip 2. Zig-Zag Papers are poised to make a second-quarter rally because… yo, it’s all summer and shit. Tip 3. The P-to-E ratio on A-Metro Trans-Solutions makes it a can’t-miss stock given the Democratic Congress’s likely emphasis on subsidizing mass transit projects. (And, dude, their logo totally looks like a vag!)

I drive through a forest of leftover political signs, red and blue and black and white and good and evil; the experts say we are polarized again, but I think we’ve become bi-polarized, and I leave the parking lot, pull out into the world, merging into something larger than myself, perhaps bleeding into the flow of history as we’re on the verge of…

What? What was that? I lost it. Shit. A merge on the verge of the surge of…Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…

Damn. What was I thinking about?

Sprinklers? Internet? Forbearance? Unraveling? Slurpees?

No, it is very good pot.