accommodations are appropriate. I definitely want to be taken care of when I’m old—by a team of people who hand out heating pads and pudding
It’s hard for me to commit to something today just because it might serve me in the future. It’s like exercising now so that my knees feel good when I’m old. Who cares? I’ll want to just sit down when I’m seventy- five anyway. It’s hard for me to even picture my future—besides the future I always picture, which is that I am retired by forty and living in a “community” in Palm Springs. It’s also somehow magically 1970-something and I’m hosting pool parties at my ranch-style house for the likes of Liza Minnelli and whoever her gay husband is at the time.
I’ve always been somewhat of a believer that the world will end in my lifetime. Maybe it was from watching that fucked-up
I cashed out three 401(k)s in my twenties because I needed the money right away. I had the same phone conversation with every Fidelity representative.
“Hi. I’d like to cash out my 401(k). I’d love to not have to work as a temp in New York City for about a month. The other day at one of my assignments, the office manager placed a coffee and bagel order for everyone and excluded me. I don’t even have my own desk. I have to sit in a chair at a file cabinet. I have nowhere to put my legs.”
“Ms. Kirkman, if you are under the age of fifty-nine, you will lose thirty to forty-five percent of that withdrawal in taxes and penalties.”
“I am twenty-five years old and have no concept of living until age fifty-nine. At that point I figure I won’t have to worry about money because I’ll be dead or married to a rich guy, preferably a rich dead guy.”
“Okay, Ms. Kirkman, I need to advise you that cashing out your 401(k) can be more expensive than using credit cards to get by.”
“My credit cards are maxed out so I won’t be using them to get by. How soon can you send me the money? There are a ton of designer knockoff purses for sale on Canal Street but I don’t think the guy is going to be at his table for long. The police have really been cracking down on fake Kate Spades.”
“Ms. Kirkman, if you cash out your 401(k), you are restarting the clock on your retirement date.”
“I hate the thought of my money sitting there while I’m young and having fun. It’s not cool. These are the best years of my money’s life—I want it to be free with me. It’s not fair to keep those bills all cooped up only to let them out when I’m elderly. I won’t be able to keep up with it. That’s not fair to my money. Money needs a young mother who can walk up and down Canal Street with it, looking for purses without using a cane.”
WHEN I GRADUATED from college, I began planning for my future by securing the following credit cards: Victoria’s Secret (everyone needs underwear!); Bath and Body Works (everyone needs chemically induced pumpkin-scented shower gel!); Limited Express (everyone needs tight polyester shirts that don’t breathe!); Macy’s (everyone needs somewhere to go to buy their mom a Christmas gift!); and Sears (because it sounds grown-up; it’s where adults go to buy their barbecue grills and those picks that hold corn on the cob that nobody uses). At age thirty-four, when I finally finished paying off the last of my debt incurred by interest on never-paid-off charges for lacy thong underwear and stretch pants, I vowed to never use credit cards again. I now have one that I use only for travel and emergencies. And my emergencies never involve needing a last-minute lawn chair or raspberry foot spray.
I finally have a great work ethic. I write full-time on a TV show. In my spare time I write and perform stand- up all over the country. I’m writing this book in between moments of procrastination when I’m reorganizing my closet and cleaning each individual key on my computer keyboard with its very own Q-tip that’s been dipped in Windex. Back when I had my first job as a box office representative at the Boston Ballet, I got bored after a week of doing the same thing every day—and that same thing was… working. I called in sick, claiming that I had mono. Mono lasts six to eight weeks and is highly contagious. Mono makes the sufferer so tired that she can’t get out of bed. Coincidentally, that is also a symptom of lethargy and depression.
I lay in bed for two days with “mono” until I walked into my kitchen to light a cigarette from the pilot light on the stove and a mouse ran over my foot. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the counter. Crunch. I broke the back of a cockroach with my bare hand. The cockroach ran under the microwave (with a fucking broken back!). Both critters got away because they are faster and have stronger constitutions than human beings. Here they were showing up for work every day and I was avoiding my job, pretending to have mono because I wanted to sleep for fifteen hours a day. Terrified of my own apartment, I got the fuck out of there, returning to work that afternoon, having made a miraculous “recovery.”
(By the way, this is another reason that I don’t understand people who want to stockpile bottled water so they can survive the apocalypse. Cockroaches are said to be the only things that would make it through a nuclear holocaust unscathed. So if you’re one of the lone humans who make it, you’ll be sharing a microwave with a cockroach—just like I did when I lived in a crappy apartment in South Boston in 1998. And no matter how many kids you have to ensure that you’re taken care of in the future, your stockpile of canned soup and babies can’t stop doomsday. You might want to adopt some cockroaches instead.)
EVEN WHEN I was married I was well aware of the fact that having a husband was no guarantee that I’d have someone to take care of me when I grew old, because men die first. Seriously. I’m not a sociologist but look at the math. I grew up with two grandmothers and no grandfathers. I know my personal experience doesn’t make my hypothesis universally true, but my favorite kinds of “facts” are the ones that I get to decide are “true.” Most people my age have grandfathers who died around age sixtysomething and their wives went on to live another twenty or thirty years. I picture God dictating a memo one day to his archangels:
(I know that sometimes women die first, but it has very little impact on the man’s future. When a man’s wife dies, he just gets remarried three days later because he doesn’t know how to use a dishwasher.)
Knowing my theory, some of my friends asked me how I felt about the fact that without kids, I’d likely die a lonely widow. Um, I don’t have to live alone just because I’m widowed. I knew when I was walking down the aisle that after my husband died of an aneurysm at age sixty-two I’d just move in with a woman. I don’t mean that in a lesbian way. I will just move in with a lady and we’ll water plants together. I mean, if she wants to go down on me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to do anything to her. I have no interest in going exploring inside another woman’s vagina. I have one and I’m freaked out by the weird things that can come out of one—unexplained moisture, once- a-month bloodbath, and the weirdest of all, another human being.
Unlike Best Buy Bren, I grew up on a solid diet of
