person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you.
We’re all just renting.
And this is how the poets failed us.
The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem./The only
emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.) and to balance real estate with ethereal states (One need not be a chamber to be haunted,/One need not be a house). Hell, we don’t need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets.
Yes. Standing behind my own home like this, I imagine letting go of this dream of solvency…let it go…float away into the sky…let someone else live in the big house; I’ll live above the garage, finally get some sleep, spend the rest of my life as a simple servant (Matt? He’s our poet-driver), let the boys forget that I was once their father, now just the kindly old poet-driver who brings the car ’round front. Rest of the time I’ll disappear in my little writer’s garret, grow a goatee, write bad verse and smoke good weed until I can’t recall those people who loved me, or how much I owe on their big house ($485,592). Write during the day, and at night hang out with Skeet and Jamie, read them my poems while we fry our skulls and haunt Rahjiv’s convenience store aisles for Fritos. And this is such a pleasing thought-Fritos!-that of course my mind can’t hold it and it goes the last place I’d like it to go: Lumber-Chuck moving in, taking over the parenting, the payments, the pampering and pleasing of Lisa.
And that’s what finally snaps me out of my self-pitying funk. Not the thought of Chuck inside my house, but the thought of Chuck rooting around inside my wife snaps me out of this delusional hole, and I run across the backyard, ready to reclaim my house, my wife, my life. I’m suddenly aware again that the air is sharp and cold; winter’s here. A gun has gone off in my head and I know what to say: this is insanity, Lisa, this place we are going! We have to stop: dope dealer? Mistress of the Prince of Lumberland? No, no, no! Is this really who we are?
Who cares if we lose the fucking house next week? This house isn’t us. We are us. One need not be a house…So what…we default? Declare bankruptcy? Big deal. It doesn’t matter where we go,
what we do. Hell, I’ll wash dishes, tend bar. You can clean houses. We can take the kids out of school, walk away from this big house, drift. Go from town to town, see the world, work menial jobs. Live. Let be be finale of seem!
Through the kitchen, I take the stairs two at a time, fired up to reclaim my life: Damn it, Lisa. Why are we doing this? Come back-
But she looks up at me from bed and there’s something in her eyes that stops me cold. She closes her phone. She’s seen my earlier check and…she raises the value of the pot: “I called Dani. She doesn’t know if she can get another ticket for the concert.”
My knees lock. “Oh.”
“She’s pretty sure she can’t.”
“Ah.”
“You could probably still go. You just might not be able to sit with us.” And Lisa shrugs, pretends to go back to her magazine, phony nonchalance. She’s steady, unmoving, but beneath the covers I can see that she’s wiggling her toes nervously. God. She really wants this. That’s what hurts. What’s the last thing I remember her wanting this badly? Oh yeah. The house.
How do you know when you’ve gone too far? When you can’t go back? I think of my home from the alley again. Sometimes you can’t get back in. You just have to live outside for a while. “You know what? You guys go ahead. I’ll stay home, save us the cost of a babysitter.”
“Are…Are you sure?”
“Go. Have fun.”
I grab my jacket and wallet, trying to keep my hands from shaking.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
I don’t even turn back. “We need milk.”
Dave the Drug Dealer Wants to Look Up My Ass I DON’T KNOW WHAT I expected-no
maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface-
but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino
at the beginning of The Godfather
reasonably bemused, untouched by his
criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton
whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep
with the fishes, or like Al Pacino
from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually,
now that I think about it, he’s not
like Al Pacino at all but more like
Kevin Spacey from that film, and who’s
ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?
“Okay, then,” says the drug dealer, whose name is Dave. He’s probably thirty, with short hair and deep acne scars. He wears a sports coat over a button shirt, and I think, Hell, since I took a buyout and stopped showering, I look more like a drug dealer than you. Then Dave stands and I get queasy, thinking: why is Dave the Drug Dealer standing? And it’s clear I should stand, too, when Dave gives a little roll with his hand and says, “Should we get to it?”
Preceding getting to it, I have so far on this night: (1) left home pretending to get milk again, leaving Lisa alone again so she could presumably scurry to the computer and email the Prince of Lumberland-He fell for the concert story. See you Saturday night and we will have sex (2) hurried to the 7/11 near my house, arriving promptly at 10 p.m. to find Jamie already there, bouncing in the cold drizzle, blowing on his hands, wearing not his silky sweat suit but a pair of dark jeans, a sweatshirt and a watchman’s cap that make him seem just a bit dangerous (3) driven in my car with Jamie to an even older, sadder neighborhood, where the blocks of huge 1890s Victorians have been split into unfortunate apartments-this particular house an old four-story beauty whose original grand floor plan is long gone, replaced by cubby apartments with mismatched numbers and letters hung on the doors, so that we somehow walk past Apartment 5 to get to Apartment G (4) met the owner of this cozy book-and-candle Apt. G, a tall, leggy, striking girl named Bea or maybe just the letter B or maybe the insect Bee, not sure, her long blond hair pulled in a ponytail, her no-doubt banging body effortlessly buried beneath a pile of tights and sweaters and scarves-she is a walking coat rack-and as we shook hands, Bea fixed me with the most alarming blue-eyed stare of my life, the kind of stare in which you think some potent subliminal message is being passed along (Run away with me or maybe just Run away), before Bea said she’d get out of our hair so we could “get to it” (5) waited about five minutes until Dave the nonthreatening Drug Dealer swept into Bea’s place, shook the rain off his overcoat, and I thought, what kind of drug dealer wears an overcoat, as I also noted that Dave has a key to Bea’s apartment, a fact that broke my pathetic little heart, since I had
decided to fall in love with Bea, and as Dave set his briefcase next to the couch, we engaged in a little political small-talk (like everyone I know, we seem to agree on everything) before Dave stood and said, as reported earlier: “Okay then. Should we get to it?”
And here we are, about to get to it.
The best part of Apartment G is Bea’s wall-length hot-English-major bookcase, filled with the comfortable spines of all of the books we were supposed to read in college but which we only got a few chapters into, and
