The Financial Lives Of the Poets

enough contemporary fiction to make it clear that reading is not just an assignment for lovely Bea. Alarmingly, though, on top of the bookcase there is also a family portrait of Bea with two just-as-striking blond-and-blue-eyed sisters and a pair of handsome proud Nordic parents, whose stares make me aware of the vast age difference between Bea and me, and I am profoundly ashamed to be here buying drugs in this girl’s apartment. What I’d really like to do, I think, is lie down on this couch and take a nap.

Jamie elbows me. I stand.

“Okay,” Dave says. “Take off your clothes.”

“My…”

“I need to make sure you’re not wearing a wire or anything.” And then he pulls out a small flashlight. “And I need to look up your ass.”

I turn to Jamie on the couch. He is surprisingly unsurprised, impressively unimpressed.

“What…would possibly be up my ass?”

Dave says, “It’s just a precaution I take.”

“I’m no expert,” I look over at Jamie, “but if I was wearing a wire up my ass, how would the police even be able to hear it? Wouldn’t it be muffled?”

Dave stares at me. I look over at Jamie again but he has picked up a copy of The Sun magazine and is flipping through it.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“This is what I do,” Dave explains. “It’s the same search you’d get in prison. I do it to make sure people aren’t stealing from me. I might do it any time. You never know.”

“But…I haven’t even bought anything from you yet.”

Dave is starting to get a little more threatening. “And you aren’t going to buy anything until you take off your clothes and I get a look up that ass.”

I look over at Jamie again but he won’t meet my eyes. There’s a twitch in his neck tattoo.

So I take off my shirt and, for some reason, fold it before setting it on the arm of the couch. I try to remember the last time anyone has looked up my ass, which would be, oh, let’s see: never. I begin to unbutton my pants.

And that’s when Dave spits laughter. “I’m just fuckin’ with you,” he says.

My hands are still on the buttons of my pants.

“Man,” a disappointed Jamie says, “I can’t believe you were actually gonna let him look up your ass. What’s the matter with you? You some kind of ass exhibitionist?”

My shirt is off and my pants are two buttons down and I am dumbfounded. “You mean you don’t need…I don’t have to get undressed?”

“It just proves my point,” Dave says. “You can get people to do anything.”

I put my shirt back on, button my pants and we all sit again.

Then Dave picks up his briefcase and opens it on his lap. “Jamie says you need some pain relief.”

“Um, yeah.” I reach for my coat, which has the money in it. “Nine thousand dol-”

“Bup, bup!” Dave interrupts me. “I didn’t ask how much.” He

holds up his hand to stop me. “Wait… You brought the money with you?”

“Well…yeah.”

“First-I don’t handle money. And second-” He looks over at Jamie, shakes his head, and then back at me. “You brought nine grand to a meeting with someone you don’t know?”

“What if we were planning to rob you, Slippers?” Jamie asks.

I scratch my head, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of that.

“What if we rolled you? You gonna go to the cops and say you got robbed in a drug deal?” Dave asks. He taps my skull. “You gotta think, man, if you’re gonna work with me.”

“I…I’m sorry,” I say. I glance over at Jamie, who has the look I sometimes see on Teddy’s face when I take him to school, or roller skating, or anywhere: please don’t embarrass me anymore, Dad. “Look, I don’t usually do this.”

“That explains why you seem to think you can just go out and buy two pounds.”

“Look,” I say, “I really am sorry. I’m just trying to make a little money, and I have some friends who I think would buy some-”

“Bup, bup!” Dave says again, and he puts his hands over his ears. “Don’t ever tell me how much you want or what you’re doing with it. All I wanna know is what condition you got.”

“Uh.” I nod. “Okay.”

Jamie leans over and says quietly, “Glaucoma.”

Dave waits.

“I’ve got…” I look over at Jamie “…glaucoma?”

Dave smiles, opens his briefcase. Takes out a tabbed folder marked CONTRACTS. He opens this CONTRACTS folder and sets two short stacks of pages on the coffee table.

Then he holds out a pen and spins the first contract so I can read it.

“This,” Dave says, “is a simple agreement between Party A, which is me, and Party B, which is you, obviously…stipulating that you are not a law enforcement officer, that you’re not in any way or manner working with state or federal law enforcement in any investigatory or information-gathering capacity, either as an undercover agent or as a paid or unpaid informant, and that you will not knowingly provide any law enforcement agency with any material information regarding this transaction.”

Before I can read the language in the first part of the contract, Dave is already on to the second: “This stipulates that you and I have not discussed any intended usage for what will heretofore be known as the medicinal product, that I will introduce you to a grower but if you are planning to use the medicinal product for usage other than medicinal, I have not been made aware of this fact, and thirdly, I have made no promises or guarantees that in any way indemnify you, should you, upon your own actions, outside the basic language of this contract, end up as the subject of any outside investigation for any prosecutable criminal offense. To wit-”

And he flips to the second, longer set of contracts. “This is a series of riders in which you agree that you will not engage in selling the medicinal product within 400 yards of a school, that you will not sell the medicinal product to minors, nor use weapons in any way connected with the medicinal product, that you will not use the Postal Service to mail it, nor cross any state borders with it, nor in any other way, knowingly or unknowingly, commit any material infraction in connection with the medicinal product which would represent a real and severe breech of this contract in any substantive manner and which might violate any and all state or local statutes, as well as the federal Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C., and all its subsections herewith, nor commit any willful act that can be defined as an extenuating circumstance superseding the standard

guidelines as defined by the federal mandatory sentencing laws, which, for the purposes of this contract, shall include any laws now on the books, or any laws passed in the future, in perpetuity, etcetera, in all states and territories, etcetera, etcetera…”

“You’re a lawyer?” I ask.

“There appears to be some question with the bar about that,” Dave says. And then he hands me a final, single contract. “This last one simply indemnifies me, and releases me from all liability, all claims both criminal and civil, should you, knowingly or unknowingly, alter the medicinal product in any real and/or material way by cutting it, or crossbreeding it, or enhancing it through the addition of any artificial stimulants or other substances covered by the Controlled Substances Act or by federal sentencing guidelines or by FDA regulations, those substances including but not limited to, cocaine in all its forms, PCP, heroin, methamphetamine, insecticides, fertilizers, artificial sweeteners, etcetera, etcetera.”

I am staring at this pile of contracts when Jamie holds up the magazine he was reading to reveal an arty black-and-white photo of a nude woman standing in the shade of a doorway. “I like this kind of tits,” Jamie says.

“Pointy,” Dave says.

“Artificial sweeteners?” I ask.

Dave shrugs. “Some people like it sweeter. Most people use honey, but some assholes go cheap and douse it in