The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“I worked at the…place.” He looks at me. “Sears,” he says, relieved.

“And what did you do?”

He pats himself for a missing smoke. Then he looks at me again. After managing the automotive department at Sears, Dad

worked briefly in the Sears insurance offices but I think he missed his coveralls. He says, “What did I do? Hell, I did my job, that’s what.”

“I’ll bet you did. And what did you have for breakfast today, Jerry?”

He looks from the doctor to me. Blank. I can’t help him. He is pissed. If this test is the SATs of senility, Dad is headed straight for the Yale of assisted living places. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he tells the doctor.

While he’s gone the doctor looks at his chart. “He’s lost six pounds.”

“He’s eating,” I say.

“Does he have any favorite foods you can make?”

“Shit-on-a-shingle?”

Maybe Lisa is right and I do have an inappropriate sense of comic timing; or maybe some people just don’t laugh when they should, this doctor, for instance, who looks down at the chart.

“He comes in and out, has good days and bad days,” I say, which is pretty much the outlook the doctor predicted six months ago.

“More bad days, though? More days like today.”

“Not really,” I lie. “Half and half.”

“Have you talked with your father any more about assisted living?”

“A little,” I say. “He’s had some financial trouble…we’re sorting out his insurance now. But honestly…I think he’d rather eat a gun than go live in one of those death warehouses.”

I’m not sure why I’m doing this-shit-on-a-shingle and eat a gun and death warehouses…as if the rough drug dealer is already emerging. Maybe I’ll whack this doctor.

Dad comes back in the room. “Two thousand eight,” he tells the doctor. “I think I said it wrong before.” I recall the calendar at

the nurse’s station. Dad glances over at me, and smiles, and I don’t think I’ve ever loved the old guy more than I do right now.

He drifts in and out like this during the remainder of the test, knows some things I wouldn’t guess he’d know but can’t come up with others that seem basic to me, like two of my three sisters’ names. Simple math crushes him, and when he’s asked to repeat a list-wallet, telephone, car keys-thirty seconds later, he’s angry about the trick question. “What list?”

“I said to repeat those three things,” the doctor said. “Remember?”

“Well, they must have been stupid things,” Dad says. Right again.

I drive Dad home and put the TV on financial news, slip into a sports coat and drive back downtown for my meeting with Earl Ruscom. I park ten blocks away to avoid paying for a meter. I’ll buy nine thousand dollars worth of pot, but I won’t pay fifty cents to park.

Outside the restaurant, I call Dave the Drug Dealer to put in my order. He asks if I’ve read the menu. I say I have and that I’m interested in Arrow Lakes PB. I’m careful not to say how much.

“Good choice,” Dave says. “Very good for glaucoma. Let me get back to you.”

He hangs up and I go inside.

I first met Earl Ruscom in 1997, at a public hearing I covered as a reporter. Earl was there to get the county to waive environmental cleanup for a cluster of houses he wanted to put on the site of an old railroad depot. Somehow, Earl got it in his mind that I was on his side in this dispute, because while my stories described him accurately as a voracious fat-ass developer trying to get around reasonable environmental laws, in the profile I called him “bombastic” and Earl took this as a compliment. “Just glad to have you on my side, Matt,” he used to say, even though I explained that reporters

weren’t allowed to take sides, and, were I allowed to take sides, it wouldn’t be with a guy who wanted to build cheap houses on a polluted hillside soggy with oil leeching from old buried tanks. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re fair. I can smell the fair on you.”

In the late 1990s Earl first approached me with the idea of starting his own newspaper. Earl’s newspaper would be “business friendly,” he said, and would contain none of the “liberal bias” and “anti-growth bullshit” that he believed were choking off development and keeping capitalists like himself from making money and filtering it back into the economy through the companies that made yachts, Jacuzzis and Scotch. I always liked Earl though, and we played golf together a few times. But I always thought he was talking out his ass about owning his own publication. Then he began drawing up a business plan, and one day he called to see if I might want to edit his newspaper- which was going to be called, I kid you not, The Can-Do Times. But I still had a job then, so I was brutally honest with him: “Earl, I can’t take the job, and I have to tell you, I don’t think this is the right climate to be starting a newspaper, anyway.” A third-generation Westerner, Earl wasn’t a tie-and-jacket man as much as an ironed golf-shirt and big belt-buckle guy. He just laughed at me. “So I should take bid’ness advice from a guy makin’, what, fifty grand a year?” It was actually nearly sixty, but I didn’t say so. “Look, Earl,” I said, “I know you can read stock listings. Newspapers are just a bad bet right now. You might as well be starting a railroad. Or a Pony Express station.” This was when media stocks were merely trading down a few points, before “buying media stock” became a synonym for setting your money on fire. But this was also around the time that I was thinking of leaving my job to start a business-poetry website, so I maybe wasn’t the best person in the world to lecture Earl on bad ideas.

Over the next year, of course, I went back to the newspaper and quickly lost my job, and Earl’s idea began to seem less crazy.

So last week, I called and asked if he was still moving forward with his newspaper idea. He said he was, and he was glad to hear from me because he hoped to be up and running in a year and he still didn’t have an editor. And as he talked about his paper, it seemed that he’d been doing his research, because he’d given up the idea of a daily print edition of The Can-Do Times. Now, it would strictly be updated online, and he’d only produce one hard copy a week, a slender Sunday night edition-Sunday nights being the cheapest press run in town. This Monday morning howler would feature only the best columns and pieces that had run online all week, and would sit in the offices of people like Richard, my ganja-reefing broker, allowing savvy local businesspersons to feel like they’re hitting the week running. I asked if Earl was worried by the hard economic times and he said that a recession was the best time to go into business, just as it was the best time to buy real estate, because, “trust me, the big-dicks ain’t hidin’ in their panties, Matt,” and when Earl gets going, you don’t stop to untangle the words, you just go with it; No, Earl added, now was the time to “pull the goddamned trigger, open ’er up like a six-buck whore,” whatever that meant.

It wasn’t that Earl’s bluster totally convinced me, and the thought of writing developer propaganda for him wasn’t exactly my idea of a dream job, but if he could at least pay me close to what I was making, say, sixty thousand (I’d gladly take fifty) a year, I owed it to myself and my family to see if Earl and I could make a go of it. And maybe the idea would fail, but it wouldn’t be for my lack of trying; I was prepared to give it the best effort I could muster.

Our meeting is 11:30 lunch at a sushi place, which is not as odd as it sounds for a porterhouse like Earl; as my friend Jamie might say: dude love him some uncooked fish. It’s something to behold, watching Earl in a sushi place. He has a shark-like single-mind

edness, eating roll after gourmet roll, gobbling gobs of sashimi, handfuls of edamame, slabs of seared ahi and maki, full paddies of rice. Every time the waiter passes, Earl orders something else. The last time I saw him, almost ten months ago, we were at this same sushi joint; he killed more fish in two hours than a trawler could in a week.

I walk around the restaurant but don’t see him. The only person here is a thin guy who-

“Matt!” calls this thin guy, sitting at a table near the door. He stands. He looks like Earl at the end of an old televised movie shot in CinemaScope, when they have to squeeze everything into a skinny frame to make the credits fit.

“Earl?” I ask.

He is at least eighty pounds lighter. The suburban sprawl that used to spill over his substantial belt has been zoned out of existence, and standing in front of me is a guy in size 33 Wranglers, craggy, gaunt and gray, like one of