The Financial Lives Of the Poets

for milk for the third time this week?

There are always moments in which a person can stop, crossroads where you can change course…there are those moments…until there aren’t any more.

I grab my keys.

CHAPTER 16

Welcome to Weedland, Haiku #2

I WANT MY DEALERS

To be smarter than they are;

Welcome to Weedland

“Wake up, Slippers,” says a voice I don’t recognize. I snap awake.

“Welcome to Weedland!” Jamie says from the backseat. I look out my window and then over at Dave the Drug Dealer, who is driving.

“You have a nice nap?” asks my sidekick Jamie.

“How long was I out?”

“Half hour.”

It was oddly relaxing, riding in a car with someone else driving, even if that someone was Drug Dealer Dave and his car was disconcertingly just like my own. We met at Bea’s, and since I hadn’t slept in days, I started feeling my head bob as soon as Jamie began a story about “this dude in my math class who wants to get an operation to make himself into a chick, but dude says he ain’t gay and I’m like, what the fuck you mean you ain’t gay, but he insists he ain’t gay, he’s, like, a woman, and I’m like, ‘Dude, until you’re a real woman, you are totally a ram- banger, yo,’ and he’s like: ‘But if I’ve never had sex with a man, how can I be gay?’ and I’m like, Dude, whoa! That is kinda freaky…”

And the next thing I knew Dave was saying, “Wake up, Slippers.”

And I snapped awake here in…

…Weedland, which exists in the last place I would’ve ever guessed, a small farming town an hour from the city, on a little road behind the main street of this endlessly dying wheat and mill town-a town which fell on hard times so long ago the people there are actually nostalgic for the old hard times. These new hard times? Boring. Wimpy. Back in the old bad days, they ate dirt. But they were happy!

I don’t tell Dave that I’ve been to this little town at least five times before, back when I was a reporter. Off a nowhere, two-lane highway, this little shitburg is close enough to the city that it was one of five or six trusty small towns that served the newspaper staff whenever we needed “rural reaction” to stories. We came to Weedland fairly often (without knowing it was Weedland, of course) to write about this agricultural bill’s failure or that wheat embargo, or this local politician’s pandering run for office. Sometimes a story just calls for a random quote by some craggy old farmer and there was always a craggy old farmer to quote here, the sons of other craggy old farmers that my newspapers quoted in the hard-times 1970s, the grandsons of old crags we quoted in the hard-times 1930s. Legacies.

Dave parks along a street of plain clapboard houses, just behind the town’s main street, which is, appropriately enough, called Main Street. The house we walk toward is situated behind a couple of unlikely Main Street businesses-a camera and watch shop and

small engine repair. There are a dozen houses on this block, six on each side of the street. We park behind a red Camaro (so much depends on a red Camaro) and I follow Dave and Jamie between piles of leaves up the sidewalk to a simple two-story with a pitched dormer, a hot tub on the side of the house and an old RV with an electrical cord leading to the back door.

Dave rings the doorbell.

A shortish, roundish, twentyish guy in a backward ball cap answers the door, chattering away on a cell phone (“No way…She did not…Come on…Just my brother’s friend and some cop…No way…Come on…No way…”) and after opening the door he steps back without really acknowledging us; he just keeps talking, into infinity (“No way…Come on…She did not…No way…”) as he pushes through a door and disappears.

“Don’t worry about that guy,” Jamie confides. “Fat fuck thinks everyone’s a cop. I hate that guy.” Jamie is wearing his skullcap again, along with a knee-length black coat and a disarming pair of black glasses (he explained that he’s out of contacts and his mom switched insurance companies to one that has totally worthless vision benefits).

Jamie says again, “Fuckin’ hate him.”

And I haven’t known Jamie all that long, but I’m surprised to hear him say he hates anyone. Maybe all skullcaps simply hate all ball caps, some kind of Red America/Blue America, India/Pakistan thing.

I look around the living room of this old house. There are a couple of beer posters and a big map of the world, a bad oil painting of a house in the woods, a couch, two old easy chairs, a TV, a set of World Book encyclopedias and another bookshelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed. The carpet is well-worn beige. But for the beer posters, it could be your grandparents’ house, everything where it should be, yet there’s still something…I don’t know…wrong

about it…something forcedly random, as if it’s been put together for a family melodrama by the set designer of a local theater.

Dave the Drug Dealer bounces on the balls of his feet as we wait for the person we’re meeting. Dave’s hair is freshly trimmed and gelled and he’s wearing a beautiful worsted wool overcoat. I have a wool overcoat almost like it and again, something feels off about that-my drug dealer sharing the same car, same coat? A drug dealer should drive a low-rider Monte Carlo, and wear sharkskin or black satin or velour sweats or something. I officially don’t like having a lawyer for a dealer.

We stand a minute longer and, finally, into the room comes the man we’ve been waiting for…and again he’s not at all what I expected-even though I don’t recall expecting anything. This guy is round and heavy, in his thirties, with a baby face and puffball cheeks, thinning blond hair. He’s wearing the largest parka I’ve ever seen, zipped to his tree-stump neck. He’s a walking Quonset hut, this guy. Then Big Parka and Dave do an awkward handshake hug thing-heads tilted back, using the soul-shake as a buffer between them.

“How you doin’, man.”

“Good. You?”

“Oh, you know.”

“So.” Dave backs away from the hug and…presents me. “This is the guy.”

I put out my hand and Big Parka takes it with his squishy wet mitt. He gives me a damp handshake and I look up into his ruddy, gentle face. “Nice to meet you, Guy.”

“Uh…no.” I glance over at Dave. “My name’s not Guy.”

Big Parka looks back at Dave. “You said, ‘This is Guy.’”

“No. I said, the guy. ‘This is the guy.’ His name’s Matt.”

“Oh.” Big Parka looks sort of horrified at this dealer faux pas. “I thought Guy was like…short for Matt.”

“How could Guy be short for Matt?” Dave asks. “Who shortens a name by going from four letters to three?”

I feel bad for awkward Big Parka, who is in full blush now. I actually think he might cry. “But…it could be a nickname, right?”

“Dude’s nickname is Slippers,” Jamie says.

“Oh,” says Big Parka. “Look, Slippers. Is it okay if Dave and I talk alone for a minute?”

I say that of course it’s fine. Then Jamie and I sit on the couch while Dave and Big Parka rumble off to talk in low voices in the kitchen.

On the couch, Jamie says, quietly, “Dave grew up around here.”

“Really?” It’s not that I’m that surprised Dave is from this town; I’m just surprised that Dave is from any town. Of course he has to be from somewhere, but you don’t expect to end up in the old neighborhood of your drug broker.