The Financial Lives Of the Poets

hints and clues glimpsed through his unfailing work ethic and his refusal to ever complain about anything. No matter what happened, the man soldiered on-got up every day and put on that tie and went to a job he knew was beneath his abilities-and anyone who thinks there’s anything more profoundly inspiring than that is fooling himself. I wouldn’t mind talking to that old clear-eyed Sears tie-and-coverall father of mine again. Or better, I wish I was five again, that he’d take my little hand and pull me up on his lap. But we stopped hugging at the time Prior men have presumably stopped hugging for hundreds of years, right around ten or eleven. Teddy, for instance,

is out of the embrace business. Franklin: still in for another year or two. I wonder why I can’t hold Teddy, why my father and I can’t hug.

My dad used to be bigger than me but I’m standing next to him and I’m looking down on that wild hair. His shoulders are thin and drawn in.

“Dad,” my voice cracks. “I need…help. I’m falling apart here.” And my dad turns and looks at me-and I hear his clear old deep voice, Damn straight-and a kind of epiphany begins to form in my mind-

It’s all connected, these crises-marriage, finances, weed dealing-they are interrelated, like the physical and mental decline of my dad, and my own decline, like the housing market and the stock market and the credit market. We can try to separate them, but these are interrelated systems, reliant upon one another, broken, fucked-up, ruined systems.

It’s the same world, the same clear, cool place I woke up to-both sunny and cold.

And just like that…

A plan. “Hey Dad?”

He turns.

I laugh, probably a little crazily. “Think it’s too late to go get the sons-of-a-bitches who told me the world would be fair?”

Dad shows me his remote. “Can we do it after The Rockford Files?”

CHAPTER 21

Agent CI OH-2 Goes Rogue

CHUCK TAKES A STEP back and

looks at me like I’m crazy.

Oh I’m crazy, all right! A crazy man

with a crazy glowing watch!

Fans whir; warehouse breezes blow through Lumberland.

“I’m sorry, but this is just…kind of weird,” Chuck says.

“Yeah, I know,” I say, “but I felt awful about yesterday-”

“Look, it’s really fine,” Chuck interrupts me.

“This seemed like a good way to apologize-”

“Really, it’s not necessary-”

“So much stress with this economy-”

“I promise you, it’s just fine-”

“I’m telling you, this is really good stuff-”

“I’m sure it is, but I’m not interested,” Chuck says sternly.

Come on…“It’s a great price-”

“Look, I don’t mean to offend you, but I don’t smoke pot.”

My watch glows with failure, picks up my insane laugh.

“Never too late to start!” I practically yell.

I cannot buy a break in this life.

CHAPTER 22

A Good Old-Fashioned Newspaperman

SO THE CHUCKHOLDER WOULDN’T buy any pot and implicate himself in a drug-buying conspiracy. Fine. I knew it was a long shot with a stiff like him. And toward the end there, I was probably flirting with entrapment anyway. But still my mission to Lumberland wasn’t a total failure. Chuck did agree to send a truck tomorrow morning to take back the lumber I can no longer afford. And he also agreed to give me a full refund on the lumber, to only charge me one delivery fee, so that’s good.

Then, with all of the pot-selling weirdness still in the air, Chuck was doing the paperwork for my refund (I stared daggers into that pot-sticker bald spot) and Chuck finally registered my name and address. And I swear his bald spot turned red. He looked up, slowly-into my mad, grinning face, and he gave me the most gratifying double-take, went pale, coughed, excused himself for a minute (long enough to leave a phone message for Lisa, perhaps?) and then he came back looking awful. So I accomplished one of my goals-showing my enemy the face of the man whose life he would destroy. Of course, I didn’t let on that I knew anything about him and Lisa. And before I left, I apologized for trying to sell him pot, and asked him to keep the whole thing between us. “My wife doesn’t know I’m selling pot,” I said. “It would kill her.” Chuck stared at the ground. And right there, in the cold, high aisles of Lumberland, my enemy Chuck Stain finally saw the anguish of the man on the other side of his harmless little flirtation. Even better, he saw the overlapping layers of stalemate and mutually destructive conspiracy here, the untenable situation we are all in.

In the car now, I laugh again. It always seems strange when maniacal movie villains laugh for no reason, but I’m finding that when you’re in the grips of mania, you really do laugh maniacally. What can Chuck do…tell Lisa? “Hey, your insane husband came in today and tried to sell me pot.” What’s Lisa do then? Confront me? If she does, I’ll just say, “How did you find out about that?” It would be like admitting the affair!

No, I’ve drawn Prince LumberChuck into our stalemate now, and depending on how fast his mind works, I bet he won’t even tell her. Out of self-preservation, he might think, I do not want to be in the middle of their shit. I imagine the odd, halting conversations going back and forth between them and I get a strange mixture of nausea and glee, my skipping heart about to leap out of my chest. Is this mania? An anxiety attack? A euphoria that precedes death?

Whatever it is, I am driven by it, and by my epiphany; for the last hour I have known exactly what to do. I am on the righteous team, Randy. And yes, I screwed up my plan with the Prince of Lumber, but Chuck’s refusal to buy weed does not change my mission: I will be a narco-Robin Hood. It’s the only way out: if I’m going to be a snitch, secretly taping people buying drugs, then I’m only going to sell to people who deserve to go to jail.

I will be the arbiter of guilt and innocence in this messed-up world.

First order of business, I call the HR department of my old newspaper from a phone booth. “Sorry,” I tell innocent Amber Philips, my watch sitting dark and harmless on my wrist. “I couldn’t get any weed after all.”

“Aw, it’s probably okay,” she says, and then she tells me that she and her boyfriend have decided to call it quits anyway. “And I mostly only smoked with him.”

I hang up, happy with my first pardon: Amber Philips doesn’t deserve to go to jail.

And yet, deserve is such a difficult concept to define. Take money-man Richard, for instance, he of the Mexican Shipping Bonds and commissions on eighty percent losses…does he deserve jail for that? Even as I call him, I wonder if incompetent is the same as guilty.

“This is Richard Blackmore.”

No. Being a bad financial planner is not a crime. Watch remains dark. Heart racing.