The Financial Lives Of the Poets

In the office of Richard Blackmore, Idiot Financial Planner, on the third floor of a squat downtown building, the reception

area’s littered with Forbes and BusinessWeek and Investors Daily: crisis porn, full of emphatic dirty-talk about “Hidden Opportunities in the Wreckage,” climaxing charts, “How to Make Money in a Crash,” photos of wet-browed, bug-eyed investment experts looking for full relief in this overheated climate.

The meeting is as predictable as coffin shopping. Richard keeps his diplomas on the wall, and I wonder why journalists and poets don’t do that. He tells me that losing the house might be inevitable, but that it’s only the beginning of my trouble. “Look,” he says, and he plays his adding machine like Jerry Lee Lewis, shows me various groupings of red numbers, offers painfully obvious advice. I could go into deeper detail, but frankly, I’m not that interested in the further specifics. Except these two points: (1) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves); (2) Richard’s basic advice is to liquidate, sell, sell, sell, dump, sell, scale down, sell some more, live “like a fry-cook in the ’70s,” try to get a job, any job “very fucking fast,” beg my lender for more time, and with a great deal of luck we might avoid losing the house and going bankrupt.

This is something like taking your car to a mechanic, only to hear this: I hope you have good walking shoes.

“And by ‘scale down,’ you mean…”

“Scale. Down.”

“Right. And by ‘down’ you mean…”

“Down,” Richard says. His mouth is car-ported by a black mustache, an effective tool for delivering bad news: “Down down down. I’m talking public school down, used-car, canned-food down, lower-middle class down, Matt. Not 2004 upper-middle class down-not eight-person Jacuzzi and lawn guy down-but

1977 generic-food buy-your-clothes-at-K-Mart down. I’m talking dump your car payment, have a garage sale, clip coupons, Christmas shop at Goodwill. I mean-look at these numbers.” He spins a red page. “You see anything I don’t?”

I see London. I see France. Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! Heat check: still high. “Richard, if we cash out everything, is there any tax benefit to-”

“Tax benefit?” Richard’s mustache spits laughter. “Jesus, Matt. I don’t think you understand.” And he leans forward, his bleary eyes darting around my face. “Once this starts, you can’t stop it. I’ve seen this before. You’re parked on a hill without a parking brake and your car is rolling toward you and the only move is to get out of the way…and you want to talk about tax benefits?”

I should point out that my money guy Richard is not the best money guy in the world. (My first clue in this direction came in the late 1990s, when I was doing pretty well on my own, blindly investing at the height of the tech boom and I let Richard talk me into what he called “a safer bet”-Mexican shipping bonds. So while I had doubled my own easy bets on Microsoft and Cisco, I lost thirty cents on the dollar on Richard’s great tip-that anchor of the business world: Transmaritime-Pacifico.) But if Richard is not the best number guy, he’s a brilliant word guy-probably the reason I stay with him-and should anyone doubt it, the man shifts metaphors while I’m still marveling at the idea of our finances as a rolling car.

“Look,” Richard says. “I’m gonna give you the straight diagnosis, Matt. You are severely hemorrhaging here-not just on the house, in every area possible. Credit-card debt, health care debt, the equity you took on your house, unpaid creditors from your little business venture, your stubborn insistence on riding those bank and media stocks into the ground. And I don’t know who talked you into forbearance, but that’s the worst thing you could have

done. It’s just a way for lenders to squeeze the lemon once more. Did anyone tell you that ninety percent of the people who make the big forbearance payment still end up losing their houses?”

I seem to have missed that part of the sales pitch.

“Listen,” Richard says, “unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.”

See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.

Richard slides a small check across the table to me. “Here’s another way to look at this. The last thing you can afford right now…” And he pushes the folders from my file over to me. “…is a financial planner.”

This is why I’m here, of course. To cash out. I am pretending to need advice, but what I really need is whatever cushion I have left. So…I hold my breath and pick up the check. It’s in the high…four figures. Nine thousand four hundred and twelve dollars. I laugh. “That’s it?”

“I wanted to diversify you, Matt. You insisted on media and financials.”

This is true. In my past life as a business reporter I’d decided I was the expert and I clung to a tip from a banking guy who, I can only hope now, is lying dead on a sidewalk somewhere. But I can’t entirely blame him either, because I rode those stocks up for years, and when the financials first cracked, I stubbornly refused to sell. Then I got distracted by my own job loss and by Dad’s senility meltdown. And every time Richard begged me to let him unload those bad stocks, I reminded him of his last advice, And buy what? Mexican Shipping Bonds?

So…as I say, here we are-

“After penalties,” Richard’s mustache continues, “taxes, commissions…”

“Wait.” I look down at the check again as Richard stands. “You took a commission? Do travel agents take commissions on flights that go down?”

Richard ignores my choice metaphor. He apologizes, then walks me to the lobby and asks me how everything else is going-which is a bit like asking the Prime Minister of Poland how everything else is going in the fall of 1939-you know…other than the Nazi invasion. I tell Richard that, all in all, I’m not in a bad mood-probably because I got high at a 7/11 last night.

“You got high at a 7/11?”

“Well, we actually got high in my car, and at this apartment building. But I had an amazing burrito at the 7/11 afterward. You can’t believe the pot they have now, Richard.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. And then, he leans in and sort of wistfully, adds: “It’s supposed to be a myth, the increased potency.”

“It’s no myth.”

“No.” He smiles. “No myth.”

And then something hits me. “Wait. You smoke pot, Richard?”

“Now and then,” he admits. “When I can get it. Doesn’t everyone?”

“I didn’t.” And I tell him how it had been at least fifteen years, how I assumed that, after Lisa and I had two impressionable kids, two hypocrisy-sensing laser beams of sweetness, my weed-smoking days were long behind me.

Richard hums laughter. “Hey…I’ve got a question about that.” Then he looks both ways and leans in close. “Can you get me some?”

Outside, after the meeting, it’s cold-air crackling with the

sudden turn to late fall. Leaves are giving up, like newspapers, becoming insolvent all over the streets. I walk to the car. It was disconcerting at first, to be out in the world in the daytime, when everyone else was working. This is the first fall since I was fifteen I haven’t had a job of some kind. Sadly, I’m getting used to it. Right now the editors will be coming out of their budget meeting and the reporters will be trying to avoid their eyes, or pretending to be on the phone so they won’t get assigned a weather story (“Colder temps move in”) or a brief about last night’s trailer fire (“Suspected arson at mobile home park”) or a feature on the Eagle Scout who built a bike out of aluminum cans (“Recycled cycle leads to scholarship”).

I call Lisa from the car as I drive to Costco.

“Well,” she says, “How’d it go?”

“You know Richard,” I say, “always the optimist. Thinks we should invest in cyanide.”

Polite laugh.

“Would you have ever guessed Richard is a weed smoker?”