Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

So there’s that.

On the elevator, M-stares straight ahead. Like any bully, I know that he is driven by his own insecurities, and for a minute I have some sympathy for this awkward, friendless stump, who somehow believes that chinstraps aren’t just for boy bands, and who is, after all, on his way to being out of work himself. But none of that excuses his behavior; only bullies respond to being bullied by being bullies, and all I have to do is recall the way he walked so many good people to the edge of the playground and my sympathy dies.

Ding. My floor.

“Have fun mentoring,” I say.

M-just snuff les.

The elevator doors close. Why are those snappy things I imagine myself saying so unsatisfying when I actually say them? Then, into HR where I wait in the waiting room, waiting.

“Matt. How are you?” asks Amber Philips. Amber was the head of the HR department for the newspaper when I worked here. Now, four rounds of layoffs later, Amber pretty much is the HR department. That has to suck, too, the head of HR laying off almost everyone in HR. We shake hands. Though no great beauty, Amber has that slightly-slutty business look just this side of inappropriate, her suits 0-2 fastballs-little high, little tight-her shoes a bit drastic for an office setting. (If Amber ever has to lay herself off, she could always commit suicide by jumping off those pumps.) And she’s a genuinely nice person.

Perhaps the most pathetic thing about long-married guys like

me is the delusional list that each of us keeps in our heads, a list of women we think are secretly attracted to us. Amber was always at the top of my delusional list. Even now, in my beaten-down state, I can’t help but have a kind of muscle-memory that she’s crushing on me a little (ooh, out-of-shape middle-aged unemployed guy, yum) -an assumption for which there is absolutely no evidence.

“What can I do for you today, Matt?”

I explain that Lisa and I have an investment opportunity for which we might need some immediate cash; and I need some information on my tiny newspaper pension, and what kinds of options I might have for tapping it early.

She looks mildly horrified. “How early?”

“Um. Now?”

“Wow. Is it that bad out there, Matt?”

“In the words of Robert E. Lee, ‘you have no idea, Pumpkin.’”

“Remind me.” She smiles as she looks up my file on her computer. “Who did Robert E. Lee call Pumpkin?”

“He called all his soldiers either Pumpkin or Sweetie. I know he called Nathan Bedford Forrest Doll-face. At Appomattox he called Grant-General Snuggles.”

Her smile goes away as her cursor arrives at my dainty little pension, which I’d always counted on to pay for a tee time or two when I turned sixty-five. “I’m glad you still have your sense of humor, Matt.”

“Actually, I don’t,” I say. “I’m just really stoned.”

This is true.

Of course, I wasn’t able to buy nine thousand dollars’ worth of pot last night, but the kid did call my old felon friend Jamie, who drove over to the apartment building and said it would take a few days to get such “significant weight,” a term that should’ve scared me off, but instead made me feel sort of exhilarated. As an act of

good faith, I gave Jamie back Skeet’s Starter hat and told him to ask Skeet for my slippers. He said he would. We smoked a little in the apartment of the kid I’d flagged down in the parking lot, whose name turned out to be Larry, and whose apartment was-there is no other word for it-fetid. There were beer cans and pizza crusts all over the place and when I sat on a pizza heel, Larry shrugged and said, “I don’t like the crusts,” which didn’t explain why he needed to throw them all over his apartment. But I was a guest, so I just smiled and told Jamie and Larry that I really did want nine thousand dollars’ worth of pot because I needed some immediate cash and I thought some of my fellow old pothead middle-classers would buy it up. Jamie said that for that much money he could probably get me a couple of pounds. Meantime, he gave me a little taste at a bargain price, an ounce for the three hundred I was able to squeeze from a cash machine.

We smoked a little last night, and I tucked the rest of my rolled Ziploc into a top dresser drawer and tried to go to bed, but I still couldn’t sleep-Was that a smile on Lisa’s dozing face?-so I got up and watched the sunrise, fed the kids and drove them to school, came home, showered, got Dad settled in front of the round-the-clock-politics-and-economic-crisis-dither-fest on CNN, and immediately took my wares to my baked broker, Richard. I sold Richard half of my deep green stash-what Jamie called four-eighths (and not a half, which is apparently different, or else Jamie is just bad at math)-feeling not even a hint of guilt for charging him three hundred, all I had invested to that point, even though it was an inflated price (and more evidence that Richard is not the financial genius I once thought he was). I also made Richard pay me twenty bucks for the pipe Jamie gave me for free. And I made him light up and give me a hit right there in his office. We blew smoke and stared at one another.

“What?” Richard asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just wouldn’t have figured you as a pothead-although that might explain your tip on Mexican shipping bonds a few years ago.”

“In this economy?” He shrugged. “I’d get stoned every day if I could.” Then he smiled wistfully. “I only smoke a couple times a year now. Partly because it’s so hard to find. And Liv hates when I do it.” Liv is Richard’s wife. He hummed some distant memory. “After college, I lived with this painter, Anya. She was wild, nothing like Liv. She liked to wake and bake-a quick bowl in the morning-and then have sex. Something like that sticks with you.” Richard considered the little pipe, and then took another hit, his mustache keeping a lid on his mouth as he fought coughing. He said, through gritted teeth: “God, I miss her.” Then he lost the smoke in a combo sneeze-cough-seizure-laugh. His eyes went wide and he said, “Wow.” The last thing he said when I left was, “I’ll take as much of this as you can get.”

And now, sitting in the HR office of my old newspaper, Amber leans in, legs crossed, makeup perfect, and smiles rather wickedly. “Are you really high, Matt?”

“Oh yeah.” I was so sure that I was done being a pot smoker. I was a two-drink, twice-a-week guy. Sober. Straight. Clean. Like a lot of parents, I anticipated the questions my kids would ask when the time came, and had prepared a speech to deliver when I sensed they were at the age temptation might arrive. No, son, my speech went, I did not smoke marijuana. I am proud to say that drugs have never touched this body. Here was my rationale, worthy of a politician eyeing a presidential run: if, as scientists say, every seven years the human body remakes itself with all new cells, then after fifteen years, I was two full People removed from that loser who smoked weed in college. And the truth was: I didn’t miss getting high. Not at all. I could honestly tell my kids that it was bad stuff. It made you

stupid. Lethargic. And it was illegal!

I felt good about spouting this company line, partly because I assumed I actually had company in my line, that the rest of the adult world around me had also stopped getting high.

But now I’m beginning to feel like the only jerk not invited to a great party, because it appears that while I was repeating my Nancy Reagan mantra, every other responsible adult was smoking bud like reggae musicians. Amber confides that she was a twice-a-weeker until her regular dealer moved six months ago, and her boyfriend, a drywaller whose drywall work has dried up, has been in a funk for months, has even considered moving somewhere where it’s easier to get a medicinal prescription. After some light negotiations, I give Amber a better deal than I gave Richard, because Amber is better-looking, and because she didn’t take a commission off my severance check, which Richard would probably have done. Amber buys the rest of my weed for two hundred, straight profit for me since Richard took care of my nut this morning.