Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

I’ve only been in the business a few hours and I’m up 66 percent! Amber writes me a check. On the subject line she writes: “lawn care.” We giggle.

As for my pension, it’s not good news. With penalties, it would only be about twenty-six hundred dollars. Still, I tell her, get the paperwork started. (If I can make sixty-six percent on that twenty-six hundred…)

“Wait,” says my friend Ike over lunch an hour later. “You’re like…a pot dealer now?”

Ike and I have skipped our usual how’s-your-family and how-is-Idi-Amin-ruining-the-newspaper-now small talk and gone straight to my new career choice.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” I say. This is the crux of it, I know. This is what we’re really talking about here. I am apparently buying

marijuana and selling it. For profit. This is, I believe, the definition of a drug dealer. “But it’s only temporary.”

“Wow.” Ike was the music writer at the newspaper for years, and oddly enough, given that position, among the squarest people I know. Married. Three kids. Asthmatic and frail. He was probably the only other adult not getting high the last fifteen years. He’s recently been transferred and is covering politics and city government now. On a shrinking staff, a music writer is an extravagance they can’t afford. I feel bad for Ike, who spent years developing that weird, specific music-writer vocabulary (the thunky wallop of the bass…the womb-like, plangent guitar) only to find it doesn’t quite translate to covering politics (the state Senator’s speech “lumbered along like a fussy cover musician scatting a complex hook”).

“What about your kids?” Ike asks.

“I’d rather not sell to them if I can help it, although I probably can’t afford to rule out their friends.”

“You know what I mean.”

I do know what Ike means. And it is something I’ve tried not to think about-what would happen if my kids found out, if Lisa found out.

Ike is a pale, skinny enrolled member of one of the California casino Indian bands-I can never remember which one-bifocaled and smart, he’s the best kind of newspaper guy in that he is a chronic underachiever, doomed to spend his life working for people half as intelligent as him. He’s my favorite writer at the newspaper, laid back and modest, one of those natural stylists whose effortless flow seems typed within the genetic code of his sentences, so that when you finish an Isaac Watts story you are unaware of its inherent art. Ike’s talent and intelligence are not without their blind spots, however; he was the one person genuinely excited about poetfolio.com , and in fact was even going to contribute a monthly column on real estate using a pen name: Frost Peltier. Ike and I started at the

newspaper at the same time, eighteen years ago. He’s figured he was “safely above the water line” of layoffs, but he keeps watching others he assumed were safe, like me, “get sucked under, thrashing as they drown.” I have to say that, like my financial planner, sometimes Ike’s way with words is, at times, too evocative.

“I can’t believe it,” he says again. “You are seriously thinking of dealing weed.”

“I’m not thinking of dealing weed. I’m up two hundred and I just put in a buy order for almost ten thousand dollars.”

“Is it really called that…a buy order?”

“How do I know what it’s called,” I say. “I just started. Look. This is a bad idea. I know that. But I’m only gonna do it until I get back on top of my mortgage, or until I get a real job, whichever comes first. But if today’s any indication, it might just work-”

Ike agrees: “Every other person I know smokes weed.”

“It’s like prohibition,” I say. “In hard times, people crave the old stuff. Pot is nostalgia for a lot of people our age. Selling weed is like opening a speakeasy in 1933.”

“I think prohibition ended in ’33,” Ike says.

“Either way, I’m only going to do this for a few months, just long enough to make some house payments and keep my kids in Catholic school. Then I’ll quit.”

“Wait.” Ike lowers his head. “You’re selling pot to pay for Catholic school? Drugs for private school? That’s so Iran-Contra.”

Ike and I are in a favorite old haunt, a lunch place and donut shop on the edge of downtown called The Picnic Basket-the walls painted like a park, picnic benches for tables. The place has great chicken, sandwiches and pies, and transcendent maple bars. It’s owned by an old New York transplant named Marty, who runs it with his wife and adult son and the boy’s hot girlfriends. Marty loves talking politics, and he always corners Ike and me, leans in and asks us, Fellas, what’s really going on , so certain is he that we have

inside information that the general public doesn’t know. It’s probably the other reason we come here-aside from the great food-there aren’t many places where the chef makes a big deal out of newspaper reporters. Even now, Marty delivers a half-chicken-in-a-basket to the table next to ours, and gives us a knowing wink.

And that’s when my cell rings. I pull out my phone…look at the number. It’s Jamie. I look up at Ike, who holds a forkful of potato salad in midair. I mouth: It’s them.

I look around, then open my phone and clear my throat. “Hey?” I say, which is what I assume drug dealers say into phones.

“My guy needs to meet you first,” Jamie says. I can hear the announcer for the Madden Football video game in the background. Okay. It’s on, then. They want to meet me.

“Sure. Sure. Um.” I am aware that we are to be very careful about what we say on cell phones and I speak slowly. “I would like that. To meet your friend.”

“You okay, Slippers?”

“Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’ll come alone.”

“What?” Jamie says. “What the fuck you talkin’ about. Who else would you bring?”

“Oh…no one. I don’t know. I just…thought I should say I’ll come alone.”

“Look, don’t freak out on me, man. These guys can be a little paranoid.”

“Sure. Sorry. So…should we meet at the 7/11…what, at midnight again?”

“Do you think we could meet a little earlier? I have a midterm tomorrow.” I shift the cell phone at my ear. (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Nokia’s 6700 is perfect for setting up buys.) We agree to meet at 10 p.m. I click off the call. Ike has had his potato-salad-laden fork at his mouth throughout the call. His eyes are wide.

“That…” I put my phone away. “…was my contact. The

deal goes down tonight.”

“Holy shit!”

“I know!” I say.

“Holy shit,” Ike says again, and leans forward, over his rice. “I can’t believe it. You’re a drug dealer!”

A woman at the next table looks over.

“I know,” I say more quietly.

“Holy shit,” Ike says again.

“I know!”

We eat our chicken quietly. Wait. I-am a drug dealer? “Holy shit,” I say.

“I know,” Ike says. Then he leans in, cocks his head. Something else has occurred to him. “Hey,” he says, “this is…I don’t know, I was thinking about what you said about nostalgia…this is probably crazy, but…” He looks all around The Picnic Basket-people licking fingers and rolling eyes-and then back at me. “Do you think you can get cocaine, too?”

IT’S SO DISTRACTING

how sexy the women are

on the TV news

Here’s what Dad and I do during the day while the kids are at school and Lisa is at work (at least I pray to the patron saint of pathetic husbands that she is at work): we sit with cups of coffee and flip from channel to channel watching overheated experts argue about the crises in housing and banking and credit. We can’t turn away; it is financial porno.