Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“Good, huh?” asks Jamie.

I hack: “Not bad.”

“Shit’s designer. Like three hunnerd an ounce,” Skeet says.

The next roll of coughs I can’t suppress. “Really?”

“Definitely,” Jamie explains, voice lilting with excitement. “In this lab in British Columbia? This Nobel Prize dude? He Frankensteined that shit? It’s knock-off, but shit’s still pretty good. They can do whatever they want to it, you know? Make it do a thousand different things to your mind, yo.”

And I think that must be true, because a couple of old dorm-floor hits later my brain springs a leak and my life seems to trickle out, as I tell Jamie and Skeet my whole story: how I left a good job as a business reporter two years ago to start an unlikely poetry-and-investment website, how we got buried in the housing collapse just as my senile father moved in, how I scrambled back to my old newspaper job, only to get laid off eight weeks ago. How I got

fourteen weeks of severance from the paper, and have six weeks left to find a job, because fourteen minus eight is six. How last week it was seven, next week it will be five, but right now,

at this moment,

with Skeet in the backseat

and Jamie in front,

right now, as of this…very

moment-and I hold the smoke

in my chest as if I can make

this moment forever-Hooooo-

“It’s six. Six weeks.”

And that’s not even my most pressing deadline; I have all of seven days to liquidate my retirement and pay off a $30,000 balloon payment to the mortgage company, or risk losing our house. And it is this second deadline, I tell the boys, that has given my job search such throat-constricting immediacy, as I worry over thinning want ads, shakily fill out applications and hope my references still have the positions I’ve listed on my résumé, and how-this part has just occurred to me-I’ve gone and added another stress to a very shitty situation, because “Even if I do somehow get a job interview now, they’ll probably make me take a-”

“-drug test!” Skeet yells from the backseat, and he laughs and I laugh and he laughs and I stop laughing and he keeps laughing.

“Don’t freak, Slippers,” Jamie says, “there’s a million ways to beat a piss test.”

“Pecans,” says Skeet from the backseat.

“Pecans?” Jamie turns back.

“Didn’t I read about some kind-a pecan diet in O ?”

“How the fuck I know what you read? An’ what the fuck Oprah be writin’ about how to pass a drug test?”

“Dude, Oprah don’t write O . She just own that shit.”

“And what the fuck you be doin’ readin’ it? ”

“My moms reads that shit, yo… An’ I don’t know, maybe it was in People. ”

“So what the fuck the pecans do?”

“The fuck I’m supposed to know what the pecans do! Clean up your piss or somefin’.”

“You crazy, motherfucker.”

“You crazy.”

“You crazy.”

“You crazy.”

“You so crazy you took the short bus to school.”

“You know that shit was behavioral, yo.”

And I must be high because this conversation makes sense.

Jamie waves Skeet off and faces forward again. “Don’t listen to that shit, Slippers. Here’s all you gotta do for that piss test. Get some of them pills. You know, online?”

Not you too, Jamie. Don’t fall for the online lie-that everything we need is available at the click of a keystroke: all that shimmering data, the dating habits of the famous, videos of fat people falling down, porn…investment poetry…job listings, foreclosure information, poverty advice…and what about the thing my wife has begun seeking online?

But before I get too deep into a new round of self-pity, Jamie offers a lilting anecdote: “You could do what my cousin Marshall did? Fucker wore a catheter? Connected to a baggy? With some other dude’s piss in it? And now he screens luggage at the airport? And he’s up for a supervisor job with the NTSA? And a security clearance? I shit you not, Dude’s got someone who warns him about random tests, and he keeps that catheter full of someone else’s whiz right there in his locker? And when he hears about tests, dude loads that shit up.”

In the rearview, I see Skeet drink directly from my milk carton.

Hey. That was like nine dollars a gallon.

Very good pot. Far better than the dusty brown ragweed we smoked in college. And I think of my mother again, and the trouble we had at Christmas break my freshman year when she was doing laundry and found a single joint amid the pennies and pocket lint of my 501’s-she hated the sound of change rattling in her dryer-and I tried to convince her it was a rolled up note from a friend and she asked if I thought she was stupid and I said No, even though I was eighteen so of course my mother was stupid, and my parents were still together then but she never told my father about the joint, and I feel awful about her being so decent when I was such a shit; I feel awful for everything I did and everything I didn’t do, and I miss her terribly, although it’s probably good she’s not here because I couldn’t bear for her to hear about Jamie’s cousin Marshall screening bags…pissing someone else’s piss as he watches for shoe bombs and keeps us safe from the dudes planning another 7/11.

No, it’s exceptional pot-

And the party…is not a party the way I remember parties but eight young guys, short and fat and tall and lean, black, brown, white, rejected Abercrombie models standing in a flower bed outside an apartment building across from a closed pizza place, smoking and laughing and drinking malt-liquor forties, talking in likes and shits and dudes, and I fit in fine, although I can’t remember when I gave Skeet my slippers-but he’s wearing them, dude drinking from my milk jug-and I’m in my socks, sucking that blunt like a scuba diver on an air hose as I track conversations that mean nothing to me: music I’ve never heard, and “skank-ass trippy chicks” I don’t know, someone’s “bus’-up ride”-and I gather from these conversations that my new friends are between nineteen and twenty-two, have a few community college credits,

some minimum-wagey part-timey jobs, a possession charge or five, and I think about the semicircle that I used to make with the old neck-tied newspaper hacks in the newsroom around the 5 p.m. TV news, arms crossed, talking in our own code about our wives and our cars, about flacks and blogs and the Dow, and I think maybe the world is made up of little circles like this one and that one, that maybe there’s no fundamental difference between the circles except the codes for the shared bits of data, that somewhere a pack of plotting terrorists is standing in their own little circle, bouncing on cold feet and ululating not about the great American devil but about Ahmed’s skank-ass trippy girlfriend and Mahmoud’s bus’ ride, and that’s when I picture my boys again, one day standing in their own circle, generational losers smoking ever-improving weed and talking about their loser dad who went in the tank after getting run in the Great Recession or whatever they’ll call it in the history books, or the history MP3 files and Christ, I’m only forty-six…I don’t want to entertain such grandpa-thought, but I feel so old, so unemployed, outdated, dead technology, impotent scrap-heap, unraveling, unraveling, unrav-

“Wait,” one of the felons interrupts my time-dilated self-pity; it’s tattoo-necked Jamie, the reliable one, quiet leader, and he leans in close: “Dude! Aren’t you…like. Starving?”

And the thing is, bouncing on soaked socked feet outside this apartment building, blowing on cold hands that seem to belong to someone else, thinking of my sons at home in bed and the many ways I can still let them down, it’s true-