Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“The song I was just singing? By the band, Blue Eyed Jesus? You know them?”

Chuck’s lips are still moving as he adds my lumber purchase in his head. When he’s done, he jots down a number. “Hmm? I’m sorry. What?”

“Oh. This band I heard. Supposed to be coming to town? Blue Eyed Jesus? I really like ’em, but I can’t find anyone who has heard of them. I was just wondering if you knew them.”

“What was it again?”

“Blue Eyed Jesus?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

This proves, of course…nothing. It could be that the concert is simply a cover story for their rendezvous and so Chuck wouldn’t know the band. It could also be that he’s pretending to not know the band because he’s figured out who I am. Or it could be that Lisa really is going to the Blue Eyed Jesus concert with Dani. It could also be that Jesus really did have dreamy blue eyes, just like Chuck’s. Maybe Chuck is blue eyed Jesus, Prince of Peace and of Lumberland. Maybe Chuck is the emperor of ice-cream. Or maybe life is an illusion, an image shadowed by fire onto a cave wall.

Chuck hits print and when he bends over to pick up the printout I am finally given a gift, the kind of thing that makes me thank Jesus’ blues, the kind of vision that makes me believe that I can turn around this long losing streak, the first sign of light in a very dark tunnel:

Chuck has a bald spot!

The genre calls for me to go coin-size with my estimate-quarter, fifty-cent piece, silver dollar-but it’s hard because Chuck’s bald spot isn’t exactly round. (Who ever heard of an irregular bald spot? Cancer, I think, before the burgeoning Catholic in me scolds with self-directed guilt; after all, the man does have children, and anyway, I’ve never heard of scalp cancer. Okay…how about just an acceleration of this uneven hair loss?)

And then it comes to me: Chuck’s bald spot is roughly the size and shape of a fried wonton. “I don’t suppose there’s any good Chinese food around here?”

“Hmm?” Then, still bent over, reading my printout for the treeless tree fort, Chuck tells me the name of a place nearby.

“They have wontons?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Probably.”

I have, I should point out, a luscious head of hair. Cut short now, up over my ears, my hair is nonetheless thick and healthy and free of dumpling-shaped islands of skin. The wonton is turning, my friend, decaying Prince of Lumberland, balding boy-wonder of woodwork, male-pattern ninja of wife-thievery. I run my hand through my hair; it bristles like windblown wheat.

And when Chuck straightens up with the printout, I see that the triangular-shaped hole has two allies I didn’t notice on either side of his head: a couple of little lots just being paved on either side of those dreamy Jesus blue eyes. (This is the thing about dreamy eyes; like red paint on a car, they cause buyers to overlook a lot of other problems.) Looks like some very real hair-care disappointment ahead for the blue-eyed Prince of Pine.

“Here you go.”

I look down at the invoice, eyes going straight to the bold

number at the bottom of the page…“Eleven hundred bucks! For a kid’s tree fort! Christ on a bike! How much would it cost if it was actually in a tree?”

“I’m sorry. I said it’s the easiest, not the cheapest,” Chuck says, and he wrinkles his forehead and takes back the estimate and I can see the condescension creep into his face (this jerk’s wasting my time; he was never going to build a tree fort) and it pisses me off-are you really looking down on me, wife-stealer? You can’t possibly be looking down on me, baldy -and my face flushes, and I ball up my fist to smack this asshole and that’s when I notice the phone is buzzing on my waist and I look down at the number, it’s Dave the Drug Dealer, and instead of punching Chuck, I have what can only be called, in the religious sense, an epiphany-

More than a good idea, I see, as clearly as if it’s right in front of my sleep-hungry eyes: a stack of boards sitting on my front yard, the Stehne lumber invoice stapled to it, Lisa walking up, bending over, reading, her eyes going wide (What?) looking toward the neighbors (Do they know?) typing furiously on the keypad of her phone (Did U send this wood?) getting his response (That’s UR husband?) and then her typing back (U think he knows?)

Yes. I know. I can’t control the smile that crosses my face. “I’ll take it.” I snatch the paper back from him. “When can you deliver it?”

“Monday?”

“I need it tomorrow.”

“Our driver’s off tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s when I need it. My wife’s going to a concert this weekend and I’m apparently going to have a lot of time on my hands.”

“I could maybe get it there…on Saturday?”

“That’s too late. Look,” I say. And I hold up my buzzing phone like a time bomb- deliver my lumber or I blow this little wooden king

dom to hell. “I have to take this. Now can you deliver my lumber tomorrow? Or should I go to a different store?”

“Okay.” He shrugs and gives me one of those idiot-customer-is-always-right sighs that must come from a lifetime of working in the family business. “I may have to deliver it myself, but I’ll get it there.”

THIS ONE ADMITS TO being a lifetime

proponent of deregulation

but now, on NPR, he doesn’t know what to think-

I however, think of Mother Teresa, who at the end of her life

admitted she’d had a crisis and had stopped hearing God’s voice

decades earlier, which had to be a bit of a relief, I’d think-

hard enough to live a perfect life without

being hectored about it

– give away everything, feed the poor, don’t forget to love

the lepers!-but back to this disillusioned expert who says

you could go to any business school in the country and learn

the same lousy things he believed during those wasted years

– those Brooks Brothers days of strippers and Town Cars-

which is that financial systems are equilibrium-producing

engines and it takes random or external forces to derail them

that our entire economy is based on this simple principle-

that left alone markets will chug mostly in a straight line

that they will mostly do what is in their own best interest-

Balance risk with reward.

Throw out bad paper.

Make money.

But this crisis, the broken expert sadly explains

belies all of that, defies everything everyone ever

believed because it wasn’t caused by famine or hurricane or

by war, by OPEC raising prices or by some third-world country

bailing on billions in loans while its epaulet-happy despot

bags the humanitarian aid and raids the banks-no

the ultimate cause of this global crisis

in our financial system

is our financial system.

This problem is endemic to the faulty machine it exposed

and contrary to the news, it wasn’t caused by poor people

being allowed to borrow one hundred percent

of inflated home prices with nothing down, not really-

and it wasn’t even caused by traders inventing questionable

derivative side bets against those same bad loans, not really-

(that’s like saying a cold is caused by a cough

that your pneumonia came from a sneeze)-

no, the root cause of this global crisis

in our financial system

is our financial system.

And here is my real issue with financial experts

the whole time they’re advising you what to do