Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

Yes! I am so! Starving!

But maybe we’re all starving

hungry for the warm lights

and tight aisles of nacho-corn-

sour-cream-onion-and-chive-

barbecue-goodness-and again

I drive my boys, Skeet and Jamie

– And I’m hypnotized by the set of cat-eyed taillights I’m ordered to follow as we arrive-because where else can you find the hungry, a community of the hungry-you tail the dude in the tricked-out Festiva- damn he drive well -and that smell? Dude! says Jamie, and Skeet laughs proudly and Jamie says, Lay off the milk, Skeet! and I crack with laughter as Jamie explains, Dude’s lactose-infuckin’tolerant yo -to the flat green and orange stripes-the sheer hot white light goodness of…

…another 7/11. And here I am, just like my mother feared, stoned off my nut, unemployed, a week from losing my house and maybe my wife and kids, and I file in with my new friends, as per-(1) banger in sweats (2) dude in baggie jeans (3) kid in hoodie (4) another banger in sweats (and my slippers) and finally (5) middle-aged unemployed man in Chinos, pea coat, golf shirt and wet socks- and yes, Mom, in a perfect world, we could find an open grocery, but there are simply going to be times when you must go out in the world, into the dark uneasy dangerous places and so I go…

Straight to the freezer case and a siren of a meat-and-bean burrito which I tear into, unwrap and microwave-bouncing in squishy socks, watching that thing turn under the light like baby Jesus in an incubator-and that’s when Skeet freaks, he completely freaks! loses it! “Turn it off, man! That shit’s poison, man! They’re nukin’ us with that shit, turning us into radiated zombies!” Jamie trying to calm the poor kid through gritted teeth, “Chill, man,” but Skeet won’t chill, he just screams and points at the humming microwave oven as the clerk, this store’s Rahjiv yells: “Get that trippin’ guy outta here before I call the cops!” And everyone’s yell

ing, “Chill, man, chill!” and “What else he on?” and “He always be trippin, yo!” and “Don’t call the cops, dude’s on probation!”

And that’s when I remember: I am an adult and I can do…something…I can fix this, protect my boys, make the world okay, and so I grab Skeet by his round shoulders and feel his racing heart, catch his sketchy eyes and say-

“Skeet. Look at me. It’s not nuclear radiation. It’s just waves. Like sound waves,” my voice getting softer, slower: “Tiny…waves.” A deep breath. “Like good vibrations, right? That’s why they call them micro…waves. See?” And he’s still breathing heavily when I nod and the microwave beeps, and Skeet looks over, still panting. And it’s quiet in the store.

After a second, Skeet nods back. Smiles. It’s gonna be. Okay.

And I pat Skeet’s shoulder, grab my steaming burrito and get in line to pay-take my place with the starving and the sorry, the paranoid, yawning with fear, the hungry lonely lost children let down by their unemployed fathers, men zapped by history’s microwave, a generation of hapless, luckless, feckless fathers with no idea how to fix anything, no clue what to do except go home to face the incubated babies staring at their dry bowls of Crispix and confess-

– Sorry. But Skeet drank all the milk…right before he freaked-

Oh, I am such a shit father, shit husband, shit son, shit human being…and I’ve lost my shit job, am losing my shit house, am at the bottom of my shit-self when I glance over at the endless wet roll of the Slurpee machine and it’s instantly hypnotic-

Banana-blackraspberry-cherryCoke-piñacolada! So peaceful. Around and around it swirls and I could watch the wet blend of flavors forever-when Jamie sidles up and whispers, “I’m gonna mix ’em all, man,” like a soldier volunteering for a suicide mission.

“Go with God,” I whisper, and Jamie does, straight to a piñacolada icy blur, and then down the line, cherry Coke, black raspberry, and he smiles back, and I’m insanely proud as I step forward to pay for my burrito, eyes falling on the clerk’s wristwatch when…

for just a second…I can’t tell…if I’ve forgotten…what the numbers mean, or maybe…I’m just imagining…what it would be like…to forget what they mean…

I spend days staring at this guy’s watch before the second hand finally moves-and the position of the hands against the little numbers correlates to a memory of how this particular mechanism works (a memory from kindergarten: Miss Bean in go-go boots standing above me moving the hands of a sun-faced clock)-and I connect the relation of these symbols to a system of tracking the movement of the earth around the sun as across a forest of synapses there sparks a pattern of theoretical constructs (time, space, go-go boots) flaring into an evolutionary fire that represents a near miracle of abstract comprehension, an Einsteinian leap of cognition: It is four-thirty in the morning. That means I can still make it home to watch my boys’ last hour of sleep.

And in my mind, the Nissan Maxima of my responsibilities follows the Ford Festiva of my unraveling into this convenience store of realization:

Hey!

This is where they sell more milk!

But that shit’s like nine dollars a gallon.

Outside the store, Skeet and Jamie go off with the dude in the Festiva and I wave goodbye with my new white jug and I am in love with the predawn cool black, in love with my boys, in love with two percent.

The drive home is glorious-streetlight rollers like tide at dawn.

I blow laughter through my nose. Key in quietly. Like I’m sixteen again. My old senile father is asleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room, TV still on ESPN. This is what we were watching together when I left to get milk…almost four hours ago. Dad doesn’t stir. I try to take the remote control from him but he’s holding it against his cheek like a security blanket, so I turn off the set manually, old school. Every day now they show the top ten sports plays of the day-and I think: what if life was like this, and at bedtime we got to see our own daily highlights (No. 4: Skeet freaks over the microwave).

Lug my jug to the kitchen, milk in the door of the fridge-the food inside is also glorious: cheese stick, martini olives- chomp, chomp -I eat shark-like, without conscience, hover upstairs to find Lisa in bed, tousled short hair clinging to the pillow. My wife, she is cute-everyone says so, but lately that word has carried a kind of accusing overtone, as if there might be something unsettling about a grown woman who retains her cuteness well into her forties; and maybe that’s our problem, maybe Lisa is too cute, curled up in her cute little ball, cute back to the profoundly un-cute space where I’m not sleeping. Her cute cell phone on her nightstand, where she no doubt set it after TM-ing her old flame…and I toy with waking her, begging for a little marital goodness- smack, smack -maybe we can fix this thing the way we fixed problems when we were twenty-seven, but we’re in a smack-smack dry spell, and according to an online chat of hers that I reconned earlier, she’s not a big Matt fan these days. Anyway, this might not be the best time to win my cute wife back, given my B.C. bud-and-burrito breath, and the fact that I haven’t told her that we could lose the house as early as next week. (I imagine breaking it to her as we fire a couple off- Yes, yes, yes! Uh-uh! That-feels-so-good-we’re-about-to-be-evicted!)

So I step back into the hall; the boys’ rooms are across from

one another, and I stand between them, fists on my hips. Sentry. Superhero. All I want is to keep them safe, healthy, fed. But with no job? No prospects? No money? No house? What did the man say- There is always hope, but not for us. Mouth dry. Head weighs eighty pounds.