Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

I look around the living room of this old house. There are a couple of beer posters and a big map of the world, a bad oil painting of a house in the woods, a couch, two old easy chairs, a TV, a set of World Book encyclopedias and another bookshelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed. The carpet is well-worn beige. But for the beer posters, it could be your grandparents’ house, everything where it should be, yet there’s still something…I don’t know…wrong

about it…something forcedly random, as if it’s been put together for a family melodrama by the set designer of a local theater.

Dave the Drug Dealer bounces on the balls of his feet as we wait for the person we’re meeting. Dave’s hair is freshly trimmed and gelled and he’s wearing a beautiful worsted wool overcoat. I have a wool overcoat almost like it and again, something feels off about that-my drug dealer sharing the same car, same coat? A drug dealer should drive a low-rider Monte Carlo, and wear sharkskin or black satin or velour sweats or something. I officially don’t like having a lawyer for a dealer.

We stand a minute longer and, finally, into the room comes the man we’ve been waiting for…and again he’s not at all what I expected-even though I don’t recall expecting anything. This guy is round and heavy, in his thirties, with a baby face and puffball cheeks, thinning blond hair. He’s wearing the largest parka I’ve ever seen, zipped to his tree-stump neck. He’s a walking Quonset hut, this guy. Then Big Parka and Dave do an awkward handshake hug thing-heads tilted back, using the soul-shake as a buffer between them.

“How you doin’, man.”

“Good. You?”

“Oh, you know.”

“So.” Dave backs away from the hug and…presents me. “This is the guy.”

I put out my hand and Big Parka takes it with his squishy wet mitt. He gives me a damp handshake and I look up into his ruddy, gentle face. “Nice to meet you, Guy.”

“Uh…no.” I glance over at Dave. “My name’s not Guy.”

Big Parka looks back at Dave. “You said, ‘This is Guy.’”

“No. I said, the guy. ‘This is the guy.’ His name’s Matt.”

“Oh.” Big Parka looks sort of horrified at this dealer faux pas. “I thought Guy was like…short for Matt.”

“How could Guy be short for Matt?” Dave asks. “Who shortens a name by going from four letters to three?”

I feel bad for awkward Big Parka, who is in full blush now. I actually think he might cry. “But…it could be a nickname, right?”

“Dude’s nickname is Slippers,” Jamie says.

“Oh,” says Big Parka. “Look, Slippers. Is it okay if Dave and I talk alone for a minute?”

I say that of course it’s fine. Then Jamie and I sit on the couch while Dave and Big Parka rumble off to talk in low voices in the kitchen.

On the couch, Jamie says, quietly, “Dave grew up around here.”

“Really?” It’s not that I’m that surprised Dave is from this town; I’m just surprised that Dave is from any town. Of course he has to be from somewhere, but you don’t expect to end up in the old neighborhood of your drug broker.

Jamie goes on, sotto voce: “Big dude in the coat’s named Monte. He went to high school here with Dave. Played football together. You imagine those dudes playing football? Shit, I should’ve lived in a small town. I’d have been fuckin’ all-state. Definitely wouldn’t have gotten cut in eighth grade. After they graduated, Dave moved away, went to law school. Monte stayed around here. This is his grandpa’s house.”

“Where’s Monte’s grandpa?”

Jamie makes a kind of bug-eyed face that makes me think either Monte’s grandfather has gone crazy and is in an asylum or that Monte and Dave have choked him to death.

“Monte got popped on a possession couple of years ago. Dave got him off and they been workin’ together ever since.” Jamie nods toward the kitchen. “Asshole on the cell phone? Monte’s brother, Chet. Real prick. Leeches off Monte, stupid motherfucker. Me ’n

him are gonna go one day. And I can’t wait, yo. I’m gonna lay that punk-ass bitch out.”

Even though this sounds like empty bluster coming from Jamie, I contemplate giving him my effective four-point nonviolence lecture, a version of which I delivered to Franklin earlier (…(1) Except in rare cases of self-defense involving hand grenades, violence is always wrong, even against stupid motherfucker punk-ass bitches…)

Jamie looks around the living room. “So…you’re like a businessman and a writer?”

“I covered business for the newspaper for eighteen years.”

“And you write what, poems and shit?”

“Mostly shit.”

“So how’d you get into that? You get, like…a degree in it?”

I’ve been sitting next to Jamie on the couch, but now I turn to face him-gaunt cheeks, straight, dyed-black hair, a stud through his nose and another through his lip and that tattoo wrapping partway up his neck, and at the top, a pair of downturned eyes. My drug dealer sidekick is like any kid venturing a tentative question. He blushes.

I can’t help smiling. “You want to be a writer, Jamie?”

He chews his lip nervously and looks down-unsure if my smile means I’m making fun of him. He’s embarrassed to aspire to something as low-rent as being a writer.

“I don’t know,” Jamie says. “I’ll probably end up in sales…or law enforcement…or, I don’t know…I might be in a band? I’ll definitely have to do something else to make some coin.” He shrugs. “But yeah, I always thought I’d be a good writer.”

Sadly, our career counseling session is interrupted when Big Parka Monte comes back in the room alone. I don’t know where Dave has gone. “Come on, Slippers,” Monte says. “I want to show you something.”

Jamie and I follow him through a rustic kitchen-an open pizza box with half-a-veggie on the Formica table (stoned stock analyst side-note: Domino’s Pizza’s time-tested delivery platform and low price-point make it a solid recession buy)-to a padlocked basement door. Big Parka produces a janitor’s key ring and unlocks the door and we descend (Jamie: “Watch your head, Slippers.”) into a paneled rec room with two small window-wells. There’s an unlit pellet-burning stove in one corner and a ceiling fan moving the warm air around. It is surprisingly hot down here, stuffy even. On the other side of the room an air hockey table is pushed up against the wall. Big Parka grabs one side of the air hockey table and Jamie grabs the other and they pull the table away. Then Big Parka Monte takes a putty knife and wedges it into a seam in the paneling, pries away a door-sized section, sets the paneling against another wall and steps away to reveal a narrow, yellow-glowing hallway lit with strung Christmas lights along its dirt floor.

“During Prohibition, there was a still down here,” Jamie tells me. “Monte’s great-grandpa was a rum runner.”

I follow Monte down this narrow hallway. It’s warm. No windows. There are three small doors off the hallway, each one padlocked. A slender yellow strip of light burns beneath each door. Monte uses his key to open the first door and steps aside as I look in.

Dave is nowhere to be seen; everything he does seems planned in advance for some later testimony: Mr. Prior, did you ever see my client in the grow room itself?

I step into the narrow doorway.

I’m not entirely prepared for what I see.

The room is small, maybe ten-by-ten. It’s almost unbearably bright. There’s a low gurgling hum, the sound of water moving through pipes. Hanging from the ceiling are three banks of hooded lights, like a photographer might use, and the walls are papered in

reflective Mylar. Space heaters line the bases of the walls, and temperature and barometer gauges are on the wall nearest the door. In the center of the room, beneath the lights, are what we’ve come here for: four rows of chest-high counters, each with a pot and rows of large cubes that look like steel wool, each of these cubes connected by plastic water pipes, and rising from each cube of steel wool, like rows of patients on IV’s, three dozen of the most glorious dark green hydroponic marijuana plants anyone has ever seen, their stems bursting into ferny leaves and sitting on top, like dirty Christmas tree toppers, gorgeous bursts of purple-green, scuddy buds.