Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“I need a little time to get the rest of it together,” Monte says. “You can’t just pull two-and-a-half-pounds off the shelves. And I needed to make sure you actually had the money.” He shrugs apologetically. “Tomorrow night, you pick Jamie up, come out here and get the rest. That’s a little taste. Three ounces. I’ll take it out of the two-and-a-half.”

“Just enough for your glaucoma,” Jamie says, and laughs.

I’m a little confused, and feel stupid that I let them take my money. I wonder if that’s why he had me smoke first-to loosen me up. And why’d they have me all the way out here if they were only going to give me three ounces? Why couldn’t I wait and pay him tomorrow? I shift…there’s a hole in my side where that big stack of money sat.

Monte holds the pipe up. “You good?”

I say that I am and he puts the pipe away in that giant file cabinet of a parka. “Put that away,” Monte says, and so I put the three ounces of weed in my messenger bag. Then Monte yells, “Dave!” and Dave comes back in with his briefcase again and I think, Oh great, more contracts, but instead he pulls out an envelope that is red-stamped Confidential. He slides it across the Formica table to me. “I trust you’ll keep this between us.”

“What is it?”

“A kind of…prospectus. A business plan. The real reason we wanted you to come out here tonight. Now, obviously, you can’t take this with you. You have to just read it here.”

A prospectus? What kind of drug dealers have a prospectus? I glance over at Jamie. He is unflappable, never looks confused, but also never seems to entirely grasp what is going on around him. Maybe he should be a writer.

I look at Dave, and then back at Monte, who has that same tentative, eager-to-please look on his round, red face. He runs bratwurst fingers through his side-parted hair. “Everything you’d need to know is in there.”

Then, as I’m still trying to understand, Chet comes back through the room, eternally talking on the phone: “No fuckin’ way.” He opens the refrigerator and grabs a beer.

“Chet!” snaps Monte again.

“You gotta be kidding,” Chet says into his phone, waving his older brother off. “No fuckin’ way. You gotta be kidding.” And then Chet is gone. I’m actually starting to wish Jamie would crack his skull.

I turn back to Dave. “Why do I need a prospectus to buy weed?”

Dave pokes Monte in the big parka. Nods at him.

“There’s something I’d like you to consider,” Monte says. And

he looks at Dave again. “I’m looking for someone…I mean…Ask yourself this: why go on buying milk when you could have your own cow?”

I look from Dave to Monte. “Because…I don’t want a cow?”

Dave puts a hand on Monte’s arm. “What Monte’s trying to say is that you should think about buying the farm.”

I laugh. But they’re serious. I look from Monte to Dave, to Monte again. Yes. They are serious. “I really just want a little milk. I don’t want a cow.”

Dave shakes his head. “Look, that wasn’t the best analogy. But you really should consider this…it’s a once-in-a-lifetime offer.”

And I don’t know what makes me ask this, maybe the bowl I’ve smoked, maybe simple curiosity: “How much?”

“Well,” Monte says, a little embarrassed. “I’d like to get four million.”

“Dollars?” And I laugh again.

Dave sits back, crosses his arms. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, Slippers.”

“No,” I say, “I’m certainly not taking it seriously. No way I’m going to buy a four-million-dollar drug business.”

Monte looks hurt again, those cheeks venting pink. “It’s worth a lot more than that.”

And, as I’m thinking of the falling value of my own home, Dave taps the prospectus in my hands. “After costs, Monte nets upwards of a million a year. You’d recoup the entire purchase price in four years. With his old buyers, you increase the market even a little? You could do two million a year…pay it off in even less time.”

I have no idea what to say. What do you say to an offer like this? You go in to buy a Chrysler and they try to sell you the whole lot, the whole company? “This is why you had me out here? To try to sell me your drug business?”

“The four million includes equipment, property, plants, everything,” Monte says. “And two weeks of transition and training.”

“And you’re not just buying a business.” Dave says. “You get all of Monte’s knowledge, his accounts, access to markets. You get an experienced lawyer-me. And Monte will agree to a noncompete clause so you don’t have to worry that he’ll just go start up another operation somewhere.”

I stare at them. They’re serious. “Look, guys. Even if I was interested, which I’m definitely not, I don’t know what makes you think I have four million dollars sitting around.”

Dave has a quick answer for this. “Monte would carry the contract. I’d arrange it through a foreign bank. You put something down as good faith, say fifteen percent, and after that, Monte gets a percentage of your sales until you pay it off. It would be like making payments, like any home purchase, except rather than paying your mortgage off in thirty years, you could pay if off in four or five. And make a sweet living in the meantime. Tax free.”

“If it’s such a sweet living, why is he selling?”

I think Monte might cry. He shoots a quick glance at Dave and then says, “I’m tired,” his voice cracking. “I’ve been doing this six years. It wears on you. It’s a young man’s game.”

Dave puts a hand on Monte’s arm. Don’t mess this up. “It does wear on you…but while you’re enduring the stress, you can make a lot of money. We’ve managed to put away well over a million dollars for Monte’s retirement.”

It’s quiet in the kitchen, long enough for the irony to register: I’ve been working in the “legitimate economy” for twenty-some years and my retirement amounts to four hundred bucks in the bank and the two-and-a-quarter pounds of knock-off weed I have to come back here tomorrow to pick up.

Monte nods. “I’m going to Mexico. I’m freaked out by the di

rection of the country. I think we’re headed toward global socialism. This isn’t the America I grew up in.”

I just stare. The high is descending on me like drawn curtains. I smile. What do you say to a drug dealer afraid of socialism?

Monte shifts in his big parka. “I want to spend the money I’ve made but I don’t want what I’ve built to fall apart. I’m proud of it.” He looks at the door. “Chet wants it, but he’d be in jail two weeks after I left.” Monte leans forward to confide in me. “He’s kind of a moron.”

Jamie laughs.

“Why me?”

“Monte has wanted to get out for a while,” Dave says. He shrugs. “He has some stress issues, anxiety attacks.”

“I can’t sleep anymore,” Monte says, and his eyes tear up. “I had a nervous breakdown.”

Perfect business for me.

Dave goes on: “So when Jamie told us he met a businessman who could buy real weight, we talked about it, and I said, ‘Hey…maybe this is our guy. He seems perfect for it.’”

It makes me realize just how low I’ve sunk in my unemployed funk, that it’s actually flattering to hear that I’m perfect for something, anything-even a drug operation. “First of all, I’m not a businessman. I was a business reporter. Look, I never made more than sixty thousand a year in my job.”

Monte and Dave look at one another; slight winces.

“And I don’t even have a job right now.”

“You’ll find something,” says Jamie. “You’re smart.”