Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

I laugh and rub my brow, sort of touched by Jamie’s confidence in me. “Shouldn’t you guys…I don’t know…sell to criminals?”

“You can’t just look up the Russian mob in the Yellow Pages,” Dave says. “And you can’t put something like this on craigslist.

And most of our customers-” He glances at Jamie “-aren’t the kind of people who could come up with that kind of money.”

I look from red face to red face. Fat Monte: confused, a little paranoid, flushed. Pocked Dave: intent, brewing, scheming. Jamie: chewing gum.

And I think of…Lisa. She loves to shop for houses we can’t afford. On weekends she used to like going to open houses for two- and three-million-dollar homes. We’d park down the block so they couldn’t see we were driving a Nissan and we’d try to look like BMW people, and then we’d walk through these big, grand homes and pretend to be considering whether the indoor lap pool was big enough for our kids (when they came home from boarding school); whether the subzero refrigerator and double Viking commercial oven would work for the gourmet meals our staff prepared for dinner parties with our country club friends. (I’d occasionally crack from the pressure and say something stupid: “I like the double oven; we could put fish sticks on one side and crinkle fries on the other.”) Lisa was the master at looking these shit-for-sure real estate agents in the eye, conveying, You bet your ass we belong. In fact, she always looks like she belongs. Maybe I just miss her, but I find myself wishing she was with me on this conversation, helping me seem as if I can afford a four-million-dollar grow operation.

I don’t know whether I’m afraid of endangering my drug purchase, or hurting the feelings of my sensitive dealers, or whether I want to be the successful businessman they mistook me for-or I’m just high again-but I find myself feigning interest. I pull the two-page prospectus from the envelope. The first thing I see is a kind of quarterly report, including a graph with three bars-sales in blue, gross earnings in black and net profit in green. As a business reporter, I saw enough of these to know a real winner when I see one. That green bar rises above the skyline like the Sears

Tower. I flip to the next page…see assets dwarf liabilities and expenses. The return on investment is insane.

Dave leans in over my shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking.”

I look up into Dave’s acne-scarred face.

“You’re thinking, too bad we can’t take this public.”

When he thinks I’ve had enough time, Dave takes the prospectus from my hand. “Slippers, this is the kind of opportunity that comes once in a lifetime. Ask yourself this: ‘Who gets to buy a potential two-million-dollar-a-year business for four million?’ You think Jack Welch wouldn’t jump at this? Or Warren Buffett?”

And this is when I finally crack…go all fish-sticks-and-crinkle-fries…burst into laughter. The idea of Warren Buffett owning a grow operation gets me. I can’t do the Lisa-at-the-mansion feint, can’t pretend this makes sense. I’m too high, too tired, unraveling and I simply don’t have it. “Guys, I appreciate you thinking of me, but even if it wasn’t crazy…fifteen percent down is still, what, six hundred thousand? Look, that nine grand I just gave you, Monte? That’s all the money I have. In four days, they’re coming after my house. Which bank do you suggest I go to for this? Which bank specializes in half-million-dollar loans to homeless guys looking to buy hydroponic grow operations?”

Monte looks stung. “I know it seems like a lot.” Again those cheeks flush. The man is so vulnerable. It’s heartbreaking. He is Piggy, Drug Lord of the Flies. “Dave said it might be hard to raise that kind of cash in this economy. Dave thought you might be able to, you know, put together a-” He glances over at his high school buddy “-a contortion?”

“A consortium,” Dave says weakly, to his shoes, embarrassed by Monte’s slipup.

“Right,” says Monte, “a consortium.”

I am sitting in front of the most hapless drug dealers in the

world. “A consortium,” I say, full of sympathy, and again, strangely flattered that-to these guys-I look like the kind of person who could put together a bowling team, let alone a four-million-dollar consortium. “Look guys. I’m going to be absolutely clear with you here. There is no way I’m going to buy a four-million-dollar grow operation-”

“Okay, okay,” Dave says, and for the first time I see something else on his face; thin-lipped and arms crossed, he is pissed off. “We get it.” He stands and shoves his chair toward the table. And then he turns back. “Three-point-eight?”

IN MONTE’S FIELDS THE sweet weed grows

On a basement farm where row by row

Water courses through plastic tubes

Feeding unlikely dreams of rescue:

Roughly four million dollars in B.C. bone

Who knows what it is that causes the world to seem benevolent: you rise in the morning and it just feels like something has lifted, some weight. Everything that yesterday looked terrifying today seems benign, maybe even munificent. There’s a certain slant of light, or the turning of those red leaves…or it could be the last of a good buzz or simple brain chemistry; hard to say. Whatever it is, I sit up on the basement couch curled beneath an afghan-I can’t say that I wake, really, since I only slept an hour or so-and my eyes land on a small painting that Lisa and I bought years ago at a little gallery, and for the first time in weeks I feel…hopeful. Clear. The painting is the style that Lisa and I both like-not quite abstract but not overtly figurative either, in between: there appears to be a couple standing near a road, and I don’t know why I missed it before, but now it’s obvious to me: the man in the painting is reaching for the woman.

I walk over and lightly touch one of the squalls of paint on the dry warm canvas-all reds and oranges and browns-and then I climb the basement stairs and glance outside; it’s beautiful out there, trees emerging from leafy cover like the bones of an old ship. Dad stirs on the living room hide-a-bed, and I hear Lisa and the boys upstairs, getting ready for work and for school and it sounds so wonderful, so sweet; is it possible to fall in love with your own life?

It’s not that I’ve caught up on my sleep-other than the thirty-minute nap in Drug Dealer Dave’s car and a quick hour this morning, I haven’t really had any. It just feels as if there has been a slight turn in events, a gentle shift in my direction…a clearing, so that I get a glimpse of the other side of this storm.

It certainly isn’t Lisa’s reaction that cheers me; she turns away on the stairs, as pissed off as I’ve ever seen her. I was hoping that she’d assume my “sleeping” in the basement was a way of giving her some respectful space. But Lisa is seething-greedily anticipating more space between us. I volunteer to make pancakes for the boys and she wordlessly heads back upstairs to finish getting ready for work. I try to catch her eye as she leaves, to give her a short shrug of apology for ambushing her with guilt last night. She wants no part of me.

And it’s not Franklin who turns my mood, either, because he’s pretending to be too sick to go to school. “You know what I think?” I ask, pulling a 98.8 digital thermometer from his downturned mouth. “I think you’re worried about seeing Elijah, or that Ms. Bishop will still be disappointed in you. But listen, you have to face your fears, Frankie. You have to look them in the eye and say, “I can handle you.” Franklin gives me the first of what will likely be thousands of rolled eyes, and heads upstairs to brush his teeth.