Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

Just like that. Easy. Maybe I’ve found my calling.

I meet M-in the parking garage of the newspaper. I don’t have a parking pass anymore so I have to walk in. M-is waiting by his car, wearing his fey 1940s newspaper editor uniform, gray suit, suspenders, fedora. He has a small twitch in the corner of his lying mouth, which is perfectly framed by his pencil-thin beard. M-looks around the parking garage and makes a Deep Throat joke. I pretend to laugh. It’s cold and gray all around us. He holds out three fifties even though I told him two hundred. Is he really low-balling me? Guy’s an asshole to the end. Still, I give him one ounce in a sandwich bag. I’d sell at a loss to get this asshole. He closes his eyes, smells it. Smiles.

I collect the money with the hand wearing the bright watch.

“I’m looking forward to this,” he says. “My first newspapering job, we got high in the darkroom every afternoon. Everyone got high then.” And then, perhaps worried that I’m judging him, he adds: “Nobody had kids.” Shrugs. “It was the seventies.” Smiles wistfully. “It was a different time, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” God, I want out of there. I feel sick…can’t spend another second near this guy. “Call me if you need more.” My hands are shaking.

“I might do that.” The pot disappears in his coat. “I’m going to have some time on my hands. Have you heard? I’m leaving, too. I quit rather than be a part of this any longer.”

“No. I hadn’t heard,” I say, though I have heard, of course. And I also know that he’s really being forced out. But unlike the scores of people he slagged, M-gets to go out on his own terms, probably with a bonus. A guy like him saves the suits a few hundred grand by marching good people into the wood chipper, then gets to pretend he quit in indignation (even though he stuck around to do the layoffs first, protecting his Vichy loyalists to the end) so he can save face and go around speaking in front of college classes and journalism groups, eventually getting another job ruining some other newspaper.

M-nods, and seems to take my silence for sympathy, which I’m in no danger of actually feeling. “I’ll be okay, though,” he says. “I can always teach. And maybe there are still papers out there looking for a good old-fashioned newspaperman.”

With his last ship still listing in the bay, Queeg wants another one. I suppress a scoff.

Meanwhile M-is warming to our postwar camaraderie. “So you’re out there…in the world. What’s the job market like for old ink-stained pros like us?”

Us. “I don’t know…if you’re willing to work…there’s always something. In fact, I picked up a little freelance work today.”

He smiles wearily and I think his eyes rim with tears. “That’s great, Matt. I’m happy for you.”

I have to look away to keep the sympathy from welling up in me.

“I don’t mind telling you, I’m a little bit scared,” M-says, and tightens his scarf. “Fifty-six? And no job?” He wipes at his eyes. “What if it’s…you know, the end?”

I don’t say anything.

“Well.” He pulls the bag of weed from his coat and smells it again. “Thanks for this, Matt. I think it’s going to help.” And then he puts his pot away again and considers me seriously. “It’s too bad you and I didn’t spend more time together.”

“Well…” I twitch and shudder, glance at my glowing watch and hear myself laugh maniacally again. “Never too late to start!”

I AM OH-2 THE VENGEFUL

Wiretapping angel of fury

Be prepared to meet your maker

Or at least a federal grand jury

The guy who talked me into refinancing last year, John Denham, no longer works for the mortgage company in the mini-mall next to the tanning salon. In fact, John’s mortgage company is no longer a mortgage company but an empty storefront-as is the tanning salon. In fact, this whole mini-mall appears to be on its way to becoming surface parking.

Mark Akenside, sly salesman who bait-and-switched us into the more expensive Maxima, also escapes CI OH-2. He no longer works for the Nissan dealer, and neither does Dodsley, his old manager, the capo who dry-sold us winter floor mats. “It’s been a bloodbath this fall,” a surviving car salesman confides, staring out at a savannah of starving sedans.

Fine. There are others. Always others. It’s Friday, so I find our old phony Aussie real estate agent, Thomas Otway, running an open house on a foothills cul de sac.

“’Ello, mite,” he says when I come into the blond-wood foyer. “I ’ope you’re ready to see the house-a-yah drimes.” He sweeps his arm toward a living room tastefully appointed in French Colonial furniture, with a grand staircase and a completely updated kitchen.

“Oh, it looks like a dream all right,” I say. And then I smile and explain that we already bought one dream from him.

“Oh?” Thomas doesn’t remember me. In fact, he doesn’t seem to register people at all, any more than a reef shark notes the kind of fish it’s eating. But he does remember the house when I describe it. “Ah, yeah. A tudah, on almost a half-acah. Go’geous home. Only drawback was the neighbah-hood school if I remembah roight.”

Oh, you remember roight.

Thomas Otway’s skin is perfect. He has longish, soap opera styled hair, light brown with crazy yellow highlights, and besides affecting more accent earlier in the sales process, he apparently frosts his locks, too, and I begin to imagine a system for determining who I’ll entrap, giving points for various crimes against humanity: Real estate, or any kind of predatory salesmanship, is four points. Fake or affected accents? Two points. Frosted hair? Four points. Right away, without even knowing if he beats his kids or fails to stop at red lights, the bastard’s at ten, which will be the threshold for incurring the wrath of CI OH-2.

No, I’m not bad at this. For one thing, it’s easier to bring the subject up than I thought it would be. The key is patience. So I let Thomas show me around the house, pretending to be interested in the lush runner carpets on the wood-floor hallways, the limited edition lithographs on the walls, the horrid Chihuly blown-glass chandelier. I think the transcribed wire in this case could be used to train other informants:

CI OH-2: It’s certainly bigger than it looks from the outside.

Suspect 2: Mite, this house has 3,600 square feet on two floors.

CI OH-2 : Wow. And does that include the basement?

Suspect 2: No, bisement’s unfinished.

CI OH-2 : Good, because I have big plans for the basement.

Suspect 2: Pehfect for a home gym, roight?

CI OH-2 : Actually I might put a grow room down there.

Suspect 2 : What? You serious?

CI OH-2: Serious as a bloody reef shark. Why, do you smoke, Thomas?

“Sure.” Thomas smiles out one side of his mouth. “I used to,” he says.

“You should try this stuff I have. It’s killer.”

Thomas stares at me for a long second before shaking off the temptation. “Nah. I’m try-ning fur a meer-athon. I’m a runnah. That stuff…bad for the lungs, roight? But listen-” He looks around, then leans in close. “I don’t suppose you can get your hands on some coceene?”

Side-note for my handlers, Randy and Lt. Reese: you have got to get me some coke.

I check my glowing watch as I drive out of the cul de sac, through the splotches in my exhausted eyes. School’s almost out. Work’s done for the day.

I never thought I’d like working in sales, but it is strangely satisfying getting people to do what you want. And I’m not just working; Randy says I’m doing something for society and maybe I am, in my way-ridding the world of parasitic, layoff-happy newspaper editors and asshole real estate agents, home-wreckers and tailgaters and people who speed on residential streets, all the pho