Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

It might make me angry if I drove by the house and saw for myself, but since my car went back to the bank I travel by bus now and it would take at least one transfer and…I don’t know…I guess the truth is that I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be reminded of all that I lost, all that I gave away. I slowly replace the furniture that we lost or sold at our garage sale with second-hand stuff; I hook the boys’ Wii up to an old 19-inch TV. After our second dinner with the boys-fish sticks and fries-Lisa teases me about my latest purchase: an orange couch with cigarette marks on the arms. I explain they were out of moss green, cigarette-burned couches. The apartment’s best feature is a balcony, which is built at tree-level, and when we’re done with dinner we move our chairs

out there and sit. I tell Lisa that I can’t wait for spring, to sit out there and watch the boys ride their bikes. She smiles politely.

On the grass in front of our triplex is the big wooden Frontier Fort, which I had moved over from the house. The boys hardly ever play in it but there are two rotten neighbor boys who are younger (and who swear like teenagers) and they seem to like it. And I like having it there.

Teddy hates sharing a room, but I think Franklin likes it. He sleeps better with someone else in the room. Every morning I walk them to school, and then take the bus to Earl Ruscom’s real estate office building, where he’s opened the little headquarters of Biz-Daily Online (I was able to talk him out of the awful name Can-Do Times) in a little twelve-by-twenty room, consisting of-for now-two desks and a white board. When I accepted the job I had to admit to Earl that I’d been arrested and charged with possessing and intending to deliver marijuana. Earl’s eyes narrowed and I steeled myself for trouble. “No shit? You were dealing weed?” Then he leaned in close. “Can you still get some?” I told him that I couldn’t. He hired me anyway.

My old dying newspaper just keeps laying people off-half the staff is now gone, including Ike, who has gone back to school to be a teacher-so there’s no shortage of writers for me to hire to do upbeat freelance stories for almost no money. In spite of Earl’s mandate that we write “positive business stories,” we find ourselves doing a lot of stories about businesses going under. I think we might last a couple of years ourselves before Earl gets tired of losing money and I have to write a cheerful story about our own demise.

Every time I take the bus to work, I recall how our old house was around the corner from a bus stop, how I used to watch that big bifurcated bus roll past every day without giving it much thought; I certainly never thought I’d be on it. I do remember

seeing people at the stop and sometimes I’d catch their eyes, think vague thoughts about their lives, and get a surge of my old atrophying empathy. What were their lives like? Was it awful to be so poor? I’d see kids sitting with their parents, waiting for the bus, and I’d feel worst about my own pity for them, my passing-by-at-forty-miles-an-hour-in-heated-leather-seat pity.

The first time I waited for the bus I felt self-conscious, as if I were watching myself with that same pitiful detachment. A car went by my stop and I saw myself in a woman’s eyes as she passed: Look at that poor guy in the nice wool coat. What do you suppose happened to him? Could it ever happen to my husband? On the bus that day, I sat next to a large woman reading a pulpy novel. I started to read over her shoulder-I couldn’t help it; it was a sex scene-but she moved the book. It felt as if everyone on the bus saw through me.

At the next stop a woman, maybe nineteen, got on, followed by a little boy no more than four, and a rail-thin man with the gapped smile of a meth-user. The boy had one glove on his right hand and was holding up his left hand-red, bare and cold-while his mother finished a lecture that must have started long before they got on.

“Because I told you not to lose it, that’s why! Gloves ain’t free, TJ. That’s your last pair for the whole winter. You just gonna have to wear that one.”

“I don’t know what happened to it,” the boy said with great wonder. “It was on my hand.”

“Well it ain’t now,” his mother said. They moved down the aisle toward the back of the bus, mother in front, boy in the middle, father behind, and as they passed me, the little boy turned back to his father. They were in this together. “It’s okay, Dad,” said TJ. “Look.” He smiled at his own cleverness. “I got pockets.” And he shoved his bare hand in his pants pocket.

The father put his hand on his son’s head and made eye contact

with me, smiled proudly, and I swear to God I have never felt such shame-such deep, cleansing shame. I put my judgmental face in my spoiled hands and I wept quietly. The woman with the sexy book got up and moved to another seat.

Christ. It is the only unforgivable thing, really…to feel sorry for yourself.

The next day I took a pair of Franklin’s old gloves and put them in my messenger bag. I carry those gloves in my bag every day now, but of course I’ve yet to see TJ or his dad. In the meantime, whenever I feel like a failure-not an uncommon feeling-I take those gloves out of my bag, imagine that father touching his boy’s head and hope I’m half as good a man.

After being assessed by the nursing home, my own good father has been moved to the memory unit. It’s paid for by Medicare and his VA benefits. I’m not going to pretend that he’s happy-but he has his remote and one of the cable networks has begun showing The Rockford Files every day at 11 a.m. Dad has built his day around that. His clear memories come in fainter now…I wonder if he might be better off when they don’t come in at all. One day Lisa offers to pick Dad up and bring him over for dinner. I gladly accept. On Dad’s second visit, she even cooks, makes him chipped beef; but he asks her not to make it anymore. Says he doesn’t like it.

What he does like is the treeless tree fort. He and I sit on the balcony and watch the cursing neighbor boys climb around on it, Dad laughing every time they swear: Fuck you, Travis! Fuck you, Alvin. Dad loves this show; he doubles over like Travis and Alvin are Martin and Lewis, funniest thing he’s ever heard.

Teddy and Franklin go to a little public school four blocks away but I made sure the new apartment was in a better district than the little Sing-Sing school in our old neighborhood. The boys seem okay with their new school. They miss their friends but they

love not wearing uniforms. There’s even a Math-Quest team at the public school.

Biz-Daily exists only online for the first month, but when we finally finish our first print issue, the thing is gorgeous. We sell out of it. I can even imagine the thing making money someday-if companies can ever afford to advertise again. In the back of our first printed edition are two features that I pushed hard for, both of which turn out to be popular, the Stoned Stock Analyst, in which I make random picks under the pseudonym Jay Wollie (he’s already up four percent by pushing fast food stocks), and The Poetfolio, which I write under my own name:

Recovery

We’re like bored ghosts-over our horror

as we wait for dispensation

on the hard wooden pews

of bankruptcy court

and next to me

this old ruddy trader

who’s been reading the paper

whistles at something in the stock pages.

“If only,” he says, “I had about twenty G’s”

and I complete: “you wouldn’t be here?”

but he slaps at the paper, “No, look

don’t you see, it’s already

here-the next thing…” and I’ll be