The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter Meet Matt Prior. He's about to lose his job, his wife, his house, maybe his mind. Unless . In the winning and utterly original novels Citizen Vince and The Zero, Jess Walter ("a ridiculously talented writer" - New York Times) painted an America all his own: a land of real, flawed, and deeply human characters coping with the anxieties of their times. Now, in his warmest, funniest, and best novel yet, Walter offers a story as real as our own lives: a tale of overstretched accounts, misbegotten schemes, and domestic dreams deferred. A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of lank verse. When his big idea - and his wife's eBay resale business - ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana? Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all my problems? Following Matt in his weeklong quest to save his marriage, his sanity, and his dreams, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a hysterical, heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin - and how we can begin to make our way back. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jess Walter is the author of The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award; Citizen Vince, a winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Land of the Blind; and Over Tumbled Graves, A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family. PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R orl, England Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada).90 Eglinton Avenue East,Suite 7oo,Toronto, Ontario.Canada m4p 2y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi -. 110 0.7, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R orl, England www.penguin.com First published in the USA by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2009 First published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 2010 Copyright ©Jess Walter, 2009 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn: 978-0-141-04913-7 For Anne, always Penguin Books is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. The book in your hands is made from paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Poets have to dream, and dreaming in America is no cinch. —Saul Bellow CHAPTER I Another 711 -Here they are again--the bent boys, baked and buzzed boys, wasted, red-eyed, dry-mouth high boys, coursing narrow bright aisles hunting food as fried as they are, twitchy hands wadding bills they spill on the counter, so pleased and so proud, as if they're the very inventors of stoned-- And behind the counter, the ever-patient Rahjiv makes half lidded eye contact with me as he rings up another patchouli-foul giggler--It. Reese's Pieces, Pic-6 Lotto, Red Bull and a cheddar jack tacquito--Rahjiv probably thinking: These kids, eh Matt--or maybe not, because Rahjiv doesn't know my name and I don't wear a nametag. I'm just the middle-aged guy who leaves my gunmetal sedan running when I come in after midnight. When I can't sleep. And I've forgotten to get milk at a regular store. Milk for the kids' cereal. In the morning. Before school. The milk is like nine dollars a gallon. For years, recent immigrants like Rahjiv have been a political Rorschach: see turban, think terrorist and you're a Red 'Merican. Assume Indian neurosurgeon fluent in five languages, stuck serving morons at midnight for minimum wage, and you're Blue, like me. Of course I have no more proof that Rahjiv was a doctor in Delhi than some Texas trucker does that he's a bomber. Rahjiv may have jockeyed a 711 in India too for all we know--so impeccable is he with change, effortlessly plastic-bagging Hostess Sno Balls and Little Debbies, Power Bars and Mountain Dews--"No wait . . . dude. Chocolate milk! And pork rinds"--as yet another stoner reassesses the aisles--"And ooh, ooh! Cool Ranch Doritos!" Whenever I come in here, I invariably think of my own boys, at home asleep in their beds, still a few years from such trouble (or do they already dream of midnight at the Slurpee machine?). Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet. The fat one juggles a half-rack of malt-liquor forties while his partner rolls away to yell in his cell, "Chulo! Don' do shit 'til we get there, yo." The door closes behind the cell-phoned gangbanger and I'm finally at the front of this line with my milk--"Hey Rahjiv"--when something goes terribly wrong at the soda fountain and the clerk and I turn together, drawn by a hydroponic squeal from deep inside the cave of a blue hoody. A pierced, lank-haired skater, board strapped to his back, has spilled his 72-ounce Sprite and now believes it is . . . the funniest . . .fucking . . . thing . . . in the world, and Rahjiv nods wearily at me again, no doubt wishing he were back cutting craniums at Mumbai General. He casually swings my jug past the scanner. Then he hands me my milk. For the boys. For their cereal. In the morning. It's like nine dollars a gallon. I also think of my mother when I come in here. She was dying several years back and became obsessed with the terrorist attacks in New York. I hated that she should be so wracked with random anxieties as she wasted away, thumb jacking the morphine pump like it could save her life--it couldn't--her fear of dying manifested as a fear of things she had no reason to fear anymore: random crime, global warming . . . and most of all, terrorists on airplanes. "Matt?" she asked right before she died, "Do you think there will be another 711?" I thought about correcting her, but I just said, "No, Mom, there won't be any more 711s." "Nice slippers, yo," says the cell-phone banger when I come outside with my milk. He's twenty or so, in a sagging shark-colored tracksuit, black hair combed straight over his ears, elaborate tattoo rising out of his shirt at the base of his neck. And right out in the open, in front of this convenience store, he conveniently offers me a hit on a glass blunt, a little marijuana pipe shaped like a cigarette. I wave it off, but sort of wish I hadn't--it's been at least fifteen years, but I didn't just spring from some relaxed-waisted suburbia with a Stoli martini in hand; I had my moments. In college they used to call me Weedeater because I devoured those Acapulco Gold joints, incense burning, black light on the walls, Pink Floyd thrumming down the dorm floor-- Oh, and they're not technically "slippers," but a casual loafer I got at the Nordstrom Rack with a gift certificate when I returned a cardigan that made me look like my grandfather. Of course I don't tell the stoned kid that, I just smile and say, "No thanks," but then I pause to get a closer look, instead of continuing on to my car. Maybe I'm just curious about this clever pipe or maybe it's the smell of the weed or maybe it's just this swiveling looseness I'm feeling, but I'm still in mid-pause when the fatter white gangster joins us, flat-brimmed ball cap worn sidesaddle, and now there are three of us standing in a little semicircle, as if waiting for a tee time. "Hey," says the one with the neck tattoo and the blunt, "dude here can give us a ride to the party." And I'm about to say I can't give them a ride because I've got to get home (and they look mildly dangerous) when fat-in-the-hat says, "Thanks, man," like he's surprised I'd be so cool and suddenly I want to be that cool. And then the fat kid looks down at my hands, and laughs. "Damn, man. Why you buy your milk here? Shit's like nine dollars a gallon." The clouds are low, like a drop ceiling suffused with light from the city. They slide silently overhead. And two dope-smoking bangers in tracksuits climb into my car. I read once that we can only fear what we're already afraid of; that our deepest fears are the memory of some earlier, unbearable fear. If that's true, then maybe it's a good thing my mother never lived to see another 711. "This a nice ride." "Thanks." "Seats heated?" "Mmm." "Feels funny. Like I pissed my pants." "You pro'ly did piss your pants, yo." "I'll turn it down." "What kind-a-car is this?" "Nissan. Maxima." "How much 'at set you back?" "Oh. Not much." But this isn't true. With the winter floor mats, taxes and redundant two-year service contract, the car set me back $31,256. And because of several other recent setbacks--missed payments, ensuing penalties, house refi's, debt consolidations, various family crises and my untimely job loss--after two years of payments I still somehow owe $31,000. On a car worth eighteen. This is my life now: set as far back as it will go. "My brother boosted a Maxima once," says the kid from the backseat. "Or an Altima. I can't keep 'em straight." Car thieves. Nice. The criminals' names are Skeet and Jamie. "Jamie?" I ask the kid in front. "Yeah right, no shit, huh?" says Skeet from the backseat. "Dude's got like a chick's name, don't he?" i "Eat me, Skeet," Jamie says, and he offers me the blunt again and I surprise myself by taking it this time; I just want the smallest taste of that sweet smoke, or maybe I want to make sure they haven't done anything new to the pot. . . . Oh, but they have! I suppress a cough. Nose runs. Eyes burn. Someone is composting leaves in my throat. Scraping my lungs with a shovel. Wow. "Good, huh?" asks Jamie. I hack: "Not bad." "Shit's designer. Like three hunnerd an ounce," Skeet says. The next roll of coughs I can't suppress. "Really?" "Definitely," Jamie explains, voice lilting with excitement. "In this lab in British Columbia? This Nobel Prize dude? He Frankensteined that shit? It's knock-off, but shit's still pretty good. They can do whatever they want to it, you know? Make it do a thousand different things to your mind, yo." And I think that must be true, because a couple of old dorm floor hits later my brain springs a leak and my life seems to trickle out, as I tell Jamie and Skeet my whole story: how I left a good job as a business reporter two years ago to start an unlikely poetryand-investment website, how we got buried in the housing collapse just as my senile father moved in, how I scrambled back to my old newspaper job, only to get laid off eight weeks ago. How I got fourteen weeks of severance from the paper, and have six weeks left to find a job, because fourteen minus eight is six. How last week it was seven, next week it will be five, but right now, at this moment, with Skeet in the backseat and Jamie in front, right now, as of this . . . very moment--and I hold the smoke in my chest as if I can make this moment forever--Hooooo-- "It's six. Six weeks." And that's not even my most pressing deadline; I have all of seven days to liquidate my retirement and pay off a $30,000 balloon payment to the mortgage company, or risk losing our house. And it is this second deadline, I tell the boys, that has given my job search such throat-constricting immediacy, as I worry over thinning want ads, shakily fill out applications and hope my references still have the positions I've listed on my resume, and how--this part has just occurred to me--I've gone and added another stress to a very shitty situation, because "Even if I do somehow get a job interview now, they'll probably make me take a--" "--drug test!" Skeet yells from the backseat, and he laughs and I laugh and he laughs and I stop laughing and he keeps laughing. "Don't freak, Slippers," Jamie says, "there's a million ways to beat a piss test." "Pecans," says Skeet from the backseat. "Pecans?" Jamie turns back. "Didn't I read about some kind-a pecan diet in O?" "How the fuck I know what you read? An' what the fuck Oprah be writin' about how to pass a drug test?" "Dude, Oprah don't write O. She just own that shit." "And what the fuck you be doin' readin' it?" "My moms reads that shit, yo. . . . An' I don't know, maybe it was in People!' "So what the fuck the pecans do?" "The fuck I'm supposed to know what the pecans do! Clean up your piss or somefin'." "You crazy, motherfucker." "You crazy." "You crazy." "You crazy." "You so crazy you took the short bus to school." "You know that shit was behavioral, yo." And I must be high because this conversation makes sense. Jamie waves Skeet off and faces forward again. "Don't listen to that shit, Slippers. Here's all you gotta do for that piss test. Get some of them pills. You know, online?" Not you too, Jamie. Don't fall for the online lie--that everything we need is available at the click of a keystroke: all that shimmering data, the dating habits of the famous, videos of fat people falling down, porn . . . investment poetry . . . job listings, foreclosure information, poverty advice . . . and what about the thing my wife has begun seeking online? But before I get too deep into a new round of self-pity, Jamie offers a lilting anecdote: "You could do what my cousin Marshall did? Fucker wore a catheter? Connected to a baggy? With some other dude's piss in it? And now he screens luggage at the airport? And he's up for a supervisor job with the NTSA? And a security clearance? I shit you not, Dude's got someone who warns him about random tests, and he keeps that catheter full of someone else's whiz right there in his locker? And when he hears about tests, dude loads that shit up." In the rearview, I see Skeet drink directly from my milk carton. Hey. That was like nine dollars a gallon. Very good pot. Far better than the dusty brown ragweed we smoked in college. And I think of my mother again, and the trouble we had at Christmas break my freshman year when she was doing laundry and found a single joint amid the pennies and pocket lint of my 50l's--she hated the sound of change rattling in her dryer-- and I tried to convince her it was a rolled up note from a friend and she asked if I thought she was stupid and I said No, even though I was eighteen so of course my mother was stupid, and my parents were still together then but she never told my father about the joint, and I feel awful about her being so decent when I was such a shit; I feel awful for everything I did and everything I didn't do, and I miss her terribly, although it's probably good she's not here because I couldn't bear for her to hear about Jamie's cousin Marshall screening bags. . . pissing someone else's piss as he watches for shoe bombs and keeps us safe from the dudes planning another 711. No, it's exceptional pot-- And the party ... is not a party the way I remember parties but eight young guys, short and fat and tall and lean, black, brown, white, rejected Abercrombie models standing in a flower bed outside an apartment building across from a closed pizza place, smoking and laughing and drinking malt-liquor forties, talking in likes and shits and dudes, and I fit in fine, although I can't remember when I gave Skeet my slippers--but he's wearing them, dude drinking from my milk jug--and I'm in my socks, sucking that blunt like a scuba diver on an air hose as I track conversations that mean nothing to me: music I've never heard, and "skankass trippy chicks" I don't know, someone's "bus'-up ride"--and I gather from these conversations that my new friends are between nineteen and twenty-two, have a few community college credits, some minimum-wagey part-timey jobs, a possession charge or five, and I think about the semicircle that I used to make with the old neck-tied newspaper hacks in the newsroom around the 5 p.m. TV news, arms crossed, talking in our own code about our wives and our cars, about flacks and blogs and the Dow, and I think maybe the world is made up of little circles like this one and that one, that maybe there's no fundamental difference between the circles except the codes for the shared bits of data, that somewhere a pack of plotting terrorists is standing in their own little circle, bouncing on cold feet and ululating not about the great American devil but about Ahmed's skank-ass trippy girlfriend and Mahmoud's bus' ride, and that's when I picture my boys again, one day standing in their own circle, generational losers smoking ever-improving weed and talking about their loser dad who went in the tank after getting run in the Great Recession or whatever they'll call it in the history books, or the history MP3 files and Christ, I'm only forty-six ... I don't want to entertain such grandpa-thought, but I feel so old, so unemployed, outdated, dead technology, impotent scrap-heap, unraveling, unraveling, unrav-- "Wait," one of the felons interrupts my time-dilated self-pity; it's tattoo-necked Jamie, the reliable one, quiet leader, and he leans in close: "Dude! Aren't you . . . like. Starving?" And the thing is, bouncing on soaked socked feet outside this apartment building, blowing on cold hands that seem to belong to someone else, thinking of my sons at home in bed and the many ways I can still let them down, it's true-- Yes! I am so! Starving! But maybe we're all starving hungry for the warm lights and tight aisles of nacho-corn- sour-cream-onion-and-chive- barbecue-goodness--and again I drive my boys, Skeet and Jamie --And I'm hypnotized by the set of cat-eyed taillights I'm ordered to follow as we arrive--because where else can you find the hungry, a community of the hungry--you tail the dude in the tricked-out Festiva--damn he drive well--and that smell? Dude! says Jamie, and Skeet laughs proudly and Jamie says, Lay off the milk, Skeet! and I crack with laughter as Jamie explains, Dude's lactoseinfuckin'tolerant yo--to the flat green and orange stripes--the sheer hot white light goodness of. . . . . . another 711. And here I am, just like my mother feared, stoned off my nut, unemployed, a week from losing my house and maybe my wife and kids, and I file in with my new friends, as per--(1) banger in sweats (2) dude in baggie jeans (3) kid in hoodie (4) another banger in sweats (and my slippers) and finally (5) middle-aged unemployed man in Chinos, pea coat, golf shirt and wet socks--and yes, Mom, in a perfect world, we could find an open grocery, but there are simply going to be times when you must go out in the world, into the dark uneasy dangerous places and so I go. . . . Straight to the freezer case and a siren of a meat-and-bean burrito which I tear into, unwrap and microwave--bouncing in squishy socks, watching that thing turn under the light like baby Jesus in an incubator--and that's when Skeet freaks, he completely freaks! loses it! "Turn it off, man! That shit's poison, man! They're nukin' us with that shit, turning us into radiated zombies!" Jamie trying to calm the poor kid through gritted teeth, "Chill, man," but Skeet won't chill, he just screams and points at the humming microwave oven as the clerk, this store's Rahjiv yells: "Get that trippin' guy outta here before I call the cops!" And everyone's yelling, "Chill, man, chill!" and "What else he on?" and "He always be trippin, yo!" and "Don't call the cops, dude's on probation!" And that's when I remember: I am an adult and I can do . . . something ... I can fix this, protect my boys, make the world okay, and so I grab Skeet by his round shoulders and feel his racing heart, catch his sketchy eyes and say-- "Skeet. Look at me. It's not nuclear radiation. It's just waves. Like sound waves," my voice getting softer, slower: "Tiny . . . waves." A deep breath. "Like good vibrations, right? That's why they call them micro . . . waves. See?" And he's still breathing heavily when I nod and the microwave beeps, and Skeet looks over, still panting. And it's quiet in the store. After a second, Skeet nods back. Smiles. It's gonna be. Okay. And I pat Skeet's shoulder, grab my steaming burrito and get in line to pay--take my place with the starving and the sorry, the paranoid, yawning with fear, the hungry lonely lost children let down by their unemployed fathers, men zapped by history's microwave, a generation of hapless, luckless, feckless fathers with no idea how to fix anything, no clue what to do except go home to face the incubated babies staring at their dry bowls of Crispix and confess-- --Sorry. But Skeet drank all the milk . . . right before he freaked-- Oh, I am such a shit father, shit husband, shit son, shit human being . . . and I've lost my shit job, am losing my shit house, am at the bottom of my shit-self when I glance over at the endless wet roll of the Slurpee machine and it's instantly hypnotic-- Banana-blackraspberry-cherryCoke-pinacolada! So peaceful. Around and around it swirls and I could watch the wet blend of flavors forever--when Jamie sidles up and whispers, "I'm gonna mix em all, man," like a soldier volunteering for a suicide mission. "Go with God," I whisper, and Jamie does, straight to a pinacolada icy blur, and then down the line, cherry Coke, black raspberry, and he smiles back, and I'm insanely proud as I step forward to pay for my burrito, eyes falling on the clerk's wristwatch when . . . for just a second ... I can't tell ... if I've forgotten . . . what the numbers mean, or maybe . . . I'm just imagining . . . what it would be like ... to forget what they mean . . . I spend days staring at this guy's watch before the second hand finally moves--and the position of the hands against the little numbers correlates to a memory of how this particular mechanism works (a memory from kindergarten: Miss Bean in go-go boots standing above me moving the hands of a sun-faced clock)--and I connect the relation of these symbols to a system of tracking the movement of the earth around the sun as across a forest of synapses there sparks a pattern of theoretical constructs (time, space, go-go boots) flaring into an evolutionary fire that represents a near miracle of abstract comprehension, an Einsteinian leap of cognition: It is four-thirty in the morning. That means I can still make it home to watch my boys' last hour of sleep. And in my mind, the Nissan Maxima of my responsibilities follows the Ford Festiva of my unraveling into this convenience store of realization: Hey! This is where they sell more milk! But that shit's like nine dollars a gallon. Outside the store, Skeet and Jamie go off with the dude in the Festiva and I wave goodbye with my new white jug and I am in love with the predawn cool black, in love with my boys, in love with two percent. The drive home is glorious--streetlight rollers like tide at dawn. I blow laughter through my nose. Key in quietly. Like I'm sixteen again. My old senile father is asleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room, TV still on ESPN. This is what we were watching together when I left to get milk . . . almost four hours ago. Dad doesn't stir. I try to take the remote control from him but he's holding it against his cheek like a security blanket, so I turn off the set manually, old school. Every day now they show the top ten sports plays of the day--and I think: what if life was like this, and at bedtime we got to see our own daily highlights (No. 4: Skeet freaks over the microwave). Lug my jug to the kitchen, milk in the door of the fridge--the food inside is also glorious: cheese stick, martini olives--chomp, chomp--I eat shark-like, without conscience, hover upstairs to find Lisa in bed, tousled short hair clinging to the pillow. My wife, she is cute--everyone says so, but lately that word has carried a kind of accusing overtone, as if there might be something unsettling about a grown woman who retains her cuteness well into her forties; and maybe that's our problem, maybe Lisa is too cute, curled up in her cute little ball, cute back to the profoundly un-cute space where I'm not sleeping. Her cute cell phone on her nightstand, where she no doubt set it after TM-ing her old flame ... and I toy with waking her, begging for a little marital goodness--smack, smack-- maybe we can fix this thing the way we fixed problems when we were twenty-seven, but we're in a smack-smack dry spell, and according to an online chat of hers that I reconned earlier, she's not a big Matt fan these days. Anyway, this might not be the best time to win my cute wife back, given my B.C. bud-and-burrito breath, and the fact that I haven't told her that we could lose the house as early as next week. (I imagine breaking it to her as we fire a couple off---Yes, yes, yes! Uh-uh! That-feels-so-goodwe're-about-to be-evicted!) So I step back into the hall; the boys' rooms are across from one another, and I stand between them, fists on my hips. Sentry. Superhero. All I want is to keep them safe, healthy, fed. But with no job? No prospects? No money? No house? What did the man say--There is always hope, but not for us. Mouth dry. Head weighs eighty pounds. I look around at my house--for a while anyway--before it begins its journey back to Providential Equity, or whatever company buys the company that bought the company that bought the bundle of red bills in which ours is bundled. Or is that more melodrama, mere self-pity? (They don't just take your house. They want you to pay. You're just the sort of homeowner they want. They'll do whatever they can to keep you here.) No, all I have to do is liquidate, get some money together, show good faith, get someone from the mortgage lender on the phone and convince them we need a little more time . . . that's all ... a month . . . what's one month ... a single month for a journalist in his mid-forties ... to find a job . . . during a recession . . . with newspapers failing faster than investment banks. I slump against the wall, played out. Who am I kidding? I can't save anyone. Maybe Skeet's right. Maybe they are irradiating us; maybe we're dead already. Mom knew it, that there would always be another 711. And suddenly I understand her fear of terrorism wasn't fear for herself. She wasn't flying on any more airplanes. She was afraid for me, afraid for her kids and her grandkids, for all the hungry, lost boys. Afraid for the world she knew she was leaving. As she lay there dying, she must have realized there was nothing she could do anymore to protect the people she loved. Just as there's nothing I can do for my boys anymore, my boys who will one day freak out alone in the tight warm aisles of a world beyond their understanding. I may as well be dead for all the help I can be to them. (My boys stir, agreeing that it's their scary world now, their hard, hard world: go on, old man; rest now; sleep.) And in my fraying head there plays a news medley of war and instability, financial collapse and bad schools; forbearance, foreclosure, eviction; cynicism, climate crisis, 711--and the melody switches to my personal theme song (Concerto of Failure and Regret in E minor) as the life bleeds out from my feet and puddles in the hallway. . . . And this is when the unlikeliest peace comes, and I smile. Because as fucked as the world is, as grim as the future surely seems to be, as grim as it revealed itself to be for my mother as she lay dying of the tumor that kills us all, there is a truth I cannot deny, a thing no creditor can take; even as my doomed boys stir in the cold unknowing of predawn sleep, even as the very life leaches out of me, soaks into the berber, into the cracks of my arid grave, I must grudgingly admit-- --that was one great goddamn burrito. CHAPTER 2 Giving to Charity "the guy's coming to blow the sprinklers," Lisa says as she blows through the kitchen, in a billowing skirt, and I can barely keep my head up--something I forgot to do? Ah, I remember now: sleep. I forgot to sleep, after I got home high from 711, spending instead the hour before dawn worrying and flipping between CNN and Cartoon Network--endless politics and the Go Go Gophers, international financial crises and Klondike Kat. And apparently I'm still stoned--and a huge proponent of today's weed--big fan. In fact, I wish I could invest in the dude who Frankensteined it up there in B.C. There used to be a cranky old government reporter at my paper named Abe Cowley, who always ranted that "kids now are fucked," because they'd never be able to afford real estate or find jobs--I couldn't always follow his rant- but if it ever comes up again I'll say, Yeah, Abe, you're right, kids today have no future, but Christ, have you tried their pot? At the table Teddy reaches past me for the milk. I think of the hours and brain cells that went into getting that simple white jug and I feel strangely proud. Lisa blows through the kitchen again--we pass like storm fronts now--this time she has her jacket on and she tells me, "Before you take the kids to school, don't forget to turn off the water and roll up the hoses." When I don't say anything, she asks, "Matt?" Beneath the table, I click my heels together. "Jawohl, herr commandant." Note: for future marriage-enriching banter, avoid Nazi humor. Smart, round Teddy slides the milk over to wispy little brother Franklin, who teeters it before finally pouring milk on the counter. He diverts the wayward stream toward the bowl, but it hits his upturned spoon and splashes even more on the counter. Today's milk spill looks like the state of Florida. I grab a dishtowel and sop. "Hell, I can blow out the sprinklers," my daft father says. He's having one of his sharper moments--eyes clear as he stares out the window, gray hair bursting cactus-like off his head. He watches the horizon for something. Grips his spoon over his coffee like a battle knife. Two white pills sit in front of him, right where I left them, Aricept, the medication he takes for his cobwebby memory. "No you can't, Dad." I push Dad's pills closer, wipe milk off Franklin's elbow. Dad pats the pocket where he used to keep his cigarettes. Then he tosses the pills in one side of his mouth and spews anger from the other: "Would you goddamn let me do one thing around here, Matthew!" "I don't think you put the swear word in the right place, Grandpa," Teddy says. When Dad first came here, my boys would look shocked whenever Dad went Old-Faithful-profane, and I began to wonder if Lisa and I shouldn't swear more so Franklin and Teddy weren't so put off by curse words. But they've gotten used to Grandpa's eruptions; they don't even look up from their cereal unless it's to correct his grammar. I try to be patient: "Remember Dad? You can't blow out the sprinklers because you don't have an air compressor anymore?" "Where the hell's my compressor." His ears are bright red and he won't meet my eyes. I think he sometimes knows that he's forgetting, even if he's not sure what he can't remember. "Look, we'll talk about this later." Sometimes this answer is enough; other times Dad's creeping dementia makes him angry and frustrated, like now, and he argues with me. "No. Tell me now. Where the hell's my air compressor. Did you sell it?" "No, Dad. You gave it to Charity. Remember?" This is what I say when Dad persists. It is partly true. My father did give everything he owned to a stripper stage-named Charity--a young silicone-peaked girl he met when he went with some old Army buddies to a reunion in Reno that ended at six in the morning with lap dances at a strip club. Dad's and Charity's relationship was one of those classic May-December romances, a by-the-numbers affair, those numbers being (1) grind, (2) drunken proposal, (3) taking stripper home, (4) identity theft and (5) disappearance of stripper. After Dad drove her all the way back to his remote house in Oregon, she lived with him for exactly ten days, just enough time to clean out his bank accounts and ruin his credit, and to have her boyfriend drive up from Reno to load most of Dad's belongings--including his beloved air compressor--into a U-Haul and drive away, Charity waving bye-bye from the truck window. Dad was so embarrassed he didn't tell me or my sisters for Months, during which time Charity and her boyfriend lived high 0n Dad's cratering credit; his power was shut off, his gas cut, phone disconnected, and I arrived at his little fifteen-acre ranch to find him eating canned corn he cooked in his fireplace. It was too late to untangle him, especially since Dad couldn't remember the details of his undoing (although I notice he hasn't forgotten my childhood failings, i.e., the great Little League dropped pop-up of 1977). Now, when I explain--over and over--how a stripper ripped him off, Dad's biggest disappointment isn't that he gave everything away, but that he didn't get Charity's last name so we might track her down. When I point out that Charity is a phony first name, and that getting a phony last name probably wouldn't help us find her, Dad says I give up too easily. "And you're going to see Richard today?" Lisa asks on her next lap through the kitchen. Richard is our financial planner, which is a bit like being Lido Deck Officer on the Lusitania. "Yeah," I say. "Just to move some stuff around. Get some advice." Lisa doesn't do financial crises very well--when she was twelve, her father died and she and her mom struggled--so I've been sparing her some of the specific details. Obviously, she knows I'm out of work and that we're in debt (she helped get us there) but she doesn't know, for example, that today Richard is cashing out what's left of my retirement so I can make a deferred balloon payment to the mortgage company next week. "After the meeting with Richard," I tell her, "I'll go see that employment counselor. Then I've scheduled a bank robbery. Then I'm selling my organs to buy food. It's a glorious day in Matt-topia." Lisa has learned to ignore self-pity disguised as humor--my metier. "Don't forget to pick the kids up and take Franklin to speech therapy and Teddy to Scouts. And can you get over to Costco to pick up our pictures? I have a session after work." Lisa goes to a therapist every other week for the compulsive shopping binge she went on last winter, or more precisely, for the depressive episode that sparked her shopping binge, the same depressive streak that is now causing her to act in other mysterious, online ways--a social surfing habit that she doesn't know know is getting more social all the time. She puts a hand on my shoulder, and for just a moment my wife is in my port and I put my hand on the lovely notch of her waist and look into those green eyes, but she sniffs the air around me, pushes away from the dock and makes a face. "God, what did you eat, Matt?" "I had a burrito when I went to get milk last night." In the language of a fraying marriage, the truth often comes with ellipses. I had a burrito . . . after I got stoned with some criminals . . . when I went to get milk last night. "Meat or fecal?" "What's fecal?" asks Franklin as he washes his bowl in the sink. "It means poop," says Teddy, who is ten and, left alone, would insert the word poop into every sentence he uttered. Franklin is a tender, breakable eight. He giggles, as he always does when Teddy says the word poop. Frankie is the world's greatest audience for poop humor. "Dad ate a poop burrito?" "I had to try the recipe before I make it for dinner tonight," I say. Franklin gives me the requisite Eeww, and I beknight him with my coffee spoon. "Now go get dressed for school, my young apprentice." "I had a cigar made of donkey shit in Mexico once," my father says to Franklin as he squeezes past the counter. "It wasn't bad. Hard to keep lit. I bought it at a little whorehou--" And as much as I'm glad to see Dad reminiscing, I step in. "That's enough, Dad." "Eeww, Grandpa," Franklin says. "You smoked cigars? That's bad for you." Among the world's evils--fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation--smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school. At least my new friends Skeet and Jamie have escaped this indoctrination. I glance out the window to see Lisa's ten-year-old Subaru backing out of the driveway. I wave, trying to recall whether she said goodbye. Or said anything. She's already on her phone. She's always on her phone now, or the computer. It's her new life. I make my way upstairs, glance at the computer, but I don't feel like doing recon on Lisa's online life right now, so I do a few push-ups, fewer sit-ups, take a shower--fourth in line, I get lukewarm--dress in the same weedy clothes I was wearing last night. Downstairs, Dad is planted in front of the television, where he spends his days, switching from old movies to news and back. He pets his universal remote control like a tiny cat. Ten minutes later, I'm driving the kids to their little parochial school. When Lisa and I violated the first rule of real estate by buying a big house in a questionable neighborhood, we landed near a low-income public school--and after Lisa investigated ("I heard a first grader call her teacher Ass-face") we decided to shop around for the best private school we could afford. This turned out to be a little Catholic shop a few miles away--odd since neither Lisa nor I is Catholic. This whole private school thing would baffle my Dad: not that we're sending our kids to a religious school whose religion we don't practice, but that I drive the kids to school every morning when a perfectly good squash-colored school bus rolls past our house. It would seem insane to him that I willingly pay tuition beyond my taxes. In fact, Dad would be outraged by the whole idea of being a consumer of schools. My parents never shopped for schools. It would have been like shopping for water, like shopping for air. It wasn't that Mom and Dad chose to be public school people; it just would never have occurred to them there was a choice. If a school bus pulled up, whatever children were in the house were expected to file outside and get on the bus. It didn't matter if the bus was going to the compound of a racist, survivalist, apocalyptic cult--bus pulls up; kids get on. Of course, the schools I attended were god-awful; that bus took me to a junior high that was more bong and nunchuk factory than school. So maybe education shopping isn't such a bad idea. "I love you guys," I say as we pull up to the old brick school building; uniformed urchins seep from assorted foreign sedans and big Catholic-family Suburbans and Expeditions. "Have a great day learning about the evils of smoking." "Whose hat?" Franklin holds up the flat-brimmed, black and silver Raiders cap. "Skeet's," I say. "Oh," Franklin says, as if this makes sense. Teddy grabs the hat and somehow knows exactly how to wear it, cocked a bit sideways and off-center. It's amazing how this kind of knowledge filters like an aquifer beneath the adult surfaces of the world, how everyone under thirty speaks the same subtle cultural language. Our parents' parents blamed records, our parents blamed MTV, and we blame MySpace or some other Internet villain, but I suspect it's the microwaves I was telling Skeet about; maybe they're not benign . . . maybe they beam style advice to the young, and on some unseen command the children of the world will one day band together and slit their parents' collective-- "Take the hat off, Teddy." "Jawohl, hen commandant." He drops the hat in the backseat and the boys jump out, start walking toward the school in their wrinkly blue chinos and white polos, and I think these uniforms wouldn't be so bad if they didn't make the kids all look like bank tellers on casual Friday or the employees of a discount airline or-- like me . . . Truly amazing, this pot. I have gone through at least five strata of high since those first hits on Jamie's blunt: the calm and the paranoia and the weepy displeasure, then the euphoria and rolling epiphanies, and now I seem to have a hyper-fluent sense of the world, as if I've traded in my old vacuum tube eyes for a pair of high-def LCDs. It's no wonder jazz musicians are so certain they write better stoned. In fact, maybe there's something there for me, too. Linking free-verse poetry and financial advice was obviously a bad idea, and thinking my two passions would translate to the larger world was out-of-control hubris, even in the epoch of hubris we are passing out of. . . but this new idea forming in my mind makes some real sense-- I will be the baked financial journalist, Moneydude, Stoned Stock Analyst. I'll start a blog, get high every morning and give stock tips with the clarity I've achieved from deep-frying my skull in B.C. bud: Tip 1. Time to take a flyer on Frito-Lay stock. Why? Because, man . . . that queso cheese dip? Damn!. . . Tip 2. Zig-Zag Papers are poised to make a second-quarter rally because . . . yo, it's all summer and shit. Tip 3. The P-to-E ratio on A-Metro Trans Solutions makes it a can't-miss stock given the Democratic Congress's likely emphasis on subsidizing mass transit projects. (And, dude, their logo totally looks like a vag I drive through a forest of leftover political signs, red and blue and black and white and good and evil; the experts say we are polarized again, but I think we've become bi-polarized, and I leave the parking lot, pull out into the world, merging into something larger than myself, perhaps bleeding into the flow of history as we're on the verge of. . . What? What was that? I lost it. Shit. A merge on the verge of the surge of. . . Tyger! Tyger! burning bright . . . Damn. What was I thinking about? Sprinklers? Internet? Forbearance? Unraveling? Slurpees? No, it is very good pot. CHAPTER 3 Social Networking u My wife types her life, key-by-key site-by-site, primarily at night, on the home PC where I try to find work while she's drowsing, instead find the history of her browsing, surfing her lost past for evidence that she wasn't always this sad-- Still, I'd convinced myself, at least until last night, that Lisa's new online hobby, social networking, was a healthier compulsion than the brief, eBay shopping spree she went on last year (our garage lined with unsold remnants, nine boxes of commemorative plates, plush toys and china figurines). At one time, Lisa managed this online life at work, but the optometrist's office where she rots as a receptionist for thirty hours a week without benefits put an end to personal computer use, so every night now Lisa spends two hours on our home computer, managing her Facebook page and her Linked-In page and her MySpace page, responding to ass sniffing inquiries from old friends on Classmates.com and Google-imaging people she used to know. I don't say a word about any of it--this was our couples-counselor's advice--but I worry that what she's really looking for is not the people she once knew, but the her she once was, some happier version of herself living a better life than the one she has with me. Of course, it's unwise to diagnose the mental condition of one's spouse. But if I had to trace Lisa's current malaise (and if I didn't trace it to the moment she accepted my marriage proposal) I would say that it began when her confidence was battered by leaving her career to birth those two boys eleven years ago. Before that, Lisa was a world-beating, self-assured businesswoman, in charge of marketing a doctors' group that specialized in sports medicine, and she ventured out every day in curvy business suits that made me want to coax her into elevators for inappropriate workplace contact. But then I spermed her up and she left that good job, and since I was earning decent money and making indecent profits on some canny investments, we felt safe and maybe even wise--perhaps even morally good--having Lisa quit her job while she nursed, nested and nurtured those thankless little shit-heels. Then, a decade on, with the boys safely ensconced in papist school, we figured she'd just go get another job like her old one, but she ventured back into the job world two years ago with none of the hot confidence she'd had before we procreated. I try to put myself in her position-- one day you come home from work a vital twenty-nine-year-old babe, whom the fellas at the office actively lust after (a real pro, too, trained in the latest technology, terminology and theory) and next day you go out looking for work a nearly forty-year-old Mom who colors the gray and doesn't even know PowerPoint, a short tempered lady who didn't get any sleep last night because one.of the kids pooped his bed (how do you poop a bed, anyway?). Six months of resumes, referrals and rejections took their toll and Lisa accepted the first job she was offered--receptionist for a dull optometrist who calls the women in his office gals, and whose idea of a Christmas bonus is twenty-five bucks at a craft store. I hated seeing the woman I loved lose her confidence that way. And yet, in the deepest reaches of my psyche, I wonder if there wasn't a part of me that was glad she didn't go back to the gym toned guys at the sports medicine clinic. Our marriage was typical, I think; we deluded ourselves that it was made of rock-solid stuff, but there were trace elements of regret, seams of I-told-you-so, cracks of martyrdom. In the last few months--with things around here deteriorating--I've even asked myself if I didn't take some pleasure keeping my wife at home, that maybe I subconsciously preferred a depleted Lisa because I was threatened by the sexy, confident one, the one I couldn't control, the one I could lose. If so, then I am an even smaller man than the out-of-work, out-of-gas loser who greets me in the mirror every day, and maybe I deserve my unraveling fate, pushed away from this beautiful beaten wife, who goes out every night on the Internet in search of her better self---pre-child, pre-forty, pre-me. More self-pity. It's ugly. Counterproductive. I constantly warn my sons about the dangers of self-pity when they're moping about being the only kids in the world without a Nintendo Wii. And honestly, with Lisa and me, it hasn't been that bad. Beneath our current troubles, I think we still like each other, and as flatly unromantic as that might sound, it's amazing how many of our couple friends genuinely don't. Lisa and I still root for each other, still make each other laugh, still have fairly successful sex at least once a week, sometimes more--at least we did until about a month ago, when this dry spell started. We have similar goals and interests, share the same politics. And (I realize I'm making the case to Myself) we don't even argue much. Certainly we did argue some last winter and spring, when our finances fell apart, but even then Lisa and I didn't argue so much as not talk--our little ballet of sighs, pursed lips and hushed voices as I worried over mortgage statements and retirement bulletins and over the increasingly terse letters from various lenders and financial institutions--grim reams of paper that have led me today to the office of Richard Blackmore, our financial coroner ... I mean, planner. When the hole started opening two years ago, Lisa and I congratulated ourselves because at least we weren't in one of those La Brea Tar Pit adjustable-rate home loans. We had a normal thirty year, with a normal fixed rate, and even though we'd unwisely cashed in equity for a couple of costly remodels, we were still okay. We had some normal debt: normal credit cards, normal furniture layaways, normal car payments, some uncovered medical bills, Teddy's normal braces and Franklin's normal speech therapy (Oh, for God's sake, just say your 'R's). But then my perfectly normal dream of starting my own business, the afore-derided poetfolio. com, turned but to take longer and be more costly than we thought, and we found ourselves taking another line of credit on the house, going deeper in debt. Then came Lisa's abnormal online shopping binge, and our credit cards rolled over on us a couple of times and the car payments lapsed and the ground began slipping away and the only thing that seemed rock steady was the house, so we took another chunk out of it, just to catch up, we said, to temporarily cover living expenses, and we refinanced at the peak value; like a snake eating its tail we borrowed against our house to pay the house payment of a house leveraged at forty percent more than the house was worth. When the dip came I scrambled back to the newspaper, but with the hole growing deeper and monthly interest charges eating us alive, we fell further behind, missed a few house payments and our helpful mortgage lender offered us an "agreement of forbearance," six months leeway (with interest!) to get on top of our payments, and we jumped at that lifeline, but then I lost my job and maybe we were distracted by that and by my father's collapse (we dragged him into the hole with us) because while we fretted and waffled and stalled, the stock market went out for milk, got stoned and lost forty percent of its value, depleting my 401 (k), which, due to my stubborn love for financial and media stocks, had already begun to look more like a 4(k). That's about the time I stopped showing Lisa the grim letters about the house, with their phony warm salutations ("Dear Homeowner . . ."). This is how a person wakes up one morning to find that he's six days from losing his house. The advice you get when your mortgage is in danger is to "contact the lender." The last time I contacted my lender, some twenty-five-year-old kid answered the phone and talked me into forbearance, this six-month amnesty of procrastination. I should have known it was a bad move when I contacted my lender the next time and found out the kid had been laid off, that our mortgage had been bundled and sold with a stack of similarly red paper to a second company, and that the second company had been absorbed by a third company. Now I have no idea how to "contact my lender." I seem to spend hours in automated phone dungeons ("For English, press one") desperately looking for a single human voice to gently tell me I'm dead. Clock ticks. Planet turns. Six revolutions from now whatever bank owns my mortgage will start foreclosure proceedings unless I can either beg more time or come up with the balloon forbearance payment of $31,200. Meanwhile, I try to figure out how to tell Lisa about this looming deadline--keeping in mind that (a) she adores this house, (b) she was raised to connect financial security to love and (c) I'm quite possibly losing her anyway. So I go it alone. In the office of Richard Blackmore, Idiot Financial Planner, on the third floor of a squat downtown building, the reception area's littered with Forbes and BusinessWeek and Investors Daily: crisis porn, full of emphatic dirty-talk about "Hidden Opportunities in the Wreckage," climaxing charts, "How to Make Money in a Crash," photos of wet-browed, bug-eyed investment experts looking for full relief in this overheated climate. The meeting is as predictable as coffin shopping. Richard keeps his diplomas on the wall, and I wonder why journalists and poets don't do that. He tells me that losing the house might be inevitable, but that it's only the beginning of my trouble. "Look," he says, and he plays his adding machine like Jerry Lee Lewis, shows me various groupings of red numbers, offers painfully obvious advice. I could go into deeper detail, but frankly, I'm not that interested in the further specifics. Except these two points: (1) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves); (2) Richard's basic advice is to liquidate, sell, sell, sell, dump, sell, scale down, sell some more, live "like a fry-cook in the '70s," try to get a job, any job "very fucking fast," beg my lender for more time, and with a great deal of luck we might avoid losing the house and going bankrupt. This is something like taking your car to a mechanic, only to hear this: I hope you have good walking shoes. "And by 'scale down,' you mean . . ." "Scale. Down." "Right. And by 'down' you mean . . ." "Down," Richard says. His mouth is car-ported by a black mustache, an effective tool for delivering bad news: "Down down down. I'm talking public school down, used-car, canned-food down, lower-middle class down, Matt. Not 2004 upper-middle class down--not eight-person Jacuzzi and lawn guy down---but 1977 generic-food buy-your-clothes-at-K-Mart down. I'm talking dump your car payment, have a garage sale, clip coupons, Christmas shop at Goodwill. I mean--look at these numbers." He spins a red page. "You see anything I don't?" I see London. I see France. Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! Heat check: still high. "Richard, if we cash out everything, is there any tax benefit to--" "Tax benefit?" Richard's mustache spits laughter. "Jesus, Matt. I don't think you understand." And he leans forward, his bleary eyes darting around my face. "Once this starts, you can't stop it. I've seen this before. You're parked on a hill without a parking brake and your car is rolling toward you and the only move is to get out of the way . . . and you want to talk about tax benefits?" I should point out that my money guy Richard is not the best money guy in the world. (My first clue in this direction came in the late 1990s, when I was doing pretty well on my own, blindly investing at the height of the tech boom and I let Richard talk me into what he called "a safer bet"--Mexican shipping bonds. So while I had doubled my own easy bets on Microsoft and Cisco, I lost thirty cents on the dollar on Richard's great tip--that anchor of the business world: Transmaritime-Pacifico.) But if Richard is not the best number guy, he's a brilliant word guy--probably the reason I stay with him--and should anyone doubt it, the man shifts metaphors while I'm still marveling at the idea of our finances as a rolling car. "Look," Richard says. "I'm gonna give you the straight diagnosis, Matt. You are severely hemorrhaging here--not just on the house, in every area possible. Credit-card debt, health care debt, the equity you took on your house, unpaid creditors from your little business venture, your stubborn insistence on riding those bank and media stocks into the ground. And I don't know who talked you into forbearance, but that's the worst thing you could have done. It's just a way for lenders to squeeze the lemon once more. Did anyone tell you that ninety percent of the people who make the big forbearance payment still end up losing their houses?" I seem to have missed that part of the sales pitch. "Listen," Richard says, "unless you're about to inherit some money, what we're talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole." See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere. Richard slides a small check across the table to me. "Here's another way to look at this. The last thing you can afford right now . . ." And he pushes the folders from my file over to me. ". . . is a financial planner." This is why I'm here, of course. To cash out. I am pretending to need advice, but what I really need is whatever cushion I have left. So ... I hold my breath and pick up the check. It's in the high . . . four figures. Nine thousand four hundred and twelve dollars. I laugh. "That's it?" "I wanted to diversify you, Matt. You insisted on media and financials." This is true. In my past life as a business reporter I'd decided I was the expert and I clung to a tip from a banking guy who, I can only hope now, is lying dead on a sidewalk somewhere. But I can't entirely blame him either, because I rode those stocks up for years, and when the financials first cracked, I stubbornly refused to sell. Then I got distracted by my own job loss and by Dad's senility meltdown. And every time Richard begged me to let him unload those bad stocks, I reminded him of his last advice, And buy what? Mexican Shipping Bonds? So ... as I say, here we are-- "After penalties," Richard's mustache continues, "taxes, commissions . . ." "Wait." I look down at the check again as Richard stands. "You took a commission? Do travel agents take commissions on flights that go down?" Richard ignores my choice metaphor. He apologizes, then walks me to the lobby and asks me how everything else is going-- which is a bit like asking the Prime Minister of Poland how everything else is going in the fall of 1939--you know . . . other than the Nazi invasion. I tell Richard that, all in all, I'm not in a bad mood--probably because I got high at a 711 last night. "You got high at a 711?" "Well, we actually got high in my car, and at this apartment building. But I had an amazing burrito at the 711 afterward. You can't believe the pot they have now, Richard." "Yeah, I know," he says. And then, he leans in and sort of wistfully, adds: "It's supposed to be a myth, the increased potency." "It's no myth." "No." He smiles. "No myth." And then something hits me. "Wait. You smoke pot, Richard?" "Now and then," he admits. "When I can get it. Doesn't everyone?" "I didn't." And I tell him how it had been at least fifteen years, how I assumed that, after Lisa and I had two impressionable kids, two hypocrisy-sensing laser beams of sweetness, my weed-smoking days were long behind me. Richard hums laughter. "Hey . . . I've got a question about that." Then he looks both ways and leans in close. "Can you get me some?" Outside, after the meeting, it's cold--air crackling with the sudden turn to late fall. Leaves are giving up, like newspapers, becoming insolvent all over the streets. I walk to the car. It was disconcerting at first, to be out in the world in the daytime, when everyone else was working. This is the first fall since I was fifteen I haven't had a job of some kind. Sadly, I'm getting used to it. Right now the editors will be coming out of their budget meeting and the reporters will be trying to avoid their eyes, or pretending to be on the phone so they won't get assigned a weather story ("Colder temps move in") or a brief about last night's trailer fire ("Suspected arson at mobile home park") or a feature on the Eagle Scout who built a bike out of aluminum cans ("Recycled cycle leads to scholarship"). I call Lisa from the car as I drive to Costco. "Well," she says, "How'd it go?" "You know Richard," I say, "always the optimist. Thinks we should invest in cyanide." Polite laugh. "Would you have ever guessed Richard is a weed smoker?" "How did that come up at a financial planning meeting?" "I don't remember." "So what's his advice?" "Well, first, we can't panic . . . and second . . . if we were going to eat one of the children, which one would you pick?" Lisa laughs a little more heartily; her voice always gets lower, throaty, when she thinks something is genuinely funny. It's very hot. "I suppose the older one," she says. "That little one looks gamy." And suddenly I'm filled with warmth and sadness and I am rushed with nostalgia---for the marriage I'm still in. I can't believe how much I want this woman and it kills me--kills me--knowing what I know. This: Right before I went to 711 for milk last night, I considered telling her about the letter from the mortgage company. But when I went upstairs she was asleep. I signed onto her FaceBook page (it had taken me three days to figure out her password) and saw that she'd put up a better picture of herself with her cute new pixie haircut (a picture I took) and I also saw that she'd been carrying on a three-day "chat" with an online buddy named Chuck, which, not coincidentally, is the name of her old high school boyfriend, a guy I was never jealous of before, because, frankly, Chuck sounded like a bit of a chuck, and not like the sensitive, successful guy he turns out to be, at least in the online realm. The subject of this chat seemed to be the flat parallel trajectories of Chuck's and Lisa's mildly disappointing lives ("ever wake up and wonder what happened")--lives that must've seemed boundlessly perfect when they were eighteen, sneaking off to his parents' lake place to squirrel their boundlessly perfect young bodies into positions that I'd give anything to replicate. And it seems clear from their familiarity that this was not the first chat between Lisa and Chuck, not the first time the sad subject of their sad lives has come up. As the Face Book conversation continued, Lisa and Chuck went back and forth about themselves ("trying to get back in shape" "Y? U look great") and their jobs ("not the best time to be looking for something" "but U R so talented") people from high school ("Dana looks like a manatee--ooh, that's mean" "U could never be mean") and while it was all vaguely above-board, it also felt ... I don't know, intimate . . . and then Chuck wrote, "Temted to get all hot and steamy agin" as if the very words made him too worked-up to type straight and she ignored his misspellings and suggested two simple letters, "TM?" and either she was trademarking his stupid sexy talk or, more likely, suggesting that he should take his nastiness to the text messaging world--agin--so she could see it right away--