The Financial Lives of the Poets Read Online Free PDF Page B

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