The Financial Lives of the Poets Read Free

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-piñacolada! 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 piñacolada 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