spinnerface: part II
Monday 23 March 2009 | I like a cookie
I gotta letter from the govamint
the other day
I opened and read it
it said they were suckas—
[public enemy, "black steel in the hour of chaos"]
It’s late Monday morning, three weeks ago, and the Brujo and I are loafing and inviting our souls in the backyard, because he has a rare day off and I don’t teach until 3 pm. He’s sprinkling water on pinhead-sized baby cacti and I’m sitting on the lawn playing with Cap’n Fatty (who rolls around wild-eyed, littering her fur with grass clippings; we guess this is for camouflage purposes?) when I hear the mailbox door open and close, and Fiona bark her daily dark warning. So I abandon my morning pages and hop up to see if I have any letters from Knopf asking for exclusive rights to my next five volumes of poetry, etc.
Instead it’s the usual suburban-hell mail. I generally open the post standing over the recycling bin and directing items straight into it, as they are immediately discarded. 3.9% APR on balance transfers; please order these large fancy boxes of hideous smoke-flavored cheeses, salami, dried apricots and petits fours; our church welcomes community members by distributing free Wal-Mart gift cards; there is a newly released sex offender living on your block (poor bastard—and they’ve always been in jail for molesting family members, so why would they OH NEVER MIND); and please come to an evening of expensive cocktails hosted by seventy-year-old alums from the college you dropped out of in 1989, during which we will drunkenly “discuss” Edwin Schrödinger.
Directly, as I say, into the recycling.
But look, what fresh hell is this—it’s a letter from the govamint. Now since I get these on a fairly regular basis and since they all say pretty much the same thing, they arouse no great excitement now that I have a fat file folder full of them. PAGE 4 OF 12…Federal Something Requirement Act…estimated reporting burden: one hour, seven minutes and eighteen seconds…you do not need to take any action at this time…please SAVE THIS DOCUMENT for your records. So I dutifully do, though I generally have not understood a word it said.
This one is just an envelope, though. Inside it is a check, and no letter. I puzzle over this for a moment. The Feds have already sent me the SSDI pittance left over after they paid back the state of NM for assisting me in my hour of crisis; I’m using it to pay off a small student loan I took out in my first semester, with which loan I paid off a credit card bill, which had things like rent and electricity and airline tickets and emergency trips to the vet on it. (Oh, fine, and presumably some fountain pen ink and lip balms too.) Then the Feds had very nicely explained how the Brujo and I together earn too much money and have too many cars (the 1990 Honda rolled over 200,000 this weekend! how cool is that!) for me to qualify for any further pittance, even though I am five kinds of crazy. Great! I applauded this wise decision on their parts (look at big government functioning efficiently!); and thus, what the hell is this check.
I turn it over and read the amount, and burst out laughing. Though it’s a kind of sick laughter. Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha! OH SHIT. Because there’s not supposed to be a check in the first place; and even if there were, it’s not supposed to have this preposterous number on it. Immediately I feel as though I’ve done something wrong. The number is an order of magnitude larger than any number on such a check should be, assuming there would be a check anyway, which there wouldn’t, because this is obviously a mistake and therefore I am not actually looking at what looks like a check, this check at which I only think I am looking.
Clearly.
I throw the rest of the mail away and totter into the backyard clutching it.
“Hey, babe? Could you look at something for me?”
The Brujo stands, dries off his hands, and takes the pastel-colored bit of paper. We stare at it together. The Brujo doesn’t laugh.
“Um, what is this?”
“I don’t know. A mistake.”
“I thought they already sent you what they were going to send you?”
“They did. I thought.”
“It’s a mistake.”
“Maybe they awarded me an NEA after all, and just forgot to tell me?”
He looks at me unsmiling.
“Yeah, it’s a mistake. I’ll call tomorrow and tell them.”
The funny thing is where my mind goes immediately. It goes like this:
- OMGOMGOMG I am in so much trouble.
- we could get a grand piano! (Why Artists Should Not Be Given Money)
- the Brujo now has no more excuses for postponing his dental work
- helloooooo trailer in the middle of nowhere/Bahía de los Angeles B.C.N.
- I don’t have to work a horrifying cube job this summer!
- we could live for two years on this in Thailand/Guatemala
- no, be practical—it’s insurance against the next time I chuck a mental
- I should be back in therapy, I owe it to them (?)
I turn off these thoughts with difficulty and go inside to prep for class. Most of them are just your general average run-of-the-mill seven-of-cups fantasizing, so I can dismiss them pretty handily (though admittedly the piano one hangs around for several days). More astonishing and clamouring is the conviction that I have done something wrong and am going to be punished. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s just a piece of paper and I haven’t even tried to deposit it. What, they’re going to arrest me because they sent me a check? The Brujo and I manage to joke about this over lunch—the Treasury Department, destitute, despondent, has conceived of this as a way to bolster the stagnant flow of currency by entrapping citizens and demanding repayment with extortionate interest!
Other thought-feeling complexes arise, a new idea in the place of each one I gently set aside, and are even more interesting. First there is an enormous, and by enormous I mean gushingly toweringly overwhelming huge, sense of financial relief, unbinding an anxiety I hadn’t even known I was tied around my chest. But something’s suddenly not there, and there was something pretty big there, and what was it? Oh right, it was me being scared witless that I will become at any moment unable to leave the house and/or that nice cosy haven underneath my desk, and therefore will lose my job/be unable to get another one, and have to eat cat kibbles until we run out of those, at which point maybe Pyewacket can snack on my CORPSE. Now there is a big missingness inside where, it turns out, fear has been hanging out for a long time. Interesting.
I prep for class and go teach in a miasma of preternatural calm. I suddenly don’t worry about getting fired or making mistakes or being the Most Brilliant TA in the Building. I just go teach. It’s a lot easier and I probably make less sense to the students, but I’m calmer and nicer to be around, perhaps. I smile vaguely at my office mates instead of skittishly avoiding them (sunglasses are key) or performing witticisms. I am careful to thank clerks, I excuse myself when I pass others on the campus sidewalk or in hallways. I also go to the bookstore and, half-stunned, drop $30 on five used books (finally, my own copy of Oblivion, which I literally snatch from the shelf, fingers trembling—also Beckett’s novels, also Wittgenstein’s Mistress) and a new Miquelruis blank journal. I watch all this happening from the inside out. How would it be if we all felt this way, all the time? Why isn’t security and a sense of wealth this world’s inheritance to us anyway, or natural birthright, as much as the sense of lack and fear?
Right now in End of the World Class, we’re reading Carolyn See’s hilarious Golden Days and it’s weirdly apposite in its parody of est-like prosperity consciousness—that brazenly tacky Californian pseudo-religion which, tempered by nuclear holocaust, becomes in the novel a purifying, sustaining faith, an impetus for survival and a practice through which even crispy earless survivors of the LA cauldron can experience joy. OOOO-eee, I see abundance everywhere!
I drift onto and off of the light rail, make my way home in a daze, babbling at intervals to Mandarin’s voicemail. I think, I bet all I have to do is walk from my house to the train stop, and in three minutes I can find a dozen people who need this kind of support more than I do. I count them as I walk, and it is true. They just can’t speak and write English well enough to get it.
If this is not a mistake (although it is plainly a mistake), then I have to spend the summer as a literacy volunteer. Because I am already (oh seven of cups!) thinking about what I can do instead, if I don’t have to find and get and keep a cube job. Since I got passed over to teach composition.
Next, following hard on the heels of this relief, I watch anxiety being promptly shifted back to other objects: my aging parents’ health and what if I have to spend a decade in a doublewide trailer in East Texas mopping up urine and practicing tonglen like a motherfucker; the Brujo’s likelihood of contracting an expensive incurable skin cancer since he repeatedly fries his fair Irish hide in the desert sun (his spending spring break in Big Bend = SECOND-DEGREE BURNS people, but no I did not kill him, because why rush things?); and worst of all, I am an aesthetic failure and will die having published only derivative regional work, teaching five community college sections of developmental English per semester in some miserable dust-coated southern New Mexico town where I have to shake the vinegaroons out of my orthopedic shoes every morning.
Notice how all of these scenarios feature death. Because not all the pianos in the world can stave that one away. Isn’t that what the money fear has always been about, anyway—what Mandarin and I call “…and then I’ll fall on the floor and then I’ll die”? (The title of our forthcoming unhelpful-self-help book.)
I am, like the mother of God, still pondering all these things in my heart a few days later when I get another letter from the govamint. This one explains the absurd figure on the check which is, in fact, not a mistake. There are columns of other numbers and they all add up to the absurd number. Further, I am informed apologetically, there will be a small sum coming to me monthly. It’s about equal to our rent. And because my condition (five kindsa beans) is not expected to improve, really, ever, there will be a medical review in about three years.
I look over the numbers again. I get out the little calculator I use to do student grades. Suddenly I realize—the other was SSI. This is SSDI. They’re different. I further realize—why do you think so many people want disability? So they can get a couple grand to pay off a credit card? No, of course not. There wouldn’t be so many websites and so many attorneys and such an industry around it, if there weren’t some kind of payoff. Holy back payments, Octomom. And in fact, let me tell you something else (the invisible hands-on-hips woman inside addressed me): You only think it’s a lot of money, because you know why? Because you poor, fool. (Sadly enough, I really do talk to myself like this.)
I hunch at my desk flushed with shame. I am plainly more evil than any octuplet-bearing crack ho. All the flabby old bullshit, having been given fresh vitality, zooms around gaily in my cranium, cheering and singing lusty choral mottos. Deadbeat! Bloodsucker freeloader SLACKER! —You Gen Xers are all the same, you don’t really want to work. —Why don’t you stop sponging off scholarship money and get a job? —When I was in college, I never once got an extension on a paper. And of course, in re: Cambridge: Well it must be nice to travel around and not have to work like the rest of us. (It occurs to me, about ten years too late, that my mom was possibly trying to make a joke.)
Obviously, it’s only okay to be a social parasite if you eventually win the Nobel Prize. Or if you volunteer to help political refugees learn English. Or if you find a freaking therapist who does DBT in this godforsaken hellhole and WORK YOUR PROGRAM! Especially because another letter from the govamint includes what looks suspiciously like a Medicaid card. Good Lord, does this mean I don’t have to ask for partial prescriptions on antipsychotics at the pharmacy, when I next go down that happy road, which should be any minute now judging by how freaked out this is all making me?! Does it mean I could get DBT at the one consultation team in town, whose clinicians unfortunately refuse to work with the State School’s insurance company?! Shouldn’t I make an appointment right now?! Instead, I simultaneously panic and wrap myself in denial. I throw myself into housework and chores and trying to Smile Brightly whenever the Brujo asks what’s wrong. My office is finally clean, after a winter of neglect and piled-up papers and books. The sink is scoured, emptied of toxic slimy dishes. I do energetic physical therapy exercises with rubber bands, going for sets of twenty whenever I’ve been told to do ten. I mow and pull thistles and burr clover from the yard. I avoid my desk like there’s a terrifying check sitting on top of it.
It takes me three weeks and a lost blogpost. But I finally put the check in my purse, go to the bank (the one that doesn’t seem about to fail), and open a CD.
“Do you want easy access?” asks the clerk, clicking away at his keyboard.
“No!” I say with unnecessary vehemence. “I don’t want to think about it—I just want it to be like it doesn’t exist, for at least a year.”
“Okay, so the 12-month fixed-rate,” he says agreeably. And then: “That’s a really nice tax refund you got there.”
I stare at the check for, I realize with gratitude, the last time. Its hideous peach and aqua impressionistic blur, its soaring grayscale eagle. “Yeah. It is, isn’t it.”
This morning brings the news that Nicholas Hughes died on March 16, having hanged himself. Forty-seven is an uncannily popular suicide age, for men, these days. According to the Times article, Professor Hughes had just gone on leave from his faculty position to “advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay.” It would be funny, if you didn’t know exactly what that fucking meant.
There’s something cagey and canny in me. Something aging and bitter and sharp and wily and able to wait out things, now. A lot of things, anyway. Something merry and wry and wizened. Someone who hoots at turning forty because Sister, that’s nothing! So I think of Carolyn See, again—my hardback jacket of which has the original illustration by genius Fred Marcellino, an uncorked champagne bottle releasing a mushroom-shaped cloud:
And, of course, once we started feeling a little better we had bursts of what you’d have to call—although we didn’t like the word—strength. There was a day, in the middle of a spring morning, when all of us were outside taking the sun, when we were—you know, Denise was biting on her toes, and my friend Skip rubbed the skin off his legs, and the neighbor, Richard, watched some ants. I was doing sit-ups. I planned to be a very old lady, dark brown, the kind you could pluck up off the ground with a thumb and forefinger, a dwarf, an elf.
Birthday-with-a-zero in a week. Coming up fast on the thousandth blogpost. Non-alcoholic bubbly, anyone? Drinks are on me.
