The Financial Lives of the Poets (21 page)

S
LURRED SPEECH, STUTTERING OR
speaking in monotone

lapses in judgment and trouble with visual recognition

a loss of impulse control, dizziness, nausea and

erratic behavior, along with severe disorientation

all caused by a steep decline in neural activity

which can lead eventually to severe hallucinations

delirium, delusions, manias, even psychotic breaks—

then death—

Then death?
Wait. Just like that? Shit. I reread the Wikipedia sleep deprivation article to see if I missed something. A few days without sleep and you go from slurred speech to bad decisions to…death? Well, that hardly seems fair. It feels like they left out a few steps…like they skipped second and third base…went straight from kissing to a greasy threesome. I read deeper into the article: the longest anyone has willingly gone without sleep was eleven days—some college student in 1965—but because of the health dangers, the
Guinness World Records
has stopped recognizing lack of sleep as a legitimate record. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of folk stories about people going years without sleep. My favorite is a guy in Vietnam who claims to have gone thirty years.

And then, there’s sleep deprivation as torture, of course. It’s one of the oldest tortures there is—relatively clean, no scars—a big hit at Gitmo. There’s an old account by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was sleep deprived by KGB officers in the 1970s. He described “a haze” from which his “spirit” was “wearied to death.”

That about describes it: haze. Spirit wearied. Death.

I put my head down on the desk for a just a second to think and—

The front door opens downstairs.

I sit up. It’s dark outside. Shit, what time is it?

I hear the front door close.

Where am I? Push back from the desk.

She’s climbing the steps.

My face feels rubbery. Can’t focus.

She pauses at the office door.

She’s silhouetted: “I got your message.”

“What?” I wipe the spit from my mouth.

Voice quavering: “In the front yard?”

Groggy, I have no idea what she means. What time is it?

Her eyes are strange—unfamiliar. “For what it’s worth—”

“Do you…know what time it is?”

Her eyes shut. “When did you become cruel?”

I meant it as a question, not recrimination.

“And they’re coming to take that wood away?”

Oh, right. The wood. “Tomorrow. Look Lisa, I—”

She walks away. Our bedroom door eases shut.

Then the day comes flooding back to me…righteous Randy and nasty Reese…tree-fort wood…CI OH-2. Oh, and I have a watch! A dark, unactivated watch on my wrist! So I know the time…quarter to six. No wonder I’m disoriented; I think I’ve actually gotten an hour of sleep. I shake my head to clear the static and then walk to our closed bedroom door. I put my hand against the cool wood. So here we are. Now what?

I can’t hear anything in there. But behind that door is our bed. (So tired…) If I could just somehow get to the other side of this door, climb into that bed, and we wouldn’t have to speak, wouldn’t even have to face each other…I put my hand on the cold knob. I swear, we wouldn’t have to say a word, she could just settle in behind me, her knees nestled behind mine, and we could sleep until—

“Dad?” I turn. Franklin is wearing his art hat—a paint-splattered Angels cap that he wears whenever he breaks into his craft caddy.

“Hey pal.”

“I need to ask you something.”

“Sure.” I follow him into his bedroom. Here we go.
What’s happening to you, Dad? Are you and Mom getting a divorce? Which parent will we live with?

In his fussy, cluttered bedroom, Franklin has his easel set up in the center, a big piece of butcher paper clipped to it. He’s done a crude painting of Godzilla (Franklin is working through a monsters motif in his art right now, this, a classic interpretation—scales down the back and on the tail, three claws on each heavy foot, fire coming from the gaping jaws.) On top of the painting he’s written, “To Elijah. I Am Sorry.” And on the bottom, “From Franklin.”

“I like this. It’s a nice gesture.”

But something is bothering Franklin and he looks at me with all the seriousness his earnest little face can muster.

“What is it, sport?”

“I just need to know…” He takes a deep breath. “Well…” He sighs; he’s just going to go ahead and ask his question: “Who would win in a fight? Godzilla or a tyrannosaurus?”

Christ, I’m a mess—groggy, blubbery, slobbery, easy-to-tears. Crying at the stupidest things: Jenga, Godzilla. I blink away wet salt again. I didn’t see weepiness in the list of sleep-deprivation symptoms. Hard to say what gets me this time—the sheer eight-year-old perfection of that question…or that he asked
me
…or maybe the fact that his little conscience has led him to paint an apology for his antagonist, his Prince Chuck. He stares at me, waiting.

God, they want so little, these shits; they don’t care about money, big houses, private schools, darkness and light. All they want is answers. And sugared cereal.

“Well.” I wipe at my eyes. “Godzilla would win. You know. Because of the fire.”

“The lasers,” he corrects. “Yeah.” He stares hard at the painting, sighs. “That’s what I said. But Elijah said that Godzilla is made up, so Tyrannosaurus would win.”

“Well, that’s just a lack of imagination,” I say. “Some people are literalists. We can’t hold it against them. Not their fault, champ.”

Franklin nods in agreement. “What’s for dinner?”

I glance back across the hall, at our closed door. “I’m thinking pizza.”

Franklin’s eyes follow mine to our closed bedroom door and he nods.

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we’re eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.

I send Teddy upstairs to see if Lisa wants to join us for this tiny miracle. I tell him to let her know that I got fresh peppers and mushrooms on our half, her favorite. She declines. She tells Teddy she doesn’t feel well.

“What’s she doing up there?” I ask, as nonchalantly as I can muster.

Teddy shrugs. “She’s in bed. She’s sick.” He doesn’t meet my eyes.

Dad stares into the winter-black back window as he chews.

“You like the pizza, Dad? Or do you prefer the other place?”

He stares down at the pizza as if he was unaware that it was pizza.

“Pradeep Duncan got Guitar Hero for his Wii,” Teddy pretends to tell Franklin. Here it comes—Teddy’s regularly scheduled, ten-year-old consumer confidence report, his pointed survey of all the expensive and inappropriate gadgets, games and movies that other fourth graders are routinely being given by their cooler and more loving parents. He gives this quarterly report only to his brother so that Lisa and I can’t launch into any kind of lecture about his age, or the fact that we can’t afford such things, or how, even if we could afford them, it wouldn’t matter to us what other kids have.

“And his stepdad lets him watch the
Saw
movies,” Teddy continues.

“No
way!
” says Franklin. Then he shakes his head. “I wouldn’t want to watch those.”

“Dude, I would,” Teddy says. I wonder: where did Teddy learn such indirect communication? And…
Dude?
I picture him outside the 7/11—

Above us, the floorboards creak. My eyes go to the ceiling. Up there, the bathroom door opens and closes. After a minute…a flush. The bathroom door opens. She pads across the floor. The bedroom door opens and closes again.

My phone buzzes. I glance down at it. Jamie. Another board teeters.

I excuse myself from the table and take it in the living room.

“Hey,” Jamie says, and there’s a thumping bass behind him, and I hear someone yell,
Fuck you, Larry,
and then there’s a burst of laughter, and Jamie says, “Slippers, we’re having a rager over at Larry’s, yo! You should totally come over, man.”

Rub my brow.

Jamie goes on: “We gotta go to Weedland and get our shit tonight anyway, right?”

Jamie has piggybacked a smaller buy on top of mine. Okay, so here we go. I glance at the black watch on my wrist. I suppose there’s a certain point where there’s nothing more to fear. Once you’re not just a drug dealer but a narc, too…what the hell have you got to worry about? That is the one good thing about the bottom: at least it’s the bottom. “Yeah.”

“Cool,” he says. “Just come by Larry’s and get me, yo.”

“Okay. About an hour?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll just be chillin’.” And then Jamie laughs. “Oh, man, Chulo just bit it. He’s totally fried, yo.”

“Isn’t Chulo always fried?” I ask, even though I’ve yet to figure out which one is Chulo.

Jamie laughs. “No shit, huh?”

I hang up and go back into the kitchen. Dad and the boys are at the table, eating quietly. I slide back into my chair. Here we are. Three generations of doomed Prior men.

Teddy resumes his consumer-spending report: “Tommy Parnell? He’s got two Wiis.”

“Two? No
way!”
Franklin says. “What’s he do with two?”

“One at his mom’s house and one at his dad’s house.”

“No
way!”
Franklin says again.

I could buy five Wiis with the money I spent on treated lumber. Thirty-five with the money I spent on dope. Maybe I can tell Randy and Reese it was all a mistake. I wanted to buy Wiis, not weed.

World teeters. “Look, guys, I gotta go somewhere after dinner. You stay here with Grandpa. Let Mom rest unless it’s something important. Okay?”

“Can we watch a movie?”

“Get your pajamas on first, and don’t forget—”

“What happened to me?”

Teddy, Franklin and I all look up, across the table at Dad.

“What’s that, Dad?”

His eyes narrow. “Why am I here?” He pats his empty pocket for cigarettes.

Veins pop in his forehead. His eyes drill into me. This happens sometimes; all of a sudden Dad will come in sharp, like a distant radio station dialed in on a clear night.

“You just got into some trouble, Dad. It’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry.”

I used to get excited by these occasional glimpses, used to think it meant that
my Dad
was back, and I’d hurriedly brief him on everything that had happened while he was away—as if he’d been in a coma—or I’d try to get information out of him—what did he remember about Charity and her boyfriend? But the station always went away again, and I’d just have to brief him again two days later, so I quit trying to bring Dad up to speed. I’ve learned to simply stall, make small talk until the clear reception goes away again. It usually takes only a few minutes.

Dad stares at me, waiting for an answer.

“Look, it’s nothing we can’t handle, Dad. You had a little trouble, but everything is—”

He spits as he says, “Goddamn it, Matt! Will you tell me what the fuck happened to me?”

I look over at the boys—pizza slices frozen halfway to their mouths. Then I look back at Dad. He used to yell at me sometimes like that when I was a kid, but his real anger was directed at my mother. She used to say that Dad didn’t yell about anything she
did;
it was her existence that pissed him off. I was twenty-six when he finally left her. Lisa thought my nonchalant reaction odd; but I suppose I expected it, because I never asked for an explanation. From either of them. Mom talked to my sisters about it—she said Dad left because she wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. I guess Mom never talked to me about it because she sensed that I would intuitively side with him. Maybe, even then, she saw in me the same unraveling gene.

Dad stares. For once, the sharp eyes aren’t going away.

I glance over at my boys, who are waiting along with Dad for an explanation. Sigh. Oh, what the hell. “You met a girl, Dad. In Reno. A stripper. You took her back to the ranch in Oregon. She stole everything, your money…credit cards…everything.”

The boys, of course, have never heard this heartwarming family story. Teddy’s eyes are huge. His grandfather knew a stripper? He looks over at the old guy with new-found respect.

Dad nods: go on.

Funny—it never occurred to me to ask my father why he left Mom. If anything, I might’ve asked why he stayed all those years. I always felt like he was buzzing with something dangerous, banging against the walls, teetering, and he could just tip over at any time and be gone. To me, it felt like we were only renting the man. All those days he put on that tie and those coveralls; I knew he’d have to leave eventually. The fact that he made it until my sisters and I were gone from home seemed like an accomplishment. He moved to a tiny house on fifteen acres along a dry riverbed in central Oregon, a place where he could smoke all the cigarettes he wanted. In four years, I only visited him there once: