Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (2 page)

Chase had been surfacing closer, the whale with the biggest blowhole. Now, we were theirs for the
bargain-basement
price of $1.9 billion.
This was mere p
ennies for
that multi-billion portfolio
, not to mention those branches in the West w
here Chase wanted a footprint.
You could say it was a total Win/Win
: for
the Feds, who stopped the run on the bank like a kindly George Bailey with his found bag of money
;
and
for Chase, making the Deal
o
f the Century without lifting a flipper.

The
L
osers
:
Seattle, which
saw a major local company crumble
;
the stockholders, whose investment was now worth precisely zero-point-zero
;
and
we
WaMulians
in
the corporate office
, since Chase had its own colony of worker ants in
far-off
Columbus, OH.

The news had not been made official. We
had
been shut
,
sold, sodomized, and delivered, and the only reason I knew was
that
my friend had sent me an email.
Barely holding it together,
I approached my boss’s “villa” (a ghastly podlike structure
, probably
plunked down by aliens
) to inform this First Vice President and Officer of the Bank that we now failed to exist.

“Uh, Mary?”

“Yeah?” She looked up from the spreadsheet she was analyzing
. Even to the last, she worked. Some of us were better than others.

“I hate to say this, but the OTS just closed the Bank and the FDIC sold us to Chase.”

“
Uh h
uh.” For once, she
took her hands off the keyboard.

“We’re
fucked
, aren’t we?” I stated the obvious, though somewhere in the back of my head fl
u
tte
re
d that tiny thing with feathers
.
Hope.

Mary looked at me, her arms tightly muscled from hours at the gym; her short blonde haircut
The
Style
for
Seattle. When I first
came up to work
for her in 1993, her face had been unlined and her green eyes clear. Now, beneath the tanni
ng-
bed glow, I could see deep bags under her eyes and a glint of
moisture
in them.

“Yup!”

“How long do you think we have?” Even I could hear the fear in my voice. Of course
.
I was
a
neurotic
Jewish
expat
, and o
nly the Paxil
boosting
serotonin in my brain
stopped
me from having
a full-blown meltdown.

“Hard to say.” Mary feigned unconcern, but even though she was on a high salary with
many
stock options (now worthless)
,
she still needed to work, just like the rest of us.

“I give it a month.” I just threw it out there –
hell
, I didn’t know. We could show up t
omorrow and the doors would be shut
.

“Hope so.” That was Mary, Scotch-Irish tough.

This
was going to be a Two-Paxil Day. “I always said we should stay on the train until it pulled into the
last
s
tation.” I mimed tugging a whistle. “Whoo whoo!”

“
WaaaaMuuu
!” You had to hand it to Mary:
she had great gallows humor. She had to,
after eleven
years
as a Bank VP.

We made brief eye c
ontact and I slumped off.
I have
terrible posture: a function of scoliosis and a grade-school desire to hide incipient breasts. Now, they were hard to hide: 40DDD.

Turned out that me and my breasts held on for four more months. Once the news broke, the Chinese analysts
on the other side of
the wall (of course, we called it “The Great Wall”) started crying in Chinese. My cube-row mate
,
Rainier
,
took a bobble
head doll of KKK and affixed a Post-it to its smiling visage
:
“I made $24 million last year!” It was true. As punishment for pushing a fatal policy –
for
granting home loans to
house painters
who claimed to make $100,000 a year
-- with no proof --
KKK
had
cheerfully jumped
off the 747
, his Golden Parachute gleaming. Goodbye Seattle,
hello Palm Desert villa!

Other indignities followed. Two FDIC agents showed up, actually going through our files and turning over
framed photos on desks. We asked what they were looking for.

“The reason the Bank failed.” These folks were ex-FBI, and they weren’t kidding around.
   
No
doubt, they would find the reason for
WaMu’s
demise in our row. We, who sat there and coded business rules, were
now
Public Enemy #1
in
the biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

We
decided policy and pressured
u
nderwriters to gi
ve home loans to my twelve-year-old.
We
had callously bundled these toxic loans and sold them to Wall Street, to be hyped to idiot investors.

The
Feydeau
farce played on. My friend appeared on the front page of
The Seattle Time
s
. They’d
snapped
him
leaving the building, his expression a mixture of shock, grief, and “
What the fuck do I do now?”
A news truck pulled up, the media swarming the lobby, its fireplace exuding a glow that was no longer warming.

For four months, we sat there like lemmings, prepared to march wherever Chase pointed. We went through the charade of “applying” for jobs in Columbus
and
documented our systems so that Chase could decide if they wanted to keep them. Oddly,
all
of Chase’s systems were deemed superior to ours. If time at
WaMu
had crawled before, it now dragged across the carpet like a corpse pulled on a rope. Finally, in late November, the determination was made: we would
all
go, except for Mary and other VPs, who had to choose someone to stay and help with the transition. Naturally they chose themselves. Hell, I couldn't blame them. I would have done the same
.

When we finally got our
pink slips (actually legal-size
white envelopes) Mary’s gallows humor took over
. S
he marched us down the halls, holding
the clutch of envelopes aloft like a drum major.
Gathering round, looking ill, were other employees (mostly Asian) who knew what the envelopes meant. Their turn for
seppuku
would
come
.

Thirty-four hundred
WaMulians
were relieved of their jobs in downtown Seattle
while
entire
buildings
,
formerly alive with color and purpose
,
now
put out a “Vacancy” sign. George Eliot’s “deafening roar on the other side of silence” overhung floor after floor. If you listened closely, you could hear the wail of the dispossessed.

The fall of
Washington Mutual
marked the beginning of the end:
of my life,
and
the
entire
U.S. economy. Even now, I have nightmares about the place
,
where Mary is trying to fire me and I am screaming
in resistance
. Sometimes I’m exiled to a distant cube or forced to work
alone
in a conference room.

For factoid lovers: we were third in the succession of financial giants
to fail: Lehman,
AIG,
us,
Merrill, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, Indy
Mac, Country
w
ide.
There must have been a run on
lidded
cardboard boxes
as employees packed up their desks
.
But
I have to say, in all fairness, that Chase was very good to us. I received a generous severance
and thought, “
No
biggie
, this
will last me till my next gig.”

L
---
O
---
L!

By this point, you’re probably asking:
Who
is
this “I” character?
What does she want from me?
Is she going to ask for money?
?

Relax
, Dear Reader.
I’m
not going to hit you up for cash (though a Starbucks
Gift
Card would be nice).
Let me fill you in on the salient points of my past, so
that
you’ll
understand
why
for someone like me
,
Unemployment = Death
.

I was
born a poor black child. . .OK,
I was born
in the Encino Hospital to an upper middle-clas
s family
.
Though it would take seven years (and the fun of being one of two Jews in my grade school –
I can sing
“
O Tannenbaum
”
in German
) my parents eventually
clawed their way
back to Encino
.
This is a very rich area
in the Hills
adjacent to Bel Air (I’m talking
South Of the Blvd
,
dah-ling
!
)
l
ooking down – with disdain
–
on
its poorer
Valley
neighbors.
It is a place where stay-at-home Moms had live-in maids; where everyone drove a Cadillac (now, it’
s
Mercedes, the taint of
Nazism
apparently
having
faded)
;
and attended Stephen
Wise
Temple,
so
hip
it
had
a
guitar-playing
woman
rabbi
.
Back then, in the 70’s before Botox,
women still looked young, tanning poolside and dressing in their daughters’ clothes.
It seemed a bucolic time to be growing up in the suburbs:
no one worried about sexual abuse, razors in Halloween candy, gangs (
naively
, I thought their boxy
hieroglyphic
scrawls were “Chicano Writing”), or even Nixon –
much.

My family was an anomaly because we weren’t really rich. My Dad was an engineer, which, in those pre-computer days, didn’t have a lot of cachet and didn’t pay a very big salary. We struggled to keep up with the
Silvers
, who bought son
Solomon
a new Schwinn bike and a brand-new Camaro for his sixteenth birthday. My parents scraped to purchase a Lemon Peeler for me: my first car was a crappy Capri financed by summer
job
s. I had been raised in Mission Hills -- one of those towns that Encino looked down on -- and I could never get used to moms who did nothing but get their hair done and dads who were home on the weekend.

I was labeled
as being
“smart”
from
the age of two,
when
I spoke in whole sentences and could
recite
“
antidisestablishmentarianismism
.
”
Also a
t two, I told off a shoe salesman
. He
was trying
to pass off
some generic
sneakers
as
genuine
PF Flyers and I wasn’t buying it.
Oy.