Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (9 page)

But Polonius had it right: when the borrower/lender scales are too severely out of balance for too long, resentment builds, each side becomes despicable in the eyes of the other, and debt is revealed as a double-sided balancing act in which debtor and creditor alike are culpable. “To wipe the slate clean” is a colloquial expression meaning to atone for your sins and make reparation for whatever you’ve done wrong, but the metaphor — like all metaphors — is based on something in real life: the slate in bars and pubs where regular customers’ running tabs were recorded. A dirty slate is dirty because it’s smeared all over with debts, of one kind or another; but it’s dirty for both debtor and creditor alike.

I’ll end with two ambiguous epigraphs from the vast grab bag of English folk sayings — one for debtors and one for creditors. For debtors: “Death pays all debts.” For creditors: “You can’t take it with you.” Neither one of these is strictly true — debts can linger after death, and “You can’t take it with you” depends on what “it” is — but that’s another story. And it’s to that other story — or rather to debt as a primary engine of story itself — that I will turn in my next chapter, which is called “Debt as Plot.”

( Three )
Debt as Plot

WITHOUT MEMORY
, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt.

A story is a string of actions occurring over time — one damn thing after another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes — and debt happens as a result of actions occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were in there, and then — depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad — how you got out of debt, or else how you got further and further into it until you became overwhelmed by it, and sank from view.

The hidden metaphors are revealing: we get “into” debt, as if into a prison, swamp, or well, or possibly a bed; we get “out” of it, as if coming into the open air or climbing out of a hole. If we are “overwhelmed” by debt, the image is possibly that of a foundering ship, with the sea and the waves pouring inexorably in on top of us as we flail and choke. All of this sounds dramatic, with much physical activity: jumping in, leaping or clambering out, thrashing around, drowning. Metaphorically, the debt plot line is a far cry from the glum actuality, in which the debtor sits at a desk fiddling around with numbers on a screen, or shuffles past-due bills in the hope that they will go away, or paces the room wondering how he can possibly extricate himself from the fiscal molasses.

In our minds — as reflected in our language — debt is a mental or spiritual non-place, like the Hell described by Christopher Marlowe’s Mephistopheles when Faust asks him why he’s not in Hell but right there in the same room as Faust. “Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it,” says Mephistopheles. He carries Hell around with him like a private climate: he’s in it and it’s in him. Substitute “debt” and you can see that, in the way we talk about it, debt is the same kind of placeless place. “Why, this is Debt, nor am I out of it,” the beleaguered debtor might similarly declaim.

Which makes the whole idea of debt — especially massive and hopeless debt — sound brave and noble and interesting rather than merely squalid, and gives it a larger-than-life tragic air. Could it be that some people get into debt because, like speeding on a motorbike, it adds an adrenalin hit to their otherwise humdrum lives? When the bailiffs are knocking at the door and the lights go off because you didn’t pay the hydro and the bank’s threatening to foreclose, at least you can’t complain of ennui.

Scientists tell us that rats, if deprived of toys and fellow rats, will give themselves painful electric shocks rather than endure prolonged boredom. Even this electric shock self-torture can provide some pleasure, it seems: the anticipation of torment is exciting in itself, and then there’s the thrill that accompanies risky behaviour. But more importantly, rats will do almost anything to create events for themselves in an otherwise eventless time-space. So will people: we not only like our plots, we need our plots, and to some extent we are our plots. A story-of-my-life without a story is not a life.

Debt can constitute one such story-of-my-life. Eric Berne’s 1964 bestselling book on transactional analysis,
Games People Play
, lists five “life games”— patterns of behaviour that can occupy an individual’s entire lifespan, often destructively, but with hidden psychological benefits or payoffs that keep the games going. Needless to say, each game requires more than one player — some players being consciously complicit, others being unwitting dupes. “Alcoholic,” “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch,” “Kick Me,” and “See What You Made Me Do” are Berne’s titles for four of these life games. The fifth one is called “Debtor.”

Berne says, “‘Debtor’ is more than a game. In America it tends to become a script, a plan for a whole lifetime, just as it does in some of the jungles of Africa and New Guinea. There the relatives of a young man buy him a bride at an enormous price, putting him in their debt for years to come.” In North America, says Berne, “the big expense is not a bride but a house, and the enormous debt is a mortgage; the role of the relatives is taken by the bank. Paying off the mortgage gives the individual a purpose in life.” Indeed, I can remember a time from my own childhood — was it the 1940s? — when it was considered cute to have a framed petit-point embroidered motto hanging in the bathroom that said
God Bless Our Mortgaged Home
. During this period, people would have mortgage-burning parties at which they would, in fact, burn the mortgage papers in the barbecue or fireplace once they’d paid the mortgage off.

I pause here to add that “mortgage” means “dead pledge”—“mort” from the French for “dead,” “gage” for “pledge,” like the part in medieval romances where the knight throws down his glove, thus challenging another knight to a duel — the glove or gage being the pledge that the guy will actually show up on time to get his head bashed in, and the accepting of the gage being a reciprocal pledge. Which should make you think twice about engagement rings, since they too are a gage or pledge — what actually are you pledging when you present such a ring to your one true love? (Or, these days, your one in a series of true loves. As a friend of mine said at a wedding, “He’ll make a very good
first
husband.”)

But back to mortgages. With a mortgage, the house is the thing being pawned — it’s put up as the gage — but the pledge becomes “dead” once the mortgage has been discharged. I like the word “discharge” here too — it’s what is said of an arrested person when he or she is let out of jail.

So “paying off the mortgage” is what happens when people play the life game of “Debtor” nicely. But what if they don’t play nicely? Not-nice play involves cheating, as every child knows. But it’s not always true that cheaters never prosper, and every child knows that too: sometimes they do prosper, in the playground and elsewhere.

Thus there is a not-nice, cheating form of “Debtor.” “‘Try and Collect” is what Berne calls it, and the name says it all. Like the other cheating games in his book, the not-nice player wins something no matter what happens. Basically, the debtor obtains a lot of things on credit and then avoids paying. As with Berne’s other disingenuous games, “Try and Collect” needs at least two players, and the person playing opposite the debtor is of course the creditor. If the creditor becomes too frustrated and gives up, thus failing to collect what is owed, the debtor gets something for nothing. If the creditor persists in his efforts to collect, the game becomes an exciting chase. If the creditor becomes really serious and resorts to extreme measures — court cases and the like — the debtor feels justified anger because the creditor is being so mean and grasping. The debtor can then position himself as a put-upon victim and paint the creditor as a truly bad person, who, because of his badness, does not deserve to be paid.

The obtaining of goods on credit, the avoidance of payment, the thrill of the chase, the anger at the creditor, and the acting out of victimhood all come with their own jolt-of-brain-chemical rewards, and each also performs the function of providing a key element in a story-of-my-life game of “Debtor” plot line. As the dilapidated tramp Vladimir in Beckett’s play
Waiting for Godot
says of an unpleasant scene he’s just witnessed, it passes the time. His pal Estragon replies that the time would have passed anyway. Yes, says Vladimir, but it would not have passed so rapidly. Whatever else debt may be, it can also — it seems — have entertainment value, even for the debtor himself. Like the rats and their self-induced electric shocks, we’d rather have something painful happening to us than nothing happening to us at all.

DEBT CAN HAVE
another kind of entertainment value when it becomes a motif, not in a real-life plot line, but in a fictional one. How this kind of debt plot unfolds changes over time, as social conditions, class relations, financial climates, and literary fashions change; but debts themselve have been present in stories for a very long time.

I’d like to begin by interrogating a familiar character — a character so familiar that he’s made it out of the fiction in which he stars into another kind of stardom: that of television and billboard advertising. That character is Ebenezer Scrooge, from Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
. Even if you haven’t read the book or seen the play or the several movies made about Scrooge, you’d probably recognize him if you met him on the street. “Give like Santa, save like Scrooge,” say the ads, and we then have a lovable, twinkly old codger telling us about some great penny-pinching bargain or other.

But, wanting to have it both ways, the ads conflate two Scrooges: the reformed Scrooge, who signals the advent of grace and the salvation of his soul by going on a giant spend-o-rama, and the Scrooge we see at the beginning of the book — a miser so extreme that he doesn’t even spend any of his money-hoard on himself — not on nice food, or heat, or warm outfits — not anything. Scrooge’s abstemious gruel-eating lifestyle might have been applauded as a sign of godliness back in the days of the early bread-and-water saintly ascetic hermits, who lived in caves and said
Bah! Humbug!
to all comers. But this is not the case with mean old Ebenezer Scrooge, whose first name chimes with “squeezer” as well as with “geezer,” whose last name is a combination of “screw” and “gouge,” and whose author disapproves mightily of his ways:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. . . . No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. . . . Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

That Scrooge has — consciously or not — made a pact with the Devil is signalled to us more than once. Not only is he credited with the evil eye, that traditional mark of sold-to-the-Devil witches, but he’s also accused of worshipping a golden idol; and when, during his night of visions, he skips forward to his own future, the only comment he can overhear being made about himself in his former place of business is “. . . old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?” Old Scratch is of course the Devil, and if Scrooge himself isn’t fully aware of the pact he’s made, his author most certainly is.

But it’s an odd pact. The Devil may get Scrooge, but Scrooge himself gets nothing except money, and he does nothing with it except sit on it.

Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers — quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines — she has other names — but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus isn’t mean and grasping and covetous. He doesn’t want money just to have it — he wants to dispense it on his other wishes. He’s got friends who enjoy his company, he’s a big spender who shares his wealth around, he likes food and drink and fun parties and playing practical jokes, and he uses his power to rescue at least one human being from death. In fact, he behaves like Scrooge, after Scrooge has been redeemed — the Scrooge who buys huge turkeys, giggles a lot, plays practical jokes on his poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, goes to his nephew’s Christmas party and joins in the parlour games, and saves Bob’s crippled offspring, Tiny Tim, leading us to wonder if Scrooge didn’t inherit a latent gene for bonvivantery from his distant ancestor Doctor Faustus — a gene that was just waiting to be epigenetically switched on. (Scrooge doesn’t get sex with a pretend Helen of Troy, however. He’s too wrinkly for that. Having thrown over his fiancée because she didn’t have enough money and then having devoted himself to no sins but those of the counting house, he’s left that part of life too long. All he gets is a moment of ogling the cute young maid at his nephew’s house —“Nice girl! Very!” says he, Hugh Hefnerishly — but even this ogling is done in an avuncular and benevolent manner: no bottom-pinching or even cheek-pinching for Scrooge.)

Was Dickens consciously writing Scrooge as a reverse Faustus? He’d have known the Faust tale through the English pantomime — he was a devoted pantomime fan, and Faust was still popular on that stage in the days before
A Christmas Carol
was written. There are so many correspondences it’s hard to avoid the thought: Faustus longs to fly through the air and visit distant times and places, Scrooge dreads it, both do it. Both have clerks — Wagner and Bob Cratchit — the one treated well by Faustus, the other treated badly by Scrooge. Both attend jolly parties in invisible form, at which Faustus behaves disruptively and Scrooge behaves well. Marley is Scrooge’s Mephistopheles figure who carries his own Hell around with him, but he’s come to save Scrooge’s soul, not to buy it; the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future play his attendant spirits, though they’re angelic rather than demonic; and so forth. Everything Faustus does, Scrooge does backwards. I’m sure somebody has investigated this subject more thoroughly, and if so, I’d be happy to be informed of the results.