I Am So Popular: No News is Good News

Even last week’s This American Life was dedicated entirely to “toxic assets.” I take in these money stories the way I might observe a Paris fashion show or fraternity hazing. Some concepts—like being stylish or drinking two gallons of vodka blindfolded while standing in a bucket of ice water and going down on a banana—are just always going to be foreign to me. This is certainly true of money. I am not ever going to understand how it works beyond the notion that if I don’t give all of mine to the various places that demand it, I will have to live without life’s staples: roof, utilities, food and dog costumes.

My working life began when I was a 14 year-old phone solicitor for a dude called Lawn Doctor, earning a dime for every “appointment” I made, never realizing then that some of the men I cold-called offering “free lawn evaluations” were keeping me on the line not out of interest in pesticides but rather as an aid to beating off. In the thirty-three years since that first glam-gig as Lawn Nurse, overwhelmingly it has been a hand-to-mouth existence for me, with one or two random years when the money was, by my standards, astonishingly good.

But there was never enough income consistency to, say, start a retirement fund or sock away a little in savings. And even during brief spells when maybe I could have/should have put something in the bank, I was so giddy at the opportunity to exhale financially that I lived much more like the grasshopper than the ant. Last year was like that. I had a good contract with a steady paycheck that meant all side-gig dough counted, in my book, as disposable. Thus I traveled. A lot. All around the world.

I was, in fact, in Israel when I got the word my contract had rather suddenly dried up and, like Cinderella arriving home post-midnight, my carriage was once again a pumpkin. I didn’t panic. Well, not as much as I used to. I took stock—had I not lived on my own since 18? Had I not managed, if only marginally most of the time, to survive nonetheless? Why yes, like my sister Gloria Gaynor, I had survived! And I would continue to do so.

Thus I resumed the hustle that has made up the majority of my working life, fishing for freelance work, setting up workshops, and contemplating reopening my dog sitting business. I quickly scored quite a bit of work, which was good. But then, just as quickly, I was reminded of the pitfalls of entrepreneurship, when one must wait—and usually wait and wait some more—for money owed to arrive. Daily I’d check my P.O. box. Usually it was empty of money and full of bills. The steady-check comfort zone I’d fallen into the previous year had vanished. And there I was, once again, living on the edge.

Through all this, I kept listening to the radio. Stories of still more people losing jobs, houses, hope. Banks failing to re-circulate money stolen from the government in the name of bailouts—money that included the many thousands per year I pay in taxes. (Or maybe not—maybe my taxes wound up in Afghanistan, earmarked to murder innocent civilians.)

I grasped for perspective as I listened to story after story about all these sub-prime mortgages being blamed for our failed economy. Sometimes, I felt a hint of guilt. Because bizarrely enough, I have profited tremendously from the whole bad mortgage scheme that ran rampant several years ago. I was on the receiving end of one of them, just two years after a bankruptcy I filed after being wiped out by a medical emergency. I never should have qualified. But back then, all you had to do was make up some inflated income on the application and, voila, you, too, could be a homeowner.

I got lucky, bought a house in our fine city, where the property values haven’t dropped the way they have so many other places. And even if I never ever make a dent in the principal of this loan, even if I die a slave to the bank that is charging me an obscene amount of interest, my son will still stand to turn a tidy profit when the house is sold off.

Of course, that doesn’t make a big difference in my life. I continue to struggle, like an infant attempting to lift a bowling ball, to keep my payments up to date. Once a year, I try to refinance, to take advantage of all these programs I hear about on the radio, modification options that promise to make my payments more manageable. And once a year I am rejected on the grounds that I filed a bankruptcy eight years ago, or that my credit score is too low, or that I was late on a bill payment by three days nine months ago.

They don’t care if I was late because a check someone else owed me failed to materialize. It’s pure robotic number crunching for these bastards and my story makes no difference to them. Neither does yours. This is how it goes and I don’t even waste time being sad about having to wait another year to try again, in the meanwhile continuing to pay big banks massive amounts of interest for my most beloved little house.

I opt for the glass-half-full model and count myself fortunate that I even have a house to begin with, an utter fluke. I count myself luckier still that last month, practically out of the blue, I was offered a three-month contract to work in an office. I worried that having to trade out my pajamas for matching clothes—wait, do I even have matching clothes?— and sitting in a cubby might kill me. It hasn’t. The office is beautiful, the people are nice, the work is reasonable, and the pay is great. My biggest fear has shifted from, “How can I survive in an office?” to “Uh-oh, am I going to miss this gig when it’s gone?”

When the job started, a fantasy fast filled my mind. All those late checks that I was still waiting for? Now, when they did arrive, they’d go into the “extra” pile, right? I could pay off that last credit card and still have some leftover—to travel, to share, to invest in more dog costumes. But then…

Then, like a newscast full of still more bad news, I found out I need more surgery. A cataract is clouding my right eye, which is making my work very difficult. On the one hand, it’s sort of neat how everything looks like an impressionistic painting. On the other hand, being able to see is sort of crucial to being able to earn a living given my line of work. Many pre-existing conditions preclude me from qualifying for an affordable insurance plan that would actually provide me with genuinely useful coverage. And so, I will have to shovel many thousands of dollars in cash over to the surgeon to get my eye fixed in order to keep working so that I can continue paying my ridiculous mortgage.

Still, I’m clinging to the half-full theory over here—at least I can make needed surgery happen. The radio keeps telling me about people who have lost everything in this financial mess, who seem to have no hope of a warm meal tonight, let alone finding a job. I could easily be one of them and, for the two months I was in between steady gigs, I seemed to be fast heading in that direction. My new job was a last-minute save. Once again, I’ll manage to get what I need, even if there won’t be any leftover for the next rainy day.

The key to keeping upbeat about all this lays, I think, in turning off the news. I just don’t want to believe I’m one of the little people being fucked over by the banks and insurance companies, even if I am. Got denial, people? Take it from me: It helps.

Spike Gillespie can’t see clearly, but she will be able to one of these days no thanks to “health care” in the US. She would like insurance companies and big banks to please go fuck themselves. She blogs over at spikeg.com. You can sign up for her Jan/Feb writing workshops if you want. And you can sign your kids up for her Holiday Craft Workshops.