“I bought me an Illusion/and I put it on the wall
I let it fill my head with dreams/and I had to have them all”
-Axl Rose, 1991.
By day I’m a legal aid attorney. I help the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, mostly in the area of poverty law, which encompasses the legal troubles of the poor: looming evictions, wrangling over security deposits, children in the crossfire of families made septic by pills and meth, failures to appear, DUIs and domestic violence, and a fair amount of Chapter 7 bankruptcy. I’ve paid bills with these simple bankruptcies, and I’ve seen enough of them to learn the most common reasons people can’t hold it together: medical expenses; buying too much house; the sudden loss of a job followed by years of struggling to tread water as it leaked through the bulkhead; and most rarely, simple financial irresponsibility. It’s a common belief that people in money trouble earned their fate, that rubes deserve to be punished for their ignorance, that financial ruin is the just dispensation of punishment from the lawful God of the Bottom Line upon the foolhardy and profligate. Take this reaping as your just desserts, you buyer on credit! Find your bootstraps amid the rubble of your life and pull yourself up son!
I take a more nuanced approach; The broad brushstroke doesn’t survive encounters with reality; People in all their staggering, heartbreaking humanity will strip threadbare the narrative of the welfare cheat, the condom denier, the social services parasite. It’s impossible to maintain the belief that all poor people are stupid idiots when they are across the table from you oozing humanity, so I don’t traffic in the finely tuned derision for the poor practiced by the educated of the middle and upper class, the silent judgment of the legions of Wal-Mart shoppers, McDonalds’ breakfast buyers, and furniture lay-awayers; the casual sneer towards airborne monster trucks, demolition derbies, corn dogs, Camaros, Corvettes, WWE top rope high flyers, and the fourth of JU-LY.
Financial responsibility must be taught. Money, ink on paper, numbers on a screen, the digital currents of ones and zeros is a sophisticated abstraction, a consensual fiction. The investment field is the history of human creativity applied to this abstraction, taken to ever rarefied heights of incomprehensibility. The collapse of the subprime lending bubbling exceeds the grasp of most reasonably intelligent people-you don’t have to lie to kick it, you really can’t explain debt tranches—indeed, the individuals tasked with monitoring the abstraction of money failed so miserably, so completely, that their dereliction of duty can scarcely be captured with words. Some of us have a natural faculty for fiscal prudence, and others, like me, spend incessantly, without regard for consequence. My hands are two bony incinerators, turning future prosperity and comfort into go-fast car parts for worthless cars, vehicles that have long since been eclipsed by more attractive and better performing models. “Put it in a retirement account” is somewhere on my priority below “Buy another set of rims” and “Get rear tires to turn to ash” Personally, I look sideways at those smug bastards with the fat savings accounts, fix them with my finest Clint Eastwood squint. When are you going to spend it? When you retire? Assuming you will live that long, that you won’t be felled by thrombosis speeding like a heat seeking missile to your heart, or a ravenous malignant cancerous blossom, or an errant motorist with a BAC percolating at coma levels, just what are you going to do with all that dough? Where I live the answer is winter sun over a gated community and golf. Playing golf every day with a group of men and their spouses strikes me as my worst nightmare, a sunset Disneyland predicated on the exclusion of reality and non-whites and massive infusions of glorious water into a parched desert. Sure, let the Mexicans come and prepare the club sandwiches, the shrimp cocktail, the extra dry martini with a kiss of vermouth, the thick vodka lolling against the very top of the glass, let them trim the palm trees, replace the irrigation hose and plant the bright flowers, but when night falls, cast them forth beyond the gate, far beyond the terra cotta walls and manicured hedges, because by Golly you’ve earned your right to exclude. There’s something to be said for youthful extravagance, because when you’re seventy, it’s unlikely you’ll tap out a fat rail on a stripper’s ass or sip lean as the sun comes up orange over Tropicana Boulevard. Grandpa is way more interesting when he tells stories about that time tripping balls in Amsterdam than when he is talking about the importance of starting a savings account young, right?
I know how to spend and be broke; I’m a consummate artist of self-destruction, some innate response from my Irish peasant side of the family--the legion of brawlers, dutiful Catholics, and glassy-eyed pub stumblers, throttled by their own urges--so I’m the wrong guy to give financial advice, but that Esquire after my name fools some people into thinking I’m an authority. Only sheer dumb luck has kept me from the shoals of financial ruin, but circumstance, life’s inimitable humor, has me at the table with the yellow pad, taking notes on some poor bastard’s tale of ruin.
In my bankruptcy practice I’ve reviewed hundreds of car sales and lease agreements, and these contracts form a litany of human deceit, a compendium of the methods car dealerships cheat people. Satan laughing spreads his wings. As part of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, individuals have the option of reaffirming these loans, which means they obligate themselves to continue the contract, or they can dump the vehicle and walk away free of the noose. I review them and offer my sage learned advice. In almost every situation, my client would best be served to walk away from the future debt and buy a ten-year-old Camry for six grand. But they don’t have six grand, they don’t have friends or family to borrow six large from, and occasionally, they have too much self-worth and dignity to fork over their hard-earned scrilla for Metamucil on wheels. Nothing quite proclaims, “I’m indifferent to passion, color and feeling! I’m an insensate bipedal creature eating and shitting my way through the meager time I have been allotted on this cruel planet!” than driving a Camry. Some people don’t have any help; they didn’t get Gramps’ creampuff Lexus after he went to the nursing home and their ‘92 Accord went belly up on the 405 during rush hour; their parents didn’t do them a solid when they got knocked up for the first time and kicked them down the Grand Cherokee they couldn’t get within spitting distance of leasing.
The last sales agreement I reviewed was for a 2015 Ford F150 Crew Cab. You ready for the terms? 6.99% over 84 months; total amount financed a princely $57,080.79. If they keep the vehicle, they will have paid a grand total of $72, 551.64. For a fucking half ton. So how did they get taken? They made all the mistakes: they didn’t walk in with a finance offer from a different lender; they came in $2500 under water on their current vehicle; they laid down on the sales price; the chained themselves for seven years; and they dropped $4500 in F & I on not one, but two service contracts.
But those aren’t the real reasons why they made a mistake. It comes down to a belief, a conviction. Five words. I can make this work.
“Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
“No Cassius, for the eye sees not itself/But by reflection, by some other things.”
You make think them fools, saps, suckers, simpletons, imbeciles, ignoramuses, but take a look at your own life. How many of your mistakes started with those five simple words? I can make this work.
From this innocuous phrase springs a catalogue of misfortune, cascading maladies, the spiraling helix of destruction: battered women granting abusers one more chance; a risky business venture financed by an equity line of credit; creative borrowing of an employer’s money; a tryst with Ms. Margaret Everbottom, the patron Saint of southern secretaries, all hips and red lipstick pout, voice grained by Marlboro Lights with just a twinge of trailer left in her syllables. Just a game of pool, she said.
If we examine our past, what becomes clear is our seemingly limitless ability to deceive ourselves, to fail to see what others can see so clearly. Self-deception, our mind’s treasonous bloom, the whispered lie, the many headed hydra of desire, the scaffolding we build to move from the real to the unfathomable. Our ideas seduce us: they feel proper, just, girded with truth, built atop sturdy foundations. Other times our deceptions come as torrent, flood, raging passion, galloping thunder followed by sharp sweet spring rain.
Look at your own life, start microscopic, and then widen your lens and look for traces of this belief. I’ll go first.
Micro: I attempt to convince myself daily I need another junk car when I already have two junk sedans from the 90’s, neither one of which is any good or could be any good even with a massive infusion of someone else’s cash.
Zoom out: A singularly wretched time in my life when I had two girlfriends, a job in corporate America complete with office and staff, unlimited K-cups, a dress code, and the daily strangle of a suit and tie. Couple that with the belief that I could somehow safely drink alcohol and not suffer the horrors that drug me to sobriety the first time, a growing attraction towards handling firearms in a blackout. What could possibly go wrong?
Fisheye: Me playing lawyer on the safe side of the calamity of my younger years, a scatterbrain shot at the mainstream square pegging a round hole, some wreath of societal respectability to salve the sting of not chasing harder dreams.
Why do we do it then? What’s behind I can make this work? Why do we think we will escape the consequences of our questionable choices and trip the light fantastic around calamity? Is it a relentless optimism, a belief that good fortune will find us in the nick of time, that Lady Luck will skip a marker across the felt table to us with a wink and a crooked smile? Perhaps it is wanton recklessness, a belief we can go on hurting ourselves or others without repercussion, without being swept away by karmic avalanche, bitter regret, the vinegar taste of soured dreams? Could be something simpler, mundane—simple negligence, not seeing a stop sign or brake lights ahead—a failure to alert to that our choices even need to be examined.
Wisdom is often simply no more than not believing everything you think.
My clients? I begged them to dump the Ford with the $42,000 balance, told them that the note was a pair of concrete shoes that would tug them back to the bottom. I advised them to buy something that might run 20K all in, still respectable enough to not draw any comments in the pick-up line at the elementary. I told them to take the interest rate hike square in the teeth knowing they would save fistfuls in the long run.
They kept the truck. “Now that the credit cards are gone and we’re not paying those back, we’ll have plenty of money to cover the note.” The heart wants what the heart thinks it wants.