The Financial Lives of the Poets Read Online Free

memory.
    “No you can’t, Dad.” I push Dad’s pills closer, wipe milk off Franklin’s elbow.
    Dad pats the pocket where he used to keep his cigarettes. Then he tosses the pills in one side of his mouth and spews anger from the other: “Would you goddamn let me do one thing around here, Matthew!”
    “I don’t think you put the swear word in the right place, Grandpa,” Teddy says. When Dad first came here, my boys would look shocked whenever Dad went Old-Faithful-profane, and I began to wonder if Lisa and I shouldn’t swear more so Franklin and Teddy weren’t so put off by curse words. But they’ve gotten used to Grandpa’s eruptions; they don’t even look up from their cereal unless it’s to correct his grammar.
    I try to be patient: “Remember Dad? You can’t blow out the sprinklers because you don’t have an air compressor anymore?”
    “Where the hell’s my compressor.” His ears are bright red and he won’t meet my eyes. I think he sometimes knows that he’s forgetting, even if he’s not sure what he can’t remember.
    “Look, we’ll talk about this later.”
    Sometimes this answer is enough; other times Dad’s creeping dementia makes him angry and frustrated, like now, and he argues with me. “No. Tell me now. Where the hell’s my air compressor. Did you sell it?”
    “No, Dad. You gave it to Charity. Remember?”
    This is what I say when Dad persists. It is partly true. My father did give everything he owned to a stripper stage-named Charity—a young silicone-peaked girl he met when he went with some old Army buddies to a reunion in Reno that ended at six in the morning with lap dances at a strip club. Dad’s and Charity’s relationship was one of those classic May-December romances, a by-the-numbers affair, those numbers being (1) grind, (2) drunken proposal, (3) taking stripper home, (4) identity theft and (5) disappearance of stripper. After Dad drove her all the way back to his remote house in Oregon, she lived with him for exactly ten days, just enough time to clean out his bank accounts and ruin his credit, and to have her boyfriend drive up from Reno to load most of Dad’s belongings—including his beloved air compressor—into a U-Haul and drive away, Charity waving bye-bye from the truck window.
    Dad was so embarrassed he didn’t tell me or my sisters for months, during which time Charity and her boyfriend lived high on Dad’s cratering credit; his power was shut off, his gas cut, phone disconnected, and I arrived at his little fifteen-acre ranch to find him eating canned corn he cooked in his fireplace. It was too late to untangle him, especially since Dad couldn’t remember the details of his undoing (although I notice he hasn’t forgotten my childhood failings, i.e., the great Little League dropped pop-up of 1977). Now, when I explain—over and over—how a stripper ripped him off, Dad’s biggest disappointment isn’t that he gave everything away, but that he didn’t get Charity’s last name so we might track her down. When I point out that Charity is a phony first name, and that getting a phony last name probably wouldn’t help us find her, Dad says I give up too easily.
    “And you’re going to see Richard today?” Lisa asks on her next lap through the kitchen. Richard is our financial planner, which is a bit like being Lido Deck Officer on the Lusitania.
    “Yeah,” I say. “Just to move some stuff around. Get some advice.”
    Lisa doesn’t do financial crises very well—when she was twelve, her father died and she and her mom struggled—so I’ve been sparing her some of the specific details. Obviously, she knows I’m out of work and that we’re in debt (she helped get us there) but she doesn’t know, for example, that today Richard is cashing out what’s left of my retirement so I can make a deferred balloon payment to the mortgage company next week. “After the meeting with Richard,” I tell her, “I’ll go see that employment counselor. Then