Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (7 page)

I cowered in my seat, as
if she were going to swoop through the phone
like a
Death Eater
.
For a compulsive perfectionist like me, you cannot imagine how those words stung.
I felt a flush
–
over my entire body. My hands went numb.

"I'm sorry Doreen I really am. I'll fix it when I get back."

"D
on't bother."
For the first time in my thirty-
three
year career, the unthinkable
had
happened:
I'd been fired.
I was so upset
I even left my fifty
dollar
Apple
mouse in the terminal
.
Enjoy, stranger who found it!

In the meantime,
my finances were crumbling.
The
severance
money was trickling away, gone to support Nigel and Aurora in the enormous Issaquah house.
Doreen had never paid me, and
there was
no way I
could
ask her for money now.

The reason I
was going
to Seattle was to see a bankruptcy lawyer.
Rachel
, a successful business
owner,
had peered over our landfill of debt, took in a lungful of stench, and determined th
at this was the only solution.
BING BING!
I had just hit two key bumpers of
The
Great Recession:
bankruptcy, and foreclosure. I had
long ago
stopped paying the mortgage on North Bend. Our renters had decamped,
leaving the place a trash heap,
and we were so underwater I
could have waved to the giant octopi
on the floor
of Puget Sound.
Oh well, there went our
whole
down payment:
$160,000. In later days
–
when I couldn
’
t afford gas and had to cruise down Hayvenhu
rst
Avenue
in neutral
–
the enormity of this sum hit me
,
and
I marveled like Belzoni before the pyramids.
But then,
in
July
2009,
it was
all
still
a game
–
Monopoly money.

Throug
h the graces of Chapter Eleven
, g
one was the credit card debt
(and credit cards)
; gone was the house we had been so proud of.
I managed to hold onto the truck and personal
items
, but jettisoned something
else
that in Am
erica makes you a criminal.
John Edwards (despite
being a giant dick)
had it
right:
there
are
two Americas.
But
it’s not the Haves and Have Not
s:
it’s the Good Credit
s and Bad Credits
.
If your credit is bad, you might as well sneak over the
border to Mexico
.
Most employers
now
check,
so
you can’t even get a job.
If
your company blows up, like mine did, that makes you a Future Bad Employee.
Thank you, KKK! As I said during my standup, I kne
el
each night and pray
:
“
Dear
God….
please make
his dick fall off.”
  I hope it already has.

So I crept
back
to L.A., simultaneously relieved and ashamed.
I didn't give a
damn
a
bout defaulting to bank
s
, especially
WaMu
’s successor
:
they had fucked me over, and the pleasure was mutual.
I
rony Alert:
If Chase hadn’t let me go, they could have saved $650,000!  Yes, since my mortgage, HELOC, and credit cards were
all
courtesy of –
you guessed it –
WaMu
 
Can you say “
dumbasses
”?  I know you can!
  BTW,
these are the people in charge
.
Which explains the now four-year Recession.

I have to say that I felt
bad
where smaller creditors were concerned:
the horse vet who had saved my Percy, charging many thousands of dollars; the
CPA who did our taxe
s
(
Rachel
had paid for the bankruptcy).

I returned to
her
C
astle
, jobless, bankrupt, and homeless.
Every day, as I
fired out
résumés
from
her office
, I saw th
e army of servants
in motion
to
serve
t
he
One Percent
:
the maid,
who
cleaned on
e
storey a visit; the
five
gardeners,
taming
a spread that rivaled the
Kaanapali
Hilton;
the construction guys, all of them Latino
, repairing an outdoor light
; the pool man, keeping it
clean
; and the exterminator, spraying the periphery of the manse in what looked like a Haz
Mat suit.
Unemployment might be over
twelve percent
in L.A., but
Rachel
was doing
her
best
to keep the number
from rising.

One weekend, I was swimming in the
squarish
pool (adjacent to the spa and founta
in). Oddly, I was the only one who
seemed to use it
.
I got out, dryin
g off by the wrought-iron
table where Rachel
sat with her husband Miles.

"How's it going?" Miles asked.
It was a
rarity for him to address me.
I had k
nown him since junior high, but,
when asked to supply a funny anec
dote for his 40th Birthday
,
came up blank.
Still, he was a nice guy
. His Mom was a Holocaust survivor
, and, like
most
adult
children of same,
he was
very
conflict-adverse.
Logic could solve everything.
Emotion was not to be shown, not even at
his
best friend’s funeral.

"W
ell," I sighed, "I haven't bee
n
able to find a job, even
as a consultant.
I spend eight hours a day looking on the Web."

"She's really trying," Rachel said, reinforcing t
hat I wasn't a freeloading bum.

"The creditors aren’t
challenging the bankruptcy, and I told Nigel he should move back to North Bend and live rent free until they foreclose."

"
Good idea.
"

"How's Aurora?”
Rachel had the knack of alway
s bringing up the subject you
didn't
want to
hear
.

"Not great.
She
attacked Nigel at Target, then
hid in the bathroom.
The police had to get her out."

Rachel shook her head.

"B
ut everyone thinks the rape thing is a lie."

"A
bsolutely."

This was Aurora's latest stunt.
I had rented
the movie
Speak
, where a high school-aged Kristen
Stewart is raped and tells no one about it.
Finally, she hands her mother a note.
As
Aurora handed
one
to Nigel.

Her
tale was more fabulous than Aesop.
She had been walking on a horse trail in Issaquah, and two men had
run up
, thrown her to the ground, and raped her. Conveniently, she never saw their faces.
Medic
al tests had come back negative;
the police didn't believe her
–
not even her
own
doctor
.
When I
’d
questioned her, she said there had been no penetration.

"Aurora, do you know what rape is?"

She looked up
at me innocently.
She knew. Lying was the sharpest arrow
at the top of her
s
urvivor's quiver.

"I don't even care what goes on up there," I
told Rachel
, and I meant it.
Nigel and Aurora
filled me with anxiety
–
and that wasn't easy on 40 milligrams of Paxil a day.
"I just want a job," I
sighed
, and I could feel the
tears
commingle with the chlorinated drops on my face.
"I've never had so much trouble.
Usually, I apply and I get it.
Now,
I can't even get an interview.
And the studios don't want me.
They're too busy laying off their o
wn. Sony just cut
10%
.”
I could hear my voice b
r
eak.

"Don't be a victim."

"What?"

"Don't be a victim."

I looked at Miles across my sister's profile, and something prehensile rose
in me
:
the desire to maim and kill.
This is why, America, we shouldn’t keep
guns handy.

VICTIM?
Me, who had worked for thirty-three years without a break; who pursued
the
job sear
ch with the relentless will of
a
Terminator?
Who had
labored
for a solid, respect
ed
Bank
that went POOF! o
ne day and left behind only dust mites?
!

A shaking kind of hate filled me.
There was Miles, who had known very little hardship in his life
, beyond the death of his father
.
Th
is had been compensated by
early su
ccess as a
Drum
Wizard and D
esigner extraordinaire; the building up of a successful business
with Rachel that had
offices
around
the globe; this house, with two Lexi
in the three-car garage; a
marriage to his childhood sweetheart, whom he'd me
t at thirteen (His sister and I introduced them); two perfect boys
who
were proving
to be
clones of Dad:
math/science nerd
s who played in the school band and had already been to Europe, Japan, and Australia.

He looked over at me smugly. My life had not been
partitioned
into
the
neat l
ittle compartments
that Rachel arranged
(she
even
had
a cover
for
her
vacuum
).
I was
not able
to schedule
my days
down to the minute and have it all work out.
Things like a lunatic
daughter
and
even crazier
husband
, broke
n legs, cancer, being laid off
, kept getting in the way
.
In other words:  Life.
I was seriously off-schedu
le, and in these peoples’ eyes
that was a sin.
I was fifty years old, and
had nothing.

I don't remember what I said to Miles.
What I wanted to say
was
:
how dare you, you little shit?!
All over America, people
are
losing their jobs,
their homes, their retirement,
because capitalists LIKE YOU are
more than
happy to lay off every employee before
letting
a
single
gardener
go.
In effect,
Rachel and Miles were protected by an immense shield
made of
human fles
h, like Loki with his boat
of fingernails.