The brakes sounded so bad I didn't even notice the empty tank light lit up in yellow on the dashboard until I'd driven five miles out of town. The brakes sounded like an accident waiting to happen, all metal on metal grinding, the sound making my adrenaline rise by the second as I contemplated the upcoming round-abouts up in Malta.
Shit, I yelled when I noticed the empty light. Shit.
I felt too nervous to even turn the radio on, like the sound of music would distract me to the point of affecting whatever eventual outcomes the physical realities of bad brakes and an empty tank might exact.
&&&
I was late for work, as usual. And unfortunately I have the kind of job where people notice if you get in at 8:37 rather than 8:30. Doesn't matter how often you stay late, how hard you work. You get there late, you see the co-workers notice you and you see the authorities trying to pretend they don't notice, but you know they do.
So no stopping for gas, I'd chance it all the way up to Saratoga, and I only had $6.45 on me anyway. The 2004 Honda Accord, or this particular iteration of it, seems to have a feature where the empty light goes on kind of early. I looked at the clock, 8:19 as I made the last round-abouts in Malta and then onto the Exit 12 on-ramp, the brakes grinding furiously, disgustingly, alarmingly, as I slowed down through the round-abouts, I can get there by 8:30 if I speed I thought, but on empty it's wiser to keep it closer to 65. I drifted over into the middle lane and got behind an eighteen wheeler, trying to draft behind it to save gas. Shit, I think, you know you're fucking broke when you're trying to draft behind tractor-trailers in an effort to save a few cents worth of gas.
&&&
It wasn't always like this, but then, how many millions of us can say that? They've been busting our balls since the early '70's, the Romney types buying up everything, most importantly the government, and arranging things the way they want them, the result of which has been the rest of us doing more and more work for less and less money.
I knew better, but refused to hear the screams; I figured I had slipped through the cracks. Lucked into a good job back in the mid-90's, as did my wife, and her parents gifted us with a mammoth down payment on a house and we were living like hitmen for a long time there, and I thought, well, I got lucky, through no fault of my own, but I wasn't throwing that fish back for being undersized, ya know? I took it.
Then my luck ran out.
We sold our house, made a large profit, and we sat like cats with bellies full o'canaries with a big chunk of change in our pockets, renting for dirt cheap from family while waiting for the housing market to finish shitting the bed.
And then the wife got some sort of bizarre, unheard of brain tumor, benign, they said, nothing the doctors couldn't fix.
Not so much.
We went from looking at houses to arguing about where to have the surgery to her being dead in less than ninety days.
I was destroyed.
I went back to work for a few months but I couldn't do a damn thing while I was there. All I could do was talk to my co-workers about my grief. God, I must have been so fucking annoying.
I figured there was only so long I could go on doing nothing before they fired me, and I had about seventy-five large in the bank from the house sale, and very low overhead, so I quit before they could shit-can me. They gave me a nice going away party and my boss kinda cried when she finished my goodbye speech and it was all good, I knew I'd land on my feet eventually.
&&&
In some ways, I did.
I went through some pretty rough times. I stayed home with my three very young children for almost three years. The seventy-five large, supplemented only by about $1200 a month in survivor's benefits, melted down to nothing.
After a few years I got my head straightened out a bit and I met this awesome woman and fell in love with her and we got married and I thought, well, I'm done paying for that quitting my good job thing, I'm done paying period, until the next tragedy or fiasco comes, and I decided I wasn't gonna worry too much about that, because Lauren was 100,000-1 to get the tumor she got, and north of 1,000,000-1 to die from it, so who the hell knows, anyway, right? I mean, you really CAN get hit by a bus tomorrow, I saw it happen with my own two eyes.
So, life was good, and then Sheila got pregnant, jeez, I say it like I wonder how it happened, really no mystery there, and then she had Sophie last September, and then she quit her job because it was the kind of job that left her drained even before she had a baby.
We had some money saved but that disappeared very quickly, and then we went into paycheck-to-paycheck land, and from there into robbing Peter-to-pay-Paul land. My bank - a credit union, by the way - oh so graciously offered overdraft protection for a mere $30 per offense.
I hit this occasionally at first, and then fiercely after awhile.
Eventually, I learned how to work it: you go and take out $600 of cash and get hit with only one $30 charge for that rather than $30 for every tank of gas and every batch of groceries.
But even this left us perpetually broke, living on the edge, wondering on Tuesdays how we would raise enough scratch to put gas in the tank and food in the bellies living here and gallons of milk in the fridge.
Eventually Sheila started looking for work and she found something, but by then summer vacations from school had arrived, and most of her check just wound up paying for the child care we need for her to go to work. We got some help, in the form of my first mother-in-law coming over from England to watch the kids for a month, but after next week, she's back home and we gotta come up with $500 for a week's worth of child care, on top of everything else.
&&&
I did the math as the car, running on empty, crawled in the middle lane, behind a tractor-trailer, up the last few miles toward Exit 15.
My checking account sits at negative $864 and change. I don't get paid until next week. Sheila gets paid weekly, and she got paid today. Another free tip: make sure at least one of you can cash a check, as in get cash money for it.
Anyway, I'm at negative $864, Sheila's at plus $550 after paying Sophie's sitter. I figure if we're lucky, if my Dad and I are right about the tires having another coupla months on them, if the back brakes don't need replacing, and if that rattling sound coming from the undercarriage is the typical Honda heat shield going bad noise rather than an exhaust system shitting the bed noise, we might be able to get out of the garage for about $500. Sheila's folks said they'd help out if necessary.
And this is what we're reduced to: both of us working full-time, working hard, and needing best-case scenarios and help from parents, in our mid-40's, to keep food on the table.
I can't take any more and finally decide to listen to some tunes to distract myself; I can't take worrying about the gas running out or the brakes failing or us running out of any money whatsoever, any more. Keep going, I thought. Get to work on time, at least.
I pressed the CD changer, came across some Springsteen, my favorite of his, Darkness on the Edge of Town.
I sing along at the top of my lungs,
"Baby tie your hair back
in a long white bow
Meet me in the fields
behind the dynamo
You'll hear their voices
telling you not to go
They made their choices
And they'll never know
what it means to steal,
to cheat, to lie,
What it's like to live and die..."
&&&
A memory comes back.
Back in the day. An awesome house, in a beautiful neighborhood.
Money not an issue.
A Saturday night in some long-gone August.
Lauren, tired, went to bed early.
Me, not tired, stayed up listening to tunes, to Darkness, and drinking heavily.
'round midnight, I took a walk.
Wound up in a bar full of people way younger than myself.
A guy about half my age and twice as drunk asked me what the fuck I was doing there.
I told him I went out for a smoke and wound up needing a drink.
I bought both of us a double of Jack. I inhaled mine, he nursed his.
How is it, he asked. How is it? What's it like? You're married, with kids, and a house, and a real job. What's it like?
He seemed to think I would tell him some dirty secret, about how awful it actually was. He seemed to want me to tell him that he was better off. Instead, I told him the truth.
I'm in my late '30's, I said. Life's never been better. I'm happier than a pig in shit.
If you're so happy, he asked, what are you doing in here, buying us doubles?
You don't get it, I said.
He leaned in close to hear my wisdom.
It's not about one night when you're in my shoes. One night's everything to a young guy like yourself, but that's not how it goes. It's about the sum of all nights. One night's not what you remember. You remember patches. Combinations of nights. Impressions. You understand?
He said he did, but I wasn't so sure.
There's no way to understand other than by being there.
&&&
Almost ten years later, I hit replay on "Prove It All Night" and keep on praying I make it to the office before the tank runs out.
I pass Exit 14, seven minutes or maybe less before I get to the office, depending upon how it goes with the lights on Route 50. I want to gun it but know if I do I lower my chances of making it. I stay behind the tractor-trailer, drafting.
&&&
Eventually, I make it to Exit 15. The light's red and I hit the brakes and they grind out a horrible sound of impeding financial doom. I veritably scream it out, as if the screaming will help,
Everybody's got a hunger, a hunger they can't resist,
There's so much that you want, you deserve much more than this,
But if dreams came true, oh, wouldn't that be nice,
But this ain't no dream we're living through tonight,
Girl, you want it, you take it, you pay the price.
The tank's empty. The brakes are grinding, shot for sure. I got $6.45 in my pocket and my lunch in a plastic bag on the passenger seat, with my sneakers on the floor below it, so I can spend my lunch hour walking, the only time all day I know I can get any sort of the exercise I need to have any chance, given the massive levels of my youthful indiscretion, of living past about sixty-three.
Fuck.
I head south down 50, the needle hasn't moved much, I'm probably gonna make it.
Fuck.
When Sheila and I got together we had some dreams, oh, wouldn't that be nice, one of which was that we'd buy a house, nothing fancy, nothing special, but bigger than the shoebox we're living in now, but I can see now, it ain't gonna happen. I can see the next few years out in front of me, no house, and from the financial perspective, a whole lotta nothing, just an almost eternally negative balance in the checking account, living from one brake job to the next, scraping by, until eventually they take even that from us, and what they used to call the American Dream long gone. Just the way the people on either side of the aisle running the show want it; they like us scurrying, as panicked as rats, hoping we keep on believing our choices from A to B mean anything, hoping we never notice that the choices that ran from A to Z dis-a-fucking-peared.
&&&
I pull into the office parking lot at 8:31 sharp, close enough. Thankfully no one hears the brakes grind their embarrassing ode to near-poverty. Thankfully no one sees me slink in and sit down at my desk.
&&&
At the end of the day I practically coasted down to the local Stewart's and rolled up next to a gas pump. Just in front of me, a woman in an eighty thousand dollar car was pumping gas. I saw her face when she heard my brakes. I got out and smiled at her. She looked away. I opened my tank and poured my $6.45 into it. Enough to get home, I figured. It took about forty-five seconds to pump the $6.45 into the tank. The woman in front of me scoffed. Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm happy.
I'm crazy about Sheila; after what happened with Lauren, I pretty much figured I was done with the romance part of my life, so this has been an unexpected boon.
And, at least this far, we're getting by. A roof over our heads, food to eat.
I really don't want that much more than that; maybe it's just the way things are going, both personally and on the macro front, but it seems like they don't even want us to have that. Seems like they don't want us to have any comfort, any relief, whatsoever. Seems like they want us scared.
I went in and paid, made a joke with the cashier about pumping $6.45 into my car. She laughed. She got it.
A lot of people get it these days.