Reading up on the latest financial disasters tonight, my mind drifts back to the very end of the twentieth century, to the year 1999.
Life, as they say, was good.
Me and Lauren had entered the fifth year of a gorgeous marriage and we'd just brought a child into the world, our first, a boy, born on December 23rd, 1998. We had bought what they call a "two-family" home that July; up and down flats, three bedrooms in each unit, a nice place. We got $650 a month in rent from the tenants downstairs and I think the mortgage on the place was $900 a month.
We bought our first "real" car that fall, a four door blue-green 1998 Honda Civic LX, five year loan cost us $198 a month. A good car, hell, 170,000 miles later it's out in the driveway as I type this, still getting thirty miles a gallon. I wanted Lauren to drive something with airbags, it became something of an obsession with me, the airbag thing. Me, I barely drove the vehicle, other than on the occasional weekend jaunt. I walked to work, or took the bus if pressed for time.
I had quit a supervisory job in a bank's network operations center the year before; too many hours, too much stress, not enough pay, zero job satisfaction. Lauren made me quit; I wanted to, kept getting gunshy, but she pushed and pushed until I finally jumped. She worked doing graphic design and layout for a big insurance company. She liked playing around with the mac well enough and she got on well with the other graphics types but damn if a lot of the folks there didn't have this weird cult-like feelings about the place that mystified her.
Anyway, our son came along at the end of 1998 and about twelve minutes after he did, Lauren decided that she had no interest in returning to her job. Well, who am I to argue, I thought, she made me quit a job I hated so I could go work part-time for some lefty political outfit, a gig that allowed me to come home early each day, sit down, and take a crack at my long-held dream of writing a novel. (I wrote about 250 pages of it. It sucked.)
OK, we'll live on my part-time money. Which amounted to about $225 a week, in January of 1999.
Well, even then, even with a $250 a month housing nut and a $200 a month car payment, $225 a week did not make for the easiest of livings. You got your car insurance and upkeep, house upkeep, heat, hot water, food, and all that, well, you know how it goes...the bills crawled in, short and thin, the checks that crawled out seem fat and stout...
My organization started to grow and not long after we had our son they decided to put me on full time. My income doubled, but still, in the early months of '99, we had a hell of a time keeping our heads above water.
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Over the years I had developed an affinity for, and a talent for, playing the horses a bit. I know, not the most progressive activity out there. But I grew up right near Saratoga, the birthplace of American racing, and several of the family elders had grown attached to the old track and had gotten me interested, and the idea of solving these puzzles called horse races appealed to me.
Around that time my organization hired an intern. He moved here in the middle of the decade to study, from somewhere in Eastern Europe. A graduate student at the public policy program at the local university, he truly believed in America and American capitalism. The mere mention of the stock market made his eyes go moist. He watched in amazement and wonder as the stock bubble of the late '90's inflated in a seemingly endless path to glory, and he began to play around with his limited funds.
One day that year, in late May, I left the office early and I ran into him on my way out.
"Going home to see the wife and baby, eh?" he asked.
"Yup. But first I gotta see a man about a horse."
He didn't know what I meant, but seeing as he seemed like a decent guy, I took a chance and explained it to him. Told him that the dough was a little tight and I didn't have much choice but to either borrow some money or take that last Jackson in my pocket and try and turn in to something better.
He seemed stupefied.
"You GAMBLE??? You seem like a smart guy, I can't believe this..."
"But you gamble, too," I pointed out. "On the market."
"That's not gambling," he insisted, before giving me a long lecture on how "investing" in the market did not equal, in any way, shape, or form, gambling.
I tried to point out the error of his thinking, but he heard none of it. Apparently the stock market always went up and all you had to do was know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, and you couldn't help but make money.
Well, I said, I don't agree, and even if you're right, we got bills due next week and my twenty bucks ain't gonna do shit for us in the market between now and then, so I'm off to the horse parlor.
I went off and did my thing.
A couple of hours later I came home with over eight hundred bucks in my pocket. I'll never forget it: I came up the stairs into our place, you could open one door into the living room and the other door into the kitchen, I opened the door into the kitchen and Lauren was there holding our son, and I looked at her and started laughing, and she said what, and then I took our son from her, held him in my left arm, reached into my right front pocket with my free hand, pulled out the eight hundred, and started singing, daddy won big today, kiddo, daddy won big.
When I told the intern this story the next day, he simply didn't believe me.
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All that summer and fall, I won money betting the horses. I could do no wrong, it was unbelievable. We started to assume the winnings as regular income and we started living like hit men. And the intern kept getting killed in the market, and he kept insisting he wasn't gambling, and he kept insisting I was lying.
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I always stop betting in late October, after racing's "world series" as it were, and by early December we started flailing with the bills again. Lauren couldn't figure it out so she went over the bank statements and started noticing all these random deposits that seemed to have stopped once November rolled around. Oh, she said. You stopped betting, that;s why we're stuck. Right before Bailey turned a year old she took a part-time job using her artsy background, to help make ends meet. The intern went on his way and I never saw him again after that December.
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A couple of years later, in the summer of 2001, we sold the two-family and bought a fixer-upper, a three bedroom with a tremendous yard in a fantastic neighborhood, for well less than what nearby houses would normally sell for. We thought we had netted the steal of the century, we laughed all the way to the closing table.
Well, nothing's THAT easy, right? Within two months we'd burned through all the fixer-upper money, that we thought would be plenty - and that was before we had to replace the hot water heater, the roof, a portion of the (brick) back outer wall, the front porch, most of the chimney...I won't go on, but as you can guess, we did what most people did during the early years of the decade, we pretended that we weren't sinking under the weight of rising costs and declining real wages, and we borrowed from the hallucinated, supposed wealth of our house, hey, too bad that stock market thing didn't work out, intern, but this is different, real estate always goes up, eh?
We finally got everthing done around the summer of 2005, but by then, we saw the writing on the wall: the jig was up. We decided to get out while the getting was good, and in early 2006, right near the top of the market, we sold. Even with the borrowing we did to fix the place up we made out like bandits, so to speak, and we squirreled the profits away, moved up to a super-cheap apartment owned by my brother and his wife (they live upstairs), and decided to wait out the storm.
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Little did we know the storms that awaited.
Last August Lauren went for a hearing test due to some problems in her left ear. Labor Day weekend we found out that the hearing loss stemmed from a large but benign tumor on the left side of her brain. In late October she had surgery to remove the tumor. By Thanksgiving she was dead.
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For the past ten days I have sat alone, with two of my three children (the eldest, the one mentioned above, has spent the time in school or with family and friends), all three of us sick as the proverbial dogs. The youngest, a boy at eighteen months, had a double ear infection. The girl, at thirty nine months, was sick but it seemed viral. Me, a bad sinus infection.
I have sat here alone, mourning my wife beyond the ability to describe it, cooped up in this small and decrepit apartment, which was supposed to be a temporary stop for our family. I have laid on the couch and wept with a pillow over my face as the little ones played obliviously on the floor beside me. I have not gone to work in what seems like forever; I only just returned and we had not worked out child care options yet, so my mother was watching them, but she has pneumonia and is obviously out of commission for awhile.
It's tough for me to believe in much, anymore. My world, my story, got shattered eight ways to Sunday. What future? What plans? It seems like I'm coming apart at the seams and it seems like the most of the rest of the world is, too.
I have sat here alone and thought, what the hell am I gonna do? I check the news here and there, the war still rages and the financial system truly seems on the verge of collapse, just tonight a huge investment bank gets sold for literally pennies on the dollar. Should I go to our banks tomorrow and take out our money and spread it under the mattresses? How the hell can I keep my job under these circumstances? And why should I bother? What's in it for me, for our children? Full-time daycare for the tykes and summer camp for the eldest will eat more than half my take home pay, what the fuck, why bother? Why not just pack it all in and live off the savings for awhile, have a nice summer with the kids, who knows when, or if, we'll ever be able to have a nice summer again?
Why not, indeed?
Yeah, I don't know what the hell to do, so for now I'll just have another glass of wine and think longingly back to the days, to back when I had a wife and a baby and my whole life stretched out in front of me, back to the days when I had it all, back to the days when the ground beneath us felt so, so much firmer.