Money

Originally Posted Sunday, June 30, 2013

I paid the house repairman again yesterday for his newest work.  I'm tapped out now.  I want to go to NYC and to San Fran, but the money river has dried up.  Suddenly every dime I spend has import.  Immediately I begin thinking of the studio.  How can I go on paying rent it if I don't sell prints?  Then I think that I certainly could sell prints.  Then I think of the work involved.  Then I think about having a drink and going to dinner or about anything other than money. 

I had a job to do yesterday.  I had to find some matching tile for the bathroom floor.  I also needed to buy some paint to match the ceiling and walls.  Saying that I would find the tiles was easy.  But when I decided to leave the house to do it, I wondered where all the tile places were.  I had memories of lots of them.  I pass them every day when I'm driving.  Where were they?  When you are not looking for them, the world is full of tile stores.  Then my old brain gave over to the new brain. Yelp!  Its an app on my phone.  I sat on a bench after my greasy spoon breakfast and brought some places up.  The first on the list was not so far away (Yelp! can do that). 

I walked into a big tile warehouse sort of place along the lines of a Home Depot.  Surely, I thought. . . and then I came upon them.  What luck.  And certainly these were the last of them, too, for I had to go through two boxes to find two squares without broken tiles.  That was easy. 

On a roll, I went into the garage to dig through old paint cans.  There were a lot and too many different ones.  I was looking for Benjamin Moore, though, and that halved the number.  They all had numbers on them rather than names.  My house is painted with paint from their Historic series.  There aren't that many colors.  I thought that surely if I saw the name and the color, I'd know, so I drove to the store to see. 

I didn't.  I didn't recognize any of the names. 

So I drove back to the house and looked again.  Surely this was it.  Hawthorne Yellow.  My walls are the faintest of yellow, so faint. . . and the name wasn't "yellow," but why would I have this can? 

At the store, I told the man I wanted a quart.  Twenty-three dollars  The man at the counter said that he had a gallon he had mixed up for a customer but they didn't take it.  "Why," I asked suspiciously?  "They probably wanted glossy instead of eggshell.  I can't remember."  "How much?"  "I'll give it to you for twenty." 

Hell, yes!  Man. . . what a day.  I was thinking of buying a lottery ticket. 

When the repairman came over, I was strutting like a rooster.  Well. . . you can imagine the rest.  The black squares in the tile were bigger than the ones on the floor, and the white tiles were smaller.  They didn't match.  Shitpissfuckgoddamn.  The paint wasn't the right color, either. 

We went rooting in the garage and I came up with some cans of paint.  Unlike me, he opened them.  They looked right.  Then they were. 

I'm amazed at the way he can make every horrible task look so easy and effortless.  While we chat, he takes apart things I don't want to touch.  I'm lazy, of course, and maybe he is at home, too.  But while we talked, he began taking everything out of the pantry he needed to paint.  There was nothing to it.  Why did it seem such a horror to me?  And in the span of a funny conversation of several stories, he had painted the pantry--bing, bang, bong! 

When he was done, I began to get sick.  He wanted money, of course. 

"How much do I owe you," I asked? 

"Let me get my book," he said and began walking to the car.  The book.  His tone had changed. 

"Hey," I called out to him.  "How about if we just rub one out and call it even?" 

Just then a friend called me to see if I wanted to go to dinner. 

"I'll have to call you back.  Dave's here and he's about to take all my money.  Let's go someplace cheap." 

The repairman laughed. 

Yesterday was a bad day for finances; I wrote (deleted) thousand dollars in checks.  And still--we ate on the Boulevard.  We ate and drank and there was no way to do it cheaply, not there.  Rugala salad, a draft Peroni, veal scalopini, a Limoncello, then, because I never drink it, a rye on the rocks.  And of course, we are big tippers. 

I sit here this morning looking around the house for money.  Where's the money?  How does it go away so quickly?  Everything is beautiful, though.  The wooden floors, the antique counters, the 19th century carpet, the antique pine. . . the sunlight falling through the Bahama shutters onto my not quite yellow walls.  It is a hell of a way to be poor, I tell myself. 

If I could only do some things on my own, I think.  If I could master some practical skills.  Even if it were just cleaning things properly.  But I am lazy and imagine myself to be something other than a dumb hillbilly from hillbilly stock. 

What delusion. 

Here is a picture of the exorcist.  It did me no good.  I am still as full of demons as ever.  I think, perhaps, I am filled with more.  In truth, however, I am strangely calm and seemingly content.  I want little more than books and art and travel and good series on t.v.  Oh, and expensive wine and scotch and coffees and teas and rich imported foods from around the world.  Antiques.  A new leather couch and chairs.  A vespa.  A better dining room table.  A beach house. . . .