Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession
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Authors: Amy Wolf
DON’T LET ME DIE IN A MOTEL 6®
Or
One Woman’s Struggle
Through
The Great Recession
By Amy Wolf
DON’T LET ME DIE IN A MOTEL 6
®
Or
One Woman’s Struggle
Through
The Great Recession
Copyright: Amy H. Wolf
Published: 1st December 2012
Amazon Kindle (KDP) Edition
The right of Amy H. Wolf to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format. All ancillary rights, including but not limited to film, broadcast,
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Mark Bourne
Author, classmate, friend
The world is a better place for
having had him in it.
Also
To Cindy, Joe, and Nisi
Who told me to keep writing
To Claire
Gerus & Matt Hallman
The “A” Team
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a
heaven
of
hell
, a
hell
of
heaven
.
--Milton, Paradise Lost
PROLOGUE: DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU
NOTHING BUT HIMSELF TO RECOMMEND HIM
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, DARKLY
AN ANGEL DESCENDS ON THE CITY OF ANGELS
DON’T LET ME DIE IN A MOTEL 6®
I HAVE HALF AN ESOPHAGUS, AND I MUST SCREAM
DIARY OF A PORTRAIT OF A NIGHTMARE
NEVER TAKE ADVICE FROM A MILLIONAIRE
PROLOGUE
:
DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU
I am going to tell you a story.
It's unlike any you've ever heard, since the story is mine
and I am
the only me.
The plot is so heightened it
reads
like
pulp
, but all of it is true:
Near-S
uicide!
Death!
Violence!
Cancer!
Sex trafficking
of minors
!
Sex
with multiple
partners
!!
This
ain’t no Jane Austen
drawing room
, with
genteel
folks dipping in and out, their speech polished and their manners
refined
.
It is a story of the Great Recession
, where, boys and
girls of future generations, the
99%
got screwed by The One, lost their jobs, their dignity, their homes, became
“
food insecure”,
and essentially, did nothing.
It is the story of America in the new millennium, as
terrifying as Room 101
and as
historic
as
1917.
We had no Lenin to lead us
because we didn’t
want one.
Instead, we “Occupied” cities and
looked like horse’s asses
.
We were
sad
proles
searching for
a
cubicle:
one not
left a sparking ruin by the Big Swinging Dicks of Wall Street
.
The good news:
I am
still alive, after trials
that make the Story of Job look like
a day at
Disneyland
.
I’m a
survivor
,
and
I survived,
to emerge out the other side somewhat sadder, certainly wiser, and a
great deal
nicer.
There is an upside to suffering.
You just have to hope that it doesn’t
go on
for
four
years, a rollercoaster
catching speed
until even the thought of
stasis
is forgotten in the screaming descent.
Dear Reader
,
did I mention?
This
can be
A
Very Dark Ride.
WASHINGTON MUTUAL
Like so many of my colleagues at
WaMu
, I had no idea, sitting in my gray-wal
led cube, that I would soon be A
Witness T
o History. Sure, the stock price had been falling, but this was endemic as the Home Loan Bubble blew its last toot on its horn, took
off its funny hat, and fell drunkenly to the floor
.
A
s with
most
things, the party was finally over.
When the stock
began to plunge, we received an email from Head Guy #2 telling us to ignore it
– that
this wasn’t an indicator of anything. Of course not! Not for a national bank with
a portfolio of
$300 billion! We knew that everything was great, because that’s what our managers told us. They reassured us that a
hundred-and-sixteen
–year-old landmark could weather any storm, even the one where rain
had
poured through the roof, bouncing off our PCs
.
On that fateful day
of
The Fall
,
I walked several desks back, looking down
at
the traffic and people. A
ll a
round us in downtown Seattle stood
testaments to concrete, steel, and power: skyscrapers which, unlike ours, were not
newly minted
. They had no homey fireplace in the lobby, lit even in summer
;
nor
did they have
their own
Starbucks,
b
ank branch, and company store festooned with the corporate logo, blue and yellow and cheerful: “The Friend
o
f the Family.” All seemed well in
WaMu
Land; in fact, we even called ourselves
WaMulians
.
Yes, t
here had been some unpleasantness lately: scared depositors rushing to close their accounts; the FDIC auditing the books. But KKK, our CEO and
l
eader, had rustled up some serious cash
from Texas
to
hold off the pod of
killer
whales who wanted to swallow us whole. We felt that
,
like Jonah, we were righteous, a homegrown institution which at its height employed 60,000, the bright
WaMu
logo
sprouting
across the land.
As usual during the workday, we did nothing. This was the
“i
deal
j
ob,
”
one that
other Americans would kill for.
We were highly-
paid IT workers
did our
personal business and occasionally updated a spreadsheet
or
wrote some online
code. I was living
la
b
uena
v
ida
.
I had many good friends at the bank; they regarded me as a curiosity – an L.A. gal who talked at warp-10 while they were still sipping their lattés. Still, I was well-liked: I served as a sort of court jester, relieving the tedium with
fun
underground newsletters and wisecracks to spare.
My satire of a classic PowerPoint slide: “If Things Don’t Change, They Stay The Same” was still talked about after a decade.
September 25, 2008.
I was busily reading Solzhenitsyn’s
First Circle
(I was studying for my degree) while my colleague Lisa planned her wedding.
I received an email from my friend Larry in L.A
. The
Office of Thrift Supervision had
just
closed
WaMu
down.
Apparently, t
he Feds had sold us to JP Morgan Chase
.