Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (22 page)

There was a letter from Cynthia MacKay, MD, an
ophthalmologist, from December 28 of the last year, of a bill that was ninety
days overdue. The visit had cost 175 dollars, and he owed 10.

And paystubs. At the end of the year John had
received what they called “gross” pay in the amount of 43,317.43 dollars.

There was a deduction in that pay in the amount of
2,428.39 dollars, which was John’s share of his partially employer-paid health
insurance.

There was a deduction in the amount of 999.75
dollars for transportation—for the subway fare cards provided through his job.
These unlimited ride cards cost 89 dollars a month. This discounted group
version reduced his cost to 83.31 dollars a month.

So John’s total income that was reported to the
government for the year past was, after all this, 39,889.29 dollars.

In this, he was way ahead of a great percentage of
the world at that time.

There were, speaking very roughly, 3.2 billion
people with jobs in the whole world. Looking at the total world population at
the time and the amount of money earned by countries all over the world, without
setting aside government money, the average yearly per-person income might have
been something between 6,000 and 10,000 dollars a month. The average person in
the whole country, meanwhile, made something near 32,000 dollars a year,
although most of those people lived in places that were far less expensive than
the City.

Of that 39,889.29 dollars, John had to give some of
that away. There was also some money kept back from him for paying into the
country’s Social Security program, which provided a modest monthly income for
the disabled and the elderly.

So they set aside, throughout this year, 2,473.14
dollars for Social Security, and also an estimated federal tax payment of
3,692.48 dollars, and a payment to Medicare, which provided health services to
the poor, of 578.39 dollars, and also local taxes were withheld in the amount
of
1,113.08 dollars.

After all that, he was down to 74 percent of his
total pay: 32,032.20 dollars, or 2,669.35 a month.

THE MAYOR, AS
required, filed his final reports for the year. It turned out he had
spent 108 million dollars of his own money on his third-term reelection
campaign.

His challenger had been able to get only about 10
million dollars together to spend, and even so had come up short by only 50,597
votes.

The Mayor wouldn’t miss the money. Or so it was
easy to think. A funny thing about money was that, even when you had a lot, even
when the perspective skewed so wildly that you could purchase in cash things
that cost millions of dollars, when you could walk into a building and write
a
check for the building itself, or walk into an art gallery or a car showroom
and
take anything or everything you wanted, or spend 20 million dollars on a
renovation of one of your secondary homes, it was often true that the feeling
of
parting with money was just the same for everyone, rich or poor.

CHAD AND DIEGO
hadn’t seen each other in a couple of nights. Chad was out a lot. Diego
said to Chad finally, “You know you’re not single anymore, right?”

AT WORK,
THEY
weren’t necessarily lying when they’d told Trixie that they
needed her salary for other uses. John was getting a raise. It didn’t mean they
had to fire her, but still.

Each of John’s paychecks would go up 230 dollars,
for a total of 460 more dollars a month. So he’d be making 2,700 a month.

It wasn’t going to change everything, exactly, but
John thought he could live like, he said, a human being. Like he could do things
now. If he wanted to buy socks, he could. And he would get haircuts.

And he thought Edward would be getting a paycheck
soon too, maybe, from somewhere. Their first line item was to get a new bed.

The big picture of the raise, it’s incredible, John
thought. And he would start paying off his other government debts again. Maybe
150 a month. He could, and he wanted to, do 150 dollars.

He was actually excited.

So say that was 675 each week. So, after he paid
his basic monthly agreements of about 1,315 dollars, for almost exactly half
his
income, he’d be left with between 44 and 46 each day to spend on other
things.

That would make all the difference.

John’s cousin was applying to professional schools.
He had gotten into a very fancy one that was far from the City. So he’d be
leaving pretty soon, most likely. John fantasized about keeping his little
apartment with Edward. And they’d have one room for sleeping, and then the
public room for cooking and eating and watching TV and socializing, and then
a
third room, which had been his cousin’s, for working or reading or thinking.
Edward would be able to afford half of the rent himself soon, John thought.
Maybe!

Meanwhile Edward was looking at getting some cheap
deal on some squatted apartment in the City, which John didn’t like, and it
sounded all kinds of dubious. Honestly, this was probably just another thing
that Edward talked about. He talked about a lot of things, and few of them
happened. John thought if he just got a nicer bed, Edward would just stay put,
finally, for once.

Problem was, John thought he’d have gotten his
raise in his last check but he hadn’t, and blammo, he’d run out of money for
five days.

In the week before the raise, Sally and another
friend at work had bought him lunch, and then a friend had bought him dinner.
Then on Friday, John planned to spend fifteen dollars and get a haircut.

John called Edward to say hi.

Edward was all comfortable at his parents’, eating
a pizza with Gruyère, a pricey cheese. He had a glass of wine, a Chardonnay.

John was hungry and tired and maybe a little bit
drunk.

People lived to suit their means. They expanded;
money would make their costs grow. If you had a lot of money, it found things
to
do and it kept you busy, and when you stopped to pull back and look at it all,
suddenly you were spending nearly all your money and you didn’t know why.

What’s the first thing you’re going to buy when you
get your check on Friday? Edward asked.

Socks, John said. I really need socks.

He was actually a little annoyed.

Later that week Edward planned to get John some
dinner sent through the Internet, and he’d pay for it with his mother’s credit
card.

It was maybe going to be John’s last broke
Thursday, maybe.

The next day John was really nice to Edward when
they talked.

ON FRIDAY
NIGHT,
right before Edward came back, John went out with Ralph, his
old friend from college, on a massive bar tour. They hadn’t seen each other in
ages! They stopped here and there, Eastern Bloc, the Boiler Room, ending at the
Cock.

All these bars were right by Jordan’s apartment,
and they met up with Jason and Jeff. Jordan and Jeff had just broken up, so John
kept texting Jordan to tell him not to come to whatever bar they were in at the
moment.

Everyone thought that Jeff and Jordan were more fun
to go out with now that they were broken up. Jeff and Jordan, when they were
together, would always get jealous, like, are you looking at that guy? What,
no,
I’m not!

It got late and pretty much everyone was wasted.
Every once in a while, Jason was like, “Who wants a Tic Tac?”

They breezed past the doorwoman at the Cock.
Eventually John went down to the basement to pee, and it was wall-to-wall guys
down there. One guy having sex locked eyes with John as John squeezed by.

John went back upstairs and grabbed Ralph, all
wild-eyed. “We have to get out of here,” he said. Ralph was happy to. To see
John so devoted to someone again, after all these years of not believing it was
possible, Ralph thought it was wonderful. He came back home with John, instead
of going way uptown where he lived. Ralph slept in the broken-down twin bed and
John slept on the floor. At around four thirty a.m., John called Edward, who
sensibly didn’t answer.

In the morning John’s cousin got up and went to the
bathroom through the living room, passing what he assumed was Edward on the
computer. When he came out of the bathroom, he realized it was Ralph. Ralph was
busy meeting a guy on Adam4Adam, yet another place people met online. The guy
came over and got him and drove him—in his car!—all the way uptown.

John woke up and Ralph was gone, and he opened the
window into the cold hard morning and smoked a cigarette out the window.
Eventually he got bundled up and went to the little coffee shop directly across
the street.

He sat outside on the bench with a cup of coffee
and lit a cigarette. His phone buzzed in his pants. It was Edward calling back.
He was so happy to talk to him.

“You know how much snow we have here? Zero.
. . . There’s salt all over the ground. There’s salt. I mean it was
flirting with snowing last night, we were like, oh, the snow’s coming. Then it
just never came. . . . Um, we had quite the night last night. Well,
Ralph and I started at G, then we went to get dinner at that La Lunchonette on
Tenth Avenue, it was so good. Then we went to the porn shop to get lube. Then
we
went to Gym Bar. . . . No! That’s why I was laughing. Like I don’t
need this shit anymore. It’s really expensive. Oh my God. I mean he bought like
a jug of it for forty dollars. Then we went to Gym Bar. . . . A giant
jug of lube in his pocket. But they wrapped it like, you know, like a nice
French bread or something. They did a very nice job of wrapping it.
. . . Then we went to Eastern Cock, where we met up with Jason and
Patrick and Jeff. . . . And Patrick was so nice last night! Yeah, I
was shocked. He was the nicest guy ever last night. . . . No,
completely. He must be on meds. So we were at Eastern Cock, then we went to
Boiler Room, where we ran into Bryan and Sam and Steve or whatever his name is.
He’s a total bitch. Ugh, such a bitch. Then we went to the Cock, L. O. L.
Mmm-hmm. It was kind of insane. I ran out, like, terrified. I mean it was just
vintage Cock. I stayed in the front and was dancing and then I had to go to the
bathroom and it was too scary so I made Ralph leave and we just walked out and
Jeff and Jason stayed behind. . . . And then Ralph slept over last
night and I’m unbelievably hungover. . . . Yeah. I’ll call you back.
Okay? Okay. I’ll call you. Alright, bye.”

The wind was coming down from the north and it was
very cold. The landlord’s son who ran the real estate business downstairs from
John’s apartment came and opened up the shop. They waved. John finished up his
coffee and went back inside his building and up the stairs.

That night, John was going over to dinner at
Kevin’s. He was looking forward to a home-cooked meal. They could be married
homebodies together! They were survivors, or something.

AND THEN IN
the very harshest dead of winter it was Jason’s birthday. Jason was
thirty years old now and that meant he was all grown up. Well, he guessed. What
would change? Nothing? Jason felt like he had turned thirty ten years ago.
Especially since he’d been married—at eighteen!—and all that stuff. Maybe I’m
turning something less than thirty, he thought. If he’d learned anything from
the writer Armistead Maupin, he thought, the one thing he’d learned is that you
can’t have a hot job, a hot man and a hot apartment all at the same time. He
really did believe that. He felt like he’d had combinations of those three
things for almost all of his life, and now the pieces were shifting but he still
didn’t have all of those. Maybe, thinking about it, maybe he had none of those?
Although he kind of liked his apartment. And he, alone among his friends, liked
his job most days! But he definitely did not have a hot boyfriend.

On second thought, maybe he did not subscribe at
all to this maxim. It sounded stupid.

The countrywide contagion, as the Mayor had
suggested, did seem to be ending. At least, people couldn’t sustain their
attention on it. It wasn’t that everyone had a job again though. The panic had
been half real, half imaginary. Plenty of companies and owners survived just
fine. Some even prospered. It was the results of the panic that were all
real.

And so the people who had jobs felt like they’d
lived by their wits, and John felt this way most times. Or they felt they’d
escaped by luck, and Edward felt this way sometimes—except when he felt he
hadn’t escaped. And there were people who felt they’d escaped but only barely,
and they knew it was maybe only for a bit. You could actually literally always
be more poor than you were, as surprising as that might seem when you owed tens
of thousands of dollars or made only a few hundred dollars or, in the City, a
few thousand dollars a month.

But then, the whole point of being in this City, it
turned out, was staying nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange
things the City might choose to offer to you.

Movement started. Soon enough, Trixie got a job,
and then an even better job. Edward was actually soon to get a job as well, with
an office and a boss who would buy him a laptop computer. His boss was, of
course, a rich millionaire, just like everyone else’s boss, and he would turn
out to be domineering and impulsive and aggressive and perhaps crazy. But
everyone was used to that in a boss by now. That was just how things were.

And soon enough, Kevin, who had gotten his current
job after being laid off, would get laid off again by John’s owner’s cousin.
He
was more panicked by this second job loss than he would have thought he might
have been. Surviving the first one was one thing. But doing it again? How
disposable could one person be? he thought.

And Jason took up a hot and heavy affair with a
really sweet guy that John had once dated. So, for a while, Jason actually did
have a great apartment, a great job and a great boyfriend all at once. It turned
out to not be as amazing as it was supposed to be.