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

by Choire Sicha

  “I actually kind of enjoy talking to those crazy people,” Edward said. “I got a lot of practice with those conversations when I used to sneak into bars in high school and would always attract the one oldest, craziest person in the room. I would always leave happy!”

  “Because you were a little less crazy?” John said.

  “No, it was something to do. It was better than standing in a corner by yourself.”

  “I’d rather writhe in the corner quite frankly,” John said. “Writhing in the corner!”

  “Nobody puts Eddie in the corner,” Jason said.

  “Many people have put Eddie in the corner over the years,” Edward said.

  Edward was staying in town for the next forty-eight hours. But that expiration date meant John was sad. “I told him he should just live in my apartment. He got all happy,” John said. “He wants to. I got mad at him today because he didn’t stay in my apartment today. He went to Jason’s. He had to get his laptop. I was like, just stay with me! My cousin doesn’t care. My cousin loves Edward. For two weeks! Then he can get his own apartment. I like the kid around. He’ll just stay for two weeks. Well, he has to get money. I’ll give him money! I’ll save, I won’t smoke or something. We smoke so much more. He’s so cute. My God. He looks— I’m so happy. He looks so good right now. He’s such a loving little guy. It’s good right now. I like the guy a lot.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Election Day, Jason was still so insanely ill. He was downtown at seven a.m., and the first thing he saw was this man having a total seizure on the street, convulsing, there was like blood on the street, he fell, ambulances came. Jason was really superstitious and this seemed to him like a bad omen. And then it turned out he had pneumonia. He kept pretending it was allergies and he didn’t slow down for a second. Maybe it can’t be good to go out every night, he thought.

  And over the course of the day, the Mayor had gotten 585,466 votes.

  His challenger had gotten 534,869 votes.

  A total of 1,154,802 people’s votes were counted.

  There were 4,095,561 active registered voters in the City.

  So only about 28 out of every 100 people who could vote did.

  The challenger had won a significant majority of voters in distinct regions of the City. If those regions were like little cities, the Mayor wouldn’t be the mayor there anymore.

  The Mayor’s team had played it like it was an easy sail to victory. But it wasn’t any such thing. He could have lost quite easily. That was why he’d spent all that money.

  So they’d all been hoodwinked! Or, more accurately, they’d let themselves be hoodwinked.

  JOHN’S COMPANY DECIDED to throw a party to announce the hiring of the new boss of the office.

  The party was held at the swank downtown store of a foreign purse and leather goods maker. It was on the second floor, where they kept the good stuff. The staff came, all draggy, without much interest. There is only so much anxiety or resentment that can be maintained for so long. Sooner or later, one develops a tolerance.

  Timothy was there. He was all political smiles. Their old boss Thomas was there too. He’d been talked into introducing the new boss. Lots of people there hadn’t seen him for a while. It was rather like running into your father by surprise in a busy airport. He was a mad kind of gleeful, all glittering, almost frightening.

  The new boss swam around the room. He almost looked the part: a grown-up in a suit. Tall and wooden, he wore a red string around his wrist, and his pants didn’t cover his bare ankles. It was impossible not to think that he hadn’t even started yet and was in over his head.

  There was a coin purse for sale in the leather goods store. It cost 195 dollars. It measured about four inches by three inches by one inch. Apart from that being two or three days’ worth of salary for some of the employees present, also you would need 9.75 pounds of quarter-dollar coins to fill the coin purse with enough money to pay for it.

  JOHN’S DESK OVERSPILLED with envelopes.

  A billing statement for Direct Loans. For this bill, the total balance due was 40,337.26 dollars.

  This bill was due on the seventh of each month. His monthly payment for this loan was 152.22 dollars.

  This particular bill said that it was sixty days overdue. “We are preparing to report this loan(s) to national credit bureaus,” it said.

  There was also another letter from Direct Loans, for a bill six months after the last one. In this bill, it said that his total balance was now 41,319.91 dollars.

  That meant that, despite a few payments, and because of interest and late fees, his total outstanding loan from Direct Loans was now 982.65 dollars more than it had been six months previous.

  There was a letter from “Diversified Collection Services Inc. a Performant Company.” It was sent on behalf of the creditor called United Guaranty Commercial Insurance Company of North Carolina. The balance due, they wrote to say, was 13,827.27 dollars. They would take from John’s bank account, they wrote, two weeks later, the amount of 165 dollars.

  And if he paid them that amount each month for the next eighty-three months, he would then, seven years later, provided there was no interest or penalties added, owe them only 132.27 dollars.

  It had become impossible to tell from the statements which bill was for which loan or debt. The Diversified Collection Services might be servicing a credit card bill, or a student loan.

  For instance, there was a statement from FIA Card Services. FIA was formerly named MBNA but had changed its name four years ago, after being bought by Bank of America the year previous. At this time, Bank of America held more than 1 in 10 of each dollar that people in the country put in banks.

  The letter from FIA Card Services may or may not have been about the same debt referenced by Diversified Collection Services Inc. Their note arrived the next month, noting a debt with a balance of 11,930.56 dollars but with a “new balance” of 12,220.23 dollars, as it was “past due.”

  Still, much of this debt was student loans, parceled out to different lenders and now, apparently, one or more collection agencies as well.

  There were his FFELP loans. Those were loans that were serviced through private companies, but that took subsidies from the government—and also the government insured much of these loans in case of default. It was a largely risk-free business, given that.

  His Stafford FFELP loans, granted five years ago, were for 8,500 dollars of subsidized loans and 10,000 dollars of unsubsidized loans. The difference between the two was actually quite minor; it was that the “subsidized” loans were for people who fell below a certain income level, and so that, while they were in school, or when their loan payments later were temporarily deferred or defaulted upon, the government would pay for the interest that accrued.

  His Perkins loan request, for professional school, was for 6,000 dollars. This was also due to a federal program, and only “needy” applicants could receive money for graduate school.

  Also he had a private loan, a CitiAssist loan, for 15,000 dollars, from August of five years ago.

  The government had been planning on changing how student loans were made. What happened with student loans was that the government actually subsidized the companies that loaned money to people to go to school, but the lenders got to keep the profits from the loans.

  Instead now people thought: Why not give the money directly to colleges and to students, for tuition?

&nb
sp; The loan companies hired more firms to go down to the Capital and engage in lobbying, the practice of persuading policy makers.

  One firm put out twenty-two billion dollars in loans just in the year previous, and also spent eight million dollars on these lobbying efforts—twice what they’d spent the year before. Ten million students received loans in the year overall.

  The government would, if they eliminated or restructured companies like that one, retain eighty billion dollars over the next ten years.

  Well, maybe it would happen, maybe it wouldn’t.

  All told, at the end of this year, John’s debt added up to about 15,000 dollars for college, 40,000 for professional school and about 14,000 in credit card debt during school, almost 70,000 dollars all in, a small percentage of which was paid down. Who could even begin to start worrying about a thing like this? That was what desk drawers were for.

  DAYS LATER, JASON still had what he described as “total pneumonia.” He went to the doctor and the doctor said, “Can you breathe really deep please?” And Jason said, “Well, no?” But he was on the mend, mostly. He was trying to drink through it. John was in a terrible mood and was pounding beers. It had just gotten dark, and everyone wanted to huddle inside. They were at a friend’s house, and Sally had come along after work.

  “I apologized both Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. I will never not vote again,” John said.

  “I apologize as well,” Sally said. “Here’s the situation. I moved three years ago, and I still have not changed where I’m registered. That was the first time I’d ever not voted. But I actually really wish I had.”

  “Samesies,” John said.

  It really had been so close.

  “I said this to Chad: If everyone knew how close it was going to be, and everyone had to revote, everyone would come out—and he’d still win,” John said.

  “It was so crazy at my polling place,” Jason said. “The Democratic Party guy in Brooklyn? The city councilwoman was his protégé. She’s like the first Dominican woman elected to everything. They had some disagreement about some zoning thing. And she was on the side of the community and he was on the side of the developers. And she’s dead to him now. So he like hates her, he totally opposes her. And she won the primary against his handpicked administrative assistant. So she won in the primary, and he, as the head of what is perhaps the largest Democratic Party organization in the country, is not supporting the candidate! He’s supporting this ridiculous woman. She literally was like his assistant. So he really got all the troops out. There were these warring factions outside my polling place. There were like no voters! But maybe hundreds of people! It was crazy.

  “I almost miss the Bush years in some ways, personally,” Jason said. “Well, I married well then. Every time I watch Mad Men, I’m like, I totally saw this episode but it was way better when it was on The Sopranos. I was like, this really reminds me of something I really like, but way better, with Edie Falco. Or The Simpsons! Edward was explaining to me—I mean I watch it and I like it but I don’t know all the backstory—and he was explaining to me Don Draper’s identity, and I was like, this is the exact same story as Principal Skinner. Right? In the war? I was shocked.”

  “Oh my God,” Sally said.

  “You know what was on like HBO3 or something? Apollo 13,” John said.

  “Oh my God, I totally met that astronaut once,” Jason said. “Jim?”

  “What was that like?” John asked.

  “Oh, it was in high school. So I was like, I don’t care.”

  “Right? ‘Oh, so you went to space,’ ” Sally said.

  “Yeah, like: ‘Fuck you,’ ” Jason said. “He seemed very nice, I don’t know. He was some old white man.”

  “Jason and I both have an unhealthy obsession with the Oscars?” John said. “What we do is play a game with each other. We have two different versions. For me, Jason will name a year, and I’ll have to pantomime a scene from the movie that won Best Picture. Jason will be like, 1962, then you have to do a scene. I’m horrible after Gladiator, I don’t know what happened, but tell me 1974 and I’m ready to go.”

  “Oh, I know, Godfather II,” Jason said.

  “Exactly. I like to do the scene on the ship, where he’s looking at the Statue of Liberty, little Vito. And Jason is an expert on Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress—”

  “1983,” Sally said.

  “Which one?”

  “Best Actress.”

  “Shirley MacLaine,” Jason said.

  “That’s Terms of Endearment?”

  “That’s kind of easy. Everyone knows that,” John said.

  “Was Debra Winger Supporting?”

  “No, she was also Best Actress but lost,” Jason said.

  “Who were the other nominees?” Sally said.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to know this!”

  “Silkwood?” John said.

  “Silkwood was ’83! Dolly!”

  “Dolly!” John said. “Dolly was nominated.”

  John was trying to round people up to go out, as usual. Chad was out with Diego and resisting. John was saying mean things.

  “He’s not that big, right?” Sally asked. She’d never really met him. “Would you describe Chad’s boyfriend as a large man?”

  “No! I wouldn’t say he’s like a svelte person. I don’t know!” Jason said.

  “He’s not a beast, but like,” John said, “there was a picture, from my birthday party, that I put on Facebook, from the album in which you never existed?”

  “But I was like there,” Jason said.

  “You were at the party. Look, I was hardly in any pictures! Kevin was in every picture. But like there’s one of Diego that I couldn’t include. The resolution couldn’t fit. It was like, you’ve exceeded your amount. He was, like, this big, and then there was me on the side of him. I mean it was disgusting,” John said.

  “I mean he can’t be that fat!” Jason said.

  Chad texted. “What is Two Boots?” John said. “Oh, it’s a pizza place? So Diego’s eating pizza right now.”

  “Oh, of course,” Jason said. “How many pies? No, I don’t hate Diego as much as some people do.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John said.

  “I didn’t say you,” Jason said.

  “He’s not as fat as Chris Christie,” John said.

  “I just feel like I’m not one to talk,” Jason said.

  John got tired of texting and so finally he called Chad, but Chad wasn’t interested.

  “Okay. Alright, well, we’ll see each other sometime soon I guess,” John said. “No, that’s okay. Whenever! Whenever, whenever. Whatever! I don’t know what else to say, I’m not mad, whatever! Alright, I’ll talk to you soon.”

  He hung up.

  “Oh, he’s pissed off with me. He was like, ‘Oh, I’d really prefer the passive-aggressiveness be put to the side, okay?’ He was like, ‘Oh, Diego really wants to go home.’ ”

  FINALLY, FINALLY, ONE morning Edward and John went to a health clinic to get their medical tests. They’d really put this off. John had tried as hard as possible not to think about this for as long as possible.

  Health clinics existed because some people had health insurance and others did not, and so, as opposed to doctor’s offices, clinics had a different, usually lower, rate of payment. Even though John had
some health insurance, it was better for him to go there, and Edward didn’t have any anyway. So they told them how much money they made, and the clinic told them what amount on their “scale” of prices they should pay for services.

  Edward was anxious; John was cavalier. Edward, really, was anxious about this only because he’d been with John.

  John got his negative test results forty-five minutes before Edward.

  It was a long and excruciating forty-five minutes though.

  But then Edward’s results came back negative too. And they were very happy about this, but they could also feel the rush of relief. You could consider yourself lucky, or you could have some other made-up system of belief to make sense of things, but it didn’t matter. Disasters happened.

  And sometimes they didn’t.

  Monogamy is so nice, John said. It’s so relaxing.

  They went out to a party thrown by one of Jordan’s exes. “You’re a romantic,” someone said to John, with surprise. They were standing outside on an old, old street. The paving stones were big gray stone blocks.

  “I always was,” he said. “You could have asked Edward that and he’d have said so.”

  “Blood brothers!” John said. John and Edward pressed their fingers against each other, but Edward couldn’t remember which finger he’d given blood for his test from, so he just picked one.

  THEN IT WAS that time already, winter was coming on, now all the trees were all dead again!

  THERE WERE MORE than a hundred hearings every business day at the Transit Adjudication Bureau—more than twenty-five thousand in the year. About eight hundred of those hearings were for taking up too much space on the subway. This was sometimes the charge against the people who didn’t have homes who tried to sleep on the trains.

  For the first hearing, you would just show up. It seemed like nearly all the adjudicators were old women. So you would wait, and go to window after window, and wait some more, and then you would see someone, and everything would be recorded on old analog tapes.