by Julia Kent
You have payday shop loans and layaway at the Walmart and you pay for your ‘new’ washing machine at a high interest rate from some rental center place with weekly payments. Debt isn’t some abstract concept you read about in newspapers or on personal finance blogs.
Debt is can I afford the payment? If yes, then if I need it, get it, and hope nothing else breaks I can’t afford to replace or fix.
The dark underbelly of this, though, is that when you do get money, sometimes you blow it. And blow it hard. It’s like sex. You can go a long time without it.
Like, two whole weeks. A month, even. Not counting masturbating.
But you can go a long time without sex, and then when you do have sex, you come like a freight train. And even then it’s not enough. You need, like, a year of steady sex before all them sexual micronutrients have been satisfied and you can trust that you’ll get what you need, and you don’t need to hoard all your orgasms.
Or something like that.
Bottom line is, there was a time when buying a single discounted plane ticket from Pittsburgh to Boston might as well have been booking a flight on a space shuttle for me. Even the cheapest multi-connecting-flight ticket woulda been a week’s after-tax pay at the gas station where I worked. Nobody had that kind of money. Nobody I knew back in Peters, Ohio, at least. Not my age.
Then there’s time.
When you’re broke, you need one thing: money. And time is money when you’re hard-scrabbling it. Take time off for a vacation? Hell no. Days off were good for two things: cleaning your house, running errands, and finding side jobs to make a little more money.
Two days in a row wasn’t a break. It was an oh, shit. As in oh, shit, those are hours I won’t have in my paycheck next week.
I spent the first twenty-two years of my life living this way. I’ve spent the last three years not living like that, and really only this past year or so having more than enough.
Now I have no debt except for college tuition debt in the form of student loans.
Now I have a savings account.
Now I have a (small) retirement account. Like three figures. But it’s a start.
I don’t have to accrue three months of electric bills and then run to the payment counter at the local branch office on shut-off day to pay the minimum.
I don’t have to take all the empty cans from the gas station and bag ‘em up for Uncle Mike to recycle when he goes to a state with redemption.
I don’t have to do lots of things, like using the orange mesh bags that onions come in from the grocery store as a pot scrubbie, or volunteering at the local food bank for ‘school volunteer hours’ in hopes they’d give me a big old box of food cause Mama had to sell some of her food stamps to pay for another foot brace that wasn’t covered by her insurance, or stealing rolls of toilet paper from bathrooms at the old Kmart because we’d run out.
It’s a relief.
But it leaves a strange sort of hole inside you.
And that’s the other thing: when you live your life convinced that the best you can do is to make do with what you got, and suddenly you got more, you know what happens?
You start comparing. Not comparing what you’ve got to other people.
To your past self.
You start to imagine how much easier it woulda been back then, if you’d had more.
And then you get pissed. Not at your past self, but just in general.
Who has time for that?
I don’t.
The problem with feelings is that they don’t care whether you’ve got time to process them. Feelings are like the honey badgers of psychology: they do what they want and don’t give a fuck about your opinion.
What’s all that got to do with an airplane ticket? Like I said, there was a time when even the cheapest ticket, and the time to enjoy the travel, were impossible.
The impossible became my normal. That’s the stuff of fantasy. Don’t we all wish for it? Ain’t that the point of dreams? We wonder and we imagine, like thinking about all the ways you’d spend a winning lottery ticket, or dreaming about meeting the right person who will magically love you unconditionally and happen to be independently well off – and make you well off, too.
Every person wishes they could swap normal for impossible. It’s the human condition, hardwired into us. Some of us turn bitter when it doesn’t happen. Others just keep trying until we waste the present, eyes focused straight ahead and unable to turn and see what’s right here, right now. A few of us mourn what we lost in the present, as if we once brushed against the hanging vines of the impossible but couldn’t grasp them.
And then there are the few who actually do it. Find the impossible and stake a claim.
Who gets a life like that?
Me.
Booking all those economy tickets wasn’t hard. None of the numbers were objectively shockers. What is customary in one situation is extravagant in another. Luxurious.
Even cruel.
And the worst of this is that a part of me wants to go back to a time when I had to make do.
Not the cold terror of feeling like I was prey, and prey with a gurgling stomach, a broken trailer heater, and a mama with pneumonia and no way to get her to a hospital. Not that feeling.
More along the lines of a time when a muscle inside me flexed itself when it came to scratching out a way that worked. Having more money makes money a solution. It’s the easy way out.
Like Mama and Calvin.
Like booking all these tickets.
Money changes people.
If I’m changing like this, then who am I, really? I get that we change when we meet new people. When we fall in love. When we have major new experiences.
None of that was programmed into me in Peters, Ohio. I had a mindset that said take what you can get and do what you can.
Make do.
Settle.
“Darla?” Charlotte’s big, round, curious eyes suddenly appear under my big old awning of yellow frizz I call hair.
“Yeah?”
“Did you book a ticket for me?”
“Yep.”
“It turns out my company is willing to pay for it. Can you give me a receipt, and I can get them to pay you back?”
“The university where you work is viewing this Vegas trip as business?” Charlotte is a resident director at a Massachusetts state university. That means she lives with a few hundred eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds most of the year and is their version of a mother mixed with a prison guard.
She can have that job. I’d rather go back to the gas station, selling lice combs to truckers who come in smelling like Astroglide and beef sticks.
“No. The sex toy company.”
Oh. Yeah. She works as a party coordinator for a sex toy company, too. Charlotte is a woman of many talents. Liam loves her to bits. They’ve been together for a while now, after they got over themselves and actually had an adult conversation about why he dumped her when they were high school sweethearts. If people would just talk to each other, half the world’s problems would go away.
The other half – well, sex might help some of those.
Solving the rest is above my pay grade.
“The sex toy company is paying your ticket? Hold on. Hold on. Esmé ain’t going on stage again, so let’s get that straight right off the bat. No promotional placement for sex toy dolls at this concert.”
She laughed softly, then just looked at me with those big old eyes that make you feel like you’re transparent and she can read your soul all the way down to the fine print.
“Don’t worry. No more blow-up dolls on stage getting attacked by a snake.”
If you don’t know what that means, sorry. No excuses, no explanations, no regrets.
“My company has an exhibit at a fetish convention. When I realized the dates were the same, I asked, and they said as long as I work at the booth for two days, they’d pay my way.”
“The band could pay part of your way, you know. I could turn
you into an assistant manager.”
“Remember how we tried that in LA? It didn’t really work.” After the band gigged in Los Angeles and all was said and done, we were stiffed out of a bunch of expenses, most of them related to Maggie and Charlotte. Maggie was Charlotte’s best friend and our savior for that concert, because she drove our substitute bass player, Tyler, from St. Louis to LA. in an emergency.
You have to be part angel – and I mean actually from heaven itself, touched by God – to spend that kinda time with a man who frowns so much he looks like a French bulldog with hemorrhoids.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Charlotte, still feeling bad. “We can pay you out.”
“No. It’s fine. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the band’s financial health. When Liam’s successful, it helps me in the long run. When you guys are rolling in it, pay me back then.”
“But it’s like, over a thousand bucks!”
“One thousand ninety-two dollars and eleven cents,” she said. “But who’s counting?”
“I am,” I insisted. “And you’ll get it back. You weren’t just a girlfriend on that trip. You made a material difference to the functioning of the band.”
“And she gave me one hell of a hummer on the balcony of that hotel room,” said a deep voice I knew well. Liam walked in the room, dropped his guitar, and gave Charlotte an ass pat.
She didn’t even bat an eyelash. “While you watched the sun set over the Pacific.”
“Life is good. Let’s do it again.”
“Again?”
“In Vegas.”
“Vegas isn’t on the coast.”
“I mean let’s have a memorable hummer somewhere. I’ll just face west and pretend I can see the ocean. Might take a few tries until we get it just right.”
“How about we have a memorable –” Charlotte took this conversation down to a whisper, saying something in Liam’s ear that made him blush.
Pro tip: if a guy blushes like that, it involves butt stuff.
Trust me.
“You’re sure you can get all of that just for working for the sex toy company? And it’s free?” Liam asked her, revealing way more of their whispered conversation than I wanted to know.
She nodded. “We’re beta testers.”
“Baby, I’m always an alpha tester.”
One perfectly shaped eyebrow arched. “Not if I use one of those toys on you. Then you’re definitely beta.”
I left the room. I can handle sex jokes and raunchy talk ’til the cows come home, but I really didn’t need to listen to these two talk about recreating the International Women’s Day scene from Deadpool. I had more important things to worry about.
Like getting on a plane the next morning.
When the band gigged on the island of Eden, I flew for the very first time ever. And I experienced a few problems, sure. If by a few problems you mean nearly getting arrested for violating a bunch of federal laws.
Now, though, I’m practically an air warrior.
Last year I forced everyone to go to Logan Airport with me and get approved for expedited lines. Mercifully, we all survived the background checks, even Frown, who I swore was gonna get arrested on the spot for having some seedy experience on his record. Nope. Whew.
This time I made everyone buy travel clothes and shoes without metal or anything suspicious. A bunch of twenty-somethings traveling with electronics and musical equipment are bad enough. Add in anything that triggers a security check and the TSA would be the ones administering butt stuff to Liam. Not Charlotte.
They all went along with it without complaint, until I imposed the following final rule: no drugs for twenty-four hours before we flew.
You would’ve thought I stood up and declared I was Jeff Sessions undercover.
That’s right. With twenty hours to go before boarding, all my guys were clean. Not a single hit off a bong. Not one dab. No shatter, no edibles.
Of course, that meant they were all high as kites right then, because exactly four hours before, they all got together and consumed enough THC to invent another universe. Our living room was filled with everyone except Maggie and Frown, because we didn’t technically need him, and Maggie couldn’t get the time off to go with us to Vegas. All the guys were flying high, so you know what that meant, right?
We women did all the packing.
If I’d’ve let Joe and Trevor pack their own shit, we’d have a fifty-pound checked bag full of Oreos and beef sticks and nothing else. While I love my men walking around naked, I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to cut it for the actual concert.
Plus, you ever stay in a hotel room with two guys eating nothing but Oreos and beef sticks for a few days? I have. Pretty sure it’s a form of torture somewhere in the fine print on some international human rights declaration. And by day three you’re ready to sneak them some sugar-free gummi bears and get yourself outta there.
“Darla?” Trevor called from the other room. I went in the kitchen and found them all around the small dining table, playing Cards Against Humanity and eating chocolate-covered pretzels with their diet Cokes.
“Yeah?”
“Can you remember to pack my special earplugs this time? I can’t find them.”
Sam started giggling helplessly. Amy couldn’t come that night, but would fly out on a separate flight the next day. He drummed his fingers on the table and muttered “earplugs” over and over. Jesus. How baked were they?
“You guys just vaped, right?” I asked.
“Shatter,” Joe said with a sigh.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
I looked carefully at Trevor’s eyes. He was half there.
“You two. You’re so wasted, if I gave you a blow job I’d get a contact high from swallowing.”
Sam sat up tall in his seat. “Is that possible?”
Joe grinned. “We’ll have to try next time. I wonder if we can test semen samples for THC and CBD?”
I walked away, leaving them to their Deep Thoughts on cannabinoids.
My earbuds were in and I was on the phone all day, on a dopamine high that was not artificially induced like some people need. In many ways I was at my best when I was juggling 8,000 different details all focused on the same goal. It was like the universe sent me 1,000 arrows and I had them all pointed in one direction. Once I lined them up just so, I could relax.
And bask in pride.
I got antsy when I was like this, as if an internal itch wouldn’t go away, and not the kind you treat with Monistat. Packing and repacking while I talked on the phone made it easier. Sex didn’t. Sex just made my mind go a million miles away into the mental river of chatter that flowed within.
“Darla?” It was Charlotte again, tapping on our bedroom door. I shoved Joe’s boxer briefs into another travel cube and looked up, startled. My heart sped up and I had one of those moments where I simultaneously looked her in the eye and pretended to be engaged while thinking about the fact that I needed to bring my period panties and some extra tampons because shark week was about to start. And that a call to Mama was in order before we flew out, and how the lock on Trevor’s suitcase broke last time we flew, and –
“Yeah?” I coughed up.
“Can I help?”
All the muscles in my face went slack, like a candle that got a little too close to heat. “Excuse me?”
“Can I help you? You seem like you’re taking on the brunt of the work while the guys all play Cards Against Humanity.” She thumbed in the direction of the living room.
“Yeah?”
She shrugged. “They’re currently giggling about children on leashes.”
I groaned.
“What if you just didn’t pack for them?”
“They’d end up with fifty pounds of Oreos and beef sticks,” I shot back immediately.
Charlotte proved she’s the opposite of Amy by not reacting and simply saying, “Good point. But… will they ever learn if you keep doing everything for them?”
/>
“Isn’t that my job now?” I didn’t ask with sarcasm. I meant it. “I pretty much am in charge of making sure they can perform. I’m an obstacle clearer.”
“Down to packing Joe’s underwear for him?”
“That I do because he’s my boyfriend. I am not touching your man’s tighty whities.”
“Liam doesn’t wear underwear anymore.”
“I didn’t need to know that.”
“But now you do.”
“I hope to God he never has a wardrobe malfunction on stage.”
“If he does, and someone videos it, think of the viral publicity.”
“It wouldn’t bother you to have your guy’s balls all over YouTube?”
“Did it bother you to have Joe’s naked body hanging out a window with a gerbil and a chicken attached to him?”
“YES!”
She just laughed, a quiet chuckle of sympathy.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Anymore? What do you mean, Liam doesn’t wear underwear ‘anymore’?”
Big smiling eyes met mine, even if her mouth remained neutral. “He just doesn’t.”
“Sex play?”
“What? No.”
“Then why not?”
“Personal preference.”
“That ain’t good enough.”
“Good enough for what?”
Even though Charlotte had no interest in law school, she’d fit right in with Amy, Joe, and Trevor.
“You’re not gonna crack, are you?”
“Darla, I live with hundreds of young adults and am in charge of interviewing them when there have been problems in the building. I am also the target of gossip, and have to protect my private life like I’m a celebrity. So no, I’m not cracking. Butt out.”
I put my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Wasn’t butting in. Just curious.”
“Okay.” She had a way of handling conflict like it was just part of life. No big deal. No hurt feelings, no fragile egos. Problem identified, problem discussed, boundaries enforced, compromise made.
Issue resolved.
It made me feel like a four-year-old with mood swings. How could Charlotte be so mature when I was the same age and I had the conflict resolution skills of a North Korean intelligence officer combined with Gary Busey on a coke bender?
