Reflections on the Art of Going Broke (Singles Classic)

by Vince Passaro

  Our culture has responded to its sharp division between haves and have-nots by making money into a dream, a private religious experience, an unspeakable ecstasy or a wordless horror. A great deal of shame surrounds money—for those who have lots of it, those who have little, and those who are uncomfortably stationed in between. I know much more about my friends' sex lives than I do about their finances. I know about their polyps, the lumps that tested negative, the growths and stones and reflux and misshaped toe bones. I know that certain couples are or aren't sleeping together at the moment; I know whether they're on 20 mg or 40 mg of Prozac or that they've made the switch to Zoloft; I know the very bad things their parents did to them. The one thing they will never permit to be known about them, to any friend, the only thing that cannot be discussed, is how much money they have in the bank.

  Therefore, we have no joint knowledge of how we are dealing with the money issues in our lives; each of us faces the problem alone. It has been our decision to allow the collective consciousness of the society to put forward only the fantasy life of television and "money" magazines, commercials, and features about people in large, lovely houses whose biggest problems are managing their portfolios sagely and carrying the massive insurance coverage they'll need to protect them from every misfortune. Watching the faked authenticity of the Dean Witter advertisements (done in the style of old films, showing fatherly executives talking about their commitment to their clients), I always think, somebody out there has the job of making the film look scratchy and antique, and that person probably can't afford his own life either.

  But in fact I'm only guessing. Broke and dead are equivalent states of being in our culture, dealt with in whispers and with lowered heads. My wife wrote a spoof "Christmas letter" last year. "SEASON'S GREETINGS '97! Well, no head lice so far in the Passaro house this year, and only a week to go! The kids are thrilled and proud…. Not for the first time, we discovered that the IRS has a nifty system for collecting those pesky back taxes! They take it right out of your paycheck!" The letter also contained one horrific anecdote about our youngest son getting himself lost in Riverside Park. "Beth was also much the wiser when she found out that 911 operators do not acknowledge any part of the interior of Riverside Park as a valid location …" Yet, when a friend of my wife's at work read the letter, he asked her whether she wasn't "embarrassed" to include the item about the IRS. In this country, apparently, it is more acceptable to lose your children than to be broke.

  MY OWN ROAD to indebtedness is marked by certain key memories, flashes of fiscal decision-making that seemed perfectly plausible at the time but that would have been unimaginable by sensible people thirty years before. The first occurred in my college dormitory, in my sophomore year, when, for reasons I don't remember, a large argument about money and its inherent value got going, and to demonstrate my point, which was that money had no particular value other than what we choose to assign it, I took all the cash I had, collected more from a number of others, and burned it all on the steel part of the floor in front of the service elevator. We burned a pile of $100 or more, which in 1976, to college students, seemed a significant amount. The burning of cash produced a frenzy of reaction. Even in a time when it was important to pretend one had no love of money, this act brought soon-to-be lawyers and businesspeople right out of the closet. One was particularly frantic in his disapproval. Finding he had no moral ground from which to argue that money itself is too precious to burn, he finally said, "You could have given this money to the poor." I gathered up what hadn't burned yet and told him I wouldn't burn it if he promised to take it right out and give it to the poor. He stared at me, and I tossed the bills back onto the fire.

  That man probably carries no more debt than he can afford.

  Another moment: encouraging my wife to use the Visa card to register for graduate school, since her student-loan money hadn't yet arrived. She was pregnant with our first child at the time. Standing there, in the registration line with her, I thought we intended to turn the student-loan money over to the credit-card account. But now, looking back, I know I was already calculating, at another level of the brain, how we might use some of it for other things, which, of course, we did.

  My history with money also is that it falls out of the sky when you need it. Except that, increasingly, it doesn't. My mother was my sole custodian, and her death when I was eighteen left many unresolved feelings, obviously, but it also left the monthly Social Security benefits that would carry me through my first stint in college. Later, after I'd left school and returned, I found myself without the money to register one semester, until I went to the bursar's office to find out how much l owed them and discovered that a mysterious cash payment of nearly $3,000 had been credited to my account.

  I told the chief of the office repeatedly that this must have been an error, until on my third visit he produced a copy of the slip written out by the bursar's teller, with my name, my Social Security number, and a payment of $2,800. I never did find out where the money came from. The day after my third child was born, I left the maternity ward and went looking for a bank machine that gave out increments of $10, rather than the usual $20. I had $16 in my account at the time, and needed the ten to buy some food. As it happened, a short story of mine was published in a national magazine that week, and an editor called to see if I was working on a novel. I had about fifty pages of one, and within a few weeks he'd purchased it. The money was just enough to pay all the back bills, and was gone in a fortnight.

  My attitude, too, has been shaped by some delusional part of my ego that makes it impossible for me to believe that the whole money issue can define or control me. I've had trouble being convinced, despite what my wife and friends have told me and what I've read in the papers, that it is no longer possible to lead the life of the genteelly impoverished bohemian intellectual in New York City. I moved to New York from the suburbs in 1975 to go to college. A year and a half later, having dropped out of school for a time, I had to move out of the dormitories and find my own apartment. The apartment I landed seemed pricey: $225 a month for a one-bed-room, utilities included. I was desperate, so I took it. That the landlord paid the utilities meant that the landlord controlled the fusebox, and he was quick to turn off the power when I fell behind on the rent, which I frequently did. (Everyone should at least once know what it is to sit in a dark apartment while a man with a very moist cigar and a Bronx accent pounds on the door and says, just like in the movies, "C'mon, I know you're in there.") Eventually, I moved into a larger apartment with two friends: we paid $96 a month each. That the neighborhood was considered "bad" didn't bother us. My wife's and my first apartment, after we were married in 1982, was a one-bedroom for $232 a month. It seemed possible to live cheaply. It was around that time, I remember, that I declared one evening, in a moment of beer-profundity, my foreknowledge of adulthood: that it was much, much easier, with far less paperwork, being broke on $20,000 a year than it would become later, when we found ourselves broke on $100,000 a year.

  NOW THAT WE are, in fact, broke on $100,000 a year, some will respond that I should have planned better, I should have spent less, I should send my children to schools I can afford. You can't argue with the logic or the morality of prudence. You can only point to a world where so many people find themselves incapable of practicing it. We look at other people we know, with their children in the same schools and living even more expensive lives than ours (better homes, better furniture, vacations, etc.) and the question is—because in New York the silently mouthed question always is—where's the money coming from? Parents? Grandparents? A trust? The way our parents taught us to live (if we had frugal parents, which many of us didn't) doesn't seem possible. The life they acquired, under a more favorable tax structure and sane real estate values, with one wage and a home and summer vacations, doesn't seem possible either.

  What does seem possible, as Beckett once wrote, is going on—accepting joy where you can get it and fending off fear. If the debt of the c
ountry heaps up like so much slag during the economic good times, if the savings rate hits an all-time low during this boom, then what can we expect later, when the stock market finally, frightfully, "corrects," when interest rates begin to rise, when people start to lose their jobs and wonder what they're going to do with a near-ghetto apartment they paid more than half a million dollars for? Perhaps we can call in the IMF, like Indonesia. Or simply charge up one last pile of goodies—tents and Coleman stoves, lanterns and hunting knives, an almanac, a Bible, a dictionary, and a copy of the Gettysburg Address—before we really do head for the hills.

  —Harper’s

  August 1998

  1 An acquaintance recently looked to buy an apartment the size of ours a block to the north. The block is a pretty one in a neighborhood that was, when I moved in during the 1970s, adamantly shabby and is now not all that much better. This place, she said, had two bedrooms and a dining room that could be converted to a third. How much were they asking for it, I inquired. Oh, she said, about the same as usual, between six and seven hundred thousand.

  2 Last June, heavily influenced by banks, consumer-finance companies, and credit-card issuers, Congress voted to rewrite the national bankruptcy laws, making it more difficult for those who make more than $50,000 a year to walk away from high debts without paying anything to creditors. In 1997, 44 percent of the Americans late with their credit-card payments earned $50,000 a year while only 4 percent earned under $15,000 a year.