Down the Up Escalator

by Barbara Garson

  Millions of Americans live with the fear that Richard described. Their stories don’t involve Turkish gold chains and uptown-downtown subway chases rivaling The French Connection. A vast number obviously don’t make it to the bank by 5:45, or there wouldn’t be so many people paying the usurious interest rates that Richard was racing to avoid. For most debtors this race never ends.

  It didn’t end for Richard that day either. He was telling me about his close shave in retrospect. If I’d met him at 6:05 that day, he might have reported the 5:45 victory briefly and gone on to tell me about the piano he was trying to sell on eBay (“Never got a single offer”) to make sure he didn’t fall into the 29 percent rate the next month.

  “What kind of racket is that?!” Richard demands. “Twenty-nine percent interest rates while your money in the bank is getting less than 1 percent! Well”—he calms down a little—“at least I kept my American Express at 15.9 percent, the Visa is 19.9 percent. But chipping down that debt once you’ve accrued it, that’s the hardest thing I face now that I’m stabilized.”

  This is how Richard Bey finally stabilized himself.

  “At that point I had a $600-a-week job and a $1,200-a-week rent. So I decided to move into a studio apartment. I was going to do it in the same building because that way you don’t have to put down a new deposit.”

  “To avoid the cash gap between putting down the new deposit and getting the old one back?” I asked.

  “Right. That’s the kind of thing I was constantly thinking of. How do you avoid laying down cash for a deposit? How little can you spend for dinner in this restaurant? Is it worth it? Which is cheaper? That kind of thinking, every single day.

  “But Richard,” I said, “we all think that way every day.”

  “After a certain point, for me at least, you have to turn it into a game of how little can I spend today, or else …” He shook his head at the thought of what constant economizing might do to one’s soul.

  “So I looked at a studio apartment in the same building, and I told the woman I’d be by the next day to pick up the lease. Then I showed up for work. Three-quarters of the people weren’t there, and the rest were crying. The guy had pulled the plug on the whole operation.

  “The person there said if you do your show today, you’re not going to get paid for it. I said, ‘I’ve already done the research.’ But even as I’m on the air, I’m thinking, ‘I’ll never get another job around Christmas unless I’m going to be Santa in Macy’s.’ ”

  “Did you ever think about those kinds of jobs?” I asked. “Santa? Messenger?”

  “Not even when I was an actor.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because you can’t just pick them up today the way we could in our day.”

  “Anyway, it wouldn’t solve my problem.”

  So Richard gave up on moving halfway down to a studio apartment and moved all the way down to his parents’ condo in Florida. The hardest part about that was telling the child, he said. But Richard had temporarily solved the school problem, and he promised to return often. Indeed, he manages to crash in New York about ten days a month.

  Richard’s parents had left their condo mortgage-free, and he and his brothers maintain it as a vacation home. But moving, even to a free place, takes money.

  “When I was an actor, I moved from sublet to sublet by just tossing my stuff in the car. Now I have all these physical possessions.” Richard remembered another resource. “I have a friend who was a vice president of MTV. I see him once a year. I hadn’t touched him yet. So I went and explained that I had to get out of New York and I couldn’t even pay for the movers.

  “He said, ‘Just tell me how much you need.’ I said, ‘I think I could do it for $2,000.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you $5,000 but only on one condition, that you never bring it up; you never think twice about calling me as a friend because you owe me the money.’ ”

  “That’s just the condition I would make,” I said. “Because if you’re embarrassed to call me, I’d lose a friend by helping out.”

  “Unfortunately, I am embarrassed to call him,” Richard said, laughing. “But I called the woman who lent me the $1,000 and said, ‘I’ve stabilized, and I can pay you $200 a month. She said, ‘That’s all right. I don’t need it right now.’ My friends are motivated by friendship and trust, like I was with Bill. Are they as foolish as I was?”

  As part of the stabilization process Richard decided to start collecting his union pension early. It was an old-fashioned guaranteed-benefit plan to which his broadcasting employers had paid in over the years.

  “I’m collecting $3,800 a month. That’s $44,000 a year.” Richard had been a high earner. “Most of that goes to paying down my credit card debt. If I could have waited till I was sixty-five or sixty-six, I would have had a $6,100-a-month pension. With that and Social Security, I would have been golden. Still, God bless the union.”

  “You know something,” I said, “somebody might say that $44,000 a year and a fully paid-off apartment on the ocean is not a bad way to be ruined.”

  “You don’t have to bring ‘somebody’ into it,” Richard answered. “I say that myself. I could have had a lot worse places to start from or to have fallen to.”

  “Do you think this might be a transition into retirement?” I suggested cautiously.

  “Last time I spoke to Bill—I’m pretty sure I’m the only investor who still talks to him—he was worried about going to prison. I said, ‘What are you going to get, three years? Two with good behavior? What you should do is lose weight, work out, bring lots of books.’ Then I realized, what I’m telling him to do in prison is what I’m doing in Florida. I work out an hour and a half a day. I eat frugally. There’s a place that has a twelve-inch pizza for $7.95 on Tuesdays. I eat half of it Tuesday and the other half Thursday. And books. It used to take me two months to finish one. Now two a week. I call it a pleasant purgatory. Pleasant because of the walks on the beach. Purgatory because it’s a waiting room till I figure out how to get back to New York and do something creative.”

  “I bet you will,” I said and thanked him for his time.

  But Richard Bey is used to being the moderator, not the moderated. After collegially answering my questions about his personal experiences, he took the mike, so to speak, and gave me a general wrap-up of my subject.

  “I’m not an economist, but this is my theory. Since the seventies, middle-class workers, their wages haven’t gone up. There’s lots of statistics on that. You can fill them in.

  “People don’t realize this, because it was hidden first by the dot-com technology boom. That was the time when even a chimp could pick a winning stock. In fact they had a chimp on television doing it. So stocks went up, and everyone thought they were rich. When that bubble burst, they had the real estate bubble. People said, ‘Oh my God, I’m living in my bank. Every day I get richer just because I own a house or a condo.’ Then that burst. So now people are waking up to a reality that’s existed since the 1970s. The earnings of the richest 2 percent have increased eightfold—eightfold. We haven’t had a disparity of wealth like that in this country since the Gilded Age.

  “So what they’ve basically done is moved all the money out of the middle class with a shell game. They stand there and say”—Richard transforms himself into a street hustler behind a table with three cups—“ ‘Your money is under your house.’ ” He lifts the first cup.“ ‘Whoops, no, it’s not there.’ Okay, your money is in the stock market. ‘No, it’s not there.’ So where is all the money? ‘The money is under the third cup and that’s my cup. And not only that, but if I lose any of it, the government’s going to put it back for me.’

  “I tell you, if anything would drive people to socialism, it should be what’s going on in this country right now. Myself, I happen to be a capitalist because I believe incentive is very important. I believe that hard work, dedication, talent, perseverance, all of those things should be rewarded. But what we have now is the law of the jungle. The lion eats everyb
ody because he can.”

  Thank you again, Richard Bey.

  The last time I saw Richard he was enjoying a six-week sublet in Manhattan while he guest hosted a morning show for Sirius Radio. Then it would be back to pleasant purgatory. His friend and fund manager Bill pleaded guilty to defrauding the German bank and is free till his sentencing, but the one-armed treasurer is fighting the charges. So far no money has been distributed to investors. But the fund’s assets, Richard fears, are being depleted by managers and lawyers. Richard is active in the investor committee to get the SEC to stop what it considers new mismanagement.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE PERFECT TWOFER

  Author Gets Insulated

  I live in a low-income building in one of the wealthiest parts of Manhattan. Westbeth consists of 383 rent-stabilized apartments in a rehabbed nineteenth-century warehouse with tall, leaky windows right on the Hudson River. Heating costs us a fortune.

  That’s one reason I noticed that the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or “the stimulus” as it was more often called, included $5 billion for weatherization.

  Insulating old buildings seemed like a perfect recession twofer. It yields immediate energy savings and creates jobs that use the very skills that were idled when home construction crashed.

  Since 1976 the U.S. Department of Energy has run the Weatherization Assistance Program, which channels relatively small amounts of money through state governments to nonprofit community groups to subsidize the weatherization of low-income homes and apartments.

  Much of the $800 billion stimulus was to be distributed in the form of tax cuts to private businesses and grants to state and local governments. But the increased weatherization money would go to those community groups to pay workers to produce a public good. It wouldn’t put millions of the unemployed directly on the government payroll the way the Works Progress Administration (WPA) did during the Great Depression. But it was as close to the WPA as anyone dared go this time around. So aside from a personal interest in replacing my leaky windows, I had a professional interest.

  I imagined myself interviewing a formerly unemployed young man from the Bronx—no, make that a young woman—her electric screwdriver poised in midair while joyful neighbors wave their lowered utility bills.

  In order to locate such direct stimulus beneficiaries, I set up an appointment at an established weatherization group in my area. But I found this message on my answering machine: “We had a meeting today at two o’clock, but … I was told by my funding source that I needed to request, um, that you needed to request in writing, um, the organization that you’re working for and pretty much what you’re interested in because I have to submit the request through DHCR’s [Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s] media office.”

  When I phoned back, she promised to send my written request for an interview off to Albany tout de suite. We’d reschedule just as soon as she got the approval. “It’s nothing personal.”

  After a few frustrating weeks I gave up on appointments and dropped in at some outer-borough community groups where sweet, sincere people either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me how they were going to spend their weatherization money when it came through.

  I began to suspect that something ugly like a jurisdictional struggle was holding up the works. Then I happened to attend a lecture on alternative energy. I recognized one of the speakers as a staff member at a community group I’d tried to visit. After her talk I privately mentioned my interest in weatherization, and she implored me not to tie her environmental activism to her community group. But why shouldn’t a weatherization worker champion alternative energy?

  That’s when I realized that I might be feeling the Van Jones effect. The man President Obama appointed as his “green-jobs czar” had recently been outed on Fox Television as a 1960s black radical—which indeed he had been. Fox ran pictures of him sporting a huge Afro and saying things he would surely put differently these days. Within a week the president accepted his resignation.

  Fear of tarnishing the weatherization program with environmentalism or radicalism was one worry. Corruption or the appearance thereof was another. Over its two-year duration the stimulus bill would provide small groups with enough money to insulate about a million homes a year, or seven times what they’d been doing until then. That’s far more than these groups were used to spending. To avoid scandals, real or cooked up, they adopted elaborate paperwork to account for every penny. I wonder if the WPA got off to a slow start like this. I still wanted to write about people finding work, but I put weatherization on the back burner.

  Then, one day about a year and a half later, I saw a Hispanic man in his twenties, a white woman in her thirties, and a black man in his forties eating bag lunches behind my building. Next I spotted them on the roof measuring the emergency doors, then in the basement near the laundry room. Finally, the trio knocked at my own apartment and asked permission to install new bulbs, faucet sprays, and weather stripping.

  While I’d been writing downbeat recession stories, my building management had slogged through a weatherization application. To be eligible, over 66 percent of the tenants had to have incomes not more than 150 percent above the official poverty income. (So that’s why they’d collected our Social Security numbers.) Once we’d been declared poor enough, we were given an energy audit to determine what upgrades we could use.

  Now my personal insulation team, José Santos, Tracy Leonardo, and Cleavon Bell, were at the door. Tracy, the clipboard woman wearing boots, tool belt, and ponytail, explained their mission. I let them in, and they dispersed with choreographed speed toward the bathroom and the kitchen. By the end of the afternoon almost every apartment door on my floor had one of those silver strips to hold in the heat.

  I caught Tracy without her clipboard one lunch hour, and she joined me for a cup of tea. An organization that prepares women for nontraditional employment helped her to find her way to the weatherization group. “I was the first girl they ever hired as a field worker,” she said.

  Before that she’d worked as a plumber (nonunion, noncertified), a bartender, an emergency medical technician, and at an animal hospital. Along the way she’d earned a BA in criminal justice. “I thought I wanted to be a cop till I dated one for a while.” She’d also gotten a law degree that she’s never used.

  “Does your family feel disappointed that you have a law degree and you’re doing construction work?” I asked.

  “They wanted me to get a degree; I got a degree. My dad is a carpenter. His career was computer technician at IBM. But he redid our entire house. He can do it all, and he taught it to me. I love it. Besides, I make more at this than I would as a lawyer.”

  For the moment that was probably true. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 required contractors receiving federal funds to pay local “prevailing wages.” This is generally interpreted as union wages. After a bit of a tussle, that requirement was attached to the ARRA or stimulus bill.

  Because of the variety of work they did, my three insulators were classified as carpenters. That meant that Tracy had earned $70,000 during the year that she’d worked exclusively on stimulus contracts. “I paid like $15,000 in taxes,” she told me proudly.

  But the two-year stimulus program was just about over. Because of the slow start her group was granted an extension to finish our job. But in another few weeks she’d be back to earning $40,000 a year. That was fine with her, she said. It was still the work she loved.

  Though Tracy was clocked out for lunch, she took a call from Cleavon with a question about washers. “Yes, I’m the informal supervisor,” she acknowledged when she got off the phone. “Except not in the sense that I would ever rat the fellas out for anything. But I tell them what to do, where to go next.” This was not because of her education, she said, but because she’d been taken on staff a little before them.

  Her really important contribution to the team, Tracy thought, was helping them get into the individual
apartments. This was tricky in any part of the city. “But frankly,” she said, “gaining access in your building is harder than anywhere else I’ve worked.” That’s all she would say. Despite my coaxing, her professionalism prevented her from telling me stories about my eccentric neighbors.

  She did wonder, however, whether the heating team would have as much trouble when they came to put regulators on our radiators. “They’re going to be installing in each apartment,” she said. “But it’ll be a bit of a waste because of the windows.”

  That’s when the bad news sank in. A building like ours has to pay at least one-fourth of its weatherization costs. Replacing hundreds of irregular-sized windows over a century old was beyond our means. It would be so expensive that it probably wouldn’t meet the government’s standards for cost effectiveness even if we could pay our share. So after the job was finished, I’d still have to stuff towels into the cracks around my elegant, wood-framed windows when it rains. Tracy deplored the energy waste even as she admired the vintage woodwork.

  She thanked me for the tea, noticed my odd-sized hanging lamp on her way out, and promised to send up special flood bulbs that would fit. In her capacity as informal supervisor, she also promised to send “the fellas” up to talk to me next day at lunch.

  José Santos is a slight twenty-four-year-old born in the Dominican Republic and raised since school age in New York City. Weatherization work introduced him to many new neighborhoods, and he didn’t mind sounding provincial. “I went out to your supermarket the first day to buy sandwiches for us. It cost $30. We bring our lunch now.” José’s partner Cleavon Bell is a sturdy forty-five-year-old who seems far more sophisticated and confident. But they both felt awkward being interviewed.

  “Is the ARRA money the best pay you’ve ever earned?” I asked the two.

  “Is that the Recovery Act?” Cleavon asked.

  “Yeah,” José answered him.