It’s a cold day in San Francisco, but not the typical cold summer day that’s fifty degrees and foggy. No, it’s February, and you’re sitting in your apartment that overlooks Fort Mason and the Bay, and it’s cold. Maybe thirty-five. Definitely not warmer than forty. Definitely enough to make your misery more miserable, your problems that much bigger and your solutions that much smaller.
You’re holding a small piece of crumpled brown paper marked by the municipal imprint of the United States Postal Service. It’s informing you that a package has been mailed to you but the mailman or mailwoman tried to deliver it several times and has given up and now it is your responsibility to pick it up at the nearby post office. You have dealt with this by adding it to the list of things you need to do with your rapidly deteriorating life. It’s at No. 8, at the bottom of the list, notated by a command of your own choosing: “Get package.”
This has been on your list (the one with the neat boxes you drew in next to the to-dos so you could check them or color them in once they’ve been completed) for weeks, and who knows if the box is even at the post office anymore?
You place the wrinkled notice on the desk next to the list and begin to read the more important single-digit items again.
1. Insurance
You still need car insurance for the beat-up Bronco you bought from a co-worker for five hundred bucks after your Accord finally died, but a week ago you were pulled over and given a ticket for no insurance that’s going to cost you seventeen hundred and your court date is coming up in two weeks. You can probably bum the seventeen bills off your roommate, but that still doesn’t help you with …
2. Taxes
You haven’t filed in at least five years. On the drive to work, or at least, before you started taking the Golden Gate Transit bus to work because you got that ticket for no insurance that you haven’t paid, you kept hearing a radio ad that started with, “Haven’t filed taxes for years? We can help!” It sounded great until you considered yourself smart enough to assume that it was a scam, so now you’re wondering when you should dig up all those old forms and see an accountant and find out that you owe penalties, you’re getting audited and you’re going to owe another three or four grand. Which brings you to …
3. Bills/Budget
The great thing here is that you don’t have any credit card debut. Then again, that’s only because you don’t have good enough credit to get a credit card. With the seventeen hundred you owe for the no-insurance fine and another month’s rent (almost thirteen hundred) coming due and your paycheck at the newspaper checking in at about four hundred seventy-five a week, you know you’re going to have to face the paper on this. To have any shot at getting Nos. 1 and 2 out of the way, you’re going to have to dig into the messy, neglected file drawer where all these horrendous documents live and pull out your numerical fears. Lay them on this stark wooden table and figure out all the math. Or you could make a call that you really don’t want to make, to the one person whose mere voice could make you think you’ll never succeed …
4. Grandma
Dad’s dead, Mom’s helped already, and there are no other options at this point. Naturally, No. 3 and therefore Nos. 1 and 2 could be dealt with in a non-interest-bearing way if you could muster up the courage, humility, and possible drunken stupor required to phone your grandmother and ask her to float you, oh, six or seven grand, but do you want to visit that neighborhood of verbal self-mutilation? Is it worth the money? To once again own up to “irresponsibility” and inability to make it on your own? Wait, maybe there’s a solution right above this very table, right there on the bowed shelf …
5. Kobliner book
Speaking of your mother, sort of, about a year ago she sent you what she believes to be a cure-all, a book called Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties, by Beth Kobliner. You’re supposed to read this and begin to carve out your renaissance with smart, precise moves of economic innovation. You will then emerge from this abyss of debt and self-doubt a new man, set for marriage, parenthood and presumably nights of salad and cigars and snifters and guffaws at the country club forever after. You open the book and read the first page. “More often than not, the smartest financial move you can make is to take any savings you have …” OK, that’s enough. You don’t have savings. This item will have to wait until you get a better handle on items 1-4, but, then again, don’t forget about …
6. Do GateExpert.com stuff
GateExpert.com claims to be “the everything site for the Bay Area professional with everything,” and you recently sold the sports editor on the idea of building a local golf section. He agreed to pay you two hundred per article as a freelancer. You will travel to all the golf courses within fifty miles, play them if you have the time, write up reviews and take a few photos. The problem right now is that you owe them ten articles in twelve days and you haven’t gone to eight of the courses, and now you can’t drive to the courses because you don’t have seventeen hundred for the no-insurance ticket, not to mention the money to start actually paying for car insurance, which you’ll have to sign up for immediately after forking over the seventeen bills. You decide you might have to risk being pulled over, do four courses one day and four the next, pull an all-nighter or two of writing and wait a month for the two grand. But that’s at least ten days away, so now you can move on to …
7. Start screenplay
You still remember the pamphlet your cousin gave you a few years ago, something she picked up in L.A. It’s still in the drawer somewhere. It’s an application for the Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, a contest through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or, in your cousin’s mind, quite possibly your only ticket to eternal riches. You need to read over the application before hitting Barnes and Noble and purchasing a book that will tell you how to write a screenplay. Before that, you’ll have to brainstorm ideas, which calls for making another numbered list on another piece of paper. You decide you can’t make that list until this one is all checked off. Maybe you’ll have it all together in time for next year’s fellowship. For now, you’ve got one item left …
8. Get package
The piece of postal paper is right there and you pick it up once again and stuff it in the back pocket of your jeans. This, you realize, can be done. It can be done now. Starting with one check or one colored box at the very bottom doesn’t mean much, but at least it’s starting. You grab your mountain bike off the hook and carry it down the stairs. You bust out of the front door and head up Octavia as the wind whips you into tears that stream down onto the cotton hoodie that’s the only layer of protection from the cold you forgot in your rush to complete this task.
Fifteen frozen minutes later, you arrive at the Lombard post office and hand the shot-to-shit chit. You wait another ten while the man goes into the back, and when he returns, he hands you a box. It’s light. You shake it a few times. There’s nothing particularly solid in it. It’s from your uncle, who’s on vacation in Europe.
You open the box and inside is a sweater, a grand white wool Aran knit with classic cables, purchased in Dublin, the tag says. And a card. “Hope this keeps you warm. Uncle John,” it reads, and you laugh a bit as you put it on and it fits and you hop on your bike, which needs air in the front tire, and you think to yourself that at least you’ve got this … at least you’ve got this.
***
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