George & Hilly by George Gurley

Author:George Gurley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Money Matters

Dr. Selman first got the idea we had financial problems when I told him I was going to have to postdate his check. He asked for a little clarification. That simple question unlocked a torrent of confessional self-pity.

“I’m thirty-seven years old and I have ten dollars in the bank,” I said. “I can’t plan ahead. I wait until the last moment to buy a plane ticket, which doubles the cost. I’m in a dead-end job.” Writing for a newspaper gave me a veneer of success. But I felt stagnant. Newspaper readership was in decline. I could foresee the day when I might lose my job. I let such morose speculations excuse me from producing stories, which inspired my bosses to cut my salary in half and somehow convince me it was a promotion.

Why hadn’t I listened to my father? A journalist himself, he thought the profession was doomed. “Join the ministry, the army,” he said. “Start a Laundromat or become a pastry chef in Portugal. Something with a future. Otherwise, you’ll end up operating a leaf blower or delivering pizzas.”

I gave him a typically impudent reply. “My ambition is to make enough money to buy a brand-new pair of tube socks every day and throw them away every night.” Now, even that luxury seemed to be slipping out of reach.

I’d thought about business school and spent a thousand dollars on tutors for the GMAT, but I had no idea what I would do with a degree. I whiled away hours in semicomatose nostalgia, daydreaming about moving back to my college town, renting that same one-room studio for $300 a month, getting my old dishwashing job at the microbrewery, auditing classes, and pursuing other undirected studies. The first time this bright idea came up in therapy, Dr. Selman asked if I’d ever seen The Twilight Zone episode “Hooverville.”

“It’s about a guy who falls asleep on a train and wakes up in his hometown,” he said. Apparently, some ironic subtext was intended. Was the doctor suggesting I was an escapist? And what if the dream came true and I really did wake up down-and-out in Lawrence, Kansas? I’d probably become another local oddity like the guy who walks in the middle of the street dressed only in a dirty sheet, holding his hands before him, playing an invisible piano.

I spent hours badgering editors for raises and whining about my desperate circumstances.

“You’re not being tough enough,” Hilly said. “You have to bully your bosses.” She recommended reading You Can Negotiate Anything. “You have to come at them with a crowbar. Threaten them with cement shoes.”

“Let’s talk about changes that you could make in the here and now,” said Dr. Selman. “Anything you could do besides running away and becoming a busboy?”

I vented a torrent of excuses. “Reporting is a young man’s job. My insides are already annihilated. I’ve developed breathing problems and heart palpitations. I’ve got asthma. Can’t you hear my wheeze? Maybe I could start over and go back to fact-checking.

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