The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

Author:Jess Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Welcome to Weedland, Haiku #2

I WANT MY DEALERS

To be smarter than they are;

Welcome to Weedland

“Wake up, Slippers,” says a voice I don’t recognize. I snap awake.

“Welcome to Weedland!” Jamie says from the backseat. I look out my window and then over at Dave the Drug Dealer, who is driving.

“You have a nice nap?” asks my sidekick Jamie.

“How long was I out?”

“Half hour.”

It was oddly relaxing, riding in a car with someone else driving, even if that someone was Drug Dealer Dave and his car was disconcertingly just like my own. We met at Bea’s, and since I hadn’t slept in days, I started feeling my head bob as soon as Jamie began a story about “this dude in my math class who wants to get an operation to make himself into a chick, but dude says he ain’t gay and I’m like, what the fuck you mean you ain’t gay, but he insists he ain’t gay, he’s, like, a woman, and I’m like, ‘Dude, until you’re a real woman, you are totally a ram-banger, yo,’ and he’s like: ‘But if I’ve never had sex with a man, how can I be gay?’ and I’m like, Dude, whoa! That is kinda freaky…”

And the next thing I knew Dave was saying, “Wake up, Slippers.”

And I snapped awake here in…

…Weedland, which exists in the last place I would’ve ever guessed, a small farming town an hour from the city, on a little road behind the main street of this endlessly dying wheat and mill town—a town which fell on hard times so long ago the people there are actually nostalgic for the old hard times. These new hard times? Boring. Wimpy. Back in the old bad days, they ate dirt. But they were happy!

I don’t tell Dave that I’ve been to this little town at least five times before, back when I was a reporter. Off a nowhere, two-lane highway, this little shitburg is close enough to the city that it was one of five or six trusty small towns that served the newspaper staff whenever we needed “rural reaction” to stories. We came to Weedland fairly often (without knowing it was Weedland, of course) to write about this agricultural bill’s failure or that wheat embargo, or this local politician’s pandering run for office. Sometimes a story just calls for a random quote by some craggy old farmer and there was always a craggy old farmer to quote here, the sons of other craggy old farmers that my newspapers quoted in the hard-times 1970s, the grandsons of old crags we quoted in the hard-times 1930s. Legacies.

Dave parks along a street of plain clapboard houses, just behind the town’s main street, which is, appropriately enough, called Main Street. The house we walk toward is situated behind a couple of unlikely Main Street businesses—a camera and watch shop and small engine repair. There are a dozen houses on this block, six on each side of the street. We park behind a red Camaro (so

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