We Won’t Play Tent City

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Tim Geithner

Tim Geithner is on my mother’s teevee, going “blah blah blah.” I am here in Oklahoma, with my boy and my dog and my mama, and we are traveling, man. I thought after I quit my newspaper job in November I would go to Paris. Instead, I held down the couch a few months, a-bitchin’ and a-whinin’ about poor poor me. I want to go to Paris! I want to go to The Bazaar! I suspect I am mighty entitled.

The kid is off of school for two months—and when he gets back, it will be just in time for state testing. Stupid year-round schooling! Stupid, stupid LAUSD! For the first several weeks, he relaxed like a champion, under a chenille blanket before the TV, and I smiled gently, his tender mama, and told him to relax away. The dog is a shepherd, so it is her earthly bliss to have us in her sights at all times, no matter how many dozens of hours we drive. Even when my mortified boy locked her in the car in Gallup, New Mexico, along with my phone, money, and keys, she sat happily in the middle of the back seat as seven Indian and Latino dudes of varying ages attempted to break in. The dude who eventually did it won himself a tank of gas on me.

People are nice in New Mexico. And people are nice at my mama’s. People are nice in Paris, too, despite their American reputation, but when I quit my job as editor of my paper, my boyfriend couldn’t go with me, because he was still employed. As of yesterday, he isn’t. The newspaper has shut down. It’s a perfect time to go to Paris, darling. Oh, why can’t you be as entitled as me?

For the last four months, as I’ve bitched and I’ve moaned, my boyfriend has cosseted and loved me. Now he is a 48-year-old man who’s lost his job, and I’m 1500 miles away. There’s only so much cosseting you can do on the phone. We are steelworkers in Pittsburgh in 1994; we don’t know how to do anything else. I prescribe a week curled up in a tight little ball. Then I prescribe another.

Becca's future home?

It is not all the fault of Joseph Cassano at AIG, although, really, most of it is. All of us lived beyond our means, and plenty of us knew it. George W. Bush inflated the housing bubble on purpose, lowering interest rates to nothing so people would refinance and spend the money on boats and granite countertops, propping up with sleight-of-hand an already busted economy. Now the Fed is lowering interest rates to imaginary negative numbers. Good job, brilliant finance guys! Granite countertops for everyone! Except for my friends in Tent City, which may soon include me.

The newspaper business is its own situation; faced with shrinking profits—but still profits—they went Mutually Assured Destruction, a nuclear arms race to downsize themselves to irrelevance, putting out a product that sucked and was stupid. What would I do if I were a visionary and a genius? How would I make lemonade from pee? What if I were a really hard worker instead of indolent and lightly depressed? What can I summon, Secret-like, from the warm and waiting universe? Man, fuck all if I know. Perhaps without web skills I can put out a zine.

I want so badly to get back in the car and drive on to Minnesota, or New Orleans, or to Maine. My boy doesn’t go back to school until May, and there’s nowhere really that I need to be. I would if my boyfriend weren’t curled up in his ball. I will drive home, and I will roast him a chicken, and I will hold him to my bosom and coo at him and cosset. Then I’ll whine and bitch that he doesn’t take me anywhere—why can’t we go to Paris, baby?—and he will break up with me if he has any brains.

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