I Should Have Figured Out About Passive Income First and Then Dropped Acid

We didn't end up going to Coney Island. Max was feeling too wasted from cumulative effects of life in the fast lane and the imminence of his trip's ending. Instead we hung out, chatted about various projects he has percolating, got wasted. Ate the rest of the vegetarian chili I'd made the night before.

Then he played Sims and I wrote stuff for money, and the stuff I was writing for money was so boring and so unremunerative and moved so slowly that I felt like a seamstress in a sweatshop.

I remembered Tim Ware's quip from so long ago: "I should have bought real estate first and then dropped acid."

Except I would change the quip to: "I should have figured out about passive income first and then dropped acid."

For the most part, we got along really, really well. I could feel myself go a little dinky when Max made remarks like, "Liza really liked you! She said you weren't nearly as embarrassing as I'd said you were –"

"What do you mean, I'm embarrassing?"

"Oh, come on, Mom. Every person finds their parents embarrassing –"

"But, I mean, what specifically?"

"Mom—"

Don't go there, my better self warned me. I'd been about to personalize it, about to assume that he was ashamed of me because I'm Such a Failure when it fact it was the generic embarrassment and ambivalence that every kid feels about every parent.

More than once I apologized: "I really wish I'd had the money to take you guys out to dinner at a great restaurant and a show –"

"Well," he said, "I mean we didn't have the money to take you out either. We don't care about that stuff."

We had one bristly moment about the famous Cup Incident: When I was separating from Bill back in the Paleolithic Era, I got so mad at him once that I threw this huge over-sized ceramic cup at Bill's head. Max was about two and a half or three at the time, in the room and much traumatized. In my defense, Bill back then could be the type of person who was so infuriating you had to throw things at him. MaryAnn, Bill's second wife, has thrown many, much heavier things at him over the years like telephone answering machines. But I guess there were no kids in the room at those times.

Anyway, The Cup became one of the defining incidents of Max's childhood. I have no doubt that it was traumatizing, but it also became the negotiating point in every childhood wrangle that we had well into adolescence. If I made Max do something he didn’t want to do, his lower lip would begin to tremble. Then if I didn't rise to the bait and ask him, he'd announce in a portentous voice: "I'm thinking about The Cup."

It became an ongoing joke between Ben and I.

"What's your earliest memory?" I asked Max last night.

"Oh, probably The Cup," he said.

I laughed. "You were so-o manipulative about The Cup –"

And he bristled. "I was not! Little kids aren't manipulative like that!"
And I thought: OmiGawd – clearly you have not been around a lot of little kids since you stopped being one.

But then I thought about it some more as we drifted back into slightly uneasy parallel play. Little kids are definitely manipulative. But not manipulative in the same sense that adults are manipulative, true. And maybe they don't realize they are being manipulative. If you don't know you're being manipulative, are you being manipulative? Or are you being something else?

Later he said, "I don't even know if The Cup is my first memory. It's like the memory of a memory, you know? It's that remote."

I found out a lot of stuff about his life that I hadn't learned during our regular phone calls. Like he's been collecting unemployment since he was laid off so he really hasn't been dipping into his capital. And he wants to do environmental law. And he has a part time job working for a judge – Buzz! Law school recommendation! – and he has been networking with a Boalt Law School professor who's a Deep Springs alum, and may do some pro bono work for – Buzz! Another law school recommendation!

So while Max is not as competitive as he used to be back in middle school and high school, say, he is still quite the strategic thinker and planner.

He also fiinally finished reading Infinite Jest.

"Would I like that book?" I asked.

"Probably not," he said. "It's very structured. You have to read it exactly the way it was written. You don' read books like that –"

"No," I said. "I read novels like hypertext. I frequently start at the end and work my way forward. Or I'll dip into the book and read random chapters at a time. I'm much better with short stories."

I'll be heartbroken when I say good bye to him this afternoon. Overcome with that bittersweet feeling that is just too poignant for words, the gist of which is that damn it! it all goes so fucking fast and yet each individual moment presses down on you like an eternity –

But I have a plan now. Do the at-risk teens Poughkeepsie gig till August 2014. Get the bankruptcy shit dealt with during this coming year – I found a lawyer I want to work with so it's a matter now of saving up that cash.

If I can figure out this shit with the missing Vdub pink slip – and one way or another, I'll have to figure that out – I can sell the Vdub and probably squirrel away enough money to buy a replacement vehicle in October. I've got the budget set up to pay back money I owe, meet outstanding obligations and still save a little. It's just a matter of not fucking off but doing the work I need to do on a regular basis to make that money. I am a little seamstress in a Taiwanese sweatshop!

Write the three Stegner stories. Find people who can help me fine tune the three Stegner stories before I send them in.

Go back to the Bay Area in the fall of 2014. The thing to do might be to find another AmeriCorps-type job in that area. Since I begin collecting TW pensions and what not on my next birthday, from between what I make at the copywriting, the AmeriCorps stipend and the old person payout, I'll be comfortably back in the middle class again.

Also had a long phone conversation with Jeanna who is having major problems with employees. She lives in remote New Mexico where management is not a science. She also let this situation evolve where she was flirting with the one security guard all last year. Entirely inappropriate – he is so much younger than she is. On Friday night, she confronted him and he stared at her coldly and said, "Know what you need? A good fucking –"

"Jeanna!" I said. "You should have fired him on the spot. That violates every employment-related sexual harassment code on the books. I mean, even in New Mexico –"

She sighed. "He's got the keys to everything on the property. And then when I was telling him I was seriously thinking of letting him go, he said, 'I wouldn't do that if I were you. I know all your secrets.'"

"What secrets?" I asked. "Is the ghost of Osama bin Laden doing tickets for the drive-in?"

She sighed. "I guess he means he could sabotage the place," she said weakly.

I realize my role here is to listen and make comforting noises. I mean every time I give practical advice, she says, "You don't get it, Patty. This isn't Berkeley. It's New Mexico."

Forget about it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

All day long I did the texting thing with B. The smartphone umbilical cord thing. I kept wishing and wishing he were in my physical space so I could talk to him about something more concrete than NSA spying rings and Stephen King's final capitulation to editing. I miss Ben still so much sometimes. Like he is the only person who has the history and the understanding to be sympathetic toward the stuff that's really in my head. Except demonstrably, he's not sympathetic. That ship sailed.

It's kind of like the theme music from To Kill a Mockingbird is on a perpetual radio loop in my mind. I'm in the poignance overload zone.

Maternal Pride

In the space of one week, Max ran a 3 hour and 43 minute marathon, and scored in the 99.7th percentile on the LSAT.

The kid done his old doddering Mom proud.