Death, Rebirth and Taxes
Today is Easter Sunday and on my way home from picking up a free IKEA shelving unit (the hustle, like Christ, will sleep when it’s dead) I kept seeing parking enforcement officers. It seemed cruel to make them work on such a “sacred” holiday and crueler still, obviously, to make them give tickets to people who forgot to move their cars because they were too busy celebrating the rebirth of their Lord and Savior. I imagined they were all listening to the opening line of the opening track of Patti Smith’s “Horses” on a loop as they looped around city blocks:
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Last night, as I watched the live stream of Megan Thee Stallion’s Coachella performance (the sheer salaciousness of which dropped my jaw, as it was an exercise in acute female carnality I thought, like the revolution, I would never see televised) I came up with my own rap verse:
“My AGI game tight / $38k and that’s as a wife.”
I had just done my taxes, as that’s the law, and was overall unsurprised to learn my financial status had changed little from the year prior yet still cognizant of the fact that most other people pushing 40 would be aghast at the meagerness of my income. I don’t feel poor, because I’m not poor; I am not wanting for any necessities, I have no fear of eviction, my apartment is still filled with superfluous shit.
But when you see the numbers there, in black and white, you can’t help but think, Damn. When my parents were my age, they were doing much better than me. (Granted, they had also thrown their lives and autonomy away by having me, but I think you understand what I’m saying.)
It’s kind of like when you clean your bathroom for the first time in months and in the process ask yourself, “God, I live like this?” You tell yourself afterward that you’ll never again let your bathroom devolve to such a state — that you won’t allow the tub to develop a patina of scum and the magazine piles to grow to heights that topple at the slightest touch — but you always do. God, you do live like this. But it’s fine. God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt [sic].
I think I grew up middle class; I say this because I certainly didn’t grow up rich, nor did I grow up poor, and because I’m so old that, when I was a child, America had a middle class. My mother and father met in community college, which was the only form of college they ever attended; I suppose I’m grateful for that, because if they had any aspirations at all I wouldn’t be here. My mother was a bookkeeper and my father a computer programmer; he was lucky, having got in at Big Blue when the getting was good, when the machines were primitive enough that anyone with a modicum of sense, degree be damned, could make a good living by making them cater to their will. I miss when computers were stupid — when even a child, this child included, could easily program their own text-based game wherein the player was asked to pull their finger. (What happened after said finger was pulled, you ask? Why, the word “FART!” would emerge in white text on a black screen, fucking DUH.)
As a child, I never lacked for anything; that being said, I still wanted things, outward symbols of status I could use as bargaining chips in order to fit in and be accepted — Guess Jeans, L.A. Gear sneakers, et al. My mother would never buy me such extravagances, insisting instead that the clothing at Mervyn’s was perfectly acceptable, and I resented her accordingly.
By the time my parents were divorced, though, I was a teenager who no longer wanted anything, other than to be left alone. If I was unlucky enough to be gifted something with a logo on it, I’d promptly cut it off; I took to making my own clothing, which looked about as shambolic as the haircut I insisted on giving myself. I spent my leisure time printing zines no one ever bought on my grandmother’s copy machine and rereading the same William S. Burroughs book over and over trying to understand it (I am, at this point, not entirely sure the problem was me).
When they divorced shortly after the birth of my sister, whose existence required multiple rounds of costly IVF treatments, my dad bought jet skis and wrote things like “blood money” in the memo lines of the child support checks I would bring to my mother, who worked as a bookkeeper in a windowless room inside a grocery store. The more complicated the machines he programmed became, the larger his paychecks, which I imagine is how they afforded the IVF; now that the kid was here, however, he didn’t seem particularly excited to continue to spread the wealth, especially since it was my mother who divorced him.
And when my sister died shortly after their divorce, having contracted spinal meningitis and becoming brain dead within a matter of days, he blamed my mother, as the offending virus had made its way into my sister’s bloodstream on her watch (the implication being Weekend Dad would have nipped that shit in the bud, in much the same way Mark Wahlberg would have prevented 9/11 had he been on one of those planes). He bought a motorcycle. The memo lines of the child support checks were still filled with lamentations.
No effort was made to pay for my college, and in retrospect I should have taken the hint and realized the worthlessness of a social sciences degree. Maybe I wouldn’t have found out what labeling theory is on my own, I don’t know, but he certainly didn’t need a degree to make it in America, so why would I? I ended up paying for it — and, in fact, am still paying for it — but that’s my folly, not theirs.
And so here I am, their last living progeny, 38 years old and pulling in a collective $38k, married filing jointly. Things were easier for them but not entirely. I’m definitely happier now than they were at my age.