Page 37 - WTP Vol. V #5

“What’s Going On” and “Sexual Healing.” ~
story? What’s a more important story than one about making fifty-seven thousand a day doing nothing, and our two-hundred-dollar hotel room and the hundreds of thousands of people—no, let’s be honest, and global—the millions of people who will never enjoy luxury like that shabby, but bedbug-free, hotel room on 94th Street.
On that trip to New York my sons and I stayed at a beat-up Days Inn on 94th Street. It was the cheapest place we could find in the city, and it was still over two hundred bucks. Some peeling wallpaper, a few tiles missing in the bathroom, and before we slept we pulled back the bed- spreads and checked the sheets for bedbugs—as if we knew what to look for.
~
How many people that we passed on the streets would have loved to spend a night in that room? How many would have pushed and bullied their way to the front of a line, if there was a line? We had taken a taxi from Port Authority to 94th Street. It cost fourteen dollars, including tip. Do other people think about these things? They must. How much money they have, how much others have, what they can afford.
Whenever I take a bus, like we did to get to New York, I think of the times I’d take a bus back to Connecticut when I was in college. Sometimes the bus would be crowded and I’d end up next to a stranger. One guy, a middle-aged white business- man, talked with me a few weeks before the elec- tion in 1984. He asked whom I was voting for, and I said Mondale. He asked why, and I said I feared nuclear war. He was voting for Reagan, but some- thing I said must have touched him, and he gave me his card, said to contact him if I wanted a job.
I’ve never forgotten that when our new president, Donald Trump, declared bankruptcy in the 1990s, he received over six hundred thousand dollars a month from the federal government so he could maintain his lifestyle. How can someone declare bankruptcy and get six hundred thousand dollars a month? I declare bankruptcy!
Another time I sat with a Latina nurse in her late twenties. I don’t recall exactly what we talked about—her long work days? my girlfriend?—but there was a good feeling between us, and when she got sleepy, she put her head on my shoulder and I sat there, her forehead so near my cheek, her black hair pulled tight in a bun.
How much money can one person earn in one day? Mitt Romney, who didn’t work for six years while he ran for President, was been making nearly fifty-seven thousand dollars a day dur- ing all that time. He didn’t have a job, and he was making fifty-seven thousand dollars a day! If there were fifty-seven thousand one-dollar bills scattered on the ground, do you think you could pick them up in one day?
That moment I felt far from the lives I knew, far from the lecture halls of Columbia with their dark wooden desks and dingy windows, far from my own home with the comforts and limits of fam- ily, playing basketball in the driveway with my brother. The world was greater and more myste- rious than I had imagined, a place where a kind stranger puts her head on your shoulder.
Let’s say you averaged one bill per second. If you worked straight, with no bathroom breaks, no eat- ing or drinking, if you just kept bending over and collecting money, it would take you over sixteen hours to pick up fifty-seven thousand dollars. And then, the next day, you’d have to do it again.
It was never a choice for me, but if it was, I’ve cho- sen that anonymous head beside my anonymous one, some passing contact, our bodies close enough together to share warmth. That business- man’s card? Who knows? I didn’t save it.
Is this an old story? If it is, then what is a new
Scrimgeour’s book Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In & Out of Class won the AWP Award for Non ction, and his work has appeared in Solstice, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Non c-28 tion, and Off the Coast.