Art and Money II

My dad...

Just writing those two words made me stop and reconsider. Let me come at this from another angle.

My new PA showed up today and it's a beauty. It's lightweight enough that I can schlep it all by myself. More importantly, it's simple enough that I think (I hope) I'll be able to learn how to use it all by myself. It's going to take me a while to figure it out. I have no innate aptitude for the technical or the mechanical. I will have to drill myself on a step by step procedure for setting up and, if something goes wrong, I will have no ability to troubleshoot. I also still need to invest a little more money in order to create a complete, stand-alone package. The biggest outstanding issue is a mixer. I can invest in a couple of Y inputs for $100, which should give me as many inputs as I need most of the time. But, it would be great if I had my own mixer. Two of my fellow musicians have 8-channel mixers that I can use whenever we play together. My plan is to make do with a couple of Y adapters or a borrowed mixer for the time being.  If I end up using the equipment often, I may invest in my own mixer, but I want to wait and see what I really need.

Because, Lord knows, I don't want to waste money on something I don't need. Because, Lord knows, I hate to waste money.

Making this purchase has me wound tight tonight and I'm trying to figure out why. I mean, it's just money. It can't buy me love. It can't save my life. As I've mentioned in the past, I have a very complicated relationship with money. And that's what got me to thinking about my dad.

My dad had a much more fluid relationship with money than I do. Don't get me wrong, he was never afraid of hard work. Growing up, I never missed a meal and I never did without; he would dig ditches for a living before he let us do without. But we were never entirely secure around the issue of money. When I was very young, my dad was a construction worker and we lived from job to job. This was Southern California in the sixties so there was no lack for work, but it wasn't like my dad went to an office every day and picked up a paycheck twice a month. He worked his way up to supervisor, then contractor. I got a new bike, my mother got a coat with a mink collar. When I was about nine years old, he started a company with two other men, fabricating and selling hardboard concrete forms. I remember the outsized sense of pride I felt in the fact that my dad was the PRESIDENT of his very own COMPANY, something I trumpeted around the school yard. It was also a pretty big deal among the Okies and Arkies and 'Bama boys who constituted his social circle.

As mentioned, this was Southern California in the sixties. There was non-stop construction going on and plenty of call for concrete forms. The potential was certainly there for him to make a killing. He was very personable, my dad, very charming. He could sell ice to an Eskimo. He had a lot of friends, a lot of contacts, a big personality, everything he needed to succeed in business.

Well, at least that's how he told it at our kitchen table. He also had a self-aggrandizing streak a mile wide; maybe he was deluding himself. If so, we all bought it hook line and sinker.

A couple of years into running the business, something went horribly wrong. I was, what, maybe 11 years old, so I couldn't really follow the details. From what I picked up then and pieced together later, I believe that one of my dad's business partner, the "financial guy" in the triad, cooked the books, embezzled the company's funds and neglected to pay the taxes. The IRS seized the business and literally put a padlock on the gate. In one very bad year my dad went from presidency to bankruptcy.

Oh my god, what a blow that must have been to his ego, to his sense of self. It was a business bankruptcy, not a personal bankruptcy, but that word carried so much more shame back then. He was a man of outsized vanity coupled with deep insecurities. He had an inflated opinion of his own abilities and importance and usually operated on the assumption that he was the smartest guy in the room. In one brutal stroke, his good friend and business partner demonstrated otherwise.

Of course, he chose that moment to fall off the wagon.

My dad was a classic, serious, alcoholic. Once he started drinking, he literally could not stop until he blacked out. He started working a 12-step program before I was born and had great success. He became a sponsor, a speaker, and committed himself fully to living and working the program. Unfortunately, the more successful he became, the less he felt like he needed AA. He felt like he was too smart for the program. He thought he could keep it under control. As the business grew, he began to drink socially with his customers and competitors, "chipping" he called it.   By the time the bankruptcy came down, he hadn't been to a meeting in years. The business imploded and he fell off the wagon spectacularly, publicly, violently. There were scenes, fights, humiliating incidents.

My mother, bless her heart, tried to manage the situation. She tried to hold my dad together and keep up appearances, but it was a very thin veneer. I thought they would probably divorce, but they didn't. Instead, my dad took a job as a salesman with a national company and moved us all to Oregon for a fresh start, but the drinking didn't stop. More fights, more humiliating scenes. After two years, the company transferred him to Northern California where there was more conflict and drama, but I kept myself out of it . I was in high school and stayed almost frantically busy with choir, speech team, drama club and, later on, boys and drugs. I was rarely at home. Two years later, he changed jobs again and moved my mother and brothers to Illinois, but I stayed behind. I had had enough.

That's taking the long way around to arrive at an essential issue: I'm paranoid about money. After years of working and saving, I'm very lucky to be reasonably financially secure, more so than many of my peers, but I don't trust that security. I don't believe in it. I know from experience that, at any moment, it can all change. It can disappear without a trace.

I don't experience this much anxiety when I buy a car or a house. I expect a house to appreciate in value. It's an investment, not a purchase. Plus you gotta have a place to live. A car takes me to my job where I earn more money. I got a little wound up when I bought my instruments, but I knew I would play them regardless of whether I was in a band or not. It took a real leap of faith for me to spend this much money on musical equipment that I don't know how to use! What if I can't figure it out? What if the band breaks up? What if this system turns out to be a money pit that requires me to buy more and more and more equipment?

These are the restless, senseless loops in my head, stupid anxieties over stupid, stupid things. It's just STUFF for crissakes. It's just money; there's always more. But, there it is, I can't help it. A little voice twists and turns in my brain chanting "waste not, want not" and I can't make it stop.

Lord, I could use a Xanax tonight. I could use a drink.