I moved to
I lived in a trailer behind Uncle Wayne and Granny Brown.
In Parker. The boys moved up and enrolled in school. Then Brenda
sold the house we inherited from my grandparents and we bought
a house on
We were prosperous.
Barbara Ehrenreich called a book Fear
of
Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. We had outgrown
our raisin’. We had a house on 2½ acres of waterfront property
with 119 live oak, pine, magnolia, and dogwood trees. I had
a mortgage payment of $1,000 a month. It was fine as long as
we both were working at high-paying, high-tech jobs, but
we were soldiers in the transition to a post-Cold War economy
during the Reagan-Bush recession. That’s after Nixon-Ford but before
Bush-Enron. We lost the house to the bank and moved back into the trailer.
The bank foreclosed on the loan. We declared bankruptcy. It was very
frightening. It was painful. I attended a support group for unemployed,
or underemployed professionals, and shared that I was about to lose our house
to the bank. The next man said he had lost his house, his wife left him, he was
living in his car, and his car was about to be repossessed by the finance company.
It’s the economy, stupid. It’s the laissez-faire, unregulated market.
It’s Girls Gone
Wild. Dialing for Dollars.
Money Money Money. Cabaret.
Hello, Ginzu Knives.
It’s Richard Pryor in Moving.
We went tango uniform (tits-up),
No more fear of falling. We augured in.
No more Stop Screwing Artists. They were eating
the middle class. Capitalism was eating itself.
Zombies were eating the neo-cons. At least,
it chewed us up and spit us out. We had reached rock bottom.
Two clapped-out
At one point, when Brenda’s unemployment had run out
and mine hadn’t started yet, we had zero income. Whom
do I blame? No one. The fickle finger of fate.
You can’t blame anyone.
That’s just life in the fast lane.
Richard Pryor in Greased Lightning.