Why is a Turnip Like a Free-Lance Writer?

I went broke in the traditional way: I spent all my money. It's an old story and it would have been all right except that before the smell of death reached the credit-card people, I spent a bagful of their money, too--a handful here, a fistful there--and by the time their computers sensed what was going on, we were all in over our heads.

For a long time, I didn't even know how much trouble I was in, because I don't pay attention to my accounts the way I should. I never have, and that's what gets you in trouble with the card companies. Every man needs an accounting system, if only for self-defense, the way a man who lives at the beach needs a tide table. He needs to know when it's coming in and when it's going out. Simple. But there's a rip current in my life that sucks the money out to sea sometimes before it reaches shore. So the usual double-entry system once a month leaves me feeling like I've been hand-sorting wolverines and I avoid it.

Part of the problem is that I was raised to fear money, too much of it or too little. I was taught that running out of money was like running out of air, that there was no such thing as free money and that too much money made your karma sick and ugly. I even had to memorize a poem about that last one: Richard Cory, fattest cat in town, went home and without explanation ate a bullet in couplets. And, as usual in my childhood, the greatest encouragement to stay a little behind and be happy with it came from Jesus of Nazareth. He said it was harder for a rich man to get to heaven than it was for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Of course, I know now that Jesus had never been to Vegas. Anybody can get anything he wants there if he has the money. A camel could get a ringside table in Vegas to see Elvis if it had the cash or the right cards. But even Jesus couldn't have foreseen American Express. And if he could have, he wouldn't have had the math to keep up with the billing.

For a while, I had a system of my own to help me juggle what money and credit I had left. My books had three columns: At the top of one it said Peter and at the top of the third it said Paul. The middle column didn't have a name and was really just a place to launder the money back and forth. Fiscally the whole thing was pretty sound, but I let it get away from me. Empires are built every day on my system by men who have the nerves for the work.

It's OK to rob Peter to pay Paul as long as Peter is drunk and doesn't sober up before you get the money back. Unfortunately, I drink a little myself.

About two months after I ran out of money, my mailbox started to get heavy with window envelopes from the people who give you the white card, the ones who give you the gold card and the ones who give you the red-white-and-blue card. About a month later, "Forgive us if your check is in the mail ..." turned into "Past Due. Pay Immediately" for the white and the gold cards. The color portion of the computer bills ran a rainbow from polite pastels to an orange copped off railroad tool shacks. Then the mail started asking me if I'd moved or if my cards had been lost or stolen: and after about six weeks of that without an answer, they turned me over to the computer that writes business-looking letters: short declarative sentences, perfect spelling and margins and, at the bottom, scratchy machine signatures over titles like Director of Collections.

In the first four months, I got no fewer than 35 pieces of mail from these guys; but even at that, it was hard to take their dunning seriously. I knew they wanted their money, but the envelopes they were enclosing seemed to hold out a strong hope that they were going to get it and more besides. In one week alone, the envelopes that were supposed to go back with my payment came printed with offers for a Norwegian blue-fox cape, eight days, seven nights in Waikiki and a pocket calculator. They didn't want any money for these things. All I had to do was check the deferred-payment box and lick the envelope. Two weeks later, I could have had copper cookware, a golf bag or a pair of binoculars like Curt Gowdy uses to make everything 15 times bigger than the Lord intended.

The last of my offer envelopes was the best: a four-gun collection of classic pistols, each in a frame and each $60. Send no money now. Depending on which box I marked, the mailman was going to bring me a U.S. Government 45-caliber automatic, a Civil War Navy Colt model 1851, a German P-08 Parabellum designed by George Luger or a Western 44-40 six-shot Peacemaker. The print at the bottom guaranteed my satisfaction and also that none of the guns would ever fire a shot. I didn't send any of the money I owed, but I checked the box next to the Luger and sent the envelope with a little note saying that the liquor-store owners around Colorado would never know that the barrel was permanently stopped and that I'd send them what I owed when I got the pistol.

The next thing I heard from all three was that my credit privileges had been revoked and that they wanted their cards back in two pieces by return mail. When they didn't get them, they sent affidavits for me to sign swearing that the cards had been destroyed. For a while, I was going to write to all three and tell them that anything you pay 18 percent a year for is a service, not a privilege, but it seemed a little like preaching to penguins, so I signed the affidavits, cut the cards in half and mailed them off.

By then I was almost six months past due and the machines were sending me letters disguised as telegrams. They gave me 48 hours to pay up. Theysdidn't say what was going to happen after the two days went by, and I didn't want to know. Before I went broke. I'd always paid my bills by the railroad-orange notice. Six months seemed over the line and I pretty much expected that the next thing would be gorillalike guys with ugly little belly guns at my door. It was making me pretty nervous. The signatures on the letters were coming out of departments called prelegal and there was usually a phone number they asked me to call collect. Forty-eight hours turned into a month and I heard nothing. I was sure it was the sound of subpoenas being prepared.

But it wasn't. In fact, something weird and wonderful was happening. America the automatic was giving up on me. All my accounts were being turned over to flesh-and-blood collection agents within the card companies: people, manila folders with coffee on them, pencils with erasers, ballpoint pens that don't work half the time, telephones.

I got my first call at eight o'clock on a Monday morning. The man on the other end asked me if I was Mr. Vetter. I told him to check back about Tuesday noon, that I'd know by then. He said he was with the white card, then told me how much I owed and asked me when he could expect the money. I told him I had it all tied up in hog futures and he told me they were going to sue my ass if I didn't pay very soon. I admitted I was broke and said something about the depression.

"It's a recession," he said, and with an opening like that, I was forced to give him a piece of wisdom that had come down to me from the hills of West Virginia through a friend who grew up there and had a very wise daddy.

"A recession is when the guy across the street is out of work," I told him. "A depression is when you're out of work."

"Are you out of work, Mr. Vetter?" he asked me.

"I'm a free-lance writer," I said.

"Oh ...," he said, and then it was quiet while he wrote something. Then he asked me when he could expect his money. I told him I was working on a story that was still developing and that I wasn't sure when it would be finished or if it would be bought when it was. I said any date I gave would be imaginary. He told me to make one up and I did. Then he said thanks and hung up.

The next day, as if he'd been waiting in line, the man from the gold card called, at two minutes to five. This was a nasty voice that said it was calling from the prelegal department and that if I didn't put $400 in the mail that night, it was going to turn me over to the company lawyers.

"I don't have any money," I told him.

"Fine, Mr. Vetter, fine." he said, "but you owe us four hundred dollars and we aren't going to wait anymore."

"I'm broke," I said. "Broke as a stone."

"I'm tired of this," he said. "All day I get this kind of stuff ... you people use our money and then expect us to take excuses for payment. Does that seem right to you? Can you justify that, Mr.... uh ... Vetter?"

"Being broke changes your moral outlook," I said.

"I'm turning you over to the lawyers." he said.

"Where's my Luger?" I asked him, but he hung up.

That one spooked me and I ducked all my telephone calls for the next few days. Then I decided that was a mistake. I don't think you're supposed to show these people any fear. Being broke, living like a rat, is a vocation like any other. There isn't much power to it. and you'd have to (continued on page 176)Why is a Turnip...?(continued from page 90) have smack for brains to really like it, but I've been out of things a lot worse than money.

The red-white-and-blue company called me about a week later. It was early in the morning again and this time there was a woman on the line. She asked me how I was, how the weather was, and then, almost as an afterthought, she told me I was more than 90 days past due in my payments. When I told her I was out of money, she sympathized. She said times were hard and her company understood. She said all she wanted from me was 90 bucks and if that was too much, she'd cut it to 45. The 90 was only one tenth of what I owed red-white-and-blue. They held my biggest I.O.U. and for a moment. I couldn't figure out why they were being so understanding. Then I got it: This was the card with the revolving credit plan. The Eternal Credit people.

After the lady hung up with a promise to call back in two weeks. I dug out one of the statements they'd sent me. I can't read those things most of the time, even with the new laws that make them spell out interest rates so a baboon could understand them. But there was a bottom line on this one that frightened even me. It said I was paying 18 percent a year on what I owed them. They called it a nominal annual percentage rate, and though I'm not sure where they got that term, I know that on the streets of Chicago and Seattle and New York, they call it juice and you get your statement orally once a week from a guy with no neck. Bankers used to call it usury before they found a way around it and it occurred to me as I sat over the numbers that if I paid it off at the rate they were asking, I'd be sending them $600 a year, of which $200 would be walking-around money and wouldn't reduce my principal a whit. At that point, their patience made a lot of sense. In fact, it seemed like the least they could do. They could have taken me to lunch once a week and bought Lone Ranger masks for everybody in the office and still been ahead at 18 percent. I also had a horrible flash that my desire to be buried in a pine box was out of the question and that I'd probably be buried in a simple but elegant window envelope.

White card and gold card kept calling me about every two weeks. Most of the time they called on the same day, and most of the time the caller was someone new. I'd finished the story I had been working on. It took five months and it was rejected and when I told them about it, they were unhappy but nice. A man from white card told me in December that he did a little writing himself and that he knew it was rough but that America needed writers. I told him America needed bill collectors, too, and we hung up friends.

The winter and spring passed and made all my bills a year overdue. White card and gold card called me on schedule no fewer than a dozen times each. Finally, they told me they were going to sell me off to big Chicago-style collection agencies if I didn't pay soon and I knew what that meant. Experts. Belly guns, maybe. But I was still broke and I told them I understood that they had to do what they had to do. I was reading Dashiell Hammett at the time and had decided to act like a cake of ice.

The people from Eternal Credit hardly ever called and when they did, it was to ask if I wanted the payments reduced. I told them no, it didn't matter how long the race was if you didn't have either legs or wheels, and I told them I'd rather they reduced the interest rate. They said no.

By summer, both white card and gold card had sold me off to the garbage men for such cases and I got my first call from the Midwest early one July morning. After the guy on the other end introduced himself, he told me in a cop voice that if I didn't pay the whole thing in a week, he was going to feed me to a judge. He said he didn't like to sue people and that he was sure I didn't want to go through that humiliation and I told him he was right.

"Well ... ?" he said.

"You are the blood bank calling a turnip, do you know that?" I said.

Then he did something no computer has ever done. He laughed.

I laughed, too, and then asked him if there were a lot of people past due all of a sudden. He said yes, that their service was reflecting the shit state of the economy and that they were going a little softer and were less likely to sue than a year before. But then he said, "Oh, but we wouldn't hesitate to sue you for four hundred dollars. That's too much to carry any longer."

"I'm working on a story right now," I told him.

"About what?" he said.

"Going broke."

"What?"

"It's important to write about things you know," I said. "Sort of a literary declaration of bankruptcy." I laughed again, but I knew as soon as I said the word bankruptcy that I'd blown it. There was a bad silence on the other end. These men fear bankruptcy the way pit bosses fear crap-table suicides.

Just two weeks before, I'd been in a money conversation with a Richard Cory type, a man of millions, who had told me that bankruptcy was completely painless. He was the kind who would have shown me a scar if he'd had one, but he told me not to worry, that he actually enjoyed the ride once it got going and that the whole experience had given him a shot at the fortune with which he was buying our drinks. I told him it seemed pretty shaky to me and that my greatest ambition in this life was to have as little to do with lawyers, judges, lizards and snakes as I could.

I said the same thing over the phone to the man from the collection agency and he started talking again, though we never got back to the laughs. He asked me when I'd be finished with the story and when I'd get paid. I told him two weeks and he said he'd call then.

The next day, the lady from Eternal Credit called to say that if I didn't send them 50 bucks, they were going to sell me off to gunsels somewhere. I told her my story, told her I was working, told her I intended to pay what I owed. She said that my attitude was good and that my creditors could hear that over the phone. Then she asked if I'd ever considered going to a debt counselor, someone who could help me get things under control. I told her there was nothing wrong with my financial situation that $50,000 wouldn't cure. Then I said I'd send the 50 bucks she wanted, and the next day I did. It was the first money on several thousand that I'd owed for more than a year. That was two months ago and all I've heard from Eternal Credit is that my next two $50 payments are overdue. Now they seem greedy.

And just last week, I got a call from a lawyer who had sent me four letters I hadn't opened. He asked me if I was Mr. Vetter and then told me he needed a street address (all he had was a P.O. box) so the sheriff could come on Wednesday and serve me with a subpoena. It was the first real talk of law officers and legal summons and it would have scared me worse than it did if I had ever heard of anyone's making an appointment to deliver ugly papers like that. He said I had to be served because more than a year had gone by and I had never offered to pay even a dime of what I owed.

"They never told me I could pay part." I said. "They always demanded all of it."

"They'll take part," he said.

"I don't have part," I told him.

"Will you have it in a month?"

"Maybe, probably," I said.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "You send me a postdated check for one hundred dollars and I'll cash it in a month. I need something I can hold in my hand."

I told him I'd send the check and I did, and probably these last few words should be for him.

Dear Bernard: I'm sorry your check bounced. Tell the sheriff I've moved and that I'll probably be on the road for a while. And do you remember that story we talked about? I finished it.