The Sold Coast

I write under several aliases. I do it because I don’t want all my boring, for-pay work traced back to me. It also helps to discipline my thinking, which is dangerously disorganized. And I am enough of a postmodern subject that I enjoy fragmented identities.

So I get checks for several names. When they come in, I sign them over to myself and deposit them in the bank. I have been doing this for ten years. When I lived in Union City, this was never a problem: the tellers were around the way girls who knew me from the neighborhood. During our first year in Jersey City, we found a local branch of the same regional savings bank. I was never asked any questions.

Last year, that regional savings bank was bought out by a giant chain. Most of the old managers and staff were replaced. The day of the switchover, the chain gave out goodie bags containing a mug, a keychain, a promotional t-shirt, and two large cookies. A few visits later, I was informed by a teller I’d never seen before that double-endorsed checks would no longer be accepted.

I explained that if the manager would check the files inherited from the old bank, she’d see a record of hundreds of checks that I’d deposited. Further, I told her that if she wanted to do some digging, she could determine that I’d paid taxes on all of them, and that they’d all been charged to the same social security number. She didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she took my word for it.

For months thereafter, the anonymous tellers at the conglomerate chain bank took my checks. Sometimes they’d look at me funny, but then so do total strangers on the street. Once the teller called our account up on the screen, she’d invariably accept that I’d been a customer for years.

On Saturday, I needed singles. I’d agreed to manage the cashbox at my Courthouse show that evening, and since I’d talked the County down to an eight dollar admission fee, I expected to have to make change. I grabbed my stack of double-endorsed checks, wrote out one of my own to “cash”, and hit the street.

When I arrived at the bank, I was informed that the checks I was using – those bearing the name and I.D. of our former bank – were no longer valid. Now, we don’t write a lot of checks: we do our banking online. But our old neighborhood bank was constantly making us buy new checks and deposit slips. Now those checks were worthless, and only those issued by the conglomerate would be accepted.

This felt unfair to me, and I said so. Not only did I consider it disrespectful to make me buy new checks when I have a huge stack of old ones on my living room counter, I thought it was disrespectful to the memory of the community bank that got swallowed. What, after all, is a check? It’s a piece of paper with a logo and a tracing number on it. The trappings surrounding the tracing number are irrelevant. Therefore, the only objection my new bank could have is to the logo: an insignia, and a memory, that the conglomerate would like to bury.

The teller didn’t want to hear an argument. She called over the manager, who immediately challenged the double-endorsed checks that I was attempting to deposit. I explained (again) that I’d been doing this for years, and that I’d never had a problem – and, in fact, that the conglomerate’s tellers had been accepting these checks for close to a year. Her face went blank. I would have to apply to the state for a special form, otherwise I would be breaking the law. The tellers who’d been taking my checks were lawbreakers, too. I was beginning to get irritated. I submitted that neither I nor any of her tellers, nor any of the tellers at my old bank were outlaws.

The manager turned to her teller. How much money is there in the account, she asked, privately.

And I snapped. All of the frustrations that I’d encountered over the past two years seemed to be summed up in that one utterance. Depending on whether or not I had sufficient money to impress the authorities, an arbitrary and stupid rule would now either be enforced or ignored. It shouldn’t matter!, I shouted. Surprised that I’d overheard, the manager’s mechanical remove fell for a moment. Suddenly, I had no desire to put my money in this bank. I demanded that she give me the checks back. She stammered for a moment about making a one-time exception, but by now, I was too hot. I grabbed my deposit from her, shoved it in my wallet, and walked out onto Newark Avenue.

Going to my old bank was a nice experience. I knew the tellers and they knew me. The bank offered very few competitive services, but I was always treated like a valued customer. Certainly I am not the only person in America who has been displaced by banking mergers. Still, I could take my money anywhere. If I am going to have to comply with irritating regulations and conform to the logic of conglomerate banking, I might as well bring my business to New York City, where the managers actually know what they’re doing. Being in New Jersey has always meant that I can depend on a neighborhoody flexibility to the ticky-tacky transactions that complicate urban living. Recently, I have come to feel like I’m stuck in an alternate-reality Manhattan with all of the impersonality and none of the benefits. As Jersey City continues its transformation into an outerborough – and an uninteresting one at that – I find myself missing both the friendly inefficiency of Union City and the commitment to excellence that I find in Brooklyn. One or the other would be fine. But by now, I know what I’m going to get: neither.

# posted by Spring Chicken 2009 @ 5:16 PM 2 comments

Periodically we are told to buy property. We’re supposed to do this to build equity, which is a capitalist’s euphemistic way of saying that buying a house qualifies us to participate more fully in mainstream American life. We are taught to feel bad about giving money to a landlord; this is money, we are told, that we are flushing down the drain. Instead, by purchasing property and paying into a mortgage, we are putting the money to work for us.

I admit I’ve never understood the argument. Well, I understand it, intellectually; the money we give to our landlord is unrecoverable. But so is the money we pay for food. When we go to the grocery store, I don’t feel like we are flushing dollars down the drain: I feel like we are paying to purchase something that satisfies immediate needs, something we want right now. Often it is a piece of fish or fruit. We take it home, we eat it, and it’s gone. We don’t beat ourselves up about not planting our own replenishable garden with the seeds. Nobody tries to convince us that it is a moral failing of ours that we aren’t subsistence farmers.

When we write a check to our landlord each month, we’re paying to satisfy similar desires. We can’t afford to purchase the kind of property we want in Downtown Jersey City, but we still want to be here: we like being near the PATH train and the turnpike extension, restaurants we dig, and neighborhoods that are interesting to look at and to walk around. For many years, we didn't have any of that. Now that we do, it's hard to imagine retreating to where we once were, even if we were promised the security of home ownership.

If the house we now live in were to go condo, and we suddenly went berserk and decided we’d buy it, our monthly rent bill would morph into a multi-headed monster: mortgage payments, insurance payments, maintenance fees and especially property taxes. Call me a Jersey libertarian if you must, but I feel better about handing money directly to a person I know than I do about sending a check for the same amount to the municipal government. I understand that the screwed-up New Jersey finance structure forces all school costs to be paid out of property taxes, and that my disinclination to shoulder that burden could be perceived as an unwillingness to help the kids. But my landlord has four kids of his own. His are kids I like personally. I’m satisfied he treats them decently. Let our money go straight to him, and he can use it to acculturate and educate his children however he sees fit.

I’m here all day. I wake up in the morning and go straight to the computer. Sometimes I don’t stop writing until night has fallen and it’s time to head to Brooklyn for practice. My life happens at home. So my apartment can never be an investment or an equity builder – it must first be a pleasure. And there is no way that I could ever find a condominium that would be as pleasing to me as a rental: not for anywhere near a comparable cost.

Housing prices in Hudson County have gone totally apeshit during the past decade. You can’t feed a duck on the waterfront these days without getting crumbs all over a real estate speculator. If in ’94 we’d somehow scratched the dough together to buy a crappy brownstone near Van Vorst Park and fixed it up, we’d now be sitting on a million dollar property. Yet before I start counting my regrets over the imaginary money that could have been ours, I have to remind myself: all of the other lots around here have appreciated like crazy, too. Let’s say I cashed out and took the profit. I can’t just put that money in the bank; I’ve got to live somewhere. So what do I do? Well, chances are I end up taking that money and moving it to another mortgage around the corner. Meanwhile, the enormous down payment, taxes, transaction fees, real estate and insurance costs have taken away our liquidity, and with it, the flexibility of our daily lives. The house has become a safe, and the money is locked up within its walls.

It seems to me to be a psychologically unhealthy way to think about home. A residence isn’t a patriot bond, or a Sammy Sosa rookie card. It’s an investment, sure, but a second-order one: first, it's a place where we have to exist. I’m not a broker with a Manhattan penthouse, buying and selling deeds every time I pass Go. Should I ever “flip” property, it means a major interruption in my life, an epochal change, and a complete alteration in my experience of the world. That's much higher stakes than any equities trade. If I ever feel speculative, I’ll get some old X-Men comics and cover them in plastic.

# posted by Spring Chicken 2009 @ 9:11 PM 4 comments