Once upon a time, some few years back, my life was on a solid steady middle-aged middle-class track. I bought my first and to date my only house. I bought my first new car, and then two years later traded it in for a similar but sleeker and shinier model–that’s the one I’m still driving eight years later.

So I had this new car and this old new house, and the work that was paying for it all was only two or three miles away. I had this thought, that I should buy a bike and commute with that a couple days a week.

I went into the big city and I spent six hundred more of the middle class dollars on a bike, from REI instead of half as much at Target. The bike almost fit into the car, but the hatchback wouldn’t quite close. So because I was and am a working class boy truly, I had some stout black bungee cords handy, and I used one for the hatch.

Eighty-five miles later, I also had my first new-car ding, because the cardboard I’d put under the metal S-hook on the bungee had shifted in transit, and yanked up a little piece of metal above the back hatch window. Goddammit. Oh well, I thought, I’ll get that looked at sometime. Or you know, just trade in again eventually.

The bike project never really took off. Before it could, I ran into a major professional shitstorm, and the nice middle-class job fell apart in the gale-force winds.

It cost me dear. I haven’t come close to returning to smooth sailing yet.

I had to move away from the town with the job and the house, to get another job, and become a renter again, on top of the mortgage.

The place I ended up renting had no useful driveway, so I had to park on the street.

One night one of the drunken fools who lived in the low-income housing apartments across the street backed out of the lot over there and hit my pretty car with the single self-inflicted ding. Now it had two dings. They didn’t hit it hard, but the driver’s front quarter-panel was pushed in noticeably.

If I had still been in calm middle-class waters, I would have called the insurance company and jumped the hoops to get it fixed. I did think about it. But there was way, way too much other shit to be worried about by then. I lived with it, silently cursing the anonymous criminal with no morals, yanking my fevered head back to keeping the ship afloat.

I was only there a year, and then I found something a little better in another little town, and I moved and rented again (still carrying the useless mortgage, and a lot of other debt from the storm), to this place on the dirt road where they care way too much about weeds. The setting is so nice though, and this weather is very near perfection. Poverty with a view.

In recent weeks I’ve done some cagey things with the debts, shifting balances around with the purpose of making my life less ramen-y and broke. Basically I killed a single consolidated bill that was costing me many hundreds a month (more than the rent, more than the mortgage) and moved it out to standard revolving accounts, where the interest is a little worse, but the payments all told dropped quite a lot.

It all bore the expected fruit. For the first time in years, I am facing a coming month, December as it happened, in calm, decent shape. Not only are the bills for the month accounted for, mostly paid already well in advance, but I have a reasonable sum stashed for the expenses that aren’t formalized bills–food and gas and dish soap and laundry soap and paper towels and asswipe; that sort of thing.

Today, it was also time to take that stack of cash money to the big city and spend some of it wisely, laying in provisions for the coming weeks that are organic and otherwise healthful.

For example, $22 for a pound of lovingly grown Ethiopian coffee beans, ground for french press. $12 for a small canister of artisanal Spanish olive oil. Most importantly, an out-sized chunk for broth, and beans, and spices, and a butternut squash, for some chicken breasts and a real live leek, because it is high damn time for the crockpot to come down from the high cupboard, and for the cooled-down country house to echo with the right fragrance of deepest fall and early winter, instead of the smell of bags of dubious food-like substances scavenged from drive-through lanes.

I am far too impatient a person to spend much time cooking, or to double my time spent washing dishes because I cooked. But when things are right in my world, or at least right enough, I do have my strategies to make up for my impatience, and crockpottery is a great example of them.

My day was about collecting these sorts of things, and in the meantime finding out other things, like the fact that the price of car batteries has doubled since I last bought one a decade ago. (The guy at one place told me they would probably double again in less time than that. I didn’t ask why, but it seemed passing strange.)

All of that is joyful prologue.

After I dutifully dropped my recycling, I pulled into the last big-city lot to pick up my mail and get the last few things on my grocery list.

A guy pulled in next to me and he asked if that car I was driving was mine. I said it was.

He jumped out and said, come look, and he opened his own hatch. There were a bunch of tools, for bodywork.

He said he could fix that ugly crease on the quarter-panel for me, right then and there, for a whole lot less than the thousands of dollars it would cost me at a shop. (This was bullshit. But I was intrigued.) Did I have any other dings?

I showed him the bungee cord damage from the day of the bike so long ago. He appeared to think, and then he said, how about $750?

I laughed. I said, in a diplomatic tone, no, no way, I can’t afford that. I didn’t say: That’s about what a shop would charge me. I didn’t say: after the crockpot fixings, that’s pretty much the whole pile of December cash gone in one blow.

The price started dropping quick. As he was running his pitch, I thought about an old guy I knew once, a retired police lieutenant, stepdad of a girlfriend. We dropped by his place one time, and his wreck of a house had a shiny new asphalt driveway. Long story short, some guys had dropped by and sold the driveway to him. For three thousand dollars cash, even though it was worth a quarter of that, tops.

After that they didn’t leave him home alone anymore.

Finally I said I had exactly a hundred on me I could spare, and he nodded and went and got his partner and his tools out of his truck. He talked a lot, and told me a couple more lies over the top of the ‘thousands at a body shop’ one, and I watched them work a little more closely than was polite. They did good work. It was way too fast and it was in no way body-shop perfect. But I felt it was a fair deal, all told. Especially since I got a little something extra, and that was a certain fascination with his way of being.

He said his name was Steven and that he was from the Bay in California, Concord to be precise. If I had to guess, I’d say the most likely thing is that he was making his money this way because his resume’ had some pretty big prison holes in it. Or maybe he was just an undocumented angel … he had a Latin look to him, and his partner didn’t have any English … who knows, for sure.

Anyway, he wrapped it up by offering to buy my car outright on the spot, for about half of what it’s still worth. I declined that offer pretty firmly, and thanked him, and tipped him too.

But I thought about him all the way to the in-between town with the carwash, thought about his hustle while I finished making my old car pretty and new again on the outside anyway.

I didn’t like being around Steven much, but that says much more about me than him, I think. He kicked my paranoid nature into overdrive. He played me, but not in an out of bounds way–I didn’t let him–if I had, the boundaries might have got pushed, but that’s another thing we’ll never know.

It wasn’t pleasant, but he impressed me.

I didn’t like him, but I envied him to a point.

It’s never seemed worth it to me, to live like a hustler, always figuring the angles non-stop, not in the freelance sense, and not even in the context of a regular job.

Except sometimes it would be so nice to always know what to do next.

I retreated to the academy because it was the best deal I could make with my world without ever having to play the Game.

The Game that Steven and Rudy Giuliani and any average mid-level executive has to play, the Glengarry Glen Ross Game, always pushing forward and never stopping on pain of some kind of death, like sharks.

Coffee is for closers and greed is good. That one.

I have my crockpot, and now a leek to put in it.

I have my eight-year old hatchback and no car payment, for now.

I have you and I have these words to give and I don’t want to even know what you’re worth by the rules of that game because I’d rather unwind and stay unwound even if it means having to fret instead sometimes, about the price of batteries and the quality of the beans.

I’m going to find a way somehow to make it all better, and that way will involve no cold-calling, and no approaching of strangers in parking lots. Someday soon and some way there will only be one house, with a big brass bed in the front of it, and a big truck with a queen-sized futon in the back of it, and gas money and two refrigerators, one on wheels.