Debt Free
By H.G. Miller
So, I don’t remember a whole lot about “Death of a Salesman.” Like most of the books that I skimmed over in the course of high school and college, the specifics of it escape me and I can only really grasp at the grander sentiments.
I know there was something about his son coming home and being sort of a failure, and I think Willy slept with somebody he shouldn’t have years earlier, and does he get fired? He might. It would make sense, I guess.
There are two parts that I do remember distinctly.
The first is the part in the beginning when he says he’d been driving 60 miles an hour and couldn’t remember the last five minutes. It’s a sentiment that I feel often in my life. Along with this crushing desire to somehow outlive myself through art comes an inability to deal with the sameness of everyday life.
With every report I have to file about the competitive spending profiles of national pancake restaurants (don’t ask), I feel the hours of my life slipping away. The job gets done, but my mind wanders. It dreams and schemes and thinks about anything but the three and a half gray cubicle walls keeping me from the rest of my fellow worker bees.
Willy’s job was driving. Smiling and selling and driving. The driving gets old. The reports are old. Perhaps Arthur Miller meant only to point out that Willy was an aging man who lacked full control of his senses. I think Willy’s mind just wandered. Often, I couldn’t tell you what I was doing for many minutes at a time. Just wandering…
The second thing is the end of the play. After Willy has crashed his car and killed himself. His boys talk about the house and the additions he’s added to it and the debt he’s always been paying off. His wife talks to his grave and tells him she’s made the last payment on the house.
“We’re free and clear,” she says. “We’re free. We’re free…”
That was a hard sentiment for me to understand as a freshman in college just trying to write my reports and get on with my own life of debt. In all honesty, I’ve been luckier than most – my parents took the bullets when it came to financial aid for an education. I did the stupid thing of moving to one of the most-expensive cities in the world to live in, though, so I have gained an appreciation for debt management the last few years.
And now, it’s over.
I won’t go into the details, because it involves a lot of Excel work and me being a geek, but after spending four years digging myself a nice little hole in the world of Visa, Mastercard and Discover, I finally managed to dig myself back out.
As Linda Loman says: “Free and clear.”
Now, I am far from being a rich man at the moment. I’m still doing the paycheck to paycheck thing, and probably will for the next eighty years, or whatever it’s going to take once the republicans finish fucking up the economy. But, I am above the line. The money I make is mine to do with as I please.
Of course, it pleases me most to pay the rent and eat food. Doesn’t it for all of us? But, after that, I can now start to do things to SAVE money. Perhaps enroll in that 401k thing that’s been losing money for the last five years, but everybody tells me is still a good investment (because, the company matches 6% – I guess that means we lose money together!).
I’m not going to get too crazy about the saving thing just yet, though. First up is an upgrade in the apartment situation. Maybe a place with a few less bullets zinging by in the night (just kidding, Mom). After that, maybe I’ll put a little in the bank. And then, after that, maybe I’ll decide that I miss the whole debt thing and go do something stupid like buy a car, or God forbid, a house!
That’s the ticket. I’ll do it the Willy Loman way. Screw credit cards. Home loans are the way to go for serious practice in debt management. Of course, Willy was dead by the time he finally got ahead of things.
So, for a few months at least, I think I’m going to enjoy being ahead of the game.