Everybody Else is Stacking Cash, So Why Ain’t I?
How much money you got stashed in your bank account?
What’s your 401K looking like?
Do you have at least four months’ salary put back in savings in case you lose your job?
These are the sort of questions my wife bombards me with, sometimes immediately upon waking, other times when I’m settling down to watch an episode of Boardwalk Empire, a show I’ve been desperately trying to finish for the last decade and a half. Sometimes, I’ll be at my desk attempting to write a column for the Polish Hammer Poetry Corner when the interrogation begins.
How much debt are you carrying?
Do you know what your credit score is, at this exact moment?
My wife had always been concerned about money, but recently her obsession with our financial situation has escalated to the point, I can’t order a second Big Mac without getting the side eye from her. For the last six months she’d been as she calls it “stacking cash.” Half her pay goes into savings. Fifteen percent of her gross pay goes into 401K. Her credit score rarely dips below 800. She possesses zero debt. She owns her own home, the ancestral manse and twenty-three acres surrounding it.
So long as Trump keeps his greasy, orange fingers off her social security, she shouldn’t have anything to worry about. So, she worries about me.
Last week, I spent three hundred dollars getting William Shatner to autograph a couple toys.
She doesn’t know this.
But she suspects.
She asks how badly Trump’s economy has affected my 401K. I just laugh. You don’t compile a five thousand book library, two hundred of those volumes signed by the author, by socking money away in an imaginary investment firm, money I can’t touch without penalty for another ten and a half years. I’m not a sucker. I’d rather take that money and invest it in LJN 1984 Dune collectibles. A fool invests his money in electric cars and trips to Mars. A wise man sinks his cash in forty-year-old Aladdin metal lunch boxes emblazoned with the likenesses of “Dragon’s Lair” and “The Secret of Nimh.”
So, she’s worried about our economic future. And it pisses her off to no end that I blithely throw money away on Vampirella comic books.
Still, she remains unimpressed with my signed Tom Atkins NECA figures. The man’s a natural treasure. Tom Atkins starred in such beloved movies as The Fog, Night of the Creeps, Halloween 3. I even cheered for him in Creepshow. When he knocked little Joe Hill around for bringing home those filthy horror comics, I was like, “hell yeah, Tom Atkins, teach that little bastard a lesson.”
I met him at a convention in Nashville last year and got him to sign just about every piece of memorabilia available. Later, we saw him walking along the promenade of the hotel and he waved and called me out by name.
“Wow,” my wife said. “He remembered your name!”
“That motherfucker oughta be able to recite my social security number considering the amount of money I handed over to him.
“How… much… money…?”
It was a literal stack of cash.
“Eh, not a whole lot. You mind paying for dinner, tonight?”
So, my blithe lack of concern about money has got her nettled.
The problem is that my wife is ten years older than I am. This doesn’t mean she’s too mature to appreciate the allure of a celebrity signed action figure, mint on card. I’m pretty sure there was never a point in her life she would have looked twice at a Bill Moseley signed Chop Top. The specter of retirement looms large in the shadowbox of her mind. She wants to make sure she’ll want for nothing in her golden years. Ideally, being fifty, I have another seventeen years of manual labor ahead of me. The joke here is I’ll be lucky to see fifty-five. There are two things the Koweski male is famous for. Neither one is longevity nor money acumen.
“What would you do if you got fired tomorrow?”
This is always the question she asks me when I tell her not to worry about money. It’s a very real possibility since I’ve stopped caring about applying myself to the job since 2009.
In my mind, I think that I would thank my lucky stars my wife was so keen on saving money, especially considering Doug Bradley is going to be at Scarefest in October and I have thirteen things I gotta pay him to sign.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
