Rebecca Johnson

I am weird about money. When I read a menu, I look at the prices before the food. When I enter a store, I go straight to the sales rack. I think everything costs too much. In conversation, I have to make an effort to shut up about what things cost because even I can hear how crass I sound. When I first started reading novels, I devoured Jane Austen because her books were always, at their heart, about money. She would tell you exactly how many pounds someone had a year and how that would affect their prospects in life and that seemed like a sensible way to view the world. Except, of course, in my case. As the daughter of a poor man, my life would have been bleak.

It is commonly assumed that we inherit our approach to money from our parents. If they were close with a dollar, you will be. Alternatively, if they were close with a dollar, you might not be because you will have seen up close how un-fun it is to live with Scrooge. In my case, I had a wildly irresponsible father and a mostly sober-minded mother prone to occasional fits of hysteria when it came to money.

My parents divorced when I was eleven. After that, I inherited my mother’s fears, which proved to be well founded. Though my father had started life brilliantly, graduating from Yale when he was only 20 with a full scholarship from the Ford Foundation, his life took a dramatic and unrelenting swerve downward after the divorce into alcoholism, madness and, eventually, destitution. The holy trinity of the shit hitting the fan. I wasn’t the only person I knew with a bad father but my father’s antics seemed way worse than some guy who was reluctant to pay full tuition at Boston College.

My dad’s father owned a gas station in Amarillo, Texas, lived modestly and accumulated the kind of nest egg that benefitted from the magic of compound interest. When he died unexpectedly two days before Christmas my freshman year of high school, my dad could have saved the money he inherited and lived comfortably, albeit modestly, for the rest of his life. By then, he was in his early forties and beginning to experience the cold breath of ageism in his career as an advertising copywriter. Instead, he bought  a brand new black sportscar for my sister (his favorite of his four children) and insisted she drive him to Las Vegas before the flowers had faded in the harsh sun of the high plains of West Texas.

For months, nobody heard from him. “Think dad’s ok?” I’d ask my sisters and they’d shrug. Before cell phones, if somebody wanted to drop off the deep end in Vegas, there was nothing much you could do about it.

A few months later, my sister looked out her window one morning to see the black sports car being repossessed by a guy with a flatbed tow truck. Turns out, he’d gambled daily, moving from hotel to hotel, until the money ran out. Years after he died, I came across a draft of a letter my father had written to billionaire Kirk Kerkoran, the chairman of the Mirage casinos during that period, complaining about the way he had been “frog-marched” out of the building. I spent about fifteen seconds imagining that scenario, then put it in a mental box marked DO NOT CONTEMPLATE THIS IMAGE. EVER.

Once my father could no longer get a job in advertising, a profession where he had once earned an “Andy”, the advertising equivalent of an Oscar, for his writing skills, he became a car salesman. The job dovetailed nicely with his surface avuncularity but, like all the others, it did not last. As I could have told anyone interviewing him for a job, that jolly exterior was paper thin. The minute he encountered any kind of resistance, it would crumble, revealing the insecure, angry man underneath. At his next job clerking at Goodwill, he was fired because he bristled at being told he could not use the “executive” bathroom. After that, he became a Super Shuttle driver, where he was fired because he continued to drive the van without alerting the company the “Check Engine” had illuminated, an oversight that ultimately destroyed the transmission. 

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, just starting out in my own career, he was, for all intents and purposes, unemployable.  I came to dread the sound of my phone ringing, knowing it could be him on the end of the line, unspooling some fresh crisis. Bizarrely, given that he was on the West coast and I was on the East, he would call at 6 a.m. when everyone in the apartment was still asleep. Is your dad ok? My roommates would ask over their 8 a.m. coffee and I really would not know what to say. No, he was not ok, but I had no idea what to do about it.

The nadir was the day I got a call informing me he had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution after throwing a tray at a room service waiter. Apparently, he’d been thrown out of his apartment and had checked himself into a hotel using a credit card that must have been on its last fumes. I got on a plane the next day. When I went to visit him in the hospital, I brought him a carton of Pall Malls, the cigarettes he had smoked his whole adult life. It was what he had asked for and I was glad to buy them. Anything that would speed up the shuffling of his mortal coil was just fine with me.

My sister and I went looking for apartments he could afford on his social security pension but the few hovels in his price range were so depressing, even the roaches declined to stir when we entered the room. I harbored a deep and complicated disdain for this man but still, he was my father and I did not want to see him live that way. If nothing else, I didn’t want to be the kind of person who let her father live that way. So, my siblings and I pooled our money and rented him a pristine studio apartment in a peach-colored apartment complex with a pool off  Lankershim Boulevard in Studio City, California. It was the kind of place filled with hopeful young people starting out in life and a part of me hoped that perhaps he, too, would transform into the kind of person who cleaned his house. When we handed over the checks for his deposit, the manager of the complex, operating under the delusion that we were a normal family, cheerfully mentioned how we could use the pool when we came to visit. I never did visit him. When my sisters and I discussed whether we should spend an extra $150 dollars so he could have a one bedroom instead of a studio, it was his favored child, the sister who’d been gifted the black sportscar, who put her foot down. No.

For most of my life, I attributed the wounds of my childhood to my shame over my father’s  poverty. My grandparents on my mother’s side were wealthy wheat farmers in the Panhandle of Texas. Their house was kept spotless by a maid. On Sundays, they went to church followed by lunch at the country club. I felt so safe in that house compared to the chaos of my own family life, that I came, very early on, to equate money with sanity. So I was determined to make as much money as I could. At ten, I had a paper route delivering the Memphis Press-Scimitar to old ladies wearing housecoats in the afternoon. “A girl can’t deliver the paper!” they’d say when I tried to collect the weekly fees. At night, I’d stack and restack the quarters I earned, dreamily imagining the candy I could buy (but didn’t, because even then — frugal!). 

For high school, I attended an exclusive New England boarding school where I was friends with girls who lived on Park Avenue and others who, like me, attended on a scholarship. It wasn’t obvious in the classroom who had money and who did not but at vacation time, the wealthy kids would return to school with Caribbean tans that marked them with a melatonic shibboleth.  In college, I worked the maximum number of work study hours in my financial aid package and babysat for harried couples on the Upper West Side on Saturday nights. They’d give me cab fare to get back to the dorm, but I’d pocket it and walk home under the comforting lights of upper Broadway. When a friend helped me land a job as a “copy girl” at The New York Times, I took every shift I was offered. The work was menial — “coffee” sounded so much like “copy” I was often confused when the surly night editors wanted something — but the job paid union wages.

A  therapist of mine once said proudly about his child, “He wouldn’t cross the street for money.” In choosing magazine journalism as a career, I didn’t cross the street for money but I worried about it constantly and ghettoized myself by only taking high-paying jobs for glossy women’s magazines, which I secretly held in disdain. One day, at an editorial meeting for the launch of the Condé Nast beauty magazine, Allure, the editor said we needed to come up with a word that rhymed with the title. “Manure?” I suggested.

For most of my life, I attributed my neuroses about money to my father. Now that I am a parent, I understand the impact he had on me differently. The true wound was not my shame over his inability to hold a job, it was my shame in knowing that he did not put me — or any of his children — first. He did whatever he wanted to do, the impact on us be damned. Parenting requires enormous patience for the me, me, me wail of a child. In her book Becoming, Michelle Obama writes about the way her parents, who had never been to Europe, put aside their hard-earned money so that she could go to France her senior year of high school, a sacrifice she never forgot. When you grow up surrounded by that kind of love, you can do anything with your life. Otherwise, you’re just weird about money.