Debting on the Future
JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER
For many graduate students, becoming an academic means developing a set of personal beliefs about debt. My scholastic history is a history of debt and borrowing. During my suburban high school years northwest of Columbus, Ohio, my parents assured me that we could afford the very best college. My “hard work” would determine my future, not the cost of school. This sentiment, or belief, or dream, has basically informed how I make financial decisions to this day. It’s scarily close to the old Horatio Alger American dream. With hard work and a little luck, everything will work out. But as the economy recesses and depresses, I’ve seen my own life back through the prism of this attitude toward debt, which is something that didn’t exist on this scale in Ragged Dick.
Even though I had a part-time job at a CVS pharmacy all through high school, I didn’t understand money. Because of a lawsuit that propelled my family out of North Carolina and into Ohio, I became solidly middle-class and relatively privileged: I bought my own gas, but my parents got me a car—a 1977 two–door, baby blue Buick LeSabre. It got eight mpg at a time when I usually filled up the twenty-five gallon tank for less than twenty bucks. I had no sense that the economy had a history. I remember reading Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing my senior year. It follows around a drifter during the Great Depression. It at once strengthened my interest for dystopian moments and confused me. Was that America?
I applied early decision to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs at a time when the total cost of attending was rising several thousand dollars a year. I believe it cost, at the time, somewhere around $32,000. I got a limited financial aid package because I was from Ohio; to cover the rest, we took out private loans from Citibank. In today’s dollars, that’s about double the current cost of a four-year private college. I went to school during years of vast inflation, rising health care costs, and the increased necessity of a collage education.
I now understand that I got my undergraduate degree during a tech bubble that later collapsed, just as I’m getting my PhD during a housing and credit bubble that just popped. I also understand that my family’s Horatio Alger optimism—primarily rehearsed, in my mind, by my father—is part of a larger ideology of borrowing and credit. It’s as if my father’s optimism, buttressed by the discourse of the American Dream, grew to be the ideological bedrock of my ideas about debt. And I learned these ideas during the Clinton and Bush years, when shopping was a sport, when new malls were opening, and everyone was taking out loans.
Since my father was a college professor, we were able to borrow less from Citibank the next few years because of a “tuition exchange” program. I left Skidmore nonetheless several tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I had a BA in English. I wanted to take a year off before grad school, so I went back home to Ohio, and then went to New Jersey. This year was sort of the one that didn’t fit the narrative of progressive climbing that I replayed in my mind during moments of anxiety. That narrative was pure Alger: lower-middle class boy from Raleigh moves to Ohio when father wins lawsuit. Petulant hippy-punk moves to east coast liberal arts school seeking to write poetry and study literature. Over-confident English major goes to New York City for graduate study. That narrative had the peripheral, southern-accented dope transformed into the cosmopolitan, hipster doofus.
The in-between year after Skidmore is connected to the time I spent at CVS; they are the moments in my life when I’ve stepped outside my class bubble and worked at non-skilled jobs. In the fall of 2003, I worked on the I-71 highway south of Columbus, Ohio. I was a surveyor with a guy hired by a Columbus engineering firm that contracted out business with him. They were designing a new overpass bridge that connected the Columbus landfill with some local farms. On some of these local farms there were new suburban developments. There were mornings that the stink was so bad we had to breath out of our mouths.
I woke up at 6:30 am and had to be “on site” by 7:30. The drive took forty minutes. The guy had long hair, Dickeys pants, beige boots, and a baseball cap. He liked to listen to Howard Stern in the morning. When I arrived he’d be in his black Ford Explorer listening to his show on the radio. Usually I’d wait for about fifteen minutes for him to acknowledge me. Then he’d honk. This was the signal for me to join him. I’d crawl up into the passenger seat and we’d listen to the show until about 10:30. He kept his car running so the heat could stay on. It got really toasty in there. When it was time to work, he’d wake me up.
I did this through the winter. In January I moved to an exclusive, rich hamlet in New Vernon, New Jersey. I had a disabled friend from college who was living with his parents. In exchange for a bed and meals, my goal was to help my friend apply to jobs, find an apartment, and make professional contacts. For money, I’d perform odd jobs around the house and property. This included cleaning the bathrooms, the fridge, the walls, and organizing the attic. When the weather got warmer, I took down a deer fence, weeded the garden, and threw tennis balls for the dogs. Once, I found myself cleaning the house toilets next to the Hispanic immigrant my friend’s mother hired to clean the house once a week.
It was around this time that my debt and financial insecurity started to make me afraid. I’m writing this piece half-way through my fifth year at the GC; I spent the first fours years of grad school trying to race through it as fast as possible. This had less to do with ambition than financial anxiety. The first year was the hardest. I lived alone on Steinway Street in Astoria in a lower-level basement apartment. It was a studio and I paid $860 a month for it. As an adjunct at Kingsborough Community College, I was only making $980 a month. It was a stupid decision. I justified it out of fear of living with a stranger, or perhaps my own inflated sense of self-value—I required space, I guess. My first year I was without aid from the Graduate Center. Citibank refused me a loan that my father co-signed on; in hindsight, this was the first time someone pricked my bubble. They said we had too much debt.
So I turned to the Mastercard that Chase gave me the previous year in New Jersey. I went to Ikea and bought a bunch of furniture that I thought would really do the place right. I furnished the living room and kitchen. I put everything on the Mastercard: food, tuition, drinks, airplane tickets—and gas. I brought my 1992 Toyota Corolla from Ohio because it made sense to drive to Kingsborough from Astoria (about an hour both ways, which was faster than the subway). I also kept my Ohio plates; I drive back to Ohio four or five times a year, even now. For some reason, I never wanted to get too comfortable with living in New York, and having a car was necessary anywhere else. And I am convinced I will end up anywhere else. At the same time, based on that studio apartment, I was clearly too comfortable here.
Those were the great months when the credit card debt wasn’t in the four digits yet. Eventually, my Mastercard payments got so high I stopped using it, and started taking out federal loans. I should have done that from the beginning. But I didn’t take out federal loans because student loans were something I did with my dad. When I decided to take them out on my own, I realized how I cultivated my own blindspot, how much I relied on my father, on his blessing, on his judgment.
Eventually, every part of the car’s body died. The doors didn’t work, the A/C didn’t work, the radio didn’t work, the defroster didn’t work, the windows didn’t work. I went home to Ohio and found a new car in the driveway, a 1999 Honda Civic, courtesy of my dad. I say this partially out of embarrassment. But he surprised me with it, it was in his driveway, he was writing his book on genocide, and we gave away the old one to charity. He told me it was an investment. I would drive back to Ohio more, for one. And I have. But these are, in part, rationalizations. I’m profligate like this: I want to move around very easily. I cut my commute from Astoria to Queens College from over an hour to 15 minutes.
As I read about the credit crisis, the public conversations about debt, spending, bankruptcy, bailouts, and budgets are somewhat uncanny. Over the past few months, I’m sometimes left reading the business pages wondering just where I fit into the psychology of credit and debt that has become the revised neo-liberal narrative of the United States during the past 30 years. Like the federal government, the futures markets, the subprime mortgage lenders and buyers, and the credit swappers, I too have borrowed dollars against future gains. Like everyone else in America, I’ve gambled enormous sums of money to finance a dream. And every time I hear about another job pulled off the market, I strategize about how long I can remain in the cocoon of this debt financed bubble. When I think about “glass ceilings,” I’ve always felt I was privileged enough to be on top of one. But lately, I think more and more about that ceiling cracking. I think about falling.
When I think about that fall, it occurs to me that I’ve been using this debt to, in part, fund a comfortable lifestyle. The debt-bubble I’m in, and that which I’ve been given, might be best understood through my car. The car has been the symbol and the vehicle of my debt-world. All this time, it’s not that I’ve been paying solely for my education; I’ve been borrowing for the lifestyle I had in Ohio, and the one I expect to have after I get a job. I’m scared to give it up, the way my body warms in Astoria, the quick trips to Brooklyn and Ohio, the dinners out, the organic broccoli, the books, the beer. I’m scared to leave New York; I’m scared to stay. I’m scared about not getting a job—it’s not that I can’t handle the sense of professional failure, should that occur. It’s that I’ve wagered so much money on a dream sustained by rehearsed ideological optimism. And sustained, I fear, by the very middle-class privileges that the American empire promotes as a birthright, and wages resource wars to protect. New York, not Washington, is the heart of that empire.
And I worry that I’m a New Yorker now—I’m worried, too, that I always was.
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