Penthouse to Outhouse

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Tom Daschle, Not Having a Great Day | Photo 02

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It’s a phrase I first heard used during the Texas Hold ‘Em craze, somewhere around the halfway point of this particular decade. During a televised tournament, I watched Phil Hellmuth, one of the poker world’s brighter stars, go from having most of the chips at the table to busting out completely as a result of a few bad hands. He’d been playing for hours without a mistake. It all happened very fast. “Looks like ol’ Phil just went from the penthouse to the outhouse,” the announcer said. It was impossible not to feel badly for Hellmuth, at least a little bit. Despite his already-vast personal fortune and preemptive VIP status at any high-end casino, it’s never pleasurable to watch someone go from prosperity to poverty, even in a completely frivolous context such as high-stakes no-limit poker.

There are many who scoff at the losses of rich men, rolling their eyes in disgust or shaking cynical fists towards their televisions, firing off passive-aggressive retorts aimed at the void, feeling the need to dispense verbal, if not fiscal, justice. It seems that some feel, and very adamantly so, that if you’re rich you’re not allowed to feel financial pain. If you have two nice houses, then you can’t be sad when fortune, the fickle mistress, decides to bat her heavily-mascaraed eyes elsewhere, leaving you in the cold and wondering why you bought all that beachfront property in the first place.

CNN has been making recent habit of telling such penthouse-to-outhouse stories and pasting them front and center. Headlines like “From $100,000 a Year to Unemployed” have been making regular appearance on their home page. Inside are stories about upper-middle-class people who lost their jobs quickly, harshly, without time to prepare or plan for what’s next. I feel a bit voyeuristic reading this stories, unsure of what I’m to make of them. There’s a part of me that feels sad, in the man-I’m-sorry-to-hear-that kind of way. There’s another part that wants to shout “Ha!” and stand gloriously in the stagnant pool of my own moral-of-the-story brand of ethical sludge.

Of course, the most troublesome thing is to fend off the reminder that comes from the very back part of one’s brain, the little tiny back room, back there behind the Ambition, the Reason, the Memories, the Lusts, and the Laments. In the little room is a small wooden desk and a small wooden chair, in which sits a tiny creature with tiny legs who is looking at you in that way that makes you feel you should know something that you’re not currently admitting. The little creature holds a pencil in his gnarled hand, and scrawls something on a mildewed piece of white paper. He lays the pencil down and slides the paper towards you, looking directly in your eyes.

You lean down and look at the message, which reads simply this:

“You’re Dying.”

You recoil in horror at this, turning from the horrible little beast and running back towards the front of the brain, where it’s warmer and, thank goodness, more hopeful. You shake your head in a misguided attempt to dislodge the morbid message from your memory, a message that, if left unattended, could very well fester.

I’m not dying, you remind yourself.  At least, not today. There’s no purpose to this sort of thinking, all it does is make everything morbid and turn an otherwise pleasant Wednesday afternoon into a somber-palooza, complete with confusion, regret, and desperation. That little jerk-off in the back of my head is just trying to ruin my fun, you remind yourself. He’s just pissed that he doesn’t get to rub elbows with Ambition or Lusts.

Plus, when I start thinking in those terms, I can’t help but start to think of those outside of the well-organized, well-defined, well-bounded world I’ve constructed for myself. Cholera victims in Africa, rape victims in Afghanistan, sex slaves in Thailand, and just plain old poor folks four blocks down the road become dim specters, unqualified recipients of my concern and therefore unable to afford a ticket to the theater of my thoughts. It’s just a bell curve, I tell myself. There will always be rich and poor and in-between and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.

It’s true, to a vast extent. I can’t fix stuff. I can’t even work up a whole lot of sadness for the man (Boo-Hoo Brad, I call him) who was making $100,000 and now isn’t. We now live in a time when so much information comes rushing into our brains, metric tons of global information (most of which seems to demand a massive, collective, moral response) that we can’t help but jettison most of it out the sides of our heads, spilling globs of actuality onto the sidewalk where it might get nipped at by a pigeon or two, but that’s about it.

The two-words that keep slipping to the front of the line, however, are the ones you wish, out of all the ones you hear, weren’t true.

You’re dying.

Our fight with life, our desire to make each day worthwhile, had better be on the terms of that ghoulish jackass in the tiny backroom, the one with the pencil, the mildewed paper, and the Truth. Banks and financial advisors really don’t care about us, they are just caring about themselves, but with our money. Satisfaction, the stuff of inner peace, will come with the contrast that our life - whatever our income - has with the troublesome little message. When “You’re Dying” becomes a retort to your way of life, you’ve made a mistake.

• I have a million dollars. You’re dying.
• I got a government bailout. You’re dying.
• I got a terrific nose job. You’re dying.

Ugh, right? May I suggest something?

Make it a preamble, with a conjunction.

• I’m dying. But I went to the park and threw a frisbee with friends.
• I’m dying. But my children love me.
• I’m dying. But I laughed as hard today as I have in a long time.

Even as I began to write this, I didn’t know how I really felt about things. Seems like so many are going from the “penthouse to the outhouse” these days. We’re in the midst of a national pity party, and everyone’s invited.

I’m starting to get the feeling that this party sucks.

Something else just occurred to me. When comparing the penthouse to the outhouse, did anyone ever bother to ask which was a better place to be? I’ve never owned a penthouse, and I don’t feel worse off for it. Would be nice, sure, but it’s not as if I really need one.

I actually need the outhouse.

(Which is why I’m headed there now, with a good book, a contented heart, and a smile.)