Debt.

from The Student Handjob

I answered my door a couple of weeks ago. It was a guy in a black motorcycle helmet with his visor still down. I thought he was there to shoot me. I started thinking about all the stuff I did that week that could get me killed. By the time I got to the letter C on m list he handed me a letter. Made me sign for it. He left without a word and I opened it. It was a notice about a court case, all the way from Middlesex Country Court in Boston, Massachusetts. J. Lebowski vs. Harvard University. Fuck, I didn't like my chances. For twenty years they've been asking for their loan back. 10 grand. Now they want 25 for their troubles. Jesus, that was twenty years ago. You'd think they would lose the paperwork by now or something. I've lived all over the goddamned world. How did these bastards find me. Do they really expect their money back after all these years?

After all, there's a lot of stuff people lent to me twenty years ago and I don't have it anymore. Bubba Contreras lent me his Husker Du album. Martha lent me her portable Edgar Allan Poe. Fred lent me is hat. I don't see any of them taking me to court.

I know what you're saying. He should set an example for the students and pay his debts. After all he's a professor. He teaches ethics for Christ's sake. He's bringing the University of London into disrepute. Well, it's not that don't want to pay them back. It's just that if it were important, they would not be asking for it back. If it were important, I could not pay it back, and they would not take it back, and anyway no one could calculate it. No one could say how much I owe them and how much the owe me, if it were important. If it were important, this debt would be bad.

Because everything that's worth anything to me, anything important, I got from bad debt. I got and gave, but I never gave back. I never gave back to the creditor. I never gave back to the community. I never gave back what I took, and I never got back what others took from me. They never asked.

And I never would.

Fred taught me why I should give a shit about Shakespeare. Bubba taught me about music. I never gave them anything of this. I don't know what it's worth. It's incalculable. They would never accept anything in exchange. And I went into bad debt with those I loved, a kiss that I could not take back, a look that was never returned.

And out of all this bad debt came connections, not the kind of connection that says oh shit we are all in debt because of capitalism and this should bring us all together. Fuck that. My bad debt, our bad debt already lives beyond capitalism. It doesn't bring us together. It makes us different, again and again. Because nothing equals anything else, and the debt just grows, the connections to all these different bad debts get deeper and deeper, more and more complicit. And when you enter this world of bad debt, this subprime undercommons, you are accepted without question, without price, without credit. You enter the house, the family of bad debt, the house that has to keep moving, the fugitive family.

I'm not telling anyone what to do. Sometimes we need money, we need credit, we want credits, we want to graduate. Bt sometimes we need to study instead, to study together, never graduate, never get credit, never give credit where credit is due, just study together, and get in bad debt to each other, and figure out what's important, figure out what's always different, what's always something else. Just study together til they kick us out, speculate together until they move us along. Kids broke windows and took stuff this summer. They don't plan to give it back. They took what they needed and they took what they wanted and they didn't leave their credit card details. They say these kids were thugs, that they were criminals. Maybe they were, but if being criminal means knowing it's good credit and not bad debt that makes us slaves, then maybe they know something we need to learn. Maybe being in the black means being in the red, and maybe being in the red means being in the black.

Either that or don't open your door.

The Student Handjob: so radical… it's fucking bodacious p.54-5