Fall 2008
Cheap
The deadbeat dad, lounge lizard, and cat
burglar can still find love. Con-men and serial
killers shunt their rejects off to friends.
The batterer can't beat them away with a stick.
But the cheapskate, branded with his scarlet C,
slurps TV dinners alone. Much worse
than impotent or drunk—more larded
with contempt than fatso, dumbbell, suckie, bum—
cheap implies short on cojones, scant
of sperm: an elk in cut-rate antlers, peacock
in a rented tail, bowerbird who calls his thrown-
together nest of a few sticks, "minimalist."
Jay's folks, who outlived the Depression
on cadged crackers and catsup, taught him
to wipe his plate with bread, ransack
phone booths for change, and always steer
toward the North Star, Economy.
Thrift and her brother Industry bought him
the bungalow in rent-gouging L.A.,
the 40-mpg Honda Civic (used),
and classy clothes from Nordstrom's Rack
that attracted his pretty wife, who feels betrayed
when he won't dive into boiling hock
to snag her a four-bedroom in Bel Air
and a tank-sized Humvee, then hire a live-in
pediatrician when the twins are born. Okay,
the doctor lives in his own home; but doesn't Jay
deserve to be sarcastic, after the way his wife
screamed, at Burger King, "You're cheap!"?
He could list gifts he's lavished on her,
every meal he paid for, every check-out line
she's sailed through, hoisting
his Discover card. But there's no need.
If money equals love, and he is cheap, she
has been had for little. What does that make her?
Charles Harper Webb's books of poetry include Reading the Water (Northeastern University Press), which won the 1997 Morse Poetry Prize and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Liver (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize; Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies (BOA Editions, 2001), and Hot Popsicles (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is a licensed psychotherapist and worked as a professional singer and guitarist for many years.