PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : Recovery Room for Those Crushed by Plastic
It’s an airless government building with no distinguishing features. Time suspended; it could be day or night. At the doorway of Room 3114, a crowd gathers. There are two kinds of people here: those clutching large manila envelopes, those holding briefcases. The lost and the lawyers. Welcome to bankruptcy: Chapter 7, Section 341a, examination of the debtors.
There are 200 cases this afternoon. The first arrivals--those who tiptoed in especially early, pale, tears held at bay in startled faces--are soon soothed by the comfort of a multitude. This is a congregation: a host about to make a new start, debts discarded like a cloak of sin.
The worst is over--the months of dunning letters, of persistent collection agencies, of telephone calls at home, at friends’, at work, at night. Personal disintegration has been reduced to the beauty of a government form, perfectly completed. The mess, sweat, tears of life are invisible on the typewritten page.
Arnold Kupetz, a professional corporation and bankruptcy trustee administrator, calls the room to order. He is slight, tweedy, with a handlebar mustache and twinkling eyes. He has an opening monologue, a warm-up: “I’m not here to give you legal advice--for that you go to your dentist, your chiropractor, whoever you trust.” Titters from the wooden benches. The Make-U-Laff school of bankruptcy.
Credit cards: the siren song of our time.
Listening, at first it is hard to get beyond the brazen greed, the hysterical temptation. This is the bankruptcy capital of America: twice as many cases here as the next largest district (Chicago). Page after page of credit-card debts. Boats, cars, furniture, computers. . . . Where is thrift, caution, saving? And where is the difference between $10,000 of shopping on bad credit and shoplifting? “About $9,990,” says Kupetz.
There is an industry of bankruptcy; there is hardly a case without a lawyer attached. All fees--$400, $1,400--to be paid in full before papers are filed. Who would not demand cash from a debtor? Who else could understand it all--the endless bits of business, the monstrous quadrille of the law?
Slowly, though, amid the twittering, the conspiratorial smiles and shining eyes--other people’s pain makes itself felt. Some get up from their brief, minutes-long questioning as dogs do, shaking themselves carelessly, after a tumble in a puddle. Others lumber away, sore, welling with shame and loss. The next-in-line come to the stand; their faces are gray beneath the skin, trying to swallow, muscles clenched with their dishonor.
Catastrophes have ruined their lives. The man who was sick and had no insurance. The woman who cared for her mother in the long, draining years of her dying. The immigrants who trusted, whose small businesses ran on tiny margins. Victims. Those who lost their jobs, their confidence, their savings. Those who crawled to friends to borrow money and were refused, or, worse, were given willingly what cannot now be repaid. It is not their debts they are wiping out; it is their past lives.
Men from another culture, cringing as they are unmanned by this public display, that the world should know their secrets. Apartments that were to be security for old age standing empty now or lost. Sewing machines leased in good times, contracts that melted away in bad. Men who thought a handshake would do; others who thought a piece of paper was a promise in stone. A mother whose son is in the hospital with AIDS--the son, now dying, who stole everything from her; she is incredulous that any piece of paper could still be of importance in the midst of her nightmare.
Recession, drugs, violence, the parasites leeching upon one another. . . . Whatever walks in the city outside, walks, in time, into this room.
Broken lives, mangled by the customs of our time, reduced to numbers in a file. But new beginnings come from bankruptcy court. There is glory that, even in this hard-hearted age, we can let those who have been crushed be reborn.
