Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed (17 page)

In the future, expect to see more examples like the
toothfish
turned Chilean sea bass. Partly due to chefs and
foodies always looking for the hot new thing, but also because in the context
of overfishing, we simply need new things to eat.

PART IV:

SUSPENSION OF HUMAN DECENCY

***

“They were
careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness or whatever it was
that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

(F. Scott
Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
)

16.

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO FAIL

Editor's note: The following is the personal story of David
Raether
, a former comedy writer for the sitcom Roseanne who
later became homeless.

O
n
Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my
metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.”

It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading
day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year
income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a
wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for
me and our eight children,
and it was as happy a Christmas
afternoon as I would ever have.

***

On
Christmas morning, 2008, I woke up on the floor of the 1997 Chrysler minivan I
lived in, parked behind the Kinko’s just two miles from my old house in San
Marino. It was raining, and I was cold, even though I had slept in three layers
of clothes. It was one of those blustery storms that regularly whoosh down from
the Gulf of Alaska and pummel Los Angeles during the winter. I climbed out of the
van and walked to a Starbucks five blocks away. Although I didn’t have any
money, I had scavenged the Sunday
Los Angeles Times
crossword puzzle
from another coffeehouse a couple days before. The baristas didn’t mind me
sitting quietly for several hours every day to warm up and kill time.

I was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, nor was I a
criminal. But I had committed one of the more basic of American sins: I had
failed. In eight years, my career had vanished, then my savings, and then our
home. My family broke apart. I was alone, hungry, and defeated.

Between 2007 and 2011, some five million American families lost
their homes to foreclosure.

Some of them found alternative housing by renting an apartment
or moving in with family members.
But not all of them.
Many American families broke apart during this time. Mine was one of them. And
I was one of the people who ended up homeless. This, however, is not the story
of five million American families. This is just my story.

Our family faced the same economic forces that hurt many
families, but I don’t blame the banks or politicians or anyone else for what
happened to us. I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed
reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation. It is tempting to
blame external forces for the disasters that befall us, but as Shakespeare
wrote in “Julius
Ceasar
,” the fault for what happens
to us “is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

It was Christmas. I stared out the Starbucks window at the rain.
God, help me. I had said this prayer a thousand times, and would say it a
thousand more. I had to find a way back to my life.

And over the course of the next four years, I would do just
that. I would do it with the pure, unquenchable, unrelenting — some might
say naïve — belief that things would work out. And I would do it through
Craigslist, the
omnifariously
oddball website that
has nearly destroyed the newspaper industry by taking over the classified
advertising business. But it would be Craigslist that would help me find my way
back.

People say you can find just about anything you need on
Craigslist. You might even find your life again.

***

My
fall was all the harder because I had my dream job. You know, the job you
dreamt of as a little kid: quarterback in the NFL, supermodel, astronaut…
Something crazy and cool that hardly anybody is lucky or talented enough to
land.

It all started like this: I was maybe six years old and watching
“The Ed Sullivan Show.” Ed Sullivan thanked the last performer and then turned
to the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Alan King!” A burly, handsome
man walked alone onto the stage in a dark suit and tie and began talking. And
he was funny! And the audience was laughing. I was enthralled. It seemed like
magic. The next morning, I came downstairs for breakfast and told my mother I
wanted to write jokes for a living.
“Oh, no, you’re not going to do that!”
she
said
. “That’s just foolishness.”

This convinced me that this was something I absolutely wanted to
do with my life.

A couple of decades later, I took time off from my budding
career as a
newspaper man
to travel around Europe.
While in Germany, I met a beautiful and mysterious Serbian poet named Marina.
We met by accident, but we latched on to each other with a ferocious and
unstoppable kind of love. We got married a year later.

Suddenly reality came crashing. I was married and needed a real
job. I decided to launch a magazine in Minneapolis with a friend from college.
We made two basic mistakes: First, the magazine wasn’t very good, and, second,
we didn’t have any money. The second problem seemed solvable. I got a job as a
bartender to pay the rent and keep the lights on.

The place I tended bar turned out to be crucial: William’s Pub,
in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis. It was a comedy club. I met dozens
of young stand-up comics. I learned how to craft jokes and started writing some
of my own. Among the people I befriended was a young comic, Tom Arnold, who
also worked at William’s. We became fast friends, and wrote together and did
comedy bits together and were having the time of our lives until Marina became
pregnant.

Okay, I thought, now it’s really time to get a real job. My
experience launching the magazine helped me land a job with a trade magazine
publishing company that specialized in computer magazines. I left Minneapolis
and took a job in their Peterborough, NH, offices. And that was apparently the
end of my career in comedy. I spent the next eight years wearing a suit and
being thoroughly respectable. I developed all sorts of useful skills such as
how to do market research, how to create financial models on Excel, how to
negotiate with vendors, and how to sell. I was so unhappy. And then one day in
line at a supermarket I glanced at the tabloids and saw Tom Arnold on the cover
with sitcom star Roseanne Barr!

I called him in Los Angeles. He immediately took my call and we
talked and talked, and then he told me he wanted to hire me onto the “Roseanne”
show but needed a writing sample. He sent me some scripts and asked me to write
one of my own to see if I could do the job. Without a clue as to what I was
doing, I wrote a script that must have been just good enough for him to justify
hiring me. And so Marina, our five children, and I moved to Los Angeles. And
voila! I had my dream job doing what I had dreamt of doing since I first saw
Alan King telling jokes on the Ed Sullivan show nearly thirty years earlier.

But was it as good as I expected? Are you kidding me? Of course
it was! I loved everything about writing for television. I loved sitting in the
writing room with twelve other smart and funny people arguing all day about the
script. I loved walking down to the stage and seeing our stuff in rehearsals,
the taping nights in front of live studio audiences, and seeing great actors
saying our jokes and getting laughs from the crowd. I loved the post-taping
commiseration sessions at saloons near the studios and I loved the media
acclaim.

And I was making great money. Writers/producers typically are
paid on a per episode basis. At my level of experience and background in the
late 90s, I made between $12,000 and $15,000 per episode for a
22 episode
season. In addition, I had certain script
guarantees. I received writing credit on at least three episodes per season,
which paid another $20,000 per episode. A studio also paid me another $650,000
a year just to come up with ideas for television series. If one of my shows
made it on the air and into syndication (endless reruns on afternoon local
television), I could make tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

It was heaven. Except it wasn’t for Marina.
Or
my family.
The working hours were hideous: Most days started at 10 a.m.
and ended at 3 a.m. The easy nights were the nights we filmed, when we finished
by 10 p.m. I barely saw Marina and the children, except on weekends. Our house
was not a home but the place I checked into when I wasn’t working. Marina,
meanwhile, struggled to deal with eight children. Both my family and my
marriage started to fall apart. My comedy writer skillset — being a
quick-witted wisenheimer
who
could debate endlessly
— didn’t transfer well to a home setting. Whereas I was
well-compensated
to have a dad in a sitcom make a joke out
of his daughter’s emotional crisis, it wasn’t funny with real daughters and real
sons and a real wife. It was irritating and provoked resentment.

So I had to make a change. I had to quit my dream job. (And
honestly, I probably only had a few more working years left because comedy
writers rarely work into
their
fifties.) I had carefully
saved and we had lived well below our means, so I decided to take a couple of
years off to devote time to my real job: husband and father.

For the next two years, I did that job full-time. We restored
balance to our family life, and I was happy. I decided it was time to return to
television.

Television, however, had other ideas. In the interim, reality
programming had boomed. It made perfect economic sense: It was cheap to produce
and audiences were interested. The number of sitcoms plummeted and so did
employment for comedy writers. The fall primetime network schedule in 2002-03
had 43 sitcoms. When I returned in 2004-2005, there were 32. My agent told me
there were about half as many jobs available as there
were
when I left.

By 2007-08, there were only 18 sitcoms on the air. I was now
nearly 50 years old and had been out of the business for two years. Nobody was
going to hire me anymore. My agent told me that I faced a common problem for
writers my age: Producers could hire a team of first-time writers for less than
the fee they would pay me for my services. But
they won’t
know what they’re doing
,
I countered
. They
don’t care, he responded.

I had prudently saved and invested during my years in
television, so I had a $500,000 nest egg between various mutual funds and an
annuity I had invested in during my working years. But I was supporting a
pretty large infrastructure.

The expensive part of having eight children isn’t the present:
feeding and clothing them. The expensive part of having eight children is their
future. Good schooling was our priority. But there was no way we could send
eight children to private schools, even with an enormous salary. We had to find
a great public school system, and we did in San Marino, an old-money suburb
near Los Angeles. In 1995, we bought a house there. It was a big one because,
well, we needed a big one. And then there are all the other investments you
make in their future: piano lessons, club sports fees, tutoring, and so on.

After a year, when it became clear that I could not return to
television, I realized that I would have to pursue my old career: magazine
publishing. I sent out hundreds of resumes. Nothing. With our savings running
down over the next two years, we did what everyone advised in the mid 2000s: take
advantage of the soaring equity in our house. We refinanced and refinanced and
refinanced again, taking out money for living expenses each time.
This was considered a smart move by many in those years
.

But eventually we reached our limits. At one point, the water
was shut off for several days when we failed to pay a bill. Under cover of
darkness, we hooked up a hose to the outside spigot of our neighbor’s house and
ran the hose into our kitchen. We filled pots to cook pasta with and to heat up
for sponge baths. It’s amusing to think about now, but at the time it was
mortifying. We were stealing water! From the nice old lady who lived next door!

Finally, in 2006, unable to refinance any further, we lost our
home to foreclosure. Actually, you don’t lose the house. The house loses you.
The house isn’t going anywhere. You and your family are the ones who get lost.
In our case, an investor bought the house with the intention of renovating it
and flipping it. I hope she made money on it.

The worst moment is the day the sheriff comes. Two armed members
of the county sheriff’s department showed up with a
locksmith
as we were moving out. The investor stood on the opposite side of the street as
we packed and loaded a moving van. She watched us load our furniture, which we
put into storage because the
two bedroom
apartment we
managed to lease with the help of a friend didn’t have room for 4,000 square
feet worth of furniture. The deputies came and talked with us to make sure we
really were moving out, and we felt like criminals for spending a final few
hours in the house we owned for twelve years.

Over the next couple of years, our economic situation worsened.
I couldn’t find any kind of work. When I applied at Trader Joe’s, the manager
saw four years of unemployment and twelve years spent writing television
comedy. Sir, are you sure you want stack loaves of bread here at Trader Joe’s?
Yes, I really do. Well, we’ve decided to hire the 24 year-old
woman
with purple hair and nose piercings instead.