Lately, I've been getting forwarded little snippet about the
travails and
collapse of Dubai.
That's because an earlier, booze-soaked version of the fbomber once resided in Dubai, for nearly two years before fleeing the country in debt, shame and panic.
Here is an essay I wrote and performed back in 2006 about that experience. It's long. Take your time.
Sallie Mae and Me
I was in my home office last summer, avoiding work by whipping myself into a righteous frenzy on my favorite political blogs, when, somewhere between dailykos and talkingpointsmemo.com, my cellphone rang.
Private Number.
I don’t trust people who block their numbers. But my job requires me to call strangers and have them call me back.
So I answered.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Steven Schneider?”
I have never, ever, in my life had something good happen to me after that question. Still, I said yes.
“Ray Taylor from Sallie Mae here. I’d like to talk to you about your student loans.”
Busted.
Some people --- normal, sane, responsible people --- took out student loans, graduated, worked, and paid off those loans until they evaporated into nothing.
I am not one of these people.
Over the past ten years I’ve defaulted and gone into collections three times. I’ve restructured and refinanced twice. Once I told a collection agent that Steve Schneider had died, and I was merely a friend who had inherited his cellphone.
In my defense, I’ll say that I graduated with every intention of paying , but my first reporter job wasn’t producing that extra thousand bucks a year.
So I figured those loans would have wait until some later day, a day when I had so much money I could pay without pain or deprivation. Now, I didn’t have any sort of grandiose fantasies like winning the lottery. I had more practical plans, like meeting and marrying an heiress to the DeBeers diamond fortune, or possibly selling a screenplay to a major motion picture studio.
I was, you see, pursuing a career as a writer. Not in the sense of putting my words down on paper, mind you, but more in the sense of calling myself a writer, taking crappy newspaper jobs, and poisoning all my reading with envy and guilt.
People, usually non-writers, told me these crappy jobs were how I would “pay my dues.”
One muggy day, driving to a press conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sweating and shirtless because the AC in my $900 former cop car blew out air hotter than the combustion chamber of the engine, I began to think maybe these dues were a little steep.
I decided I would pay them, but not at the same time as my loans.
Shortly afterwards, I moved to London for “experiences” as Phase Two of my project to become a great writer without writing. While there, a publishing house offered me a job writing an Internet technology magazine in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The salary was three times what I’d earned back home, verging on what a starting shift manager at Chili’s might pull in.
I told them I needed to think it over, then went home to look at a map. The United Arab Emirates turned out to be a small, crescent shaped country on the Persian Gulf bordered by Oman and Saudi Arabia, a part of the world where money, quite literally, bubbles out of the ground. I was sold.
Surely in a country that owed its very existence to wealth without effort, there would be a place for me.
I imagined my life in Dubai as a sort of melange of Beau Gest, a harem and Somerset Maughan’s morally bankrupt colonialists at play.
Once there, I’d get one of those great old Land Rover Defenders, the boxy kind like John Wayne drove in Hatari. Every morning I would cross the dunes to work while my houseboy tidied up my seaside villa and helped the sultry consort I had left behind gather her belongings and catch up to her salt caravan.
I figured within a year I could pay off my college loans, accumulate some savings and return to the United States in style.
Some of what I imagined was true. In an oil-wealthy nation, inside the Internet field during its boom, I was working at the nexus of two gushing fountains of easy money. And at the top of the corporate org chart, the cash did just rain down.
The founder, a silver-bearded Scotsman, had a reputation for throwing glasses of expensive Cabernet at restaurant walls for sheer, wasteful sport. The advertising sales manager drove an obnoxious yellow Ferrari he filled with young female sales reps, then drove to his private beach club.
But down at the bottom of the chart it was a different story. In appearance and architecture, Dubai is Las Vegas without the taste or restraint. In terms of cost of living, it’s more like Manhattan.
My lifestyle wasn’t extravagant. Instead of a seaside villa, I lived in a crumbling corporate apartment with two coworkers. Instead of the sexy Landrover, I drove a rented Tercel. In place of a harem, I discovered a city with a male to female ratio similar to that of an Army base.
Even so, after paying my bills, my checkings and savings accounts remained at zero and my credit card balance grew every month.
My job was a disappointment. For as long as I had been half-heartedly participating in the workforce, I’d believed a dream job, would magically give me a work ethic. Other people fostered this wishful thinking, saying things like “Of course you aren’t really trying at work, Steven. You haven’t found your thing yet.”
It turned out that’s like saying that when I developed a passion for water polo, I would grow a blowhole.
There I was, living my dream of writing for a living, in a wildly exotic locale. A flashbulb-bright sun baked silvery glass towers rising from the dunes like a mirage. Imperious local men glided the streets in gleaming white Range Rovers and matching robes. Mysterious, veiled women scurried out of Victoria’s Secret, covered head to toe in pitch black abayas. Yet even in this extraordinary setting, I put in the same lackluster work performance that had blocked my promotion to fry station at the Muskogee Burger King.
One problem was I could not get excited about my stories. I wanted to be out riding with the Hell’s Angels, not rewriting press releases about how many processors Compaq had put in their new server.
I was also in over my head. Despite my interview lies, just about everything I knew about computer networking could be exhausted by typing those two words at the top of a page. What’s worse, I felt paranoid about interviewing people to learn more. Then they would know how ignorant I was about the subject my magazine was named after. Instead, I spent hours staring, paralyzed with fear, at the phone and business cards of Microsoft Middle East Marketing Reps.
I wound up using the same tricks that got me through college --- stretched deadlines, all nighters and plagiarism. To write stories I typically stole three or four articles from the internet, mashed them up, and created a fictitious expert to quote this information.
As for my own writing, it turns out I’ve only got so many words per day inside me. After cranking out news and feature stories at work, I simply could not go home and type more.
In fact, the only part of my life that aroused any passion was lunch. My South African coworker, Colin, and I spent approximately half our workday suggesting, eating at and critiquing lunch spots. But after six months, even these multi-hour gluttony excursions stopped cheering me up.
In my misery, I decided that if I was sinking into an ocean of debt, I might as well head to the Promenade Deck, tell Isaac to mix up some Mai Tais, and enjoy the ride down. I financed a new Jeep, got a gold card from the local bank and moved into my own place. I went to Ikea, pointed to one of the pages of their catalog and took it all home with me.
Every night I careened between Irish pubs, American bars and discos full of sad-eyed Ukranian prostitutes dancing with fat Arab businessmen. I spent sex weekends at five star hotels with my new British girlfriend, ordering $300 bottles of whiskey from room service.
Within months I spent my entire next year’s salary. I maxed out all my credit cards and had post-dated rent and car payment checks sitting in offices throughout the city like timed explosive charges waiting to blow.
What’s more, this new social calendar ignited the afterburners on my downward work spiral. Each day I came in later, often still drunk from the night before and occasionally wearing the same clothes.
Nasty rumors about my behavior circulated the office. One afternoon the founder took me for coffee. Over butter cookies, he told me he’d heard that I had been so aggressively amorous at a party that a girl had locked herself into a bathroom to escape me.
My defense was that the story could not be true, because I would have simply kicked that door down, just like I’d kicked my apartment door down the weekend before when I lost my keys.
Not long after this conversation, I was fired.
I had to leave the country. The question was how. And when.
I couldn’t leave right away. My old company had vouched for my debts and would alert the Dubai authorities. If caught leaving, I would be thrown in jail until someone paid.
To buy time, I took a job writing copy for an ad agency and secretly prepared my escape.
I couldn’t openly vacate my house. The security- slash - maintenance man lived downstairs, and popped from his door like a smiling, curry-scented cuckoo each time he heard a noise in the lobby. But I didn’t want to abandon my stuff. Those were, after all, the Swedish-designed treasures I had braved jail time to own.
I moved out one back-pack load at a time and traded my furniture and dishes for dinners out.
My car was another problem. Not only would selling it notify the bank of my immanent departure, but it refused to let me to shift gears while in motion. So I left it in 3rd for a month.
My last day in Dubai, I abandoned the Jeep in my bank’s parking lot with the keys on the seat and called a cab for the airport.
At the terminal, I poured fearful sweat. I believed that every cellphone was reporting me, that every policeman and soldier was there to put me in cuffs for stealing $30,000 from their country.
I didn’t relax until I was well into international airspace.
Once there, I reflected on the whole Dubai debacle, and swore I would never attempt to pay my student loans again.
After all, that loan had resulted from a decision I made when I was seventeen years old, namely to go to an expensive private university. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for a seventeen year old jackass’s mistake even --- no, especially --- if that jackass was me. After all, I might give the benefit of the doubt to a 17-year-old stranger, but I know exactly how dumb I was.
I realized I should have spent my tuition on a car. Back in 1990, $100K would have bought a monster sportscar, a Lamborghini cool enough to get me laid, even if I lacked the social skills to be in Wagoner High’s Dungeons and Dragons Club.
I would have wrecked this car, or defaulted on the payments. But either way, the bank would have gotten a good portion of their loan back from insurance or auction.
Instead, I had put myself thousands of dollars in hock for a ‘university experience’. Unlike my hypothetical Lamborghini, there was no way to abandon or return this experience. I couldn’t just take the degree off my resume and call it even.
I also thought the fact that leaving the country didn’t erase the debt was a little hypocritical. After all, our entire country is descended from people who shirked debts by moving here. I should have been lauded for exporting American values abroad.
Back in the States I pursued a second dream career as an advertising copywriter. After two dues-paying years in that field, living in a converted closet in New York City, I decided to make some life changes.
For starters, I realized that my drinking problem was getting in the way of the things that were really important to me… like my sex addiction. So I gave up alcohol.
I also gave up the idea of a dream job in a creative field.
I already dreamed of writing great books and stories. To pursue that dream and also a dream of being a highly-paid copywriter or intrepid journalist took energy and focus I simply didn’t have. It was also kind of greedy. Some people really do dream about those jobs, and the sooner I got out of their way the better.
I started taking jobs that, though not creative and exciting, paid me enough to meet my expenses and put some aside every month for writing classes, trips, and a richer life to write about.
Hence, my current recruiting job, which is like being a telemarketer who got your work number, but pays me $50/hour to work from home.
So when Ray Taylor called, I was ready. By taking some money out of savings, putting some debt on a credit card, and scrimping a little, I stayed out of court and paid off everything in three months.
My triumph is mixed with sadness, though. When I think about it, Sallie Mae was the one relationship I made in college that lasted. The girls I dated back in 1995 are long married in Connecticut suburbs. My rugby pals are so busy with their careers on Wall Street that our correspondence has shriveled from long emails about our lives to the latest nightvision mpegs of teen heiresses blowing their boyfriends.
By contrast, for the last decade, Sallie Mae was there for me, calling, writing, emailing, wanting to know how my job situation was going. And above all, wanting me to stay in touch.
I’m going to miss Sallie Mae.
But I’d like to think that we’re not so much through as taking a break.
Right now, I’m applying to graduate school.
