The Imperial Financial Vortex
5 September 2016, 1:14 p.m.
42° 26' 41.6" N, 87° 49' 32.5" W
Debit cards, I had read somewhere, were not as widely accepted overseas as credit cards. So I figured I needed to bring at least one credit card with me, just as a backup. I fully intended to do a little research to find out which of my six cards was the best one to take to Europe. You have to understand, I kept these things in a drawer, they were not a part of my daily life. But then, in the last couple of days before my furlough, there was this storm of crazy stuff at work. My personal to-do list got shoved to the side, and when I was packing I realized that I had no clue as to which was the best card for the job. So I put all six of my cards in my wallet and brought every one of them along with me.
Then I picked up my passengers and the journey itself began—the trip from Speyer to Canossa—and, well, the awkward social moments started to happen—the moments when somebody just had to step forward and take care of the bill. And the somebody who stepped forward always turned out to be me. Now those of you who know about medieval history are probably wondering: How could that guy be so naive? Didn’t he know how the Holy Roman Emperors operated? All I can say is, yeah, you’re right, I should have known. In fact, I did know exactly how the emperors operated. But somehow, I didn’t think it would apply to me. Not in a minivan, not in 2009.
Now for those of you who are not medieval history buffs, the thing I should have known, or did know, but failed to apply to my own situation, was that the Holy Roman Emperors—especially in the time of the Salians, the line that started with Henry’s grandfather—they were all basically freeloaders. They didn’t have their own castles. (There was a palace, in Goslar, but it was just a big house. No fortifications. No good for wartime.) So the Emperors and their entourage—family, servants, a bishop or two, and enough of an army to make the show convincing, well they’d all just show up at some nobleman’s castle and move in for a month. Or three. Or six. And their host—some local prince on whom the imperial court had deigned to bestow the honor of its presence—would be obligated to hold sumptuous banquets, re-provision the army, make gifts of embroidered fabric for the imperial wardrobe, that kind of shit. A few months later, when the well of hospitality ran dry, the court would move on to honor a different host with its ruinous presence.
Well, I guess I thought there was a whole different set of values for a road trip in a minivan. This sounds stupid, but I just assumed there would be a culture of sharing and mutual respect and cleaning up after yourself. After all, it was a minivan.
Even after I realized that I had been sucked into the financial vortex of the 11th century Imperial Family, I was really, really careful with my credit cards. I checked the balances every day on the Internet—or at least every day that I could find a secure Wi-Fi connection, which to be honest sometimes meant every 3rd or 4th day—anyway I did a really good job of keeping each credit card well below its limit. But then, as the trip continued, I had to continually readjust my financial good intentions. It was in Gex (or was it Besançon?) that I set some rules. I thought, okay, I’ll keep each card $10,000 below its limit. I called that my “ceiling.” It was in Turin, I think, that things got really out of control. It’s kind of a blur to me, but I recall checking my balances, and redefining my “ceiling” as $8,000, then $7,000, then $5,000. Per card. In the Hotel Papillon in San Polo d’Enza I did some frantic balance transfers so I could say to myself, “My ceiling is a firm $2K. Every one of my six credit cards has at least $2,000 of available credit.
Those of you who have been doing the math in your heads know that means that at this point I had run up almost $75,000 in credit card debt. And the next day—this was Henry’s second day of penitence outside the B&B—I got an email from my Discover card that they had increased my credit limit by $4,000 because I was such a good customer. I felt rich again.
That’s why it came as such a surprise in Halifax when I tried to buy a couple rounds of drinks—$37 Canadian, plus a $20 tip, which seemed minimally appropriate, according to my mindset at that moment—and my credit card was declined. My companion, the woman I was talking to—the woman who had just invited me to her room—she offered to pay, but I wouldn’t have any of that, so I just put the charge on my own room, the one I thought the airline was paying for, which of course only made things worse later on.
What I didn’t realize at that moment was that one of the airlines I had flown on in my crazy re-booked itinerary had charged me full price for a last-minute one-way first-class seat—which was totally wrong, they didn’t understand the deal I had with the other airline, the one I would have flown on, if there hadn’t been that snafu with the minivan return. But charge me they did, and that charge put one of my cards over its limit, and once one card was over the limit….
Oh yeah.
So I guess they all started talking to each other, all my credit card companies—let’s call them banks, for nostalgia’s sake. All my banks got together—at least their algorithms and their data bridges—they got together and they had a digital chat about my financial situation and they shook their heads and went tut-tut-tut and stamped on my forehead the label I would wear for the next six years: Bad Credit Risk.
But at that moment, in that hotel bar in Halifax, was I thinking about my credit?
No. I was thinking about the future and the past, about the futures of the past. I was thinking about Canossa, about Henry and Bertha and Matilda and Gregory, about what it meant when it happened and about what it would mean in historical memory.
Well, maybe I was performing those ideas more than thinking about them: I was riffing, showing off, gauging the interest of my companion in each twist and turn of my argument. I was watching her eyes, her lips, her little moments of skepticism, the little snorts of challenge, her words of gentle mockery wrapped around looks of invitation. To be honest, I was talking a good game about the past and the future, but in fact, right then, the past had become an abstraction—an entity as impossible to imagine as my credit rating—and the only future I could really think about was my immediate future. My very immediate future.
Because I was about to get laid.
This is the final episode of My Way to Canossa.
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