"Space Available"

There’s a stretch of Trooper Road heading north, beginning beyond the stop light off 422, past the Harley dealer’s “No Money Down” sign and the gas station abandoned years ago, where on the left-hand side alone I counted five “Space Available” real estate signs in less than a mile.

Space isn’t all that’s available these days. Many homes are available, of course, with foreclosures and owners relocating for better jobs, maybe any job. “For Sale” signs are planted on front lawns wherever you go, more than few with “Reduced Price” attached.

Shuttered and decrepit Bud’s Tavern, about two hundred years old, plaster chunks continually falling off and orange barricade fencing encircling it, is available, and has been for probably more than a year. Whippoorwill Works, Mark and Xenia’s cramped little arts and crafts shop will be available shortly. The friendly counter-culture couple fought Target and K-Mart and Wal-Mart for decades, holding on, but now with Mark sick and their kids long raised, they’re moving their framing business back home. The glass-paneled corner store of the strip mall ten paces from Mark and Xenia’s is available once again. Years ago, when the strip mall still had old man Hillman’s Hardware store, Baskin & Robbin’s ice cream was sold out of that corner space. A plant and flower shop with a German Sheperd always loose inside made a run at it for a number of years before folding. Last up was a Beltone hearing aid center, which didn’t last long at all. The far end of the strip was long anchored by an under-sized supermarket, then Rite-Aid moved in. That space is available, too. Along with one or two other storefronts along the strip.

Five-hundred-and-ninety-eight thousand people laid off from their jobs in the month of January are available for work. Most of them, anyway. Some will retire if they can. Others will sulk and put their search. According to the government, about 3.6 million people have been put out of work since the recession started officially in December, 2007. There exists now a huge pool of nervous, struggling and available workers. My wife is available to start work immediately, full or part-time. Untold numbers of stay-at-home moms like her are diving into the pool.

Pass by any automobile dealership and you see row upon row of available vehicles, especially wide-assed chrome and metal pickup trucks and hulking sport utility vehicles too long for the garage door to shut. Farm land is available to build on. More parking slots are available at the mall. More seating is available at restaurants. More seats are available on Broadway, where shows are shutting down after both long and short runs. Empty seats beckon at basketball and ice hockey games and English and Italian soccer matches. You see it every night on cable. Physicians have more hours available for appointments. So do hair stylists. Hospitals have more beds available as people put off what they don’t have to do. Almost 100 million people in this country watched Super Bowl XLIII, a record-breaking number. Why? Because, well, it was cheaper to sit home and watch the game than go to the mall or a flower show or a boat show or to dinner or a bar. Commercial time for the Super Bowl in the end was not available, sold out, because, well, it was a one-time expense and there was this enormous captive audience.

Millions of Americans feel trapped, held hostage by an exhausted, bankrupt economy with the perverse strength to tie down millions. This experience is opposite of the promise implied by all things available. Something available is something to be had. Grab it, quick, before someone else does. Of course that’s not the way it works now. The drum beats daily sounding new layoffs and salary freezes, salary cuts and businesses disappearing, factories deserted, libraries and fire departments darkened, bus and subway lines running less often. The president talks of a possible catastrophe if we don’t get our house in order, and fast.

But there are tempting deals. Off 202 a black man bundled in layers against the cold has been standing for weeks holding one sign after another, “Going out of business,” first for Linen N Things. Then for Circuit City. The latest it is for Oskar Huber, the furniture store. It hasn’t been the same black guy for the past month, I’m sure. But wrapped against the weather, stamping his feet, shaking his hands, it looks like the same guy.

A strange contrast for sure, hunkering down when so much is there for the taking. We’re not used to it, of course. For years and decades leading up to 2007 or 2008, millions of us scooped up what was available without thinking twice. Anything seemed within reach. Maybe a house at the shore. Moving up to a larger home. Enclosing the carport, finishing off the basement. Adding a basketball court. A third car. A roomier car. A Harley. A floor-to-ceiling flat screen. Flat screens for the kitchen and the bedroom. Trips, repeated trips, to Vegas and Disneyworld. Biking in Baja. Vacations to Mexico or Portugal or Greece, who knows where. A night at the Ritz. During Christmas week a few years ago we spent surprise bonus money on a family night at the Ritz-Carlton downtown. Another Christmas we blasted the heat and tested the plumbing in two newly-constructed log cabins, one for the kids and one for mom and dad, outside of cold and empty Zion National Park. A few days later we were living large at the grand Bellagio in Vegas, ice skating on a temporary rink right on the Strip. A couple of good moonlighting gigs had come my way.

I come from the Ralph Kramden School of Money Management. “You see, Alice,” the rotund Ralph would bellow with gusto and satisfaction, in his bus driver’s uniform, holding court in the middle of his bare-bones ‘50s apartment in an episode of “The Honeymooners.” “You see, when I had it, Alice, when I had it, I spent it.” Business-minded people put a lasting value on money and so they work with it differently; they stretch it, manipulate it, multiply it. For me, it’s been a way to get to Zion or Crater Lake in the winter. Santa Monica in the summer. Or to The Blue Man Group show in New York or it is the means to build the CD library my kids can’t believe in the age of iPod. This philosophical difference helps explain why my bro is skiing in Vermont this week and I’m sweating renting three movies from Blockbuster.

Ah, if we had only known. If we had seen signs of this sudden, jarring crash in business and personal fortunes coming. No bonus. A sizeable salary cut three weeks into the new year. “I just kick myself,” said a coworker a few days ago. “Thinking about what I spent money on. Now I comb every expense and I go to bed at night thinking, ‘OK, what test don’t I know about that will come next?’” Her husband, who works independently painting blue skies and puffy clouds on the ceilings of children’s bedrooms in wealthy homes along with other unique custom paint jobs, says he is booked up for February but the phone’s not ringing and he’s concerned about March. A lot of contractors and consultants and salespeople are waiting by their phones. Or calling everyone they know.

“You’ll tell me if, you know, you find out, you know, that things might get worse,” asked my coworker, full of hesitation. When you are cornered and scared you think hard about who you can trust, what you can say, and who might cause you trouble. I assured her I would. “You would do that?” asked my wife. “If you were told in confidence?” This woman and I have worked together for more than ten years. She works extraordinarily hard when she must, which is often, and she’s very talented. “Yeah, I would, “ I said. “What could happen, really? They’d never find out probably.” “They” — the owners or managers who sign the paycheck to keep you going — have morphed into inscrutable and unpredictable figures. With one hand on the TNT plunger, it seems.

Many of us haven’t the slightest idea if and when HQ will rock us with the next blunt email announcement. Next week. Next month. Who knows? If sales keep falling across almost all markets in my industry, and right now our store is $80,000 off for March billings, will the owners be able to pay off the bank loan for last year’s acquisition negotiated just after the unofficial recession became official, only no one knew it yet?

It’s impossible to predict with any confidence how deep the recession will go, how long it will last. Any sense of confidence is but a whiff. People are dropping out of jobs like Mother Nature’s victims who fell from the sky in M. Night Shyamalan’s so-called eco-thriller “The Happening.” My wife’s sister emailed Saturday that her son got laid off from an investment house where he wasn’t happy anyway; said son and his fiancé lost their jobs in a bar that closed and they have moved in with her and her husband in Roanoke “to get their life straightened out.” A brother-in-law lost his job before the holidays. Her best friend’s husband got laid off this week from a auto dealership. Her daughter’s company got bought out and there is talk of lay-offs and relocating to Minnesota. “All in all we are thankful for what we have,” she concluded, rather abruptly. Still, amen to that.

She’s got the best perspective, but one hard to hold on to. Today I drove around thinking how office space, retail space, land, houses, autos, boats, motorcycles, tickets to this concert and seats that game are all abundantly available at the moment. But in a recession, to be “available” is too often a tease and a taunt. Six months ago, three months ago, heck, maybe three weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought this way at all.