The last of the grand old Washington department stores, Hecht’s, disappeared a couple of weeks ago, all of its properties being rebranded as Macy’s stores. It was, the Washington Post intoned, the “end of an era.” I, for one, was not overcome with nostalgia at the passing of Hecht’s. Indeed, I smirked when I heard the news. Hecht’s, you see, once denied me credit.
Younger friends laugh upon hearing this, and from the look of disbelief on their faces I gather I may have been the last person in America to fill out a charge card application and be turned down, and by a department store, no less. They wouldn’t tell me why, but encouraged me to apply again in a few weeks.
The year was 1985, and I was new to Washington, which was no doubt part of the problem. Another problem: I was 24 years old and had never had a credit card, which even two decades ago must have marked me as a cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller or some other disreputable alien life form. Nowadays I hear they issue you your first credit card in the maternity ward, along with the birth certificate. Or, failing that, you can randomly fill out one of the 10 to 12 credit card come-ons deposited in every American mailbox on a daily basis. But some of us used to get by without plastic, in what was quaintly known as the cash economy.
Or, in my case, the beg-and-barter economy, as I was chronically short on cash. I did have a new job but needed to make good on some personal IOUs, and so couldn’t afford rent and was sleeping in my aunt’s basement in Alexandria. This was my fifth address of the previous 12 months, and I guilelessly listed them all on the credit application, including the two different Y’s in Manhattan where I had bunked (the YMCA on East 47th St. and the YMHA at 92nd and Lexington) as well as the sublet of a sublet I had shared with some Juilliard students in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge at 178th St.–a short walk from where Senator Alfonse D’Amato and U.S. District Attorney Rudy Giuliani would make an undercover crack buy the following summer. Apparently none of these credentials established me as a solid citizen in the eyes of the Hecht’s Gradgrinds.
As the saying goes, I was living from paycheck to paycheck–except the saying is wrong. Anyone who has ever lived from paycheck to paycheck can attest that what you actually do is live from paycheck to 24 or 48 or 72 hours before the next paycheck–at which point, back in the pre-credit card, pre-ATM dark ages, considerable creativity was required to get by. Fortunately, I had just my own sorry self to support in those days. Many of the precise details now escape me–they say this is common in the event of trauma–but if I’m not mistaken, a man can live a week or more on a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a six-pack of V8 juice without developing an aggravated case of scurvy, rickets, or beriberi.
Under the circumstances, why I even wanted a Hecht’s credit card is a good question. Not having any money, I was constantly obsessing over it, doing sums in my head of the small amounts I would need to get through a day and still put something aside. It does rather kill the life of the mind. I was planning to move out of my aunt’s basement once I had accumulated a month’s rent for a deposit. Somewhere around $450 was what I needed to set myself up in a small studio apartment of my own. It had occurred to me, though, that no apartment is really worth living in that doesn’t also have a color TV. The one I wanted was on sale at Hecht’s for $300–with no money down and no payments for three months if you charged it to your Hecht’s card. Here, I thought, was my express bus to the lower middle class. And then the driver had the nerve to boot me to the curb.
Of course, I can see now that my thinking wasn’t too sound. I blame the peanut butter/V8 diet. I’ll even grant that the underwriters in the Hecht’s credit department probably knew what they were doing. But I’ve still got a grin on my face when I walk past the new Macy’s.
RICHARD STARR
