My Money

There was a day a little more than five years ago when I withdrew a hundred dollar bill from the bank and walked around with it. I was going through a divorce and hadn't yet met Veronica, and money was hard to come by. This day, when I pulled out the hundred, happened to fall in between the day when my paycheck cleared and the days when my bills were due. I knew I had to put it back for check-writing time, but I just wanted to fold it up and put it in my pocket. I suppose I could have pulled out a few hundreds, but one felt like enough.

I went to a pet store and looked at animals I could buy with the hundred. I watched fish swim in pointless circles. I imagined owning their lives, and putting their endless circles in my apartment. I watched various fuzzy rodents sleep. I watched other people's dogs get shaved behind the grooming station's Plexiglass. I watched a turtle sit on a rock. I thought about taking the hundred and converting it into animals, taking them all home and waiting for them to die. I would take care of them, of course -- feed them, comfort them -- for as much time as possible, but the lot of animals from the pet store is that they die more quickly than we do. My money would die with them. Unless I bought a parrot, because those live forever. But they cost more than a hundred dollars.

I went to a car dealership. The hundred made me feel like I belonged. I parked my beat-up Ford in the space right next to the showroom door and walked in and looked at the pristine indoor cars meaningfully. A salesperson did sales on me. The hundred made me accept a test drive in a convertible. I drove it around the slow, winding streets of Santa Cruz, flinching when the salesperson commanded me to get on the PCH and "open it up" so I could feel the engine. I didn't want to feel the engine. I wanted to feel my hundred grow insignificant and inadequate in my pocket. Cars are infinite money compared to a single slip of cash. I shook the salesperson's hand and took his business card, put it in my other pocket, the one without money in it.

I went to a bar. I could have bought everyone a round. I had a beer which I paid for with a debit card. The hundred slept.

I went to a park and took the hundred out of my pocket and looked at it. I studied its details, the filigree and the grandeur. This was when the hundred dollar bill was going through its puberty from the staid little iconography of the twentieth century to the bombastic announcement of today. Franklin's head had swollen all out of proportion, but there was still no color but dirty green, the green of oxidized copper. Someone came walking by. I put the hundred back in my pocket so that they wouldn't take it. Or think of taking it. I put the bill away as a woman might cross her legs and fold her arms across her chest when a frightening stranger approaches. The park bench overlooked the Pacific Ocean from atop a modest cliff, and the sea churned, empty of money.

I went to a bike shop and carefully selected a new headlamp for my bike, then circled the register, then put it back and left.

When I returned the hundred dollars to the bank, just before it closed, I had to fill out a form to tell them where to put it, even though I had only taken it out a few hours earlier. They had effectively lost the hundred dollar bill, and here I was, returning it to its owner. The teller was the same teller who performed the withdrawal, but she didn't recognize me or the bill. It went into a drawer, and I was given a receipt, my hundred-dollar reward for bringing it back home.

On the way back to my apartment -- which still didn't feel like a home to me, so displaced by a loss of love, so foreign in its promise of solitude -- I had to fill my car up with gas. It cost maybe $30. I imagined the transaction of the gas pump reaching through electric wires to dip into that drawer and pull the hundred dollar bill apart and hand its dismembered limbs to the gas company. I couldn't get the bill back now. It was gone, broken into twenties and tens and fives and ones the way a grandparent dies with broken pieces of his DNA surrounding the hospital bed and mourning, their little bit of the original carried on until the memory of the grandparent's life is generations away, spare change.

All I had was that afternoon with it, and we accomplished nothing together, meandering freely and emptily like a pair of high school lovers with no particular agenda and no means to obtain one. I should have memorized its serial number, or photographed its face, or framed it the way some people frame dead butterflies.

I could theoretically do this again. Tomorrow, if I'd like and I have time to visit the bank. But I won't. Money is lonely, whether you have it or not.