Gimme A Dollar
by j.charles @ textproductions
I’ve always been a heavy drinker. I mean a lotta lot of liquor needs to go down my pie hole to even begin the effects of intoxication. The common abbreviation is “heavyweight.” By fifteen I was already copping 18 packs of Coors to spend the evening roof hopping with a few close friends.
Now it’s commonplace to wake up and have extraordinarily limited abilities to recall either actions or words.
Today I woke up in my clothes from the previous evening, which had been pressed and waiting for just such an occasion. The clock said one in the afternoon, which was fine. It’s just that I had already missed two classes, and had no intentions of going to the other two. No intentions of standing up, either. So I reached for the gallon of water that I keep next to my bed for times such as this. As I did so I noticed that all the money I had not spent the previous night was strewn about my bedding. I was laying on some, some was tucked inside of my shirt pocket, and some made its way onto the floor. All in all it was about twenty four dollars in singles, the fruits of paying for every round with the largest bill I possessed. And of course, some of that loose change was surely spent on Faralito after the club, so add about six bucks. I didn’t think I had even brought that much money, but there it was. In my bed, and not in my bank account. Whatever, I wrote it off as just about the least I could’ve done to myself.
Finding money hanging out of your clothing just ain’t that big of a surprise to me anymore, as sad as that may seem. The kicker came about two hours later after I had prepared for work and climbed into my sub-compact Korean automobile. It was laying in the entirety of my back seat, and I noticed it right away. It wasn’t until after I was on the road that I began to ponder its presence.
Last night, apparently while waiting for a friend to pull up and follow me to the burrito hut, me and a friend were smoking in the car. The homeless, knowing that just before two is the prime time for begging, began to populate the streets in the immediate vicinity of the Elbo Room. We were parked by the liquor store up on the corner of fifteenth, just minding our own business, when a man holding a bagged, framed print propositioned me.
“Hay, man…I got this painting. It’s a Picasso, still in the plastic. This shit is tight. “
“And why the fucks are you carrying it with you at two in the morning, sucka?”
“Cuz I’m trying to get myself a little drink at the liquor store before it closes. I’ll sell it to ya for five dollars.”
“You wouldn’t be lying to me about Picasso, would you?
“Yeah. It’s a print. But it is hand numbered.”
Whatever, I mean I have no problem giving homeless folk cigarettes, matches, food, or, situation and manners permitting, a sweater. But money is an entirely different fucking sport. You didn’t get to being homeless by managing your money, and I didn’t earn it to give you a dollar.
So, on the one hand, he was honest with me about the proceeds going to the cheapest bottle of vodka only several feet away, and I appreciated that. After all, it would’ve been hypocritical for me to think otherwise, since I did just leave the bar where I procured several dollars in change, which was currently busting out of one single pocket. After some deliberation and continued swindling on his part, I reached for my dollar wad.
“All right, give me the fucking picture, but don’t let me get this shit home and see it on the news tomorrow, know what I mean?”
“No, man, its all good, I found it in a dumpster on Guerrero, ‘bout three blocks away.’
People don’t just throw away a glass frame like this, regardless of the picture inside of it. They throw the picture away and re use the steel frame with ultra-violet proof thick ass glass. Seventy percent chance that he found it, twenty percent chance that someone was moving and it was the only thing in arms reach that was worth a damn, five percent chance he pulled a jack move and it was the last of his booty, and five percent chance he was sitting at home thinking “y’know, I really love vodka, and I want to sell that picture in the closet to get some before the night is over.”
Homeless man tried to get me to open my trunk and let him put it in there for me. I wasn’t that drunk, and I really like the subwoofers that I have back there, so I made him pass it into the passenger window of my sub-compact Korean coupe, over the head of my passenger Vince, and into he back seat where it stayed, un noticed and forgotten, until about eight hours after I pulled into my driveway.