Money Man

I don’t need to work for a living because I find all the money I need. It’s right there on the ground at my feet, or stashed under selected objects—though I don’t know who selects them, or why. I just reach down and pick up the sweet, green bills, and don’t worry about it. So eat your hearts out, you working-class peons and nose-to-the-grindstone grunts!

I guess I have a talent for finding this loose or lost cash. No one else I know can do it, not to the extent I can. Perhaps it’s because I hate to work so much that I developed this gift as a survival tactic. Or maybe I inherited the knack from my dad, a true and noble deadbeat in his own right. All I can say is: Sorry you can’t share my happiness—you bunch of minimum wage animals and overtime addicts! Too bad you can’t take it to the bank like me!

I first noticed my cash-finding talent when I was in the Welfare office applying for those plump, sweet benefits. The hag of a caseworker was explaining to me that I needed to do some kind of work to earn my handout, if you will, that the state wasn’t just going to give me a free lunch. It was that kind of bite-in-the-backside reasoning. So I reached down on the floor beneath the chair I sat in and pulled up an Andrew Jackson. A real one! I waved it in Ms. Caseworker’s astonished face and walked out. I said, Take that, company woman and loyal puncher of the time clock! If looks could kill, she’d have dismembered me. But I was as surprised as she was, that early-to-work, early-to-die witch! That was my first score.

I walked home from the Welfare office, on a hunch that I’d find a lot more money that day. I did, too. At the base of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in town, I found a nice, crisp ten-spot. In the men’s room at the library, inside the paper towel dispenser, a bunch of green singles that came fluttering out with the brown paper towels. In the stacks I had to work hard—if you can call it work—to extract ten fifties from the pages of a book on Tibetan Meditation. On a swath of freshly-mown grass in the park, with the mowing man watching me, I pulled up a new twenty with a cut in it from the mower’s blade but still plenty redeemable. In the hallway of my apartment building when I got home, an actual U.S. Grant. So: Have a nice day at work, you toches-kissing, ladder-climbing nine-to-fiving workaholics! Hope you losers have enough quality time left over for your loved ones after a day of humping the moon for your masters!

I guess right about now you’re enjoying the fifteen-minute smoke break the vampire who employs you allows you two of per day. That is, if the vampire hasn’t “moved your cheese” out of the country and left you with no job at all—you corporate ladder climbing stooge and bonus junkie! Well nobody’s moving my fermented milk, because nobody but me knows where it’s stashed.

Out of habit, I put in for a position the other day. I got a little panicky when I hadn’t found any cash that morning, only enough to cover my Starbucks and sticky bun. So I put in for an attendant at a car lot. I was about to grab a hose and cloth to make those cars out there gleam like fine jewels, when a light breeze carried a pair of U.S. Grants my way. I left the hose with the water running out of it and took off with no regrets. I still had the touch. Hear me, you word processing monkeys, you union joining lackeys, you pay-for-performance whores?

So where’s all this money coming from, all of a sudden? Maybe you’d care to know. I’ve never figured it out, really. Do I have a secret benefactor, who’s spreading the stuff my way? Yeah, right. I haven’t met that Regis anywhere. Have people started getting careless and dropping their cash all over? Not likely. And I haven’t seen in the newspapers that a bank blew up or a Brinks truck exploded or a rock star lost his wallet, spraying cash all over town. And if that happened, I wouldn’t be the only lucky one, right? But no one else seems to be finding any, or they’re laying low about it. Not me. I’m telling the world. Best way to get rich is—don’t work!

We debase ourselves for money, really we do. Or rather, you do. You give lucre a bad name, you jackass. You make a person think something’s wrong with having it, the contortions, schemes, crap jobs, hold-ups, scams and foolhardy investments you degrade yourself by. Here’s a suggestion: Just call out to money and it will run to you. I have a little sound I make with my lips that causes the stuff to pile up outside on my doorstep: Sst! Sst! Sst! It’s the sound of my thumb riffling a tall stack of crisp greenbacks.

If it works for me, it’ll work for you, you coffee-swilling, sleep-deprived, nail-biting cubicle dwellers!

Once more: You sweating, over-achieving, stressed-out, always in a meeting, looking to retire, about to be outsourced drones!