You’ve got your whole life ahead of you…
I puked and I cried and I puked some more. I crouched there until I felt like an empty skin. I looked at the piece of myself floating in the water and I howled. Charlie echoed in my head some more.
Don’t dwell on it. You’re young and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I was young, twenty-five. I’d never live to see twenty-six. My whole life. I had my whole life ahead of me.
And that added up to not much time at all…
On the way home, I stopped at the bank to cash what would be my last paycheck. Five hundred dollars. That’s what I was worth. One week’s pay, five years’ worth of severance, and my unpaid vacation. Five hundred bucks. And once the immediate bills were paid, that would leave us with two hundred.
The line at the bank was long. It was Friday and everybody else in town had gotten paid too. Apparently, like me, none of them trusted direct deposit. I got stuck between a thin, jittery woman with three crying kids, and a wheezing old man that stank of arthritis cream. It took a while, and as we shuffled slowly forward, I counted the security cameras to pass the time. Then I counted them again, along with the tellers, the exits, the windows, and everything else. I counted four nondigital cameras; six tellers; one exit (though I was guessing that the employees had a fire exit somewhere); two windows, plus the drive-thru. This bank, my bank, was less than ten minutes from two major highways, plus dozens of back roads.
“Fuck it.”
The skinny woman gawked at me, pulling her three kids close to her. I grinned until she looked away.
“Fuck it. Fuck ’em all.”
I moved forward and the cameras watched me silently.
I didn’t care. Grinning, I gave them the finger.
The guy who said that money isn’t everything was obviously never poor. Money is everything—
the root of all happiness. I read in a magazine that the number one thing married couples fight about is money. People lie for money, cheat for money, steal for money, and kill for money. They kill themselves and each other for dead presidents on pieces of paper. Money is what makes the world go round. Lying on your deathbed, you might be judged by the company you kept while alive or the way you treated your family or what those you love really thought about you; but even this stems from money. Maybe it seems like the two are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. The more money you have, the better you can treat your family. Money allows you to provide more of the things they need. The friends you have around you are determined by the size of your wallet. Do you think Donald Trump hangs out with homeless guys and crack addicts all day long? In the end, it’s all about the green. To paraphrase the Beatles, “and in the end, the love you make is equal to the cash you make.”
Want a roof over your head? That takes money. Want to eat? Money. To get the money, you’ve got to have a job, but even that takes money. How are you going to get to work every day?
Drive? The car costs money: gas, insurance, repairs. Take mass transit? Those bus tokens aren’t free. Ride your bike? Hey, even most service stations are charging a quarter for the air pump these days.
It’s very simple. In our society, you can’t live without money. I wasn’t going to be living much longer, but Michelle and T.J. would be. I was sick and tired of seeing Michelle wear worn-out panty hose with runs in them and fashions from five years ago. Tired of getting T.J.’s toys at yard sales. Tired of buying generic brands that tasted like cardboard. Tired of saving aluminum cans to turn in for beer money. Tired of living from paycheck to paycheck and never getting ahead or saving money for the future. Tired of us being poor just because of where we lived and how we’d grown up.
My wife and my son could have better lives after I was gone. They deserved it. I wanted T.J. to go to college and be somebody smart—not work in a dirty foundry like his old man and his grandfather had done. I wanted them to be happy.
Happy.
Happiness equals money. Money equals happiness. It’s fucking arithmetic. When I look back on it now, I don’t know. Would all of this have happened, would I have come up with the idea if I hadn’t been dying? Probably not. Instead, I would have busted my ass five days a week for shit pay, until alcohol’s soft middle age crept up on me and I died of a heart attack, probably while on a fishing trip with John and Sherm or sitting in the bleachers, cheering on T.J. as he made the winning touchdown for the school (because I had no doubt that he’d be a quarterback when he got to high school). Even a heart attack would have been preferable to the cancer—but then again, what chance at a better life would I have been able to offer my family?
That guy, the older guy who remained a white trash loser and went on to die, he could have never given them the chances that I wanted to provide. And those chances—that better life—could only be paid for with money.
The cancer was killing me, eating away at my insides. In a few weeks, it would leave me a husk, like the shells that locusts leave behind on the trees, a hollow shell that used to be Tommy O’Brien. But while it was doing that, while it was gnawing away, it was also liberating me—freeing me to take risks that I would have never taken before. Allowing me finally to do something to make our lives better.
I drove home. It was bingo night, and Michelle had already taken T.J. over to her mother’s house, so I was alone in the trailer. I undressed, and took a good long look at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. Two black, puffy circles hung beneath my eyes. My skin was pale, feverish; and my jaw and neck were swollen. My cheeks were puffy too. It looked like I had the mumps. My teeth hurt, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the cancer or the fact that I hadn’t been able to afford a dentist in five years. I’d lost weight—like an anorexic on the Atkins diet. Most of all, I just looked tired. Beaten.
I wasn’t beaten, at least, not entirely, but I was tired. Tired of this trailer and thrift shop clothes for my wife and yard sale toys for my son. Tired of this way of life. I was sick of it all, and I was going to do something about it.
I stepped into the shower and let the water wash over me. It seemed to help my headache, so I leaned into the spray, letting it pound against my temples and forehead. My skin had gotten sensitive over the past week, and the stream felt like sandpaper against the sore parts, like it was grinding away the old Tommy and revealing what lay beneath. It felt like a baptism. I thought about the bank.
I was going to do something. What was the worst they could do to me if I got caught? Life in prison? Lethal injection?
Those sentences both added up to less than a month…
FIVE
Sherm grinned, took another swig of beer, lit up a cigarette, and said, “Fuck me running. They laid us off, boys!”
From the battered jukebox in the corner, the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin Man” had segued into Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” I lit up a cigarette of my own and wailed along with Marvin inside my head—wanting to holler and throw up my hands while inflation grew and bills piled up. Marvin Gaye had known what time it was. He died young too.
“So what are we going to do, you guys?” John stared into his shot glass, as if the answer could be found there. In a way, I guess it could.
“I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re going to stand in the unemployment line and get our asses signed up. Shit, dog, we got the whole summer free! We can sleep all day, party all night, and let the government send us a fat check every two weeks.”
“That’s all right for you, Sherm,” John scoffed, “but I got fucking bills to pay. You know how little money you get on unemployment? Bobby Ray Hall was on it for six months, and he only got a quarter of his hourly pay.”