Pennies from Heaven

Forget the global economy and just think about me for a second. The recession has hit me real hard. Actually, I venture to say that I was the first to feel the rumblings back in 2006 or 2007- whenever I graduated from college. That's the day I realized I wouldn't have sweet sweet college loan dollars lining my pockets and coming out of my ears. I flew to Los Angeles with an iPod, a new computer, sunglasses, cigarettes, bags of psychotropic medication and assorted snacks. I stayed in the Hollywood hills at the Oakwood Suites. Air conditioned with beige carpeting. I had the option of maid service and I took that option. She came every week and did my dishes and emptied my ashtrays.

After work on Thursday, I had no money to get to home from work. I needed my paycheck and the beautiful hipster accounting girls were not at there desks that day. Too afraid to track them down, to make a scene.

Broke, hot and in despair, I found myself somehow downtown by the two story McDonalds and the Hard Rock Cafe on Erie or Huron or one of those streets. I called my mother and asked her to put yet another twenty dollars in my account. She does, thankfully, and I immediately buy a pack of cigarettes and head straight to McDonalds for a Filet-O-Fish combo. While devouring the soft fishy goodness I realize that while I have obtained the essentials to survive another evening, I AGAIN have no way to get home.

I begin to dig in my backpack for change, confident that I can rattle up enough nickels, dimes and quarters to get on the CTA. Turns out that I have done this one too many times and I am only able to come up with about a dollar eighty five. Not enough to ride the shiny brown line back home.

I think about calling my mother and asking for another twenty dollars but I can't bring myself to do it. I have to get it together. I have to figure out how to do this grown up thing- get my OWN ride home, buy my OWN food and cigarettes. I fear that one day my mom isn't going to answer that phone call. Then who am I gonna call? Am I gonna call Kara in her New York comedy penthouse and ask her to Western Union me over some cigarette and bus money. It has to stop.

I have scads of pennies in my bag but the CTA isn't interested in my pennies. Outside the Brown line entrance, I pick through handfuls of stinky sticky pennies. While I am picking off pieces of candy and disintegrating mood stablilzers that have fallen out their bottles from my precious pennies a disheveled gentleman approaches me.

I can barely understand this man as I continue to count my pennies. Tangled sentences and phrases fall out of his mouth. "Excuse me sir...Elvis...Haha...Anything you can spare...I am trying to..." Then he wiggles his hands in front of me and laughs. He has no thumbs and seems very delighted by this.

I impatiently inform him that I have no money. "I am counting pennies, I'm sorry." He fades away.

I manage to change my pennies into train fare and while I am riding home I remember the words of our Nation's poet Cher:

When the money's gone
No more caviar
Will you eat fast food in a beat up car
Live life modestly, lost in lotto dreams
Will you find your way though it all with me
Through it all with me