The Texture of Money

Brian Mahoney

I moved into Brooklyn with a minimum of possessions. Two twist-tied hefty bags of clothes, a ripped comforter, a ratty futon that I had bought two years and three relationships previous, a few boxes of books -my bulkiest item, a box of sentimental junk I never looked at, a General Electric clock radio with a fake walnut grain finish and a "Power Failure Tone" switch on the bottom. And a plastic jug. A translucent, sapphire blue six gallon water cooler jug. It had about a buck fifty in nickels and (mostly) pennies and was as light as a loaf of bread when I carried it up the stairs of 118 7th Avenue, into my new apartment.

The jug had originally (as much as I knew of the origin of the jug, anyway) been the property of my former roommate James, who had left for California to become a skydiving instructor with two English expatriates and as much gear as they could cram into a 1979 monkey shit brown Camaro with yellow and white racing stripes. The jug didn't fit, I guess; when I moved into James' room after he left I found it empty except for a dozen pennies James had marooned in it.

James had used the jug as a piggy bank until the day before he left for California and grand dreams of skydive instruction. He was forced to cash in his change for his third of a new muffler for the ailing Camaro which didnít pass inspection.

Watching James' coinage spill from the jug to the floor triggered a flood of memories of others I had known who had stored money - Paul Regan, a gun nut and older brother of my childhood friend Tommy Regan, kept his change in an empty 50 mm ammo box he had bought out of the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine (another of Tommy's crazy older brothers, Peter, who worked at the Bettman Archive and stole photos of Mussolini hung upside down and riddled with bullets, used a gallon wine bottle; Tommy himself didn't collect change - he just took what he needed from his older brothers). Joe Simone collected only dimes, in Mason jars. Michael Benish threw his change in a coffee can. Jeff Donahoe used an up-ended Yankees batting helmet.

But what struck me as I saw James lift his half empty jug, was that I had never seen any of the jars, jugs, bottles or helmets filled. I had never witnessed anyone's vessel brimming with coins, the metallic gleam reflecting in their eyes, excited words pouring forth from their lips like, "Now I can buy that AK-47 Iíve been saving for! "(what Paul might have said). Or, "Alright! Iím going to send away for that Lou Pinella batting glove! "(what Jeff might have said.) No one in my acquaintance had ever achieved their elusive goal as far as I knew -and everyone had something in mind, usually something specific -the end result of what they had been saving for. Either they had lost interest or had succumb to an impulse to grab it all buy pizza for all their friends (as Jeff had done), or had, I guess, just outgrown saving change in jars.

This thought put me in a black mood. (The mood can't quite be described as angry; on the spectrum of anger it was on the edge of an impotent wrath coupled with a clichéd wistful sadness I get whenever I think back on my childhood.) For if no one I had known had ever succeeded at merely filling a jar with coins, then what hope was there in anything? It seemed to foretell a lifetime of rainy days and Mondays, as poor, doomed Karen Carpenter sang of it, stretching out unto death.

The scale of these non-jar filling failures depressed me too - we could put a man on the moon but we couldn't fill a jar with coins? Such a small, typically human failure; another small diminishment that Paul and Peter and Jeff and Joe probably can't even locate in the swirling mists of memory but which sits in the back of their consciousness in the box of failures we all keep there.

But I kept the damn sapphire blue six gallon water cooler jug anyway. I didnít know why. It certainly wasn't because I was attached to it in any way. Or perhaps I was attached to it, but not in a positive, Iíll-keep-this-for-sentimental-or-utilitarian-reasons way. I wanted to keep it near to me as one would want to keep oneís archenemy or doppelganger close by, in order to keep tabs on him, like Dr. Frankenstein stalking his creation across the frozen wastes.

I think I also had some idea about breaking the chain of failure surrounding keeping a change jar -I wanted to decisively fill the jug. I yearned to succeed where others had failed. And I thought there should be long German verb for that kind of feeling -of having secretly set out to best oneís peers even though you knew in your nihilist heart of hearts that you were doomed to failure like all the rest -some unfathomably deep word for the roiling tempest of longing the jug had brewed within me.

So I started to keep some change in it right after James left -with no real purpose in mind, just to "keep change"; simply an exercise, or so I told myself -but found that Iíd be tipping the jug over for change constantly, as soon as I needed to do laundry, buy the paper, or eat breakfast. My modest financial situation at the time necessitated this. I stopped after a few weeks and just left the money in my pockets to be lost in the cracks and crevices of couches and car seats instead. I mentally noted that I had scored another small failure, but proceeded wholly -on the conscious level -to forget about the translucent sapphire blue six gallon water cooler jug.

Then one night soon after I moved into Brooklyn, after getting home from work at the bar where I was paid exclusively in cash, I realized that my pockets of my black jeans were weighed down with change. I had forgotten to cash in for my coinage for bills at the end of the night. Had I wandered out into the Brooklyn night and had the misfortune of stumbling into the Gowanus Canal -a miasmic, pestilential waterway that intersected Union St. near my apartment -I certainly would have suffered the fate of Ophelia. I must have had five or six dollars in quarters in my jeans.

With pockets bulging I stared at the jug; it sat as impassive as Buddha in a corner of my small bedroom. A pale, early morning light played on it and the jug looked luminous and crystalline. In the stillness I could almost hear the it taunt me. "C'mon," the jug said, "Drop your change in me. But be warned -along this road lie the wreck of many, better than you, who tried and failed. Who are you to presume? Are you truly made of sterner stuff?"

It was a distinctly Prufrockian moment. The jug had somehow assumed a ridiculously inflated importance and seemed to represent the grand sum of all human failing previous and all my own insufficiencies and general lack. All the half-finished poems. All the botched relationships. My derailed career as a "writer." The semester of college I was short of graduation by. The disappointment of my parents. This stupid fucking bartending job I hated and which had brought about this moment of coin-induced crisis.

Without a third thought, I tossed my change as nonchalantly as possible into the jug -which was difficult because the opening was only an inch and a half in diameter. I dropped the coins in in small handfuls. They banged around the barren plastic bottom and made such a racket that I figured I surely must have awakened my new roommates. I fell asleep fearing that they hated me and would nurse small grievances against me and secretly call me The-guy-who-throws-change-around-at-the-crack-of-dawn.

Some time soon after that night, I started stuffing the jug with bills as well as coins. For I was making such an obscene amount of money for a single guy with no responsibilities that I could afford to empty my billfold of singles whenever I came home. If I went out and bought a buttered bagel with a five, Iíd come home and throw four singles in the jug. At work, I made a point of not cashing in some of my singles so I could stuff the jar when I got home. I never mentioned it to anyone, but after a few weeks I started to become a bit odd and obsessional about it. I would spend a five for a slice of pizza instead of the couple singles in my wallet so that I would have more money to feed the jug. I kept throwing my change in too, but now in an absent-minded, pocket emptying way; I had already forgotten my dream of filling a jar with change. I had moved on to larger prey.

Every day for a year and a half I poured change and bills into the sapphire blue plastic jug, watching the level of money imperceptibly rise toward the top. It was slow going, and it didnít change much day to day, but by and by the jug started filling up. I didnít notice until one day when I got scared about the amount of money that was in the jug and the feared it would be stolen. I put a white tee shirt over the jug that made it look like an armless, headless, barrel-chested torso propped against the wall next to my bed., Rolling over in the middle of the night, the sight of it was often quite disconcerting. The dismembered piggy bank looked hideous, like someone drawn and quartered; yet I felt like it was me who had done it. I was the one who had tied the ropes from the horsesí bridles to the legs and arms. I was the one who yelled "Giddyup!" and slapped the horses on the ass. I was the satisfied one.

But not so satisfied. I was sorely tempted to cut open the jug after a few months. I fantasized about ripping the blue plastic open and wrapping coins in paper wrappers and stacking bills in piles of fifty which I would take to the bank and watch riffle in the digital counting machine. I wondered how long I could hold out. And why was I waiting, anyway? What was I saving for other than saving itself? I had no vision or goal -no AK-47 or Lou Pinella batting glove danced in my head like a proverbial sugarplum. I waited anyway. Every day that passed without disemboweling the jug was a victory. I felt like an addict locked in a tango with an addiction I couldnít give name to. When would the music stop?

This continued for some time, a year or so, with fluctuations in the intensity of my commitment to stuffing the jug. I went through stages of compulsion and ambivalence. I binged and purged. Then finally, amazingly, the day came to break the bank. I had decided to quit my job and move back upstate to finish college. It was reckoning time, and not least among them was the reckoning of my net worth.

I bought a bottle of red wine, turned off the phone and locked myself in my room. The heat, which my roommates controlled from a secret thermostat in their room, was intense for a December afternoon. I peeled off my tee shirt and shook of my pants and hoisted the jug onto the bed from my cross legged position. It was heavier than I expected. It took me ten minutes to rip through the blue plastic circumference with a dull knife. Then I lifted the top off and coins and bills cascaded into and over my lap and onto the ripped comforter. I placed the now useless jug on the floor and started smoothing out the crumpled bills with the palms of my hands. I spread out the coins as well. I gulped some wine straight from the bottle.

How what happened next happened I can't quite remember. One minute I was lying on top of this pile of money like Smogg on his treasure hoard in Tolkien. The next I'm on my back dropping coins on my chest, enjoying the feel of the cool metal on my nipples, watching coins roll down my stomach. I grabbed fistfuls of bills and rub them on myself. I did the backstroke and the Australian crawl across my bed in a pool of money. It felt like something out of a movie, even as it was happening, except more realistic because the movie would star a beautiful girl clutching armfuls of crisp, clean hundreds with shining white edges to her heaving bosom; yet here I was in my boxer shorts rolling coins over my love handles and scratching myself with oft-handled, dark green dollar bills.

I didnít stop though. It felt silly and false and downright fetishistic in some way, but there was also something to it which was as authentic as anything I had ever done. Like if you've ever been caught masturbating and felt the full heat of your humanity rising to a flush in your face -this is what it means to be alive. You never forget it. If someone had caught me at that moment I would have felt the same way. Exposed. Found out as a fraud and a pervert. But I wasn't. And even though I had failed to fill the translucent sapphire blue six gallon water cooler jug, as I knew I would, I had come to understand something else about money; quality as opposed to quantity perhaps. I now understood money in a tactile way one can never get from a row of numbers on a bank statement. I had come to know the texture of money.

If no one had ever succeeded at merely filling a jar with coins, then what hope was there in anything?