…which is whipped up by a speeding motorcycle whose rider doesn’t even notice what’s fluttering around him. As luck would have it, 39P lands, like a feather caught in a breeze, on the inverted cover, slightly wedged between the cover and the rim. There it sits until our pathetic schlub who fell in the hole starts hollering throught the holes in the cover, and a little old lady hears him and calls the cops. They call a city crew out, along with the fire department; they lift the cover off and the bill gracefully wafts into the fellow’s grimy shirt pocket.
The paramedics take him to the emergency room, where…
…the doctors cut Doug’s clothes off to get at his injured body. Broken and bettered, he goes into the emergency operating room. His personal effects, including 39P, are set aside in a sealed sterile container (sterile on the outside, that is).
Doug is in the hospital for several weeks, and has plenty of time to contemplate his life and the mess he’s made of it. His tooth is operated on as part of a larger emergency jaw procedure, so happily he no longer has to pay for that operation separately. He also has a broken leg repaired, and ligaments and tendons strained from the fall slowly heal.
It is in the third week that he realizes something. Perhaps it’s the physiotherapy, perhaps it’s the enforced absence from booze or drugs, perhaps it’s that his no-good ‘friends’ hadn’t shown up to visit him once–and certain other people have–but he feels clearer than he has for years. His belongings, including his wallet and 39P, have long since been returned to him. He can totter around the hospital now, and he uses 39P to buy a newspaper and get some change at the hospital shop. He looks through the newspaper, circles a particular ad, then makes a phone call.
39P…
leaves the hospital shop’s cash register when it’s given as change to Denise Millward, a quiet, serious, well-dressed young woman who’s visiting her mother in the recovery ward. Denise buys some M&Ms and the latest Newsweek with a $20 bill and gets 39P and some other bills and coins back as change. She’s bought the candy and the magazine for the plane trip to Washington, and she leaves within the hour. On the plane, she eats the candy and distractedly leafs through the magazine.
From Reagan National Airport, she goes by cab straight to the Hay-Adams Hotel. She shows her ID to a cold-eyed man in a blue suit in the lobby and is directed to an elevator, where she shows her ID to another man, who looks at her and then at her ID twice. Five other people are nearby, watching her closely; all are heavily armed, although you wouldn’t necessarily notice this at a glance.
Denise is a Secret Service agent. She takes the elevator up and checks in with her supervisor, Bob Kim, an older Asian-American man built like a linebacker. “Denise!” he says, shaking her hand, “welcome back! How was your mom?”
“Ready to climb the walls, but she’ll be fine. Knee replacements are pretty routine these days, you know how it is. She should be back golfing by the end of the month.”
“Great. Good to have you back. It’s been pretty crazy here but you’ll get back into the swing of things in no time, I know. The President-elect and his family have gotten pretty well settled and the inauguration plans are just about nailed down. Did you see Memo 09-07A?”
“Um, the parade route stuff?”
“Right. It’s been rescinded.” He hands her three stapled pieces of paper. “This is the latest. Check it out; briefing tomorrow’s at 0800.”
“OK. Got it. Where do you want me today?”
“Right now? You just arrived.”
She shrugs. “I’m ready now. Put me in, coach.”
He laughs. “OK. Why don’t you take position Alpha-3. I’ll tell Harry to expect you.”
“OK, thanks.”
Kim’s cellphone chirps and he glances at it. “Looks like Renegade’s in motion. Why don’t you go say hello?”
She steps back into the hall just in time to see Barack Obama, three agents and an advisor she doesn’t know passing by. The President-elect smiles in recognition and says, “Denise, welcome back! How’s your mom? The surgery go OK?”
“Yes, thank you, sir.” She takes out her wallet and holds out 39P. “Here’s that ten bucks I owe you.”
He laughs. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She says firmly, “A bet’s a bet, sir. You won fair and square.”
Smiling, he takes the bill and puts it in his pocket. “Well, if you insist. You’ll have the chance to win it back soon enough.” They chat for a few more moments before the aide looks none too subtly at his watch and says, “I’m sorry, sir, but we really have to be going.”
Obama nods, rolling his eyes a little, and says mock-mournfully, “No rest for the weary!” He shakes Agent Millward’s hand and moves down the hall.
The aide looks at him as the elevator doors open and asks, “What was the bet about, anyway, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Funny you should ask…” says the President-elect.
“I bet her ten dollars she wouldn’t go to California in January before the inauguration.”
“That sounds a little cold of you, Sir–”
“Relax. I made the bet with her in March. She’s one of the hardiest people on the staff, you know. Couldn’t care less about winters. She dresses for cold weather, but rarely talks about being in warmer climate in January or February. Seems to like winter.”.
During this conversation Obama and his staffer have been approaching a Starbucks. “What say we stop in for some coffee? I feel like a hot drink.”
“Fine with me, Sir.”
They go in, with Secret Service agents around them. Obama uses 39P and other bills to pay for coffee for himself and his entourage.
At the end of the day the barrista, a rather plain young girl named Katherine Martin, balances the till. She decides to take a souvenir of Obama’s visit, and suvbstitutes a $10 bill from her own wallet for 39P, which she takes home.
Visiting her are her aunt and uncle from California, a wealthy and prolific couple named Eloise and Jack Sharp. Katherine tells them what happened during the day and shows them the well-used bill. (Eloise Martin Sharp is the sister of Katherine’s father Russell.)
“…The last time I saw Denise, she was trying to give up her deep-seated love of milk chocolate. I bet her ten bucks that before she was back from her visit with her mother, she’d have given in to at least one piece. Guess I was right!”
“But sir,” the aide begins hesitantly, “that seems… never mind, sir.”
“Oh, no,” Obama replies. “What is it that you have to say to me?”
“What a silly bet!” his aide says. “Milk chocolate? Really?”
“You think there are more important things to bet on?” Obama asks. “Would you care to make a wager on that?”
The aide looks around the elevator, which is quickly approaching its final destination at the ground floor. “Well, sir,” he says, “what were you thinking?”
“$10 to you if 24 hours pass before someone else makes a bet with me about something seemingly inconsequential,” the President-Elect says, smiling at the aide. “Come on, Adrian.”
“All right, sir,” Adrian says. “You’re on.”
The elevator doors open, Obama and Adrian step off, and as they head to the limousine waiting outside the hotel, Obama stops at a newspaper stand and uses 39P to buy some M&Ms for Denise–no harm in encouraging a minor sweet tooth, after all.
The vendor smiles at Obama, gives him the M&Ms, and watches the President-Elect walk away. “Nice guy,” he thinks, and shakes his head as he remembers that he voted for McCain. That evening after work, he gives 39P to a bank teller as part of a deposit, and writes a $50 check to the Republican National Convention. He labels the memo line “Someone’s got to present a challenge in 2012, after all. Good luck.”
The next day, 39P…
Whoops. dougie’s post seems more intriguing. Go with that.
Eloise laughs delightedly about Katherine’s souvenir and says, “Leave it here on the coffee table. Henry is coming over later, and I can’t wait to wave it under his nose!” Henry, the Sharp’s oldest son, campaigned diligently for the McCain-Palin ticket, much to his parents’ embarrassment.
The Sharps and Katherine leave for lunch at a little burger joint they make a point of hitting whenever Katherine is in town. It’s Tuesday, the Sharps’ regular cleaning day, and while the threesome is enjoying Bernie’s signature Bodacious Bacon Burgers, Anna, their cleaning lady, lets herself into the house.
When she gets to the living room, she spies 39P on the coffee table. Her little brother’s 10th birthday is today, and she really wanted to give him a nice, crisp $10 bill. All she has is eight grubby ones and a handful of quarters. 39P is certainly not nice and crisp, but it’s there, and Anna won’t have time to go to the bank before the party with all the family. So she puts her money on the table and pockets 39P, hoping she remembers to leave the Sharps a note of explanation. She knows they won’t mind – they are the nicest couple!
But she doesn’t remember, and when the Sharps and Katherine get home from a long and leisurely lunch, Anna has finished her cleaning and left for the day…
…Katherine looks on the table and says, “Aunt Eloise! Somebody ‘made change’ for that ten-dollar bill I got from Mr. Obama!”
“Oh, dear,” comments Mrs. Sharp. “Only the cleaning lady would have been here–I bet she did it–I’ll have to call her today and ask her about it.”
She does call Anna later, but Anna had been at a fish market, Pescaderia Vasquez, later that day, and spent 39P. Eloise drives there and talks to the proprietor, Wenceslao Vasquez, an older man who was working at the register all that day. He says…
“Aye,” he says, “Arrr.” He says a lot of other words to colorful to print here, but what he really says, after a couple cups of coffee and conversation about his granddaughters upcoming nuptials, is that he had been short changing the customers. Nothing serious, he explained. “A quarter here, 50 cent there. Not so they would notice.”
Wenceslao Vasquez claims to have been skimming from the customers to purchase relief from his chronic pain. He did pay $40 dollars for some smokable pain medication, that he currently has secreted in his boot. Vazquez does not know if 39P was one of the bills he used to buy the weed, but he intends to find out. If it was, he will be the same today as he was yesterday, if not, he has a $10 note that the lame duck President used to snort coke out of the night after the election.
A little white lie is part of salesmanship he thinks.
Wenceslao checks his wallet and finds 39P…
SSG Schwartz
and puts it on the table. Eloise can’t be sure it’s the exact same $10 bill that Obama had and that Katherine gave her, of course. She didn’t check the serial number and one bill looks much like any other, after all.
“Are you sure that’s the ten bucks that Anna gave you?” she asks.
“Positive,” he says, tipping his wallet towards the wealthy-looking Anglo woman so that she can see he has no other such bills, just two twenties, a five and several ones. Wenceslao Vasquez can tell she really wants this particular ten, and he decides that he’ll let her have it. He likes Anna, a regular customer of his, and doesn’t want to get her into any trouble.
He wasn’t born yesterday, however. He says, “If, as you say, this is a special bill, an important bill to you, I’d want a little extra something for it, you know? I want to get my granddaughter something special for her wedding, after all.”
“Of course,” Eloise says, her eyes narrowing. She isn’t sure she can trust the man, but what choice does she have? She sighs. “What would you like for it?”
After some haggling, he agrees to part with it for $50. Eloise knows she’s being taken advantage of but, with a mental shrug, assures herself it’s worth it.
She pays him. Then, with the precious 39P tucked into her blouse pocket - not in her purse, because she might inadvertently spend it, she knows! - she leaves the fish market and drives home, smiling all the way.
She does in fact return home with 39P in her pocket and sets it down on the table, just as Katherine comes into the atrium.
Shortly after that, Katharine sets a bunch of things on her dresser in the guest room and is about to put 39P into her wallet when she hears her mother, Eloise’s sister-in-law Bernardine Martin, calling. “Katherine, we’ll be leaving tonight to go back home. Get your shower now.”
"I’ll be right there, Mom, " says Katherine. “I’m just putting some things away–”
“NOW, young lady!” snaps her mother. “Get to the shower!”
“Oh, all right,” mutters Katherine, getting her bathrobe and slippers.
She hurries to a bathroom on the second floor of the Sharps’ mansion. George, the Sharps’ fourth son, kind of a smart-aleck, sneaks into her room and sees 39P. Wincing at first from the combination smell of fish and coffee on the bill, George finally…
…pockets 39P and puts another ten, in similar condition in its place. He’s picked up on all the fuss being made over the stoopid ten-dollar bill, and he now knows neither his cousin nor his mom can tell one bill from another.
“Let’s see how much this baby will bring on eBay,” George chortles to himself, and he heads to his room, to snap a photo with the digital camera he got for Christmas. His brother Henry’s views have rubbed off on him, and he’s eager to prove how stoopid Democrats can be.
That evening, 39P is listed on eBay, with a starting bid of 99¢. (George is not very bright sometimes.) Six days later…
Atticus1970 is the winner of the eBay auction. Atticus1970 is the eBay bidder ID of Art Mayer, who graduated from Alexandria’s TC Williams high school in 1970 and was always a fan of the Atticus Finch character in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” TC Williams’ history of racial discord in the seventies was the basis for a movie, and as an African-American man, Art was keenly aware of such issues, both then and now. He’d been proud to cast a vote for Barack Obama; he’d almost given up hope of having a credible black candidate for President in his lifetime. But it happened, and he was determined to make the trip back to the DC area to see Obama take the oath of office. The idea of buying 39P seemed to fit in well with his idea of collecting mementos of the event, and although he knew the provenance for 39P was less than stellar, the auction only ended up costing him $14.15, including shipping.
George Sharp was disappointed with the low price but dutifully sent off the bill. He would later that day, in a flash of inspiration, send Second-Chance offers to four other bidders with offers for “the” bill, reasoning that, like his family, no one could really know which bill was which. The genuine 39P. however, leaves his local post office via Priority Mail, and, as advertised, a mere two days later is opened by Art, who now lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Art’s wife Karen has lately begun scrapbooking as a hobby, and she helps Art put together a nice page for 39P, with a snippet from the eBay listing, in the book that he plans to fill with mementos. Art and Karen retired to San Antonio to be near their daughter’s family, and while they live in a very nice neighborhood, unfortunately it’s not completely crime free. While they’re out grocery shopping, their home is entered by Randy Bolonegsi. Randy doesn’t break anything coming in. He’s a car wash attendant with a meth habit and a conscience long silenced by the demands of his addiction, and when Karen took the car for a wash she had no idea that the spare house key she kept in the unused ashtray “just in case” had been lifted by Randy, along the car registration… which of course had the Mayers’ address.
In six minutes, Randy had stolen a sterling silver set that Karen’s mother had gioven them as a wedding gift, the coin and stamp collection that Art had been working on for years, all of Karen’s jewelry, a Colt 1911 .45 automatic of Art’s, and, almost as an afterthought, 39P.
Oddly enough, Randy kept 39P almost forty-eight hours before using it to …
distract the cashier at a convenience store across town. Randy pretends at first that he wants to buy a pack of Marlboros (although he doesn’t smoke, it being a disgusting and unhealthy habit, in his opinion). Moments later, however, he’s pulled Art’s still-unloaded Colt .45 from the pocket of his leather jacket and is waving it under the cashier’s nose. Armed robbery isn’t usually Randy’s style, truth be told, but he needs a fix now, needs the money to buy it, and thinks he has no better options.
His voice shaking nervously, he screams, “Gimme everything you’ve got in the register. C’mon, hurry it up! Godammit, COME ON!!!”
The cashier, a pretty little thing just 19 years old, is named Susan Mullins. Her mom had been very reluctant to have her take this job, and at this moment Susan finds herself inclined to agree. It’s only her third day on the job. Terrified, she completely freezes at the sight of the gun. All of Randy’s shouting - and he does quite a bit of it now - does nothing other than turn her even more into stone. Cursing, he crawls over the counter and pushes her aside, clawing at the cash register.
At that moment, Sergeant Bob Giosti and Officer Vilma Palmer come through the door. They’re close to the end of their patrol shift and just want a nice cup of coffee, and maybe some of those little hot apple pies. Susan sees them first, is jolted out of her stupor by a flood of relief and shouts a warning to them. Randy looks up just in time to see Giosti, his reflexes almost as good as they were when he was a Marine rifleman in the Gulf War, draw on him and shout, “Freeze! Drop the gun!”
Everything now happens very quickly, in less time than it takes to read about it.
Randy means to drop his gun, he really does, but the signal doesn’t quite reach his hand from his brain the way it ought to, years of meth addiction having unfortunately taken their toll. His hand comes up from the cash register, the gun still in it. A nanosecond later, more or less, Sergeant Giosti does what’s he’s been trained to do, and fires his matte black 9mm once, twice, three times. Randy drops to the grimy floor in a spray of arterial blood, and Susan’s screams fill the air. Giosti races around the counter to cover Randy as Officer Palmer calls on her radio for backup and an ambulance.
39P, still sitting on the counter next to the Lotto dispenser, is unnoticed by everyone for half an hour or so…
…when the owner, Tayyab Mundrani, rushed in, having gotten a call from the police regarding the armed robbery attempt and its unfortunate (for Randy, at least) conclusion. He gave a quick prayer of thanks to Allah that Susan hadn’t been harmed. He hoped she wouldn’t quit, because she was one of the most reliable workers he had. Maybe if he offered to switch her to days. No, that wouldn’t work. Susan was taking business classes at Alamo Community College. He knew she needed the tuition money. Maybe he could work out something with her.
As he surveyed the mess, Randy’s corpse having been transported to the county morgue, he distractedly picked up 39P and put it in the cash drawer.
The next morning, Mauricio Munez stopped in to pick up a cup of coffee on his way to work at Zenix Group. He was rather distracted, because he was thinking about the presentation he and the other members of his creative team would be making later that day. It could land Zenix Group an advertising contract worth a couple of million. He handed a $20 to the cashier (who had no clue about what had happened the night before) for the $1.69 cup of coffee, and Mauricio pocketed 39P as part of his change. Later that day…
Mauricio strode down the glossy white corridor of Lone Star Federated Foods’s headquarters in a sprawling, anonymous San Antonio office park. His coworker and ad team partner Josh Weinstein, who was quite a bit shorter, struggled to keep up.
“You’re gonna kill 'em, I know you will,” Josh said, part of the annoying but ritualistic motivational patter which Mauricio had heard from Josh before every single one of his Zenix sales pitches of the past eight years. “Absolutely kill 'em.”
“We’ll see,” Mauricio replied through gritted teeth.
“No, I mean it! Kill 'em. Who’s da man? You da man! Who’s gonna land us this huge contract? You’re gonna land us this huge contract! Who’s the most badass…”
Something inside Mauricio just snapped. He stopped and spun on Josh. “Look, man, I know you mean well, but it’s just… well, enough already. OK? Tell you what. If I gave you ten bucks, would you please just stop talking to me until after the presentation?”
Josh gaped at him. His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish that had fallen on the carpet. Mauricio felt the seconds ticking away, didn’t want to keep their Lone Star contact waiting, and knew if Josh said another word - just one little word! - he would quite likely strangle the guy. He pulled out his wallet, took out 39P and thrust it into Josh’s hand.
“Here,” Mauricio said. “Not a word, now. Zip it. Let’s go.”
Josh was quiet and meek as a rabbit from that moment forward. Soon they reached the conference room where they were to make the presentation.
Lone Star Federated Foods was a big player in the Texas restaurant, convenience store and movie-edible scene, and supplied many vendors with the foodstuffs their customers craved (including, ironically enough, the little apple pies that the police officers who brought Randy Bolonegsi’s life to a premature end had been yearning for but never actually enjoyed the night before).
Once seated, Mauricio wiped his slightly sweaty palms on his pants under the table, shuffled some papers and looked over at Lone Star’s vice president for advertising and community relations, Gina Christiansen. She was disconcertingly attractive, a brunette with curves that her sober business suit couldn’t conceal. This was not his first ad pitch to Gina. He idly wondered, not for the first time, what she was like in bed. Then he remembered that she was hard to please in pitches. Would she be like that in bed, too? Then he remembered that he was married.
With a herculean effort, Mauricio forced a tantalizing mental image out of his head, cleared his throat, cued the first slide on the Powerpoint presentation Josh had quickly (but silently) set up, and began to speak…
“And now–to accommodate the economic slump and still keep Lone Star in the forefront economically—aaaahchioooo! Er–Josh!”
Josh hurried over with some nasal spray and Cepacol for Mauricio. In the process he dropped some stuff out of the pocket he carried them in. Unfortunately, one of these things was 39P, and Josh forgot about it.
Hours after Mauricio’s successful presentation (his boss gave him a raise), the custodian came into the conference room to clean up. This man, Aloysius O’Brien, a whimsical fellow who had been through the school of hard knocks, found the tenner under the table and…
stuffed it into the pocket of his overalls. After cleaning for another nine hours at Lone Star he went home, exhaustedly threw his overalls in the laundry hamper, and went to bed. His wife Colleen, grown old and gray before her time because of her husband’s whimsicality (which she bitterly thought of as impracticality and/or laziness), found the $10 bill in his pocket not long afterwards as she did a load of wash.
Colleen put 39P in her purse and spent it at the supermarket when she went shopping late the next morning, giving it and some other cash to Vin Tranh, the checkout cashier, for a gallon of milk, three boxes of strawberries (she loved strawberries), a pound of hamburger, a box of tampons, a packet of coathangers, a roll of Life Savers for her son Sam, and several other items. By the time she’d spent the $10 bill her husband Aloysius had entirely forgotten having found it in the first place.
From the supermarket, the bill went at the end of the day to the First National Bank of San Antonio, where it was counted, sorted, cross-checked with the Treasury Watchlist database for bills used in crimes, then bundled with 499 other ten-dollar bills and sent on to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. There it sat for six days before…
… being added to a cash order for Bank of America. 39P was riffled through several counting machines as each person who was responsible for its custody counted it in turn. 39P spent four days in the Bank of America branch before being given to Ernesto del Torres, the day manager for Dick’s Last Resort on San Antonio’s Riverwalk, who was replenishing the “bank” – the startup money – for his restaurant’s cash registers. 39P spent less than two hours at Dick’s before being given as change for a $20 to Ed Parsons, of Boston, who was in San Antonio on business and, by technical company policy, should not have ordered the mojito with his steak sandwich. Ed kept 39P the rest of the day, and it was with him that evening when his plane landed at Logan and he was staring glumly at an empty luggage carousel, rotating calmly about without exhibiting the slightest regret that, alone among the passengers of Flight 188, Ed was without the luggage he had checked in San Antonio.
After filing a missing luggage report, which process included shouting, “How do I know what kind of bag it is? It’s a fucking black suitcase!” Ed shuffled through the taxi line and …
finally, and wearily, climbed into the cab that took him home. He paid the cabbie, Yuri Medvedyev, with several bills including 39P. Medvedyev promptly spent the $10 bill on a bottle of Ocean Spray cranapple juice at a convenience store in Dorchester. The cashier, Bill Ogden, who was suffering from a bad cold but had to work to make his rent that month, used the bill to make change for Tawana Belknap, a young single mom who bought a large pack of disposable diapers and some Similac for her infant son, Dionte. She trudged the six blocks back to her rundown apartment, 39P in her pocket, trying to stay out of the worst of the slush and once almost slipping on a bad patch of ice. She thanked her big sister Dorisia for minding Dionte, popped some popcorn and sat down with both of them to watch her favorite DVD, The Wizard of Oz. The three of them fell asleep in front of the TV. At 3:27am, none of them awoke when a police car went screaming down the street, although Dionte briefly stirred in his sleep.
The next morning, Tawana awoke with sniffles from the cold she had contracted from the cashier when he’d handled 39P. Dionte and Dorisia seemed healthy, however, and she decided to…