…a customer named Phil Ramirez made some purchases, used his ATM card, and got $40 back, including 77R. This Phil was a musician, a left-handed bass guitarist with a combo called “The Cigar Band” because all the members smoked cigars while performing. Phil had made a bet with Jeanette Strong, the woman in the traveling combo, concerning the Tigers-Twins game played on Tuesday, October 6. Jeanette was nearly six feet tall, and usually wore ankle-length flannel dresses and nothing underneath, on stage. Phil found her with Johnny Goss (manager and vocalist) and Jerry Britton (drummer), her two boyfriends, in the hotel where they were staying while playing a gig at Epcot Center.
“Damn!”, thought Phil, “If only Johnny and Jerry were my boyfriends!” Realizing that would never be, Phil decided to throw a big drunk. He went to one of the local gay bars and spent 77R and considerable other twenties on mimosas and pickled eggs. 77R, in turn, was given in change to a very flamboyant…
…straight fellow named Emil Gowanus, a rare straight person frequenting gay bars. Emil neither knew nor cared anything about wheresgeorge, and went to a lunch counter and ordered a pastrami on rye, with a pickle and macaroni salad and a bottle of Moxie. He paid for the meal with 77R. Unlike Gowanus, the cashier at the counter was a dyed-in-the-wool scripophilist (collector of historic and picturesque currency). Exchanging some of her own money for 77R, this woman put it in her wallet at the end of her shift. After she got home, the woman, known only as Adelaide…
absentmindedly put her purse on the kitchen counter and went to take a hot bath. He no good two timing womanizing drunk of a husband Pirkle spied her purse and opening her wallet, took out four twenties (including 77R), three tens, a couple of ones and her last piece of Juicy Fruit, snuck out of the house, and went to the local house of…
Pancakes where he had a Rootie Tootie Fresh n’ Fruitie breakfast followed by orders of New York Cheesecake Pancakes and Belgian Waffles. Pirkle, who had earlier assured Adelaide he was on a strict diet, had decided sneak out and secretly have one more pig-out. (In addition to being a womanizing drunk, Pirkle was a notorious glutton who in the past had closed out several local all-you-can-eat establishments.)
When he was done gorging himself, Pirkle paid for his meal by handing 77R and the rest of the cash to the waitress who…
…knew him and Adelaide very well.
“What’s the big idea, Pickle? Raiding your wife’s purse again for food money?”
“That’s none of your damn business, Chloe!”
Before a scene could start, Chloe slipped the bill into a back compartment of the till, figuring the wheresgeorge stamp on it made it special (and knowing Adelaide’s hobby of scripophily). As so many people in this bill’s history have done, she exchanged her own cash for 77R and removed it from the till.
The next day she met Adelaide, and handed 77R to her.
“I think this is yours–your no-good husband Pickle–”
“Don’t call him that!”
“Oh, well, anyway he must have taken this bill from your purse. He pigged out here yesterday.”
“I might have known. Thanks a lot.”
Adelaide decided to leave the bill elsewhere for a few days, until she could reprimand her husband. She went to a coin shop owned by an old friend named R. G. Hall. She handed the bill to him, and as he examined it professionally, she explained what she wanted him to do.
R.G. was tittillated because no woman had ever asked him to do such a perverse yet delightful act as Adelaide had suggested. They agreed to meet later that evening at the NoTell Motel. As instructed, R.G. showed up wearing leather shorts, a halter top, hip boots and clutching 77R in his teeth. “Well, well”, thought Adelaide, "who would have thought that the promise of a twenty with a where’sgeorge sticker on it would cause a man to want to…
…stand on his head and gargle peanut butter!"
Hall did so, after Adelaide took the bill out of his teeth. After he finished gargling, he stood up. Then they went to the bed and tried to do S&M stuff, a subject about which together they knew next to nothing. She flogged hiim with some al dente spaghetti and rutabaga leaves. After they finished this thrilling but ridiculous session on the bed, both changed into street clothes.
Hall said, “Very well. I’ll keep the bill in my safe for three days, but no longer. By then you should have found a suitable hiding place for the bill, at home.”
They left, and Hall returned to his coin shop, put the bill in his office safe, and went home. Meanwhile, Adelaide…
yearning for a pickled egg and a pink squirrel, went down to the bar next to the Curl Up And Dye. She was feeling somewhat suspicious of R.G. Hall and his intentions with 77R. She soon forgot all about that when the bartender asked her to cover him in alfredo sauce while preforming “Habenera” from that classic opera “Carmen”. Word got around about that and when R.G. heard about the next day at The Chuckwagon, where he went every morning for a plate of eel gravy and biscuits, he became enraged. “Adelaide never sings opera for me!”, he snorted. He then went to his office, opened the safe, took 77R out of the safe and…
…shoved it in his wallet. It was time to leave. He’d put up with the weirdness of the town and its people for too long: Adelaide and the rutabaga-splattered splendour of what had gone on between them; Pickle; that guy at the bar; the other guy at the other bar who kept giving him signals; the entire frenetic lot of them. He longed for the normality of his youth in Rochester, New York.
He left without even leaving a note; he merely emptied every source of cash in the house. Oddly, he didn’t touch the joint bank account he shared with his girlfriend Tom. He jumped in his car–a 1984 Plymough Sapporo, still holding together in the mild Florida climate–and headed north.
The doughty Plymouth ran surprisingly well, and Hall got all the way to New York City, where he got on his cell phone and called a shop employee Jasper Davis.
“Jasper? Yeah, it’s me. Listen, I’m going to be in the Big Apple for a while; take care of the shop 'til I get back. Three days, maybe.”
He made the call from a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan. On the way out of the place, he collided with a man he had met occasionally, Alvin Stanhouse, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Stanhouse, unusually affable and outgoing for a drug agent, recognized Hall immediately and said,
“Reddie! What’s your hurry? And what are you doing in New York?”
“Shhhhhh, Alvin,” said Hall to his old friend. “You’ve heard of the wheresgeorge website, haven’t you?” They both went back into the Starbuicks and Hall showed 77R to Stanhouse.
Alvin, who was a big where’sgeorge fan and amateur ballet dancer, told R.G. that he’d heard of a particular twenty that had been showing up on where’sgeorge a lot as of late and that the DEA was suspicious of it as it appears it may have been traded several times for illegal substances. Of course, he had made all that up. All he really wanted was 77R so he could plug it into the where’sgeorge site to see where it had been. He convinced R.G., who was not all that bright, to hand over 77R. Alvin pirouetted out of Starbuck’s and…
…once out of sight, headed at a dead run across town to a certain internet café. This was one of the original internet cafés, started during the dot-com boom of the nineties. As a result, it had layer upon layer of funky equipment of different vintages, everything from a Commodore SuperPET (running a terminal emulation program), to the latest Linux, Macintosh and Windows machines, to network hardware from every era, to scanners and plotters and Babbage knows what. It was in many ways more a museum than a functioning business. But the space was cheap, the equipment paid for, and the customers and staff dedicated.
Alvin entered. “Johnson! You here?” An Asian man came forward.
“Yeah. What have you got this time, Alv?”
“This bill. It looks a bit… odd. Can you put it through the mill?”
“Sure. It’ll take a while, though.”
“No problem.”
Johnson was another banknote aficionado, and had placed a number of interesting cameras and scanners and filters and lights among the equipment in the café. He could do more and better tests on banknotes than most stores that had less than a $50,000 budget for equipment. He toon 77R and gave it the works. And what he found was…
…traces of turpin hydrate and Asthmador. rather out-of-date medications for respiratory problems. He told Alvin.
“Well,” Alvin answered, “I don’t know anything about turpin hydrate, but Asthmador is on our list of illicit drugs though it doesn’t come up very often. What concentration was it in?”
“Oh, maybe .008 milligram on the whole bill.”
“We could never make a case for illegal possession from that,” Alvin said. “My guess is someone was using up an old supply if they had turpin hydrate.”
“Well, that’s all the drugs we found,” he said with the elan of Abby Sciuto.
“What else did you find on the bill?” Alvin asked.
Johnson produced a page with a not-too-long list of substances named on it, took a breath, and said:
"Someone who had possession of this twenty also had access to Coca Cola made with, dare I say it, cane syrup! Alvin and Johnson were astonished. They both yearned for Coca Cola made with cane syrup. “We must find out where that was!”, exclaimed Alvin. He then plied out the door determined to find the source for the cane syrup Coke.
Both of them, in their eagerness to have an antique Coke, completely forgot about 77R, which they left behind in the sensor tray of the Internet cafe’s small lab. This being New York City, it wasn’t long before a light-fingered visitor absconded with it.
The visitor, a sloe-eyed 22-year-old, rejoiced in the name of Hippolyta Inge Mullins. She had just finished checking her email and posting on the Straight Dope (an appreciative addition to an MPSIMS thread, “Are you as turned on as I am by girls with strange names?”). Hip, as she was known to her few friends, had been living on the street long enough to appropriate an unwatched twenty when the opportunity arose. In moments she was back out on the street, 77R tucked into her bar, nestled between her breasts. Hip pulled her leather jacket around her a little tighter as a cold gust of wind swept by. She hailed a cab and headed uptown, enjoying, as always, the lights, energy and excitement of Manhattan at night.
Less than an hour later, Hip…
…got to where she was going, an obscure address in Queens.
“That’ll be $18.50, lady,” said the cabbie.
Hip rummaged in her purse but could not find enough cash in it. “Damn,” she muttered. “I’ll have to use that twenty I snagged.”
She did, and let the cabbie keep the change. She went inside and the cabbie shrugged and returned to Manhattan. Just as he passed over the Triboro Bridge his radio said:
“Fare at 52 W. 57th Street.”
“CBS News,” muttered the cabbie.
On the way to lower Manhattan he squinted at the bill. “This old thing must have been put under a microscope,” he said. “I know a fellow named Johnson who could check it out.” He slipped the bill into a secret compartment in the front seat.
He got to the CBS building and picked up his fare, a plain-looking middle-aged woman. She took a notebook from her purse and when the cabbie asked “Where to?” she said:
“The nearest sleazy bar, I’m jonesing fierce for a boilermaker and a pickled egg!” The cabbie took her to Joe’s Pool Hall, the nearest sleazy place he knew of. As luck would have it, he spied Johnson coming out of Joe’s and called him over. He showed 77R to Johnson who exclaimed, “Where did you get this! I left this in the sensor tray at the internet cafe!” The cabbie explained about getting it as a fare from a skanky young girl about an hour ago. Johnson exchanged a twenty out of his wallet with the cabbie for 77R and went back into Joe’s where Alvin was perched upon the piano singing Hard Hearted Hannah and held up 77R. "How’d that get here!, exclaimed Alvin after he had taken bows for his production. Johnson explained about how a cabbie friend of his had gotten it as a fare. “We’d best put this somewhere safe”, said Johnson. So they decided to go to Alvin’s office at the DEA and hide 77R in the back of the middle drawer of Alvin’s three drawer steel file cabinet. “Nobody will find it now!”, exclaimed Alvin. “Haw! Haw!”, snorted Johnson. Johnson was also a collector of vintage Jack Chick Tracts. The two of them then left Alvin’s office and went down to the…
…crime lab in the building, which was run by a petite, ordinary woman who was sort of an Abby wannabe. They told her about the bill and how only obsolete respiratory medications had been found on it.
“Well, I’d better go get that bill so we can check it out.”
“Not so fast, Stanhouse,” said Lieutenant Robert Merkle, a slender, well-groomed black man who was Stanhouse’s immediate superior. He was holding a restraining order with today’s date on it.
“Alvin,” Merkle said, "You’ll have to…
,come in early tomorrow–we got a hot tip about a shipment of cocaine at one of your old haunts."
“Kelly’s bar?” Alvin asked.
"That’s the place."answered Merkle. “Come in at 6 and we’ll roll.”
Alvin shrugged. He knew the kind of people who now frequented Kelly’s. Not like the crowd he knew when he was in the Academy.
But now he retrieved the bill 77R and handed it to the lab worker, who put it through a rigorous inspection, much the way Johnson had done.
The next evening, Stanhouse came into the lab looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. “It was a good bust,” he told the lab worker. “What about the twenty?”
The lab worker produced 77R along with a full report on her inspection of it…