Change

As I lay here, steadily vanishing, all I can think about is the change.

I started saving it up when I got my very first job, washing cars at my uncle’s fill spot. I’d empty my pockets into a little zipper bag my Mom had given me before she died. Fat nickels and silly dimes and filthy pennies, and sometimes, my favorite, big shiny quarters. They’re these little disks of metal with old faces. Dead men pushing into the living world, still holding some sway long after their demise. I’d always been fascinated by coins, even when I was very small. My grandfather used to pull quarters out of my ears on my birthday. I was saving towards getting the windshield fixed on my Dodge Dart.

Somehow I’d made it a rule to never count the change. I’d never even look into the bag. Eventually that old purple bag was stuffed so I moved onto a paint can with a slit in the lid. You’d be surprised to find out how quick those spare coins can add up.

I found myself never using coins at all. If I bought something and it was a dollar and change, I paid with two dollars and pocketed the rest. Over the years I filled a plastic pumpkin, a giant champagne bottle, a toy treasure chest, a hollow ceramic bust of Elvis, but it got worse.

One day it hit me. I was on the street and I was watching a sluggish little man climb out of a boxy little three-wheeled vehicle. He was dressed in blue and white and his belly hung over his belt, though still within the struggling white button down shirt. This man rolled a tiny little three-wheeled little buggy over to each parking meter. He filled large zipper bags walking down the street, empting every last one of them.

There was pretty stiff testing, but I am a college graduate and was willing to work shifts that no one wanted, so I was able to get a job driving around that silly little box. The long stretches of hills and high traffic areas. However, I was almost immediately fired for stealing. The next Tuesday I attempted to bash open a meter using a sledge-hammer that I’d come across in the parking lot of a place with a giant glowing white sign that read: DICKS. Eventually the meter wore me out and I was forced to retreat. I tried various methods, but they are surprisingly hard to bust open. Not long after that I was arrested once for backing my Dart into a meter and then again in Philadelphia for indecent exposure at the US Mint.

In prison they forced me to eat fifty soft-boiled eggs and I would vomit until I passed out from exhaustion. This happened to me on a daily basis for six months. The guards would tease me and toss little snapping meteors of paper at my feet. They would show me coins they’d flattened at the train tracks until I couldn’t help but cry.

Upon my release I applied for a few jobs but I think they misunderstood my tattoos. During the day I wore a stovepipe hat and lounged on the street clutching my stomach and holding a piece of cardboard on which I had printed: CHANGE. Sometimes I took long walks, never looking up.

At night I was busting into any machines that held coins. It tossed gumball machines off of rooftops and hid in arcades until after they closed. I emptied my bank account in coins. They tried to deny me my change, but I demanded it and once they saw how deeply I required this change they handed it over. I filled my garage with my treasure, building the rocket ship away from my life. Every time I wondered off, beginning to calculate how much all of it was worth, I’d force myself to expel the thought from my mind. Sometimes I would hang my garden hose over the fence and just stand with my shirt off in the chilly water thinking about my change.

What I’m trying to tell you, what I’ve finally come to realize, is that somewhere along the line I’d become too fond off change. I now see it was a sickness. I felt like I was building towards something; it was all adding up. Someday I’d never have to work again and just live off my change. That was not meant to be. Today is the last day I’ll ever be alive. This is probably the last minute I will exist.

I was just walking down the street when a skinny woman carrying a giant sandwich bumped into me. My jacket pocket exploded and coins were rolling away from me in an effort to escape. I watched in horror as one of those new golden dollars, the ones with the woman and her baby on it, rolled away from me into the road. My reaction was to chase after it. I felt a loud crunch and I was being carried away. I couldn’t feel anything as I drifted through the air. I thought about nothing, like a newborn being passed around the delivery room. I saw the road tumbling around in front of me, a movie of my world in a washing machine. This lasted a very long time.

Now I’m lying here and I can’t speak out loud but I can here myself making strange noises. I’m wet all over. I know I’m going to die. The sky is very bright and I can hear people talking loudly. I’ll never spend my change. I’ll never get out of here. They will bury me here. I don’t have any family left so it will all probably just go right back to the state. That golden dollar will never be added to the overall count, if they do one at all. People reading the newspapers will laugh at me and discuss this with their friends. They’ll hall it away in a dump truck and tip the whole thing into the smelter. I never even fixed the windshield on my Dodge Dart.

I can see the backside of the car that struck me. There is smoke coming from the front, but I can’t see the damage. A pale girl with long curly black hair has purple running down her cheeks. She’s holding her black hair above her head and she’s either laughing or screaming. On the bumper of her car there’s a sticker of a lizard becoming a monkey becoming a man.

It reads: CHANGE IS GOOD.