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When I was thirteen, my forty-five year old father was killed by a penny dropped (or thrown) from the top of the Empire State Building. On a rainy April Thursday afternoon, a 1984 slightly scratched disc of copper soared past one-hundred and two floors, narrowly missing the window washers' standing platform only to plummet straight through my father's dark green umbrella. My father - who was holding a NY Post in his left hand, his briefcase in his right, and a bouquet of multi-colored roses for my flu-stricken sister Jo - probably felt nothing as the penny drilled through his skull and landed somewhere in the primary motor cortex part of his brain.
The suspects included: a short, stocky twelve year old with fire coral-colored hair that had a penchant for spitting on passing cars in his hometown in Connecticut; a thirty-seven year old veterinarian that was putting coins into the binoculars for her twenty-six year old husband; and an eighty-four year old grandfather with six grandkids, bad eyesight, and a hole in his right pants pocket the size of a cantaloupe.
Nobody was ever charged.
Nobody was ever blamed.
And nobody was ever held accountable.
Mom was pretty depressed for awhile. She went through plenty of crying phases, lots of therapists, and bottles upon bottles of Jose Cuervo. This went on for a few years, before she met Rog; that's short for Roger. Whereas my father was charismatic, generous, and loving, Rog was fastidious, parsimonious, and cold. My father was the kind of father who would take you to a baseball game for straight A's; Rog, on the other hand, was the kind of step-father who would reward those kind of grades by not whipping you that night with his belt.
Jo only put up with Rog until she graduated college.
Long before she tossed her graduation cap into the air in astoundingly subdued jubilation, Jo was leafing through classified ads, posting roommate situation ads all over the Internet, and skulking around empty apartment buildings all along the East Side waiting for the old people to "move on." It was only about two months before Jo managed to trade in vindictive, coldhearted, and callous Rog for an uncleanly, slutty, and nauseating roommate named Liza with her endless parade of dirty dishes, one-night stands, and pet hamsters that never seemed to last more than a few weeks. I got out too. eventually. I went to school and took a job right out of college at a Wachovia Bank branch on 32nd and 7th. I spent every day handling other people's thousand dollar checks or just their plain old pennies.
Even if you just counted the pennies, I touched more money than I could ever hope to earn in two hundred lifetimes. And not a day went by that I didn't wonder if I would come across a certain 1984 penny that had a small dent in the word "God."
Life's pretty boring at my bank, but you could say I like it that way. All I do is count money all day long; it's almost always a different person's money, but it all looks the same to me. And yet it's what binds us all. We're all bound by the same money. After philosophizing each and every single day about who controls who: the person or the money, I usually head out and grab lunch at a Chinese place around the corner. I by and large order something with broccoli; it was the only vegetable my father got me to eat as a kid. After that, it's not long before I take a crowded, dingy, and malodorous subway back to my crowded, dingy, and malodorous apartment on 3rd Avenue. I'm not complaining, though.I like the simplicity, I like the mediocrity, and I like the absence of any spontaneity.
Don't ask me why, though.
However, a few days ago, I did have an interesting encounter with one customer that I thought I'd share. He was a short man, in his early thirties, with a very well-trimmed darkish brown goatee, a dirty and slightly ripped baseball cap, and black square-shaped spectacles. "I'd like to have these pennies changed into paper money, please," the man said, sliding a large helping of rolls underneath my window.
I placed my fingers on top of my keyboard and asked, "All right, sir, what's your account number?"
"I don't have one at this bank. Your rates are too high."
"Well, I'm sorry, sir," I said, sliding the rolls back across to him, "But if you don't have an account number, I can't accept these pennies."
"Why not?"
"That's just our policy."
"That doesn't make any sense," he said as I glanced over my shoulder to spy on my manager checking out the butt crack of his customer as she bent over to pick up her pen.
"Actually, it does sir."
"Ok. Lay it on me then - what's your name - er. Jerry."
"Well, sir, I can not accept your pennies, because quite honestly, how do I know there are fifty pennies in each roll?"
"What do you mean?" he asked, raising his crooked, yet neatly trimmed eyebrows.
"For all I know, there could be forty-nine pennies in one of those little rolls. Not fifty, as required by the excessive labeling on the outside."
The man folded his arms and asked, "You think I'm going to stiff the bank on one lousy penny?" This man obviously had no concept of how valuable just a single penny can be.
"No, sir, not at all," I said, reassuringly, "At least most likely not on purpose."
"What do you mean, most likely?"
"Well, sir, I'm just conjecturing here-"
"Please go ahead," he insisted.
"All right," I said, starting to count the rolls. "You have - let's see - ten, twenty, thirty, forty, forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight penny rolls. If there is actually fifty pennies in each one-"
"There is."
"Ok then. you would have twenty-four dollars worth of pennies."
"Yes, of course," the man said, waggling his small, hairy left digit at his rolls.
"Now, let's say you skimped off one penny in every roll. And without an account number written on each roll, we wouldn't be able to take the correct amount from your account. Therefore, we'd be paying you twenty-four dollars when in actuality, you only gave us twenty three dollars and fifty two cents worth of pennies."
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