Stomping dangling raindrops soaking sneakers, I stumble into the Family Dollar, my third eye shivering an eyelash in my forehead, feet numb with economic repressive depression soaking my holy-toed tube socks. I am on a mission.
Mental Kleenex been plucked bone clean, so I need a new notebook to catch the proverbial snot-nosed ideas dripping down my beard, staining my shirt whenever I sneeze a Think. My inner 10-year-old thinks it should be snowing big white Charlie Brown Christmas flakes like he remembers in the 1980s, but the Earth sweats swollen hot colds in the middle of December, which only makes the snot-think drippier, my sleeve tired and stiff with my own sticky ideas.
Mind Kleenex is on sale, 3 for a dollar, so I grab the notebooks and deposit them on the cash register. I’ve got one grubby buck left to my name, a dollar that’s known a billion fingerprints, a billion dreams, billions of pipe schemes. A woman old enough to be my grandmother rings up an extra 7 cents for the current administration.
$1.07 hits the bottom of my pocket and falls through a hole….
Ah, but there’s the salvation of the Give a Penny Tray Foundation, saving one pocket at a time so billions of Americans short 3 cents can satisfy their government. But in the tray’s place smiles an M&M with fangs, bloody-red greed melting in its mouth.
“Hey,” I ask the grand lady. “Where’s the cents?” I assume the tray fell off the counter, maybe 11-year-olds stole it to supply their gum habit. Imagination can’t be gone.
Because the Give a Penny tray is truly an American institution invented by Shirley working the night shift at the Quick and Go one twilighted night chewing Doublemint-smoking menthols in 1983. Staring down decimals on her register and thinking about Superman 3, it dawned on Shirley that the teachings of Richard Pryor needed to be put into practice.
In an innocent super villain scheme, Pryor proposed a Superman plotline to collect all those decimals at the end of a paycheck and put them to use.
Well, a penny was still decimal even in 1983, so a Super-Man-naturally-inspired supernatural vision socked Shirley smack in the forehead. In a halo of bright-blue Superman light, Shirley placed a tray by her register, catching all the pennies that dribbled all over her counter, rolling into knowwhere where nothing but decimal remains.
People fixed, gave a penny, and it felt great. People broke, took a penny, and it felt even better.
Overnight, Shirley’s Give a Penny tray spread faster than mothers on crack birthing bleached-white robots looking like Michael Jackson. People shared their pennies and danced in rainbows; Sesame Street simplicity smiled down in every city, in every 7-11 shining like heaven.
But presently back in the Family Dollar, here is where the senses are:
“Oh, we don’t have that tray anymore,” the grand lady says, shrugging fears of arsenic in the aspirin. “Our manager decided that when people take something they didn’t earn, it’s stealing.”
The grand lady steals 7 gulps of oxygen without paying, but I pretend not to notice.
Short 7 cents, I scan the counter for ideas, inspiration, anything for a light. Next to fisticuff frog pens, a newspaper stares me down: “Food Bank Gone Broke: Nobody Gives a Shit, Happy Rich People Still Making Money.”
But then a vision of me making money in my own Superman Underoos lights me up: I remember how back in first grade I banked a business popping pop machines for loose change.
So babbling like a subway prophet, I dance into the rain and poke a Coke machine. It burps a dime, tinkling in the deposit tray like sidewalk raindrops. I slap the Roosevelt on the register, and the grand lady slaps me back 3 cents.
Mind Kleenex is mine.
I know I should be a good Capitalist and tell the next first grader that comes along to go to hell, these are my 3 cents, pay your own damn gum habit.
But I think about that next little snot grubbing the coin slot for a Pixie Stix fix; I think about how Shirley is dying a slow Kryptonite death as Lex Luthor and the WTO dominate her cash register, taking over the world.
Richard Pryor shall not have died in vain. I will never become the bad Superman. Pennies should be free, free as a turd for anyone to take. Giving back to future generations of Garbage Pail Kids, I put those 3 cents back in the Coke change slot machine, mind fiercely flowing pure mental snot.
