City Where the Pennies Look Out for You
The man holding his dog outside The Blue Ant asked me for a dollar. I had three in my wallet, two of which looked like they had been chewed and spat out, the other crisp and sharp enough to cut anyone who touched it.
I handed over the sharp one and it did not appear to cut him when he took it.
Thank you, the man said, staring straight into my forehead.
“The money doesn’t want to stay with me,” I told him, and he smiled in the bright register of a person who will survive the youths who video-record their subhuman surroundings for future panoptic mockery, shared among friends milliseconds away, across the ocean, or in some time-wasted hemisphere, random voices grabbed at by kids, one of whom will empty a bottle of vitamin-spiked orange peel water and yell at both me and the man I gave the dollar to, the two of us trapped on the screen like frogs about to be boiled,
“Drink the water, you stupid garbage.
Drink the water before it goes away because of you.”
*
Crouched over a cloud in the sidewalk, another man wanted me to drop my eyes into his collection cup and let them stay for a dime’s duration and then report the number of still-conscious fingerprints trapped under all that monetary rubble.
The soul traps itself at the end of the fingers, says a person my wife does not notice right away, though that person stands right in front of us, demonstrating the transparency suggested by the city’s self-correcting oxygen.
Pigeons perch on both his shoulders while a smaller bird half pigeon and half street-noise paces the worn out cap protecting the top of his head like a flap of someone else’s skin.
*
One dollar will not feed the man.
It will not look good when the man holds it all by itself.
It needs companions, the dollar that’s been handled by too many others already.
It will not measure up to a single slice of bread.
It will not feed even one pigeon.
It will not fix the sidewalk pounded into submission by too many pairs of shoes, both with and without faces smeared on the soles.
The dollar will not be able to care for itself, though the loose change might be safe under its faded green hide.
*
The man who works by asking everyone for a dollar saw my wife this morning outside Chase Bank and my wife told him, I don’t have anything right now, but I’ll give you a dollar tonight.
Twelve hours later, the earth having turned its face away from the sun without a trace of shyness, my wife walked past Chase Bank and the man, somehow still standing there, forgot to ask, “Can I have a dollar? You promised that you’d give me a dollar tonight and right now is tonight.”
She gave him a twenty dollar bill because that is all she had in her purse.
The fraction of the one possession twenty dollars adds up to will not help the man live the life a twenty dollar bill lives, already colonizing early old age, the lines leading across his hand.
He may or may not have noticed Andrew Jackson clinging to my wife’s fingers, the paper pasture weakened from too many dark wallets that don’t let the air inside.
The man may or may not have noticed the twenty starting to shake just as my wife was letting it go.
The green swan in her purse turned into a faint wallpaper sample for a house the size of the sound of people holding back their laughter, the highest window left open to watch over us, the humans with bank vault faces looking down into the glare of what we hold flat against our palm,
down into the glare of the new heaven,
the new earth,
the new way of ascending from one millisecond to the next,
where the updated children design money so clean that it almost isn’t money.
*
A dollar stripped of its lawn blows back and forth in a recursive gust of wind.
The man mutters about a person who gave someone he knew a roomful of pennies.
I don’t want to live there, he says.
Every organ inside a person imagines and gestates itself from one penny’s brain matter, and each penny pumps enough blood to replace what was plundered during a bug bite.
A doctor substitutes my liver with a pouch filled with pennies.
On a biopsy slide, they look like bodies lying on the street.
The man who wakes up on the sidewalk with an anonymous dollar next to his head taps each body and asks if he can trouble it for a hundred healthy pennies.
He knows the inert bodies are busy generating pennies just for him.
Pennies with perfect, untraceable faces.
Pennies that are nothing like the body in which they were born.
*
Bearing the weight of a car horn running over everything inside his head, everyone he’s known, every place he’s been, he closes his eyes under a sanctuary of scaffolding, the only way to ward off the spying sunlight.
He leaves his hand open while he drifts back to the town trapped in his failure to achieve an authentic sleep, the town that sent him here a million pennies ago.
“I lived in that town twenty-two years and I don’t know a soul who lives there,” he says.
“The home owners were too slow to lock their doors at night. One family, five entire persons, not counting the boy’s many mental monsters, didn’t even lock the doors when they left their house alone for two weeks.”
Back in the city, where he takes up too much space on the sidewalk, people pass with their eyes pointed elsewhere.
Nobody trips over the body, which is breathing still.
The pennies pass away, one by one, lured into the woods by the pennies from which they were taken, the pennies no one sees, the pennies that would have spoken for the entombed Lincoln had he needed another good word.
*
A grown woman pounces up and down at the fruit seller’s stand.
“My stomach is sure hungry,” she says, loud enough
to embarrass the chiming church bells.
“How much for one of those pears?” she asks
in a way that shames a passing ambulance for its timidity.
“How much for one of those pears?” she demands,
letting her eyes run around like children.
“Ninety-five cents,” the fruit seller says.
“Ninety-five cents? NINETY FIVE CENTS?
Who has that kind of money?” she asks.
It’s not a rhetorical question: “Who has that kind of money?”
Her eyes quit their rolling around. They will not be fed.
Her voice falls to her feet and looks back up at the rest of her.
It does not have a dime to its name.
*
A man my wife and I refer to as “Orangie Wallace” holds the ATM door open for everyone who wants to get inside.
Tall, red-headed, voice filled with bright days, he smiles and asks for nothing.
“I had money, but it didn’t want to meet anyone,” he says.
And at the corner of Second Avenue and 5th Street he offers his big grin of light for free:
“They’re filming halfway up to Bowery.
It’s best if you proceed to the next block
and not waste an entire avenue of your time.”
He holds up his hands, welcoming everyone.
Both hands covered in excrement.
“Pennies decomposing,” he insists,
sneaking an inch closer to the curb,
his head clear as the sky.
“Please help me build a hospital for everyone,”
he says, his grin going nowhere.
*
Six families of four live together inside the same dollar bill.
Six inches long, it contains six rooms.
One inch per room.
Affordable Manhattan real estate.
“This dollar is worth twenty-four people,” the man says,
trying to trade one dollar for twenty-four dollars.
“Don’t look at it too closely,” he says,
knowing full well what’s happening inside each room.
“This dollar is worth twenty-four people
who each have ten dollars,
so really this one bill adds up to $240.”
Second Avenue flows gently by.
Spring in the East Village smells like a celebration that got loose from someone’s body.
Crowding the outdoor seating, the gods about to dine
gaze into the heavens of their hands.
The man holds the dollar high over his head.
“George Washington is terrified of heights,” he says,
his face crowded with concern.
“George Washington owns the building,
which makes it an historical site.
And how many of Washington’s buildings fit
inside a wallet? You could charge people to visit.
Imagine the revenue!”
Second Avenue flows gently by.
Try not to notice the person jumping out of the landlord’s eyes
and plummeting six and a half feet to the sidewalk
where the money flinches and lets out a cry
that amounts to only fifty cents.
The wind picks at the tenement where each inhabitant
gets out of bed, goes downstairs, and continues
out the door, looking for work.
No one comes to clean up the pennies drying on the sidewalk.
They don’t look like forms of currency.
Not anymore.
Another day passes.
The people who live inside the dollar bill come and go.
And when Orangie Wallace falls asleep,
a child yet to be upgraded picks up a penny
because he thinks he hears it begging for air.
Just a drag or a sip.
Enough to clear Lincoln’s head for one more day.