the root of all happiness. I read in a magazine that the number one thing married couples fight about is money. People lie for money, cheat for money, steal for money, and kill for money. They kill themselves and each other for dead presidents on pieces of paper. Money is what makes the world go round. Lying on your deathbed, you might be judged by the company you kept while alive or the way you treated your family or what those you love really thought about you; but even this stems from money. Maybe it seems like the two are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. The more money you have, the better you can treat your family. Money allows you to provide more of the things they need. The friends you have around you are determined by the size of your wallet. Do you think Donald Trump hangs out with homeless guys and crack addicts all day long? In the end, it’s all about the green. To paraphrase the Beatles, “and in the end, the love you make is equal to the cash you make.”
Want a roof over your head? That takes money. Want to eat? Money. To get the money, you’ve got to have a job, but even that takes money. How are you going to get to work every day?
Drive? The car costs money: gas, insurance, repairs. Take mass transit? Those bus tokens aren’t free. Ride your bike? Hey, even most service stations are charging a quarter for the air pump these days.
It’s very simple. In our society, you can’t live without money. I wasn’t going to be living much longer, but Michelle and T. J. would be. I was sick and tired of seeing Michelle wear worn-out panty hose with runs in them and fashions from five years ago. Tired of getting T. J.’s toys at yard sales. Tired of buying generic brands that tasted like cardboard. Tired of saving aluminum cans to turn in for beer money. Tired of living from paycheck to paycheck and never getting ahead or saving money for the future. Tired of us being poor just because of where we lived and how we’d grown up.
My wife and my son could have better lives after I was gone. They deserved it. I wanted T. J. to go to college and be somebody smart— not work in a dirty foundry like his old man and his grandfather had done. I wanted them to be happy.
Happy.
Happiness equals money. Money equals happiness. It’s fucking arithmetic. When I look back on it now, I don’t know. Would all of this have happened, would I have come up with the idea if I hadn’t been dying? Probably not. Instead, I would have busted my ass five days a week for shit pay, until alcohol’s soft middle age crept up on me and I died of a heart attack, probably while on a fishing trip with John and Sherm or sitting in the bleachers, cheering on T. J. as he made the winning touchdown for the school (because I had no doubt that he’d be a quarterback when he got to high school). Even a heart attack would have been preferable to the cancer— but then again, what chance at a better life would I have been able to offer my family?
That guy, the older guy who remained a white trash loser and went on to die, he could have never given them the chances that I wanted to provide. And those chances— that better life—could only be paid for with money.
The cancer was killing me, eating away at my insides. In a few weeks, it would leave me a husk, like the shells that locusts leave behind on the trees, a hollow shell that used to be Tommy O’Brien. But while it was doing that, while it was gnawing away, it was also liberating me—freeing me to take risks that I would have never taken before. Allowing me finally to do something to make our lives better.
I drove home. It was bingo night, and Michelle had already taken T. J. over to her mother’s house, so I was alone in the trailer. I undressed, and took a good long look at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. Two black, puffy circles hung beneath my eyes. My skin was pale, feverish; and my jaw and neck were swollen. My cheeks were puffy too. It looked like I had the mumps. My teeth hurt, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the cancer or the fact that I hadn’t been able to afford a dentist in five years. I’d lost weight— like an anorexic on the Atkins diet. Most of all, I just looked tired. Beaten.
I wasn’t beaten, at least, not entirely, but I was tired. Tired of this trailer and thrift shop clothes for my wife and yard sale toys for my son. Tired of this way of life. I was sick of it all, and I was going to do something about it.
I stepped into the shower and let the water wash over me. It seemed to help my headache, so I leaned into the spray, letting it pound against my temples and forehead. My skin had gotten sensitive over the past week, and the stream felt like sandpaper against the sore parts, like it was grinding away the old Tommy and revealing what lay beneath. It felt like a baptism. I thought about the bank.
I was going to do something. What was the worst they could do to me if I got caught? Life in prison? Lethal injection?
Those sentences both added up to less than a month . . .
FIVE
Sherm grinned, took another swig of beer, lit up a cigarette, and said, “Fuck me running. They laid us off, boys!”
From the battered jukebox in the corner, the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin Man” had segued into Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” I lit up a cigarette of my own and wailed along with Marvin inside my head— wanting to holler and throw up my hands while inflation grew and bills piled up. Marvin Gaye had known what time it was. He died young too.
“So what are we going to do, you guys?” John stared into his shot glass, as if the answer could be found there. In a way, I guess it could.
“I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re going to stand in the unemployment line and get our asses signed up. Shit, dog, we got the whole summer free! We can sleep all day, party all night, and let the government send us a fat check every two weeks.”
“That’s all right for you, Sherm,” John scoffed, “but I got fucking bills to pay. You know how little money you get on unemployment? Bobby Ray Hall was on it for six months, and he only got a quarter of his hourly pay.”
“Bobby Ray Hall swept floors and scrubbed toilets for a living, and he got minimum fucking wage. We’ll do okay. Better than him at least.”
I said nothing. Instead, I lit up a smoke and signaled Angie to bring us another round. Angie was a damn good waitress, the best Murphy’s Place had to offer— and she still took good care of us despite the fact that Sherm had fucked her a few times, then dumped her. Hell, there weren’t many women in this town that he hadn’t slept with, except for Michelle— and maybe John’s mom. And to be honest, I’m not even sure about that last one.
It wasn’t that he was good-looking. He wasn’t. Well, okay, he wasn’t butt ugly or anything, but he wasn’t Brad-fucking-Pitt either. His nose was too big for his face, and his wiry frame was more coiled than muscled. He always wore a battered Ford cap, usually backward, and his hair stuck out from underneath it. Most of the time, his fingernails were black from the foundry dirt and grease underneath them. Despite all this, women seemed to really dig Sherm. I think it was his attitude— he had that bad boy thing down to a science and it worked for him. The women he slept with fell into two categories: those who thought they could change him and those who were just freaks.
The freaks were every weekend— and never the same girl two weekends in a row. Sherm liked it rough, and he’d give it to the freaks that way. Once, when he was really drunk, this girl from the video store dug her nails into his back, raking them down as she came. They went so deep that she left scars; right through one of his tattoos. Sherm, in the heat of the moment, punched her in the jaw. He didn’t mean to do it, he claimed later, and he felt like shit immediately after it happened, but that still didn’t make it right. Any woman with an ounce of sense would have gotten the hell out right then and there. But not this freak. Nope. She not only liked it, she begged him to do it again. So he did. He hit her again. Later on, he told us that it was the best nut of his life.
The women who thought that they could change him usually fared worse than the freaks, at least on an emotional level. Sherm’s serious relationships had a shelf life of about one month, and they always panned out the same way. Girl meets Sherm. Girl is attracted to the hurting little boy she thinks is hiding inside the bad boy image, the soft heart beneath the “I-don’t-give-a-shit”
exterior. Girl tries to heal the little boy. Girl gets hurt after investing all her love and emotions, finding out that somewhere along the way, Sherm got fucked over so badly by a woman that he doesn’t trust anything with breasts, especially her. Girl is destroyed. Girl is devastated. Girl is ruined for life. Girl leaves in tears and Sherm loses himself in another freak until the next relationship.
Did he treat them like shit on purpose? I don’t know. Probably not. But I do know that the dude could get pussy, and that was one of the reasons we hung out with him. If you’re a guy, you’ll understand that.
Women thought Sherm was broken, and immediately they wanted to fix him. And maybe they were right.
