Ca$h money

In the past three years, I've owned five different Bank of America debit cards. Two were lost to identity theft. One was sacrificed in the name of matrimony. One suffered debilitating paralysis when I forgot its PIN number, and the last expired of natural causes. The long and short of it is, I'm no good with plastic. Every time I approach an ATM, I feign the blank, blasé stare of those ahead of me in line for the infernal machine, but secretly, what I'm always thinking is: Please, please, please work for me this time. As one can deduce from the above, the statistical level of success for this ATM rain-dance is approximately the same as a New England weather reporter's. I do not, in point of fact, make it rain.

I've noted earlier that my relationship to money is characterized by willful distrust and magical thinking. Yet, in spite of having no concept of "responsible spending," and in spite of earning a salary that would make a Starbucks barista laugh, I've somehow managed to be able to buy everything I've ever needed -- mostly to the tune of alcohol, food, and plane tickets to exotic foreign and domestic locales (in descending order of necessity). Whenever the routine ATM error message occurs and I can't get my hot, greasy mitts on the "hard-earned" cash trapped so pathetically behind the impersonal glass screen, I always think of how my father talked about not getting tenure: "You do your job, and at the end of the month there's a check in your box. Then, one day, there's no check." The pitiful way he said this -- curled around a full glass of whiskey, deep in the throes of the depression that would haunt him for years because of this one stupid professional snafu -- terrified me. I never wanted to feel like that, like somehow I'd slipped through the cracks of some nice consistent system and plunged into the bowels of Kafkaesque chaos.

But the older I get, and the more times I'm frozen out of my own stupid bank account for months on end, the more I realize that while I may have inherited many of my father's irrational fears, this one is something we feel fundamentally different about. Because when I do get that error message, I just laugh. (Well, curse profusely, and occasionally give the machine a light kick. Then comes the laughing part.) With all the truly terrible things that can happen to a person over the course of his/her life -- illness, fire, robbery, rape... -- what's the point of worrying so much about obviously temporary monetary glitches? I guess it helps that I don't have any Alpha-Immigrant hangups, and it helps that I do have a plucky American in-home support system (who knows a thing or two about Roth IRAs). But what's particularly useful to acknowledge, and what I'm probably going to end up teaching my parents the hard way one of these days, is that the fastest way to misery is thinking there's some teleological relationship between the goodness of your soul, the strength of your innate talents, and the presence or absence of that paycheck in your box. My father, with all his talk of the superiority of acetic monks over his lowly fallen self, has been circling around that realization in the form of mystical religiosity for a long time, but those pesky bourgeois values (order = virtue! check in box!) just keep sucking him back. I want him, and mom, too, to accompany me to an ATM one day. I want things, as usual, to go bad. I want to see my parents express the cringing horror they always do when something like this happens, and then I want to point to that error screen and say, "See? Look, it's all so stupid. It's a broken calculator, just a bunch of crossed wires and bad code. It's annoying and frustrating and will take a lot of shit work to fix, but guess what? Ultimately? It. Isn't. Real."

Of course, things might change once kids come into the picture and I am tempted by the trap of giving them "the best of everything," whatever that is -- but hopefully not too much. If there's one thing I want to retain of my twentysomething self, it's the ability to parse through bourgeois bullshit and come out none the worse for wear.