Vignette City 45.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

I make 35 grand a year, but I used to make 30 grand a year. So when I got the pay bump I just sat down with a glass of moscato and a spreadsheet and did the math about how to deposit to my savings a % more each month so that I would never see the extra.

Like a ghost on a trap door.

That was a couple of years ago.

Three years actually.

I don’t think about money much, except every day because I manage my boss’s money, but I don’t ever think about my money.

Then I looked at bank account, my savings account, at 2.1% interest and I had some money in there before the pay bump and so I should have had about 22 grand in there, but when I looked at it I had 9.7 million in there.

So that was weird.

I looked at the deposits and there were mine each month, about $208.33 each paycheck, but then also there were these erratic deposits: $126,314.73 one month, $76,413 another month, $449,113.93 another month.

It was not hard to sort out which ones were mine and which ones were not.

I plugged it all into a spreadsheet, figured out what was mine.

Very cautiously I withdrew all my own money and waited for the red flags.

But there were none.

No sirens.

No alarms.

So I pulled out one dollar that was not mine.

Then two.

No siren.

I pulled out forty bucks.

Nothing.

I pulled out $400.

Nada.

I bought a really good bottle of zinfandel, drank some of it and then pulled four hundred thousand dollars and …

Nothing happened.

I opened some other bank accounts. I started a couple of LLCs in Florida and Arizona. I watched a Youtube video about how to create a shell company. I transferred one hundred thousand dollars to an offshore account.

Then I waited.

I drank a really smooth Semillon and and moved one very cool million dollars.

And …

Nothing.

I looked up online how much I could withdraw in cash from a bank. The daily limit is ten thousand dollars. So I went to the bank and pulled 5. I went to my other bank and pulled 5.

I had 10k in my backpack and I went to a motel that took cash, I asked for a phone book because there wasn’t one in the room because that’s not a thing anymore and I called some stripper places and I ordered 4 strippers and they all came to my room and we did stuff like throw money in the air and they poured champagne on each other and one me and one of them knew how to do this fire eating thing and then the room caught a little bit on fire, but not that much and it turned out to not be that big a deal.

And someone had cocaine that I think I had to pay for and a teenager showed up with pizzas and then there was a guy who asked me if I wanted to invest in the circus and that seemed like a good ideas, probably because of the cocaine.

It was the best night of my life.

It took a few days in that motel room for me to realize what is really important.

So I called my boss from the plastic brown phone and I quit my job.

And nothing happened.

So I called the strippers and they sent me to the circus guy and now I help manage the circus and I know how much elephants eat. We travel all the time and that is quite nice and I get to go to places I didn’t know existed. I only make $400 a week now, but - with compounding interest - I have more than fifteen million dollars accessible to me.

But who needs that much money anyway?

I have happiness.

Now.

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