Red Envelopes

11:42. Should have a couple hours before Marie’s home. Don’t think about what she’s doing. Pull the cash from the shoebox and count. Just count. Don’t think about the ballet studio, the repetition, the chastising, the mansion, the bus rides. Remember to pull that hundred dollars out of the card Mom sent but don’t get started thinking about all her virtues and idiosyncrasies. Check the Cartier website. Count again. 200 short. Just call Bradley. Most likely he’s asleep anyway.

Let it ring and pace a little. Leave a voicemail.

Hey man, remember when I found that guitar at Goodwill? How you pulled up videos of Jimi Hendrix. Remember that? How we sat there totally rapt, in every sense of the word listening to him turn one simple instrument into the voice of a generation. And then it got to him playing with his teeth and you jumped up like your ass was on fire and pretty much screamed “I feel his soul! I’m touched by his soul! A beautiful union between man and machine!” And picked up the guitar to reenact what we were seeing.

To me you were like a monolith to everything cool, a walking talking cigarette wearing a leather jacket and chucks, standing just so against a brick wall. Greasy little god. I somehow thought you’d pull it off. Alas, you were also just a kid—just a bit older and pretty cool, I’ll admit—and that high E string screeched like a wounded bird and immediately snapped in your mouth.

Providence though, very next day Grandma—Jesus, I still can’t come to terms with that neurotic old woman and how she existed in the world. There had to have been a serious error on the assembly line the day she was minted—gave me one of those red envelopes.

Where in the ever-loving fuck did she get the idea—and stick with it despite DNA tests showing white, white, white—that we were descendants of Chinese royalty? All pasty, surname Schumacher, going around everyday in ornate silk robes. Embarrassing business.

But damn if I didn’t sort of feel like Chinese royalty when she slipped one of those red envelopes my way. That time I think I just about literally felt my heart swell- she had unknowingly just fixed the guitar and I was this close to doing my best to imitate Chinese, speak in tongues to show her my appreciation, but had the good sense, even at that age, not to. How in the hell did Mom, with her judgmental disposition, manage to stand her?

Remember that phrase Mom used to use? “Bad breeding?” For my senior Prom it was this chick Mary Ellen. Soon as Mom heard her name she made this guttural sort of choking noise and muttered all aghast, “Pah! Pah! two first names! Bad breeding!” Assuaged when I showed her a picture? Not one bit. I will give it to her though, the girl had very, um, sultry eyes.

Out of shame mostly I never told you, but last year I was about to pack it in, give it up. 30 was coming quick and I felt myself outside of a locked door with a pretty nasty storm brewing—shouldn’t a musician have dumped his creative load and burned up in a supercar wreck already? So I was feeling real sorry for myself, wondering if I might be a good candidate for assisted suicide someplace when I stopped in for coffee and fell in love with the barista. She’s 24 and would certainly, in Mom’s eyes, be the net sum of “bad breeding”. She’d be right on the money.

Single father, subsidized housing with government stipends for food and whatnot—the whole lot. The way she put it to me: Dad was a real dopamine monkey and wasn’t above huffing duster out of a rag when unable to afford his preferred routes to oblivion. I guess he would just sort of sit there all year, doing just enough to keep them alive and no more, rotting on the couch foregoing food in favor of the substance of the day, growing a wizard’s beard and cultivating a noxious coating over his skin. But somehow—and this seems to sort of balance the scales to her, at least to enough of a degree that she keeps in contact with him, sorta—every year on her birthday she’d step out of her bedroom in the morning to find him in the living room, bathed and babyfaced with some lavish, way above their means gift for her. She described it as “the great reset”. Overall effect? Pretty rough stuff.

Now your wondering is this chick batshit crazy or somehow well adjusted? How has the past near year of our lives together been? I wouldn’t change a thing. Scratch that- I would, I am, I’m working on it. Yes, I’ve still been gigging when I can find one, unpaid or paid… I always sort of imagine some executive might’ve had a real fucked up day and found himself in whichever dive bar is humoring me, finding himself being reinvigorated and shown the light, by me, hence pulling me aside after the show in an ecstatic, out of breath sort of hushed tone, “Kid you really got something here. I’m gonna need your ass and I’m gonna need it now. Gonna need that ass in a fancy recording studio.” And signing me right there and then.

It’s never going to happen, its a lingering fantasy, a childhood friend that never grew up.

Still keeping with the ballet studio every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Sitting at that piano playing the same goddamn la-di-da minuet over and over and over. I mean Jesus Christ can’t these little bitches get it together so we can move on to a new piece? The answer is no, no they can’t and yes maybe it was a little harsh to call them bitches just then seeing as they’re little girls and all but boy it really wears on you. Sometimes I’ll play my own stuff when they stop for water but the teacher lady gets pissed and I mean pissed. She doesn’t have a stick up her ass she’s got the whole damn yard up that thing and I’ve never seen a person stand so straight before.

You know, I used to get so jealous with the girls I dated. Have you ever felt that sort of anger? Where you feel this girl belongs to you as in she’s your possession like a coffee maker you bought at Target? But suddenly your coffee maker wants to wear a skirt so short it looks like a belt out to the bar with you and draw the attention of every other coffee enthusiast in the place. And your dick shrivels with anger, like you can feel your dick and your heart enter your stomach simultaneously and shake hands. And you try to rationalize, thinking like ok what’s really happening here? Although likely not a conscious decision in her outfit choice, she knows she’s in the prime of her life and wants to be alive in that moment, the here and now and its scary because the moment you say “now” it becomes “then” and maybe she just wants to enjoy and to some degree, find solace in showing off her youth. But a couple drinks in all your aware of is how spurned your feeling like you just stepped out of a microwave on high and pretty soon you’re calling this chick things she’s never been called and seeing disbelief in her eyes just before she cries. Something about it so innocent, like a kid’s drawn-out pause before sobbing after eating shit. So you’re even more mad at your own guilt. And are you paying for that little Jezebel’s dinner and drinks? Hell no.

Maybe I shouldn’t be fessing up to all this but I think Dad has a bit of that and so you probably do too. Or I’m all wrong about you guys in which case you’d probably suggest therapy, but the truth is I’ve mostly sorted it out. Living proof: Marie.

Seems about when I just say it—she’s a stripper.

Coffee shop wages weren’t cutting it. She wants to go to school, find a career, and its not like I can lend much of a hand financially. It’s temporary and I’ve seen where she works, it caters to upscale clientele and its not a full service sort of joint. The panties stay on and when you sit down you don’t worry about sitting in a warm puddle—no lost and found for rain coats. It’s themed, called The Pirate’s Cove. Basically groups of guys—the sorts that know the rules to polo or were on the university rowing team—come in and are led by a girl of their choice to a little cove complete with pool and small pirate ship with bar and plank. They do a sort of role play which culminates in them telling the girl to “walk the plank or take thar titties out” and you can guess what happens next.

She’s always telling me she finds no pleasure in the work and I partially believe her but then I’m thinking who wouldn’t find at least some measure of satisfaction in tangible admiration- especially this young woman who has spent the majority of her life perpetually forgotten? Every night she brings home this pillowcase stuffed with the night’s loot, unloads it on our little coffee table and we count it all. I saw this article the other day that I keep thinking about… all the filth on money. Cash is made of cotton and linen and makes an idyllic little home for bacteria, especially after you shove it in the dark, possibly moist void of your pants pocket. They were finding all kinds of residue on money—cocaine, dog spittle, human feces. So lately she’s been coming home, unloading the pillowcase and as we count I’m trying my damndest not to be cognizant of the grime but thinking who knows where these swashbucklers have been.

Anyway, I think if you take anything from this whole monologue it should be that I’m in love, maybe for the first time. Ten years from now I could be in a driftwood shack built by my own hands, floorboards full of splinters and the only audience for my music being Marie and our future child, and that’d be enough. She wants more than that though—wants more than enough. It isn’t shallow or materialistic so much as… I mean she’s lived in the shabby lean-to and worn the donated threads.

Here’s where I get to the reason for the call- sometimes we’ll pass time window shopping, talking up a shared dream about all these things we’ll fill our life with after finding careers. This one time we’re passing the Cartier store and they’re displaying this little gold ring called the “Love Ring”. I think it must be some sort of joke because they’re selling love as a totally plain gold ring for 1400 dollars. But Marie was enamored with it and every time we pass by now she’s stopping to look. She seems to be thinking if she gets that ring on her finger it’ll be some sort of signifier of change or some small buffer protecting her ever so slightly from discomfort.

When I got my first Epiphone Les Paul all I could think about was the big daddy Gibson, what Jimmy Page played. Of course I saw the logic in pawning everything I had to get the Gibson, plugged in and realized it was in his fingers, his hands, probably every lilt and curve in his body that effected the way he held the guitar, shaped by every unique movement he had ever made. No matter what I played on, I was going to sound like myself. I’m thinking she’ll probably feel the same breed of disappointment but even if the euphoria from the relief of having acquired what she so desired lasts for only a second, I want to give it to her just the same. Her birthday is next week and it’ll be dinner with her dad and if the lifelong trend continues he’ll be all spiffy with some extravagant gift and I can’t let her—and even him, in a way—down.

Recently I’ve been picking up whatever work I can. Through some stroke of luck I found this seedy clinical psych study place where I’m getting 50 an hour, paid in cash, and the work is pie. I don’t think there’s anything at all clinical about it other than the lab coats they’re all wearing around there. Its run out of this looming winged gothic mansion just outside town. From what I can tell its a whole lot of people with too much money and slightly sadistic proclivities that probably worship Freud and spend their time devising elaborate mind games to subject those in need of quick cash to.

Yesterday I think it was the worst one yet. I’m led to a massive lecture hall with rows stretching far off full of students? I’m placed on a raised stage, front and center. Note pads are opening making a collective whooshing gust and pens are clicking ready. Then in walks a man with one of those hulking muscular looking guts popping through his leather vest that looks like he probably gets down on all fours and beats his shining white scalp on the concrete just to feel a little drunk.

No easy way to say what happened next. Motorbike Goliath essentially worked me like a rag doll and ran me through a ringer of mock sex positions. And I was thinking yep, they’re definitely playing mind games. Consolation in the fact that at least no clothes came off and there wasn’t really any thrusting to speak of. At first, when he flipped me over and put me in well, lets just call it downward dog, my muscles were so tense I thought they’d snap my bones. All I felt was that big gut pressing firm on my ass and all I heard was the smooth morse code of the pens of at least 60 on lookers scribbling. Then I’m getting flipped on my back for trusty old missionary and at first I looked in his eyes and saw an alarming sort of penitentiary shower desire but by that point the truth is it didn’t really phase me.

My eyes found the high ceiling and I started to think about the ring and Marie and I felt so at ease I started to find relaxation in the stretch of him pushing my ankles up near my ears. Then I’m hearing a girl’s voice coming from one of the front rows whispering, “he’s really taking it now.” And I was.

Sure after I felt pretty used, but it might still beat the ballet studio. At least it was novel. As I got paid and rifled through the stack of bills my thoughts turned again to that article and the bacterial utopia on the cash and I was feeling dirty holding it. Sitting on the bus riding home, feeling the wad in my flannel breast pocket collecting my own bacteria I was going further with it. Thinking about the high rises its been in, Italian leather wallets overhearing confidential meetings in language so educated it’d sound foreign, some of it maybe having spent some of its life solitary with some bum, barely protected against the wet parking lot curb by a well worn denim pocket waiting to be transferred to a street alchemist. Switching hands to a landlord, some sweating day laborer who doesn’t speak a lick of English, a minimum wage employee at the store and then briefly finding rest in the cavern of a cash register before being changed. Exchanges that always have and always will exist. And then I’m thinking about how much value every act of trading them away holds to me now that I love someone other than myself.

Right before I called you I was counting the money I’ve put away for the ring and I’m a couple hundred short. I can get you back, if not the end of this month definitely by middle of next. Maybe you could send it in one of those red envelopes for old time’s sake haha. I don’t know man, call me back.

The click of the lock on the front door and I find my place on the couch.

We sit and count the cash and I’m feeling the cotton linen blend of the bills passing between my fingers and thinking about the men in the Cove cosplaying pirates and picture them, angular in new suits, ties making a spacious noose around their neck after the work week, while they smoke a cigarette and enjoy it because they can and they enjoy everything because they know something I don’t and have something Marie wants. Watching Marie’s tits in the dim light, pretending to accidentally brush her hips as they tuck the bills that are no more than paper to them into her panties, seeing her smile tease at promises she won’t keep, even if they were in her best interest, smelling the vestigial scent of the perfume I bought for her as it washes away in clean rivulets down her skin.