ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

A fat young man with long dreadlocks and a dirty, food-crusted shirt entered the store and walked very, very slowly up to the counter, looking stupid and confused.

“Uh,” he said.

“Er, may I help you, sir?”

“What?” he said. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on me. A strong breeze of pure marijuana wafted through the slot under the window then.

“Ah, right. What do you need?” I asked.

“Uh,” he said.

“Yes?” I said patiently.

“I need to—” He broke off mid-sentence and stared at the counter for a moment. “I need to, uh, cash this, gotta buy a money order.” He dug a crumpled ball of paper out of his front pocket and passed it under the window.

I picked up the piece of paper, which seemed to have been a Western Union Money Order he had purchased at our store a few days ago for $10 and made out to himself. It smelled so strongly of reefer that I wondered why he didn’t just tear it up, stuff a joint with it and sell it to one of his friends for $20. “You want to cash a money order and buy a money order?” I asked.

“Yeah, I don’t like the…number…on that one,” he said.

“What, the $10?” I asked, confused as hell.

“No, the number.”

I could get no better explanation from him with regard to why he considered his money order unsuitable. Although I considered his logic questionable at best, I agreed to cash his money order. It was six percent, I reminded him. That was okay, he said. I saw from his entry in the computer that he had cashed a number of $10, $8.90 and $7.87 money orders, which were increasingly smaller as the list went down. “Huh. Well, all right,” I said.

I cashed his money order.

“Uh,” he said. There was a long pause while I waited for him to finish. “How much new money order can I get for this?” he asked, indicating the $9.40 that remained from cashing his old one.

“Um, they’re fifty cents. So you can get a money order for…$8.90 with that much,” I told him. I thought of all those $10 and $8.90 and $7.87 money orders he had cashed. It made my head hurt.

“I, uh, I’d like to do that,” he said.

“Uh, right. Okay,” I said. I made his $9.40 into a new money order. “Would you like a pen to fill out your money order, sir?” I asked him doubtfully.

“I don’t fill them out to nobody,” he said.

“You don’t?” I said.

He shook his head, closing his eyes as he did so. Maybe it made him dizzy. “No, I keep them. They’re my savings.”

“I…see. Well, you have a good day, sir.”

“What?”

“Nevermind,” I said.