Cash money is sick
I probably won’t die from the coronavirus, though saying that means I probably will. As the oldtime Irish said, “What you call comes to you.”
In the meantime, I’m washing my hands more often. My wife, Deborah, says I have to wash my hands more often.
“You hardly ever wash your hands,” she said last week.
“I do talk radio for a living,” I said. “My hands don’t get dirty.”
I did a lot of manual labor getting through college and graduate school. I know when I’m dirty.
The two rules of dirtiness are that you’re really dirty if you can smell your own sweat and if you can see actual dirt on yourself. I don’t get dirty anymore. I told this to my wife. “That’s how homeless people are dirty,” she said. “This is germs. Other people sit in the chair you sit in. Other people use the microphone you use. Other people wear the headphones you wear.”
I began to scratch my head.
“Maybe I have lice,” I said. “From the headphones.”
Some of you went to nice schools that never had a lice outbreak. I did not. I’m terrified of lice. Lice are dirtier even than dirt because lice crawl around on you. They’re like dirt with goals in life.
I shivered. The whole country got Donald Trump, I thought. I could have lice.
I don’t have lice. I’m washing my hands many times a day now.
And, during one of those rare moments when I watched television news, I was told that some health organizations recommend we stop using cash because money is dirty. Debit cards are better, they said.
I have a debit card. I never use it because I like cash better.
Oh, God, do I like cash.
Rappers don’t like cash more than I like cash. I like cash more than drug cartels like cash.
I come from the country of “Buy Here, Pay Here” used-car dealers, of bookmakers, a country that knows the satisfying snap of a $50 bill coming off a pocket roll where it has several cousins.
I carry my money that way, too, folded once, small bills on the outside, the heavy artillery on the inside. I carry that fold of money in the front left pocket of my pants. Money in a wallet is for guys who don’t go out after dark. A wallet is for your driver’s license. Money needs to be worn on the hip, like a pistol.
The first time I saw a guy pay for a round of drinks with a debit card, I was horrified.
“What?” I said. “You come into a bar and don’t have $30 on you? What about the tip?”
“I tipped,” the guy said. “I added it to the tab when I signed.”
But you don’t get to hand the tip to the bartender, I thought. You don’t get to pass him a $5 bill or a $20 bill and say, “Hereyago, pal.”
If you don’t have money on you, I think you’re poor. If I have $65 in my pocket and all you have is a credit card with a $200,000 limit, you’re poor and I’m not.
Cash money goes where you go. It’s not in some bank where the guy in charge can let his girlfriend get naked and roll around on it, and maybe some of it sticks to her because she’s dirty, and not the kind of dirty you can wash off at the end of the shift, either.
Cash money is sick, but it better not die, because I’m washing my hands five times a day now, and I want to be handing out tips for another 20 years or so.
To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion’s latest book, “Devil’s Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America,” is a collection of his best columns, and is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, GooglePlay and iBooks. They don’t take cash.