You stand just out of sight, watching the security
guards, two of them, standing outside the place. Your face
feels sweaty. You hope your sweat doesn’t make the mustache
and sideburns fall off. You hope you can go through with
this. You hope everything doesn’t fall to shit.

        Breathe.

        In and out.

        Breathe.

        In through the nose; out through the mouth.

        Breathe.

        You step out into the open and you walk toward the
bank with what you hope is a natural gait.

        You can feel the security guards staring at you as you
walk toward them. Staring at you. Sizing you up. This was a
stupid idea, a bad idea, a really dumb and stupid and bad
idea. You can turn around right now. You can turn around
and forget about it. You can turn around and walk off in
some other direction and pretend you never even thought of
this. There are other solutions. There are other ways of
solving this. You don’t have to do this. You can go right
back to that Texaco station and pull all this shit off your
face and pretend you never even thought that this was
possible. There’d be no shame in that. None at all.

        “Morning, sir,” says one of the security guards as you
walk past him.

        “Morning, fellas,” you say.

        And walk into the bank.

        The line is very short. It’s mid-morning on a Tuesday.
There’s no good reason the line would be anything but
short. Yet you still feel the stir of panic in your guts
wanting to spread like a cancer, weaving its tendrils
through your body and mind till you can’t function at all.
You can feel the panic wanting to do that, but you know you
can’t let it. You simply can’t let it happen, or this will
turn ugly and wrong very fast.

        You get to the back of the line. And you stand there
and wait for the three people in front of you to be taken
care of. It takes all of two seconds.

        “I can help you here, sir.”

        You look up and a brunette woman in her late twenties
is smiling at you with artificially whitened teeth that
sparkle like a Crest commercial.

        Breathe.

        In through the nose; out through the mouth.

        On the wall behind her, there are seven mounted
cameras, all of them staring at you with their glass eyes.

        You walk to the bank teller and you smile at her.

        “How you doing today?” you say.

        Then you look at her name tag.

        “How you doing today, Naomi?”

        “Good,” Naomi says. “What can I do for you today, sir?”

        “Well,” you say.

        “The thing is,” you say. “I’m going to have to make a withdrawal.”

        “Okay,” Naomi says. “What’s your account number?”

        “I don’t bank here.”

        “Oh,” Naomi says.

        “Keep your hands on the counter while I talk to you.
And keep smiling. And look only at me.”

        Naomi puts her hands on the counter.

        And looks at you.

        “That’s my girl,” you say.

        “Now,” you say. “What I want you to do is simply open
your drawer. I want you to take out the top seven one
hundred dollar bills. Then take out five twenty dollar
bills. Then take out ten ten dollar bills. I want to see
your hands at all times. You hand me that money. You leave
the rest of the money in the drawer alone. I watch movies.
I know how you people fuck things up. I know what happens
if you take the last bill out of the drawer. Close the
drawer. Smile at me as I walk away. Close your window. Tell
whoever it is you have to tell what happened.

        “Can you do that?” you say. “Can you do that, Naomi?
Because if you can’t, bad things will happen.”

        Naomi nods.

        “That’s my girl. Get to it.”

        You smile at her.

        She smiles back.

        She opens the drawer. She keeps her hands where you
can see them. She counts out the money just as you told
her.

        Your stomach clenches and you swallow back vomit.

        Your throat is burning.

        You try to swallow back the burning sensation but it
just keeps bubbling there, clinging to the back of your
tongue and your uvula.

        You remember discovering your uvula as a boy, looking
into the mirror with your mouth wide open, asking your
mother what that thing was called and her telling you that
that was your tonsils.

        Your mother was never able to admit when she didn’t
know something; she just made it up instead.

        The teller slides the money toward you and smiles
sheepishly.

        “Thank you, Naomi,” you say.

        “You’ve been wonderful,” you say.

        “I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble,” you say.

        And Naomi smiles. “No trouble at all, sir,” she says.

        “Have a good day, Naomi.”

        “You too, sir.”

        “Holy fucking shit,” you say to the floor.

        The floor does not respond.

        Breathe.

        In through the nose; out through the mouth.

        Your heart is thumping against your chest and it feels
as though it’s going to pound right through your chest
wall, like that thing in that movie, fuck, what was it
called? Alien. Like that thing in Alien.

        You did it.

        You fucking did it.

        You sit up.

        Your breathing has slowed.

        Your heart rate is down to the level of someone not on
the brink of a heart attack.

        The contents of your stomach just might stay somewhere
inside your body, if not exactly remaining inside the
stomach itself.

        You did it.

        Breathe.

        In through the nose; out through the mouth.

        After another moment, you get to your feet and look
into the mirror. You jump when you see your reflection.
Then laugh at yourself for not recognizing the man looking
back at you. Handsome devil.

        Pulling off the mustache you think about the nine
hundred dollars you got for one day’s work. Good money. You
know you robbed a bank and could have gotten ten times
that, but you’re not a bank robber.

        You’re just a guy buying time.

        In this case, you just wanted to buy yourself one more
week. One more week to figure out what you’re really gonna
do to support yourself and your wife.

        Nine hundred dollars.

        Less than three hours of work.

        And that includes all the preparation.

        And it felt good.

        It made you sick, but it felt good too. It felt good
because you have spent your entire life getting trampled on
and used by people with more money and more power than you.
Pushed and shoved and manipulated. Since the very beginning.

        You’re going to have to work Saturday.

        This building was bought by developers; we’re going to
have to ask you to leave within thirty days of the
expiration of your lease.

        No, sir, you can’t dine here. Did you say you have a
reservation? Oh. Well. It must have been lost in the
shuffle. Those three empty tables are reserved by people
with names other than yours. I’m so sorry for the
confusion. There’s a Jack in the Box down on Sunset and
Ivar.

        Your whole life has been a series of humiliations, all
because you weren’t one of them, one of those people.

        Well, fuck those people.

        For once in your life, you took something back.

        For once.

        You spent the last thirty-six years of your life being
pushed and shoved and manipulated and humiliated and used
and abused, and this one time you took something back.

        In a way, in a strange way, what you did today was the
ultimate Americanism.

        Look at you, living in a crackerbox track home in the
Valley, in Sherman Oaks, driving a Celica, eating discount
steak from Ralph’s when you eat steak at all -- and you
took something back.

        For the first time in your life, you became a
capitalist instead of being one capitalized upon.

        The ultimate Americanism.

        The American dream.

        True: what you did was illegal.

        But you hurt no one. You simply slapped the face of
some mega insurance corporation so gently it won’t even
feel it till next Thursday.

        You simply capitalized on those that could afford it,
instead of those who could not.

        You are a good American.

        On the way home, you stop for some roses for your wife
and you also stop off at a Cuban restaurant on Wilcox to
make reservations for dinner for the evening.

        You intend to take your wife out.

        It has been a long time since the two of you did
anything worth doing, anything that you enjoyed.

        It’s time to get that enjoyment back.

        After parking the Celica in your driveway, you push
the door open, grab the roses off the passenger’s seat, and
walk toward the house.

        It’s only 12:45 p.m., and between the time you got up
and now you made more than you would have made in a whole
week at your last job.

        Whistling and walking toward the front door, you have
to remind yourself that that wasn’t your last job if such a
title makes bank robbing your current job because what you
did this morning was a one time thing.

        You aren’t a bank robber.

        That’s why you asked for just enough to hold you over
for another week.

        You’re gonna get a real job.

        Soon.

        Maybe.

        You grab the doorknob and twist it and push open your
front door (which some fucking little puke kids egged and
stained last Halloween because you forgot what day it was
and didn’t have candy ready for them) and walk inside and
shut the door behind you.

        You do this quietly.

        You want to surprise your wife. You want to be
standing before her with flowers and reservations and a
grin before she even knows you’re home. You want the
relationship you had nine years ago.

        And now this.

        You hear her shuffling in the kitchen, so you tip-toe
in that direction. But just outside the sliding kitchen
door -- which is slid almost completely shut -- you hear
her talking.

        To another person in the kitchen?

        On the phone?

        You pause and listen.

        “Well,” she says, “I just feel like he’s hiding
something from me.”

        A pause.

        Who the fuck is she talking to?

        Who is she talking to about you?

        “He’s trying,” she says.

        “A job?” she says.

        “Well,” she says, “I don’t know what a job would do.”

        Another pause.

        Who the living fuck is she talking to about you?

        “Look, Sally,” she says.

        Her sister. The cunt.

        “Look, Sally,” she says. “I don’t want to sneak around
behind his back.”

        Another pause.

        “Even if he is doing that to me.”

        Guilt in your stomach; acid in your throat.

        “You have a point,” she says. “What kind of job is
it?”

        You can see it now. Her working at some beauty supply
store in the Burbank Mall, the Mac store or something, and
hiding the fact from you because she expects you to be at
work the entire time she is working, and because you don’t
know she’s working she can stockpile her money, get some
personal bank account that you don’t know about and just
stockpile, and six months from now she’ll have enough to
leave you clean, to simply disappear, and the next time you
hear from her will be through somebody knocking on the
front door of your messy and destroyed house (you won’t be
able to keep it up after she leaves) with divorce papers in
his left hand and a shit-eating grin thrown across his
lower face, like some bad used car dealership commercial.

        “Oh,” she says.

        “That’s a good rate,” she says.

        That’s when you slide open the kitchen door, and stand
in the doorway, holding the flowers out to her.

        “Looooseeeee,” you say in your best Cuban accent. “I’m
home!”

        Your wife jumps.

        She says, “I gotta go, Sally.”

        She hangs up the phone.

        Then she turns to you and smiles.

        “Hi,” she says.

        “Hi,” you say.

        “You’re home early.”

        “I am.”

        “How come?”

        “I brought you roses,” you say.

        You hold the flowers out to her and she takes them and looks at them and
looks to you with guilt.

        “Thank you,” she says.

        “Who was that?”

        “Who was who?” she says.

        “On the phone.”

        “Oh. Sally.”

        “How is she?”

        Your wife shrugs.

        “How come you’re home so early?”

        “I wanted to see you.”

        She looks at you for a moment, and then shakes her
head. Doesn’t believe you.

        “No,” she says, “really.”

        “Did something,” she says, “happen at work?”

        “Nothing ever happens at work.”

        She says nothing. She simply crosses her arms and
looks at you, looks into your eyes with distrust.

        “I thought we were doing okay,” you say.

        “Well maybe if you paid more attention to reality you
would have known we weren’t.”

        “Where is this coming from?”

        “From me.”

        “But why?” you say. “Don’t you see how fucking hard
I’m trying here? Can’t you see that?”

        “Sally thinks you’re hiding something.”

        You sigh.

        “Finally!” you say, “It comes out! My wife is the
puppet of her baby sister, and when Sally thinks something,
my wife thinks it too!”

        You walk past her, suddenly in a very bad mood,
suddenly not looking forward to dinner, suddenly just
wanting a beer and the tv, so you can zone, so you can stop
thinking for a time.

        That’s always been what you’ve been best at.

        Not thinking.

        Doing nothing.

        Sedentary uselessness is something you know about.

        You swing open the fridge, grab a bottle of Budweiser,
twist the top and flick it in the direction of the trash
can as you walk past your wife and out to the living room.

        In the living room, you fall onto the couch.

        Sink into it.

        Eight years old and threadbare. You should have got a
new one a long time ago.

        There’s a lot of shit you should have done a long time
ago but haven’t.

        That’s life.

        You milk your beer and stare at your own reflection.

        Look at you, you fat fucking loser.

        After a moment, your wife follows you into the living
room. She stands against a wall, her arms crossed, just
looking at you. Staring at you. And it’s impossible to read
her expression, to tell what she’s thinking.

        “What?” you say.

        “Don’t do this,” she says.

        “Don’t do what?”

        “This.”

        “What is this?”

        “Don’t go back to the way you were.”

        You sigh.

        You scratch your cheek.

        You run your fingers through your thinning hair.

        “I made us reservations for dinner,” you say. “That’s
why I came home early.”

        “Really?”

        “Yeah,” you say, “but you didn’t exactly put me in the
mood for romance.”

        Another draw from the beer.

        “Fuck it,” you say.

        “It doesn’t matter what I do,” you say, “you find a
reason to be unhappy with me, to question what I’m doing.
You never just trust me. I’m always hiding something from
you. In your mind.”

        “Oh, baby,” she says. And she walks to you and sits on
the couch beside you.

        “I’m sorry,” she says.

        “Things have been so weird between us,” she says. “I
just … I get scared. I worry."

        “Let’s just go out,” she says.

        “Let’s go out and have a good time and pretend we’re
happy,” she says.

        “Who knows,” you say. “Maybe if we pretend long
enough, we will be happy again.”

        How can you be happy when the smile on your wife’s
face looks more like a grimace?

        It’s false.

        A Mrs. Potato Head plastic smile pinned to her flesh.

        “This isn’t working, is it?” you say.

        “No,” she says.

        “What do you want?”

        “I don’t know.”

        “Then what can I do?”

        “I don’t know that either.”

        “Fuck.”

        She sighs. “Don’t be like that.”

        “Like what?” you say.

        “You know.”

        “No.”

        “Upset with me.”

        “I’m not upset with you; I’m just upset.”

        “Please don’t be.”

        “How the fuck am I supposed to feel?”

        You finish the last two-thirds of your Chimay in three
swallows and wave Bangs over to get you another one.

        “Why do you always have to drink?” she asks.

        “It helps me forget.”

        “Forget what?” she says.

        “The way,” you say, “the way that, when I look into
your eyes, you look right through mine.”

        “That’s not fair,” she says.

        “What is fair? Do you think it’s fair that, no matter
what the fuck I do, you’re unhappy? All I want is your
happiness and it’s the one thing I can’t have.”

        Silence and silence.

        And then, “Let’s go home.”

        “No,” you say. “I’m not going home.”

        “I’m not gonna sit here and fight with you,” she says.

        “Then leave. But I won’t.”

        “Fine,” she says.

        She gets to her feet. And she walks away.

        And when, after fifteen minutes have passed, she
hasn’t returned, you realize she wasn’t bluffing. You
should have known she wasn’t, but somehow -- somehow you
thought she’d return. You thought she’d come back to you.

        You wonder if she took the car. You guess she must
have. She must have taken the car and left you stranded
here.

        That’s okay.

        You’ve been stranded all your life.