Evil schemes thwarted, $20

Sun Jan 25 2004

"Do you like black people?" -- Homeless man asking me for $60 $20 inside the supermarket, less than 30 minutes ago

I had the most brilliant plan ever: I have a huge jar of change. I need groceries. There is a Dominick's supermarket at Halsted and Madison, roughly one mile from here, which would be walking distance were it not negative umpteen degrees and hella windy outside. There is a Jewel supermarket even closer, less than half a mile along a major bus line, but the Dominick's has one major advantage: according to Coinstar's website, they have a Coinstar machine.

This appealed to me, because it would allow me to kill at least two birds with no more than one stone. I could dump all of my change into the Coinstar machine, and rather than cashing out as I would at the next-nearest machine at Clark and Division (and taking the 15% or whatever service fee hit), I would trade the change for my groceries. So simple, so elegant. And once again, I prove that I am a Super Genius™, because no mere genius could screw something up this badly.

All this scheming depended on one thing: the Coinstar machine. No Coinstar = Screwed. Or more specifically, the lack of a Coinstar machine would mean that I had gone blocks upon hellish blocks out of my way, ventured into a slightly less whiteyfied neighborhood and then forced to haul bags of groceries back through that same distance, for absolutely no reason.

Guess what happened?1

As if that weren't terrible enough, while I had made sure to stick a Jewel-Osco discount card in my wallet (plannning since this morning to hit Jewel, not Dominick's, for my provisions) I don't even have a Dominick's card right now. And most everything I bought was on sale if and only if one used the discount card.

I restricted my shopping to the essentials -- milk, bread, Diet Coke with Lime, four boxes of Raisin Bran Crunch -- and got the hell out of there. On my way out the door, I had to explain to a very big, very homeless black man that I didn't have any cash, let alone $60 $20.2 Then, as I'm finally walking out to catch my bus back home, I head down Madison Street to the next bus stop...only to find that at this hour, the Madison bus turns onto Halsted before heading back into the Loop. So I start running like Forrest to catch this bus, and I make it to within six inches of the door when it closes and the bus pulls away. I run after it, scream obscenities at the driver, whatever.

So I'm forced to get cash from an ATM and catch a cab. It is freezing and I know that the next bus will be at least ten minutes. I am not willing to wait. I am also operating under yet another assumption: that the cab driver will have a ten dollar bill to give me as change. I only had a twenty; I was hesitant, but generally willing to just accept a ten -- maybe a ten and a couple of ones -- which would have been a huge tip for the (as it turned out) $5 cab ride.

Guess what happened?3

1 If you had to click on this footnote...my gah. Long story short: the Coinstar machine was out of order.

2 I feel for the guy -- going broke and having to live with one's mother for seven months will do wonders for one's empathy for the homeless -- but I mean, come on. He opened by asking "do [I] like black people?", and then he asks me for $60. Granted, I am a white person in a relatively expensive, rather elegant wool coat. This is significant, because while your rank-and-file whitey (as identified by any winter attire that is clearly not secondhand, from parkas to peacoats, yet not long or woolen or Pradaesque) who does not have $60+ just bursting to break free from the oppressive confines of their velcro-and-cordura Da Bears wallet, the fine lambskin billfold one could easily imagine resting in my inside coat pocket just may contain the riches this man sought.

Anyway, the point is: after seven months spent in the casually racist South as one of the more enlightened individuals who sees value in all people, with the possible exception of my fellow white males, it's a bit of a trip to come back to Chicago, to Winter and a recession, and find the battle lines between the skin colors as finely drawn as ever.

3 God, you have no talent for inference, do you? The guy didn't have a ten.