The Worth of a Quarter from 1997

I was a little further from the door jam back in 1997.

The apartment may have been a little small for a family of six, but we found a way to fit. My older brother and sister, Chris and Johanna, each had their own room, my younger brother and I shared the second, and my parents would wrestle down the futon in the living room every night at 8:30.

Johanna's white walls were plastered over every inch with pictures of grunge rockers and Elvis, her floors carpeted with clothes to match. She had been in her own room since she got her first period. Chris' room desensitized me to heavy metal at a young age. He hung a giant Megadeth banner over a small three piece stereo that screamed louder than you'd guess it could.  He is ten years older than me, Johanna eight. Chris has cerebral palsy from a near fatal nursing mistake when he was born. You'd never have guessed it, except for the lull in his right step. While I always knew that the both of them had a different dad than me, it would be another six years before I'd come to the realization that this meant they were my "half brother" and "half sister." Those words still sound foreign to me and I don't much care for them.

My mother stayed at home and took care of my little brother and myself. My father worked hard, long hours everyday under revolving job titles for the entirety of my life. In 1995 he started up a business that helped find jobs for people with mental disorders and disabilities. By 1998 it would go under.

But on this Friday in 1997 my dad was out the door and down the stairs, off to teach James, who had Down Syndrome, how to collate paper. Me and my little brother, Sam, scrambled for the low little window where we could see his car parked down on the street. We sat framed in the second story glass, side by side and watched until we saw him look up and wave. We carried  on our goodbye waves until he disappeared. We did this every morning for all our years in that apartment. Wearing grins and high eyebrows, we looked at each other, recalling what Dad had promised from behind a newspaper, over sunny side eggs and fried potatoes. Tomorrow we were going to spend our weekly allowance, a dollar to the each of us.

"Where you gonna go?" I asked Sam.

"Dollar Store. What you gonna get?"

"Comic Book Store," I said. I'm not sure why we asked. Maybe we just needed to hear the words aloud. We went to these places every week because we could salvage the most there for a hundred pennies.

We woke up early Saturday morning and watched antennae cartoons in Ghost Buster underwear until it was time to go.

In town, the dollar store came first. Sam bought an army guy with a parachute tied into holes in his back. His fate was as fixed as his parachute, destined to float pristinely from our second story apartment into the world below. The three of us walked into the comic book shop right around noon. The cashier grinned and greeted us by name. He watched from the corner of his gold rimmed glasses as I dug delicate tunnels into the heaps of 25 cent comics stashed under tables. I emerged with two Spiderman comics older than myself, a Daredevil with Spiderman guest appearance, and a Batman for my brother.

"Your grand total comes to a dollar-five," the cashier said. I snuck my crisp dollar onto the counter while he put the protective sleeves in my bag. He smiled as he pulled a nickel out of his Hawaiian shirt's breast pocket. "Got you covered big guy, enjoy."

"We'll see you in seven days," my dad said and gave that versatile fatherly wave.

I sat on the futon that afternoon with my comic collection stacked in alphabetical towers all around me. I found places for the newcomers while Sam thought of scenarios that necessitated a parachute escape.

My parents were in the kitchen, tossing airy secrets at one another. They were the sort of whispers that your ear strained for because someone didn't want you to hear. Only scattered pieces of their sentences made it to me, debt, denied, mortgage, business, loan, down payment. These were the words they always said when they talked about getting us a house. They made my eyes gloss over a little, but I didn't think they sounded too good. I remember the last bit of their conversation as they came into the living room.

"I just don't think we're going to be able to do it for... another few months... at least."

The bright living room waned with the orange glow of sunset caught in the glass of our windows. I had to flick on a light to continue my reading, trying to mimic the words and pictures with my own pen and paper. My mom kneeled down, unwinding the chord on the vacuum by the outlet in the wall. As I looked up, I saw a commercial on our lonely TV for the Power Ranger action figures that parents were clawing at one another for.

"Mom can I get a Power Ranger tomorrow?" I asked.

She opened her mouth and tried to say yes, but the words "I'm sorry, John. I don't think we can," seemed to fall out by mistake. Her lips pursed together, and I was suddenly sorry I asked.

"It's okay," I tried to say, but she flicked the vacuum on and started to push it back and forth, her back toward me. I thought she was mad at first, so I tried to peek at her, adjusting in the ass-shaped dent I'd formed in the futon. She seemed to be taking wavering breaths, sudden and sporadic. Then I noticed  her eyeliner was beginning to run. She stood there running the vacuum back and forth facing the wall, trying to time the vacuum's whirr with her waves of quiet whimpers.

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. I didn't want her to know I saw. I looked down on the issue of Spiderman in my lap. I did my best to lose myself in his Manhattan world, watching him swing on webs to his Aunt, his girlfriend and all his loved ones that routinely found themselves in mortal danger. I studied Peter Parker with intensity as he protected his only family from the Vulture and pretended I couldn't hear my mother crying.

. . .

Eleven years later I slid through the door of my parent's house. I gave the door jam a whack as I passed under it that made the foundation shudder.

I got a creeping sensation of deja vu when I saw my parent's huddled in the kitchen. Only this time, I tried to defend myself from their dull words whispered, but one still wormed through my cupped hands into my ears. Business loan and debt had evolved into the word bankruptcy. I headed straight for the basement door, and as I closed it I trapped their last sentence in the staircase with me.

"It won't be so bad. We just sell it and then get an apartment and..."

I sunk down the basement stairs. As I twisted my way through the maze of memories and trinkets of years past, dust turned up in my wake.

It didn't take long to find it. I wrestled it from under a stuffed animal graveyard. I pulled a string and loosed the mustard light from a basement bulb. The yellow glow fought its way through dust funnels to light the huge chest. I kneeled over it and popped the locks. The hinges creaked as I curled the top back.

I could hardly believe how many there were. Every inch of room in the chest was filled with them. They didn't get rid of a single one. The sheer volume of them was overwhelming.

I picked up a copy of Spiderman and removed it from its protective sleeve like it might disintegrate if I didn't handle it properly. I leafed through the pages and looked over familiar words and pictures. They were fun to look at, and stirred up some nostalgic feelings of the imitation drawings I'd made, of having to keep a dictionary handy for the big words the writers liked to pepper into the monologues. But reading it felt different somehow. I didn't feel like I was in Manhattan, twisting through skyscrapers and sticking to bricks. I felt like I was in my parent's murky basement, hunched over a comic book treasure chest, skimming through someone else's stuff.

I thought about the millions of words filling this chest, how I'd loved them so much I decided to study them in college. I thought about the pictures I'd copied of Mary-Jane Watson in a nightie. I thought about the drawings I'd made of girls I'd been taken with a few years later in high school, trying to flatter them by etching a little Mary-Jane Watson smile into their face. I thought about what I'd learned about being a super hero. I thought about my parents. I thought about the thousands of quarters that filled that chest. I thought I'd try and wrestle this behemoth chest into my car from the back door of the basement so my parents might not see.

I came home a few hours later, maybe eight? It was definitely dark. I walked into my parents house again, a bit drained of energy. As I shut the door I walked right up to my parents who were in the middle of their post-dinner TV time. I tossed the envelope, which almost popped open because it was stuffed beyond capacity, onto the coffee table in front of them.

"What is this?" my mother asked, reaching cautiously toward the envelope.

"It's yours," I sighed. She untucked the flap of the envelope, looked inside, went wide eyed as her mouth fell open slightly, showed it to my father, and then they both stared at me as she folded the flap back in and put it on the coffee table.

"John, this is a lot of money," my mom said.

"Where did you get all this?" my dad asked. At this point I'm sure they thought I'd been out selling drugs, taking out hits on people, robbing convenience stores, etc. I pinched my lips together so my grin wouldn't turn to all out laughter.

"As it turns out, some of those comic books were worth more than a quarter."

"Why are you giving it to us?" my dad asked. I was ready for that one.

"Because you taught me a dollar is only one-hundred pennies and I should make the most of them."