Metropolitan.

I made the news today, oh boy.  The print edition, no less.  Christmas in Spring, that’s the title of the article.  The reporter stretches metaphor to the breaking point with any number of too-obvious holiday references: Santa Claus, Easter egg hunts.  And what will San Francisco’s mystery shopper do for Memorial Day next week?  Each and every shopper interviewed by this reporter… and so on.  Some days I feel sorry for language.  Bloggers have been nattering about me for a few weeks but the newspaper article confers the legitimacy I suppose I’ve been craving.

Two months ago, I stashed two hundred bucks in the wallet pocket of a pair of khaki shorts at the flagship Gap store on Market Street.  A tourist from Osaka found the money and tried to turn it in, thinking someone must have lost it.  The store manager called the Chron.  Rumors had already been circulating in San Francisco’s retail world about my random acts of senseless fiscal kindness.  The same rumors suggested that as much as five grand had found its way into lucky shoppers’ wallets already.  I knew about those rumors all along because I started them, and I kept them alive with further investments.  It has taken this long to warrant an article of my own.  I’d hoped it would happen much sooner, but I guess I’m not news with a war on.

It started simply enough, a month prior to that, at Macy’s.  I slipped a hundred-dollar bill into a mannequin’s turquoise panties.  I couldn’t stand back and watch to see whether anyone would notice the rolled-up banknote (slight bulge, nothing obscene… you might take it for a tampon that had slipped, but not a phallus); to do so would give myself away.  Besides, there were security cameras and salespeople to consider.  I picked a crowded time of day for better camouflage.  I’ve studied sleight-of-hand; I made the drop in half the blink of a cat’s eye, then hovered at the nearby perfume counter, pretending to need a gift for my sister-in-law.  I sniffed scented cardboard strips until the commingled stench gave me a headache.

“Maybe later,” I said.  The note of disappointment in my voice was even authentic.  The dull red throb in my head colored my speech and everything around me.  I’d been hoping for a squeal of surprise from the direction of the unmentionables.  I heard nothing but urban silence: the white noise of a hundred people talking, overlaid with traffic sounds and scratchy music from beggars and buskers in the background.

The salesgirl’s perkiness drooped as her commission walked away.  I thought of suggesting she go inspect the mannequins, but I stopped.

On the way out, I thought I heard a shriek.  My hopes rose and my head dashed them.  In a city like San Francisco, somebody’s always making noise: the neighbors shout, the car audio system thumps, the muttering street nut lapses into a demon-infested psychotic delusion, the drugs kick in and Jesus arrives wearing a ball gown and a boa made of flashing Christmas lights.  I consoled myself that I’d raise the volume soon enough.

Since I’m celebrating today, I’ll drive over to Berkeley for lunch at Shen Hua, my favorite Chinese place.  Those East Bay freeways are always murder.  I won’t let it dampen my mood, though.  Notoriety!  I’m exuberant.  I’ll have a glass of cold Chardonnay (and some Advil) with my prawns and my spring rolls.  Days like this make life almost worth the hassle and discomfort of actually living it.

***

There’s a fine distinction to be drawn between Stalker and Secret Admirer.  In a less criminal era, more people welcomed displays of affection or interest from strangers.  One did not worry about being kidnapped and tortured by love-deprived lunatics.  The flowers weren’t dipped in poison; the box of chocolates didn’t contain a bomb.  Today, though, in our terrified world, the old canard about strangers being friends you haven’t met yet has lost whatever shreds of meaning it once held.  Today, you fear everyone.  You have to.  We’re all closet madmen waiting for the right moment to light the fuse or stick the knife in.

I seem to have a stalker.  It’s possible he loves me, or he’s so blissed out on the heroin of limerance that he can’t tell the difference.  I don’t know when he started shadowing me; nor do I know if he’s guessed I’m San Francisco’s sartorial santabunny.  He might have, but I’ve been careful.  Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.  Last week, maybe Tuesday, I spotted him for the first time.  I’d taken the Muni streetcar down to Stonestown Galleria for some shopping.  Ever since I started hiding currency in clothing and mannequins – even shoes on display, now and then – I sometimes need reminding that shopping for the sake of shopping – not research – can be good for both the soul and the wardrobe.  Like everybody else, I need to spruce up my appearance now and then.

With a soulful Modigliani face and an assortment of blazers and baggy jeans too shabby-chic to have been bought new, he comes damn close to my ideal.  The dusk of his complexion hints at a Mexican grandma or a Russian Jewish dad.  Pure California, in other words.  Some men carefully construct that tousled look with distressed clothes bought new and hair gel to anchor those cowlicks in place; others, this one included, elevate benign neglect to an art form.  

There ought to be a law to prohibit the gorgeous from lurking in doorways and lingering at the edge of their prey’s peripheral vision.  Stalkers should be unattractive and this one isn’t.  Maybe beauty acts like social penicillin: the panacea for every transgression.  You can’t stay mad at someone whose balls you want to lick.

I’m tempted to let him become a distraction, a deterrent, or a derailment.

It’s possible I already have.

***

I washed a load of laundry – and some cash – the morning I left that first surprise in the panties at Macy’s.  Two ones and a five came out smelling like Bounce sheets: springtime freshness from a box.  Instead of keeping paper money in my wallet, I use a money clip.  Now and then, I stuff small bills in that pocket when I get them as change.  Inspiration strikes at random moments: using the bathroom, eating breakfast, folding clean boxers and T-shirts on the warm surface of the dryer.  Most shoppers in this country are not terrible people but the retail arena brings out the worst in us all.  Checkout lane culture in the US demands that you step away the second the cashier hands back your card and your receipt.  If you take more than the instant permitted by America’s retail customs, the exasperated shopper behind you will sigh and shuffle his or her feet loud enough for the whole store to hear.  My idea resolved into perfect clarity while I folded and put away my clean clothes.  I hate doing laundry, by the way, but sometimes even the most loathsome tasks have hidden benefits.

***

You will have guessed that I don’t have a day job.  This creative malingering keeps me busy.  It’s productive.  Arguably it’s the next stage of my career.  I got an early start in the financial sector: a college internship paved the way to a comfortable job right out of school and a promotion the day I finished my MBA.  I spent fifteen years in the gilded vise and got out mostly intact early last year: I misplaced my soul somewhere along the way, but so far it hasn’t made a difference.  Credit ratings are more important these days.

My bachelor apartment near City Hall is bigger than a breadbox and smaller than what people in my tax bracket can afford.  Last year, I bought the unit next door when the owners moved to Modesto.  Never underestimate the power of claustrophobia, nor the allure of mediocrity if it comes with a yard, a garage, and three bedrooms.  Equity is the new opium.  I went to Belize for a month and took naps on the beach.  When I came back and stepped through the new door into the suite my contractors had created, an invisible corset of stress I didn’t know I’d been wearing disappeared.  Finally: breathing room.

I live alone, and I’ve given up on sharing home and hearth with That Special Someone the pop songs and the movies all celebrate.  The hollow ache of solitude is something you get used to, over time.  Well, some people get used to it.  Imagine you’ve been embalmed.  You wake up missing most of your viscera, but you can go on living.  Once in a while you notice the lack of a pancreas or the chasm where your liver used to be.  The absence inside of you feels like expansiveness: in the navel gaze of introspection, you can watch spectacular sunsets and cloudscapes.  The sky darkens, inexorably.

Cat and mouse rewards the feline, not the rodent.  I saw Modigliani again at Lush.  I’d stopped in there to surveille.  Could money be hidden inside any of their products?  I’d thought I might swaddle a few hundreds in plastic wrap and drop them into a bottle of something translucent.  There he was, pretending to sniff shampoo.  Our eyes met.  Inside a Lush store, you can’t smell any individual item.  The combined scent of those immense wheels of handmade soap and the racks of fizzy bath bombs is overwhelming.  Down the block, if the wind is right, you get nuked by the wall of sweet stink.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get in your car, shut the doors, roll up the windows, and light nine or ten sticks if incense.  No car?  A closet will do.  Was this a coincidence or had he begun to anticipate me?  Was I supposed to believe he could smell the shampoo uncapped in his hand?  Should I meow or should I squeak?

Since I began this experiment, San Francisco’s retail sales have increased by 25% over the same period one year ago.  At first I wasn’t sure of the trend.  As rumors about the money got into circulation, I noticed an uptick in the number of people in the Union Square stores.  An online op-ed writer suggested that the local retail association must have clubbed together to boost sales after a sluggish holiday season.  Posts in a couple of the online discussion boards I follow have speculated that individual store managers were acting on their own.  Copycat syndrome.

Let them wonder; I’m just doing my job.

***

When a week and a half had passed with no sightings, I felt safe leaving money again: $500 in a shiny-cheap blue blazer at Macy’s, plus the same amount in a mannequin’s fashionably ragged pocket at Abercrombie & Fitch.  Neither item was something I would buy.  The blazer would only appeal to a man less interested in quality than the name of the store; the mannequin’s jeans would only fit a college sophomore with an eating disorder.  In both cases, I made sure to choose clothing near the cashiers.  I waited until their heads were turned.  Then I stashed the cash.  The dazzling customer service taking place around me worked like a cloaking device in a science fiction movie: while the sales associates blinded their customers with commission-enhanced white smiles, I could do whatever I wanted. 

In the back of my mind, and in the front too, I worried Modigliani might be lurking somewhere nearby, watching.  Maybe filming.  I couldn’t call attention to myself by scanning the stores for him, though.  I’d look like a shoplifter.

Get in, do it, and get out… undetected.  That’s the motto I live by.

On my way home, I stopped at Starbucks for a take-out iced coffee.  When I saw the bouquet on my doorstep, I sprayed the landing with cold Arabica.  Red tulips surrounded a green… what?  When I picked the bunch of flowers up, I had to shake off droplets of coffee off the clear plastic wrapper.  A green origami flower – a pair of hundred-dollar bills folded to resemble a tulip, with a couple of loops of florist’s wire to anchor it to a plastic stem – nestled in the center of the bouquet answered several questions and invited several more.

Unfolding the cash tulip felt like an act of vandalism.  Would you throw a brick through a cathedral’s stained glass window?  Would you blowtorch a bronze statue in a public park, or smash a figurine on display in an antique shop?

The note he’d written in purple ink confirmed my destructive hunch:

I know everything.

In spite of my skepticism, a centipede of dread began creeping up my spine.

***

The chronically depressed airline pilot’s antidote to loneliness is to crash his jet into the sea.  Why exit this life on your own when you can bring dozens of fellow travelers with you?  The ultimate journey need not be an event of solitary, self-gratifying despair.  Why end, when you can transcend?

By stalker’s logic, on the other hand, loneliness and solitude are magnetically drawn together.  The pull is irresistible.  I imagine Modigliani squinting through binoculars from a car parked down the block.  Days pass, and I don’t emerge from my apartment.  When I order in, he sulks and curses the delivery boys.  Black winds blow through him; they howl in his soul’s hollow places.  Like me, he doesn’t have a day job; I have the dubious honor of being both occupation and preoccupation.  The hours pass.  He chain-smokes in his secondhand Toyota, folds one piece of paper after another into clever origami shapes, and sometimes sets the birds and flowers on fire with the end of a lit cigarette.

If the pilot is unhappy, both Dreamliners and little paper airplanes will burn.

***

The bloggers (identities, URLs, and IP addresses concealed to protect the guilty) finally brought me out of my cocoon:

Blog A:  I was the first to blog about this guy [link] three months ago, when he first started leaving money in the clothes in department stores around Union Square.  I thought it was a social science experiment then.  Like, Cal or State.  Grad students with clipboards.  I still think so.  Is it over?  Has the experiment ended?  What was it about?  What was the researcher trying to study?  Consumer honesty – like, how much of the money would be returned?  Or maybe he (I still think it was a man) marked the bills somehow, like with microchips that can be detected by GPS, and the bills will be traced?  [Blog B] thinks this is a terrorism thing, but I don’t agree.  I picture a grad student with a laptop and a clipboard drinking crap coffee and typing his dissertation while shoppers from all over the world try on clothes they don’t want, just hoping to find a fifty or a hundred in the pocket.  It’s all good, right?  Sales are up!

Blog B:  The Chron calls this man (everyone seems to be in agreement on that) the Santabunny, and thats what people I know are calling him now too.  But I think hes gone back to his rabbit hole at the North Pole because he hasnt left any money surprises in a couple of weeks and maybe hes gone broke.  Used to be a weekly event, someone would find money, a hundred or two or five, but now its stopped.  I wonder why no one tested the bills for anthrax.  Too busy spending them I guess.

Blog C:  A month ago, the big debate was comprised of two big questions: Who is this person? and Where will he leave money next?  Is it a man or a woman?  Gay or straight?  Black, yellow, white, green, or purple?  There have been a few bogus claims, a few sightings that can’t be confirmed or denied.  The media and the blogosphere agree, we’re probably looking for a man in his late 30s.  More than that?  Who the hell knows?  Sometimes he leaves money in the same place more than once, so there’s no pattern.  Now the big debate here is whether he’s finished or not.  It was fun while it lasted, Santabunny.  The latest larger-than-life addition to San Francisco’s mythology.  He gave us something to talk about, other than the news which is always depressing.  Hey Santabunny, won’t you come back?  San Francisco needs you.

Blog D:  on to the next thing.  Good riddance.

***

For my purposes, the problem with American money is that its largest denomination is the $100 bill.  Obviously I need the packet of money to be as compact as possible, to call no attention to itself.  The longer this endeavor goes on – although it’s getting to be time I brought it to an end – the more difficult it is for me to operate in secrecy.  People are on the lookout, both for me and for the money.  I didn’t mind leaving five loosely folded Ben Franklins in a coat pocket.  However, ten bills together are bulkier.  I’ve tried rubber bands and various clips.  I’d use €500 bills but this is America, after all: who would recognize them?

It’s only a matter of time until somebody sees me.  Someone found $200 I’d stashed in a boot at Timberland, and the blogosphere thinks it’s a new one.  It wasn’t.  It just never turned up.

Of the $30,000 in cash I started with, I’m down to $18,700.  I can leave a couple of grand today, provided I can escape from Modigliani’s adoring surveillance long enough to find good hiding places.

***

I thought I’d gone undetected.  I wrote the clues on the money, in big block letters, one message in each of this afternoon’s two thousand-dollar Easter eggs: THERE’S MORE WHERE THIS CAME FROM and FINAL JACKPOT IN ONE WEEK.  Then Modigliani left the two marked-up bills in a bouquet upon my doorstep: fragrant yellow orchids this time, and not tulips.  The origami money flower in the center was worthy of a museum display.

THERE ARE EASIER, CHEAPER WAYS TO MEET PEOPLE, he wrote on the first.  On the second, A LITTLE DYSFUNCTION GOES A LONG WAY.  When I looked more closely at the second (damn astigmatism), I could make out the additional note, almost an afterthought: One week? Why not meet me for a coffee instead? Starbucks is overpriced but it costs a lot less than you’re spending on this.

And for the next week, every time I slipped a hundred dollars or a thousand into an article of clothing anywhere in San Francisco – or the Bay Area at large, even: one day I drove down the Peninsula to Palo Alto and San José, and stopped at the Great Mall in Milpitas and the Gap in downtown Oakland on my way home, via the East Bay – the bills with my messages written on them turned up on my doorstep within a matter of hours, neatly folded.

I replied by leaving a dozen hundreds, each bearing the words OK, WHEN & WHERE?, in trousers and jackets and panties and socks around Union Square.  The next morning, I found one of the bills in an envelope, wedged under one of my car’s windshield wipers.  Guess he knew I’d be on the lookout for more origami orchids. 

Ben Franklin never would have imagined he’d play a part in setting up a date like this.

***

Starbucks, Sunday, 4.30pm. 

You bought this, I wanted to tell him when he sat down.

“You’ve never told me your name,” I said instead.  “I think of you as Modigliani, because you look like a figure from his paintings.”

“I like that.  It’s Holden.  My parents read too much Salinger in their formative years.”

“You’ve made that disclaimer all of your adult life, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

“You already know who I am, then?”

More nodding.  He looked like a bobbing-head dashboard ornament for a minute.

“Should I ask why all the money?”

“No, first I need to ask why you went to the trouble of collecting it.  And how.  Are you broke, desperate, opportunistic, or just insane?”

“I gave it back, didn’t I?  Hang on, I’m thirsty.”  He excused himself to go to the counter where a steaming drink in a mug awaited.  When he came back, he asked, “Why, then?”

He looked into me as if he could see the answer already, the coils of wire and mechanical entrails and glowing red LED numerals counting down.  I KNOW EVERYTHING, he had written, and I almost believed him.  It was a cozy, peaceful feeling.  Was he looking for the answer to the question or the answer to the answer?  Or did he just… get it?

In the final seconds, I told him about the airline pilot.  Why end, when you can transcend?  On some level, I supposed I should feel bad about murdering him (and myself) on our first real date, but the coffee was perfectly roasted, the sky was an aching shade of turquoise blue (with a few wisps of maritime fog dispersing overhead), and the number of casualties was going to be much lower than if he hadn’t distracted me.  It was a good day to die.  Maybe Holden/Modigliani really did know everything, and this was his way of being heroic.  Maybe he had sins to atone for.  The universe swirls with maybes, but life only emerged from the primordial muck by saying I am.  We make our decisions; we live or die with the consequences.

A few lives for a few hundred?

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, glad – finally – to have company.

Sometimes things don’t turn out the way we expect.  I should have studied ordinance and wiring as carefully as I studied sleight-of-hand.  Walking out of Starbucks with him was one of my life’s more bizarre moments.  Would we explode, or wouldn’t we?  The universe swirls, as I said, with maybes.

***