One of the perks of professoring–in addition to getting paid to choreograph rooms full of people’s thinkings about thoughts, access to all the binder clips you could ever want, and a toilet-to-person ratio that can’t be beat unless you actually work in a toilet factory–is the long breaks between semesters. I taught last spring and am teaching a summer class now and still had nearly two months off in-between. Months off that aren’t the result of unemployment = tears of joy.

One of the downsides of professoring is that months off means months not getting a paycheck. Not getting a paycheck = tears of non-joy.

But no worries, I thought. I spoke to payroll in June, confirmed the payroll schedule for spring checks and summer checks, and budgeted and lived accordingly. Shit was tight for a mo, but this week has been circled on my calendar for months as the resumption of summertime-and-the-livin’s-easy…

But when my bank account was still balsa-wood light come payday, I called payroll to see what was up. Turns out there’d been an error on their end. No check till next week.

Now shit had gone from tight to too-tight-to-exhale.

With a week to go before my financial manna fell from the sky, I took inventory. I had $3.05 in change, much of it in grimy sticky pennies (no, I don’t know why they’re sticky; no, I don’t wanna know), $2.34 in my checking account, and a car running on fumes. Luckily, my job is only 3 miles away. So I decided to put $2 in gas in the car, get 70 cents worth of rice, a can of chick peas, and seltzer water. Not exactly feeding the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fish, but I was gonna have to stretch in ways that’d make Ukrainian gold-medal gymnast Tatiana Gutsu, my 8th grade dream girl, blush.

The first gas station I went to declined my card. Figuring they were just a bag of dicks, I tried another station. Same thing: no dice. It dawned on me that my card wasn’t declined for not having any money. It was being declined for not having enough. I was being judged–and found wanting–by a gas pump. There’s low, and then there’s low. This shit was low. This shit also meant I’d have to do what I’d hoped to avoid: walk into a gas station and hand another man $2 (in quarters) and say “Two dollars on pump six.” I walked in and handed this lil’ short dude eight quarters and told him two bucks on six. He could have accepted the money graciously. Could’ve accepted it without comment. Could’ve looked at me funny and just left it at that. Instead, he tried to give the money back to me.
“No, just use your card,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“No, no, you can, I fix, I fix. Use card swipe here.” He pointed to card swipe on the counter. The poor dear thought I was offering him change because my card wouldn’t swipe properly.
“No, really. I’m just using–I want to pay cash.”
“How you only get two dollars gas?”
“That’s all I need,” I lied. It wasn’t a lie so much as an inconvenient half-truth.

I went to Wild By Nature and ended up splurging on $1.30 worth of rice. I’m Puerto Rican. If there’s rice in my kitchen, all is well. If there’s not, I assume the zombies have taken over and I start looking for chainsaws and the high ground.
I used my debit card to pay for the rice. There’s that moment when you pay with a card where you and the cashier are waiting for the red APPROVED signal to pop up on the screen. When I was waiting for that, unsure if Netflix had stuck their sticky fingers in my account and pulled what little money was left, I could hear a Bernard Hermann/Hitchcock soundtrack in my head. That’s how nervous I was.