My Life if Written as a New Yorker Fiction Piece

She was tired but unable to fall asleep, worrying that she would not remember that tomorrow morning she would have to go to the ATM inside the Chrysler Building and withdraw eighty dollars to put into her cash drawer at the hotel. Each agent was to have one thousand dollars inside her locked drawer at all times. Randomly, once a month, a young Ecuadorian man came down from an office upstairs to count their drawers. She enjoyed watching him count out the money, counting the bills under his breath. She liked how he progressed, starting with the foreign currency then working his way down until he had counted the last penny. If he found a discrepancy of over twenty dollars, however, he would ask the front office manager to issue a write-up. If an agent was missing over one hundred dollars, he and the front office manager would notify HR, and she would be automatically terminated. Once, she had noticed that it had been a while since she had seen a co-worker, a cute Latina girl who looked like she might be a lesbian and who she had imagined maybe getting to know better. She asked another agent about her. "Bank problems," a fellow agent said, with a knowing look.

She had been sick lately, an angry itch covering her whole body. Her various doctors, each perplexed and unable to issue a diagnosis, had each recommended over-the-counter allergy medicine, which made her flighty, buzzed and prone to error. Towards the end of one shift, feeling the painful itch in her legs and unable curl up and scratch the itches till they bled like she wanted to, she announced that she was going home early, and angrily put her cash drawer away without doing her nightly count. After that night, she began to give into her disease, whatever it was, and decided that certain things, like her nightly drawer count or watching what she ate, she didn't have to do.

The unbearable itching, which immediately followed the start of a new relationship with a penniless 45-year old musician she met in a self-help group, left her self-pitying, annoyed and with even less ambition. She had caught a glimpse of her doctor's notes on her case: "31 year old woman with genital lesions and thigh rash unclear etiology." She felt hurt by the doctor's careless phrasing, the crude lack of even proper punctuation. And the phrase "genital lesions" was especially painful and shameful to see in print.

That day at work she had been tired but pleasant, a mood that always allowed her to make the most tips. Her tiredness slowed her down, and allowed her to connect with the guests, and her pleasantness gave her a generosity that granted most of her guests' wishes. After taking care of every aspect of a Missouri farm couple's stay, the husband pushed a crisp folded twenty dollar bill across the desk. "Oh I couldn't," she said, creating a little back and forth between her and the husband, before deciding that she absolutely could. She spent most of the rest of her shift imagining what she could do with the twenty dollars. At five forty five, she decided she was feeling well enough to face her cash drawer and count her bills. This was when she noticed one hundred dollars missing. Had she gone mad one day from the itching, taking out a hundred dollars for some now-forgotten extravagance? Had a guest, noticing her listlessness, tricked her out of money? Certainly there was someone she could talk to about this and they could reason things out. Realizing that this was not the case, that there was no excuse the hotel would accept for one hundred missing dollars, and that there was no one on her side she could talk to, she became despondent, frustrated and wanted to scream.

When she met with her friend that day, a young man she had met while performing comedy in Chicago, having accepted her monetary loss, she wanted to complain to him instead about what she saw in her file and how frustrating it was to not have a diagnosis, but she knew that this was too personal to mention to this proper, well-educated young man. He had been educated on the East Coast, something that never failed to impress and intimidate her, and she felt the need to conform to her idea of proper conversation.

That night they went from bar to bar using a list of open mics she had printed off the internet. From bar to bar they went, finding they had either come at the wrong night, or that the show was cancelled or that the club had closed down altogether. After they travelled to every bar on her list, and found nowhere to perform, they began to play one of her favorite games: how it's better in the Midwest. In the Midwest, nobody ever counted her money—she used insurance money during the day at her job as an insurance adjuster. Insurance money could not be counted as easily as cash, and so nobody ever did it. If she had allowed attorneys to settle cases for too high, she never heard about it, and she could always argue that it would be much more expensive to take it to trial. At night, when she did comedy, she knew exactly where to go and exactly who she would see there. There was no need to carry around sheets of paper with addresses printed on them. She simply put on a wool jacket and asked to borrow her art professor boyfriend's car. She didn't mention these things to her young friend. They simply agreed: in the Midwest, although the stakes were so low, you could perform, no problem.

The next morning, she went to the bank and withdrew four crisp twenty dollar bills. At eleven a.m. that day, the Ecuadorian man came down. She watched him as he counted through her money, progressing from the foreign currency all the way to the last penny, until he said, after tabulating his numbers, "Very good. One thousand."