One day last summer, I woke up to find that some jackhole from Chico had accidentally deposited over $600,000 into my bank account. At the time, I was, as my associate Daniel Taylor might put it, "indigently poor," and have pretty much stayed that way since I reversed the deposit back into the silken hands of some real estate developer or whoever else arbitrarily deposits sums of that caliber.
I struggled for literally one week - the time the bank told me it would take to look into it and reverse the mistake. So I was roaming around with over 600 Gs in my account, and some seriously heady schemes winding their ways through my depressed little brain. I'd been looking for a way out as it was - from Chico, from my job, from everything I knew, basically. Having a shit-ton of money seemed to be a good first step. There were all manner of plots: Take it to the casino and bet on red in on the roulette wheel literally every time, doubling the bet until it hit so I could make some kind of profit before I had to give it all back, fleeing the country to become a criminal in Santorini where I would read and fish (learn to) and write forever, etc. In the end, after a hellish stomach ache and lots of horseshit drama, I just let it go.
I thought that one day it might make a good plot for a short story, but at the time, turning the loss of $600,000 into even $40 sounded cool, so I pitched an editorial draft to the Portland Mercury, who said they were interested. They never bit on the story and it was never published. Anyway, I'm posting my little intro draft to it here.
The Day I Could Have Had
One Man’s Struggle to Stay True Blue While Keeping Himself Out of the Red
By Ryan J. Prado
The day began like any other. After traversing the lonesome block and a half from my downtown apartment to my office, coffee in hand, paid for in change, I hoof it up the carpeted staircase, snake the corners of the desks until I finally cozy up in my corner workstation and fire up the computer for another day of editing and emailing. Another day of sifting through the minutiae of the music industry, to fluff or huff the careers of artists I’d never meet and who would almost always never have to worry about a 9-5 gig…okay, maybe more like a 10:30-4 gig – you know what I mean. I’d experienced one of those raucous Chico Wednesday evenings the night prior, hopping bars that served you dollar drinks, paid for in change, and was more than a little heavy in the eyelids. My stomach groans, imploring me to abandon this makeshift fasting ritual which had become so mandatory over the last few months.
“Shit, am I really gonna hit up Zach for free Woodstock’s Pizza again? Standing in that back alleyway like a degenerate street urchin jonesin’ for a fix didn’t exactly do wonders for my self-esteem last week…,” I think to myself. I resolve to curb the growl with steady sips of java and move on.
Go through the motions; open up the Google mail; open up the (insert networking site here); and finally, check my online bank account to see just how destitute I really have become at the age of 27, and perhaps to deduce what sort of a number I did to my finances the previous twilight. Enter my password. Yawn and slick my fingers through my matted, greasy locks of hair. Enter my security clue. Note the pungency of my unwashed blue jeans…”Did I wear these last night?” Wait the agonizing wait for my paltry balance to reveal itself to me, to ruin my morning and my day, to beseech me into finding ways to make ends meet in this stifling little college hovel. I take a sip of my coffee, and after the horizon of the lip of the coffee cup descends back down toward my desk, a peculiar numeral flashes into view. Under the section of the online banking account page where you are made privy to your “Available Balance,” there is not the roughly $180.32 I was expecting (and silently dreading) to see, but an outlandish, bloated beacon of $646,675.32.
Surely, my eyes must be playing tricks on me. “Fuucccck,” I admonished myself. “Did I get drunk last night and deposit a string of arbitrary numbers into my checking account? That’s something only a goddamn imbecile might do! What the hell is wrong with me? I deserve to be behind bars!” But then a cool wave of relief washes over me as I remember that I had been nowhere near a bank the night before, only staggering sloppily through the thoroughfares in between bars with quarters and dimes wrestling in an insolvent battle at the bottom of my pockets.
I wipe my eyes and look again…same number. Same enormous amount of ducats heaping in my bank account. Me. The guy who eats once a day to save money; the guy who revels in the random food hookups in sketchy alleys and who has been reduced to drinking Hamm’s while publicly deriding the plight of the local bum from his apartment overlooking the City Plaza. Scrolling down, I notice, finally (things had begun to twirl in slow-motion long ago…the 25 seconds since I’d stifled a guffaw seem more like an hour) the culprit: A wayward deposit from the day before for the sum of $646,495.00. I snoop the deposit details from the user-friendly interface and discover that the offender is not the depositor, but the depositee (i.e. the bank), for there is but one number difference, at the very end, from my account number to this unknown man’s.
One mis-entered numeral from a bank teller, and I went from despondent 20-something charity case, to confused, rich and suddenly scheming mound of criminal skin and bones.
End Draft
The saga continues...but some things are more important:
