The 30th Dollar

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Three guests check into a hotel room. The manager says the bill is $30, so each guest hands him a ten dollar bill. An hour later the manager sobers up and realizes the bill should only have been $25. To rectify this, he gives the bellhop five one-dollar bills to return to the guests.

On the way to the guests' room to refund the money, the bellhop realizes that he cannot equally divide the five one-dollar bills among the three guests. As the guests are not aware of the total of the revised bill, the bellhop decides to just give each guest $1 back and tuck the extra $2 under his hat as a tip for himself, and proceeds to do so.

As each guest got $1 back, each guest only paid $9, bringing the total paid to $27. The bellhop kept $2, which when added to the $27, comes to $29. Now riddle me this, Batman. The guests originally handed over $30, what happened to the remaining $1?

When you live in a city that was once named “The Most Livable City In America” you learn that expectations are often overrated. Pittsburgh, as many of you know, and more of you never learned, was the home of the steel industry in the United States, and at one point the whole damn world. Then the 80s and Reganomics happened and the mills crashed hard. No longer could you graduate or even drop out of high school and walk into a union job starting in the mid five figures. Unlike most cities that lost the mills and began spiraling the drain (I’m looking at you, Gary, Indiana) the ‘Burgh pulled itself up by its bootstraps and switched from a production based economy to a service based one.

What this meant for the city is that for the first time some of the soot came off of the Gothic architecture and the place became a lot prettier, even though the population was now a hell of a lot less well off. We do still have one thing to thank all that pollution for. The sunsets are fabulously breathtakingly beautiful.

Kerry and I had climbed up to the roof and were cuddling before a shower, watching the sun go down and paint the sky a full warm rainbow of colors from a frosted pink to a deep imperial violet. It was a sort of tradition for our entire household. Whoever was there at sunset would climb up the extra set of fire escape stairs and sun in the lawn chairs we’d set up on the roof to watch Apollo do his daily parallel parking job. We had the only roof with direct access on a block full of nearly identical tenement buildings, and it was the one thing that made living in what was essentially a white trash college slum tenable.

While I watched this moment of beauty with another of nature’s gifts snuggled up in my lap, my mind raced through all the things I’d learned in just the last 24 hours. I wasn’t going to try to lie to myself that I wasn’t involved in this game. It had come to me, and I’ve never been known to turn down a challenge. Yes, there were weird and maybe even dangerous aspects to it, but that made it all the more thrilling, and besides, what the hell was I really doing with my life anyway?

Two hours later we show up for all ages night at Laga. It’s kinda pointless to go in my opinion. I won’t be legal to drink for another two months, but at least there’s plenty of eye candy. Steve is working the door. About my age and kinda a doof, but the ladies all think he’s pretty. Not my type. All ages night at Laga was goth-industrial, and I’m just about the opposite of the goth stereotype. For one thing I, I’m actually in pretty good shape, especially for a guy who lives on beer, cigarettes, coffee, and ramen. For another I have all the fashion sense of a Mack truck.

I buy a three dollar Coke and my gang all gravitates to a table in the corner. The guys are here for the show, the girls are here to dance. Every so often I’ll get the nerve up to get out on the floor, but I’m about as coordinated as a one legged emu on crystal meth. The table is situated to give us a view of the dance floor, and conveniently enough also the door, so I don’t miss BigWig’s entrance. She hardly looks like the same person… let’s just say she cleans up really well.

A woman in a t-shirt and jeans can transform completely by putting on a dress, and hers looks like it was designed to be worn at a charity gala rather than a dingy night club. While she moves gracefully, I get the sense that she feels uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the crowd, maybe she’d just rather be in front of a computer screen. All I can say for sure is that my eyes were two-tone epoxied to her from the moment she walked through the door.

It was baffling. I’d be lying if I said I was a stranger to forward women; most of the ones I knew had larger than life personalities and over the years that’s actually become something of my type. But forward is one thing. BigWig walked straight to me, grabbed me by my shirt and pulled me to her, planting a hard kiss on my mouth. “You’re going to dance with me now.”

This was pronounced like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and to the accompaniment of catcalls from my table I was dragged to the floor. As I previously mentioned, I can’t dance. That’s only partially true though, I studied ballroom dancing when I was in my teens because I wanted to be Patrick Swayze when I grew up. Surrounding me were scads of people, male and female, swaying side to side, some with their hands in the air, to the ethereal sounds of the opening drum fill from Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cover of “Trust In Me”. She lead me to the center of the floor, and moving her hips with the grace of the serpent referenced in the song, gazed at me expectantly.

There is no thirtieth dollar.