The Man Who Saved America

A year or so ago I went into my local bodega to buy a pint of ice cream or something. At the register, I gave the guy a ten dollar bill. He looked at it a moment, then handed it back to me. I was puzzled. “It’s fake, man,” he explained.

I looked closely at the bill. Pretty goddam good fake, to my untrained eye. I’d never even seen a counterfeit bill before, to my knowledge, let alone tried to pass one. Someone obviously passed it to me and I didn’t know it.

The clerk pointed out a few telltale signs that only a person who worked with money all day would notice, including an imperfection in the type, and the feel of the paper. I did begin to see it then, but only because he pointed it out, even though I’d seen To Live and Die in LA like a gazillion times. (So people bother to make fake Hamiltons now, not just Benjamins? Have color printers changed the counterfeiting business that much? Discuss.)

While I stood there examining the bill, the clerk called the cops, four of whom promptly rolled up with blue lights flashing, put me in handcuffs, and frogmarched me over to their cruiser where they shoved me face down on the blacktop. I lay there for almost nine minutes while one of the cops knelt on my neck and I pleaded that I couldn’t breathe and onlookers yelled for the cops to stop and even a couple of the rookie cops apparently tried to get the one…