What Money Can Buy

This is only a mildly dirty story, no good for wanking, and it begins so dark that people who don't want to read about a grieving character contemplating suicide should not read this one.

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"Who?" the teacher asked, apparently not recognizing the name.

"Cannon," the student aide repeated, enunciating clearly and loudly.

"Cannon?"

"Cannon Hooker."

"Oh," the teacher chuckled, "you mean Gay." He turned to the students. "Is Gay here? Where's Gay?"

"What?" Gay blinked, waking from a daydream.

No one heard him.

"He's here," one of the boys answered.

"Hey! Earth to Gay," the teacher teased, raising his voice as if to get Gay's attention, even though by that time Gay was looking right at him.

"What's wrong with him?" one of the girls snarled.

"Such a creep," another girl shivered with disgust.

"So weird," a third agreed.

The boys shook their heads, amused.

"Come on, Gay," the teacher chided. "They want you in the office. We're all waiting for you and everyone else here is trying to learn something, so make it snappy."

As quickly as he could manage -- not too quickly, because he dropped his pencils, the rubber band that held them together broke, and some of them rolled under a girl's desk, so he abandoned them there rather than ask her to kick them back to him -- he crammed his stuff into his backpack and walked out looking at the floor, shoulders slouched, hands in his pockets, burdened by everyone's attention.

"Why does he call you Gay?" the office aid asked as they walked down the hall.

"It's my middle name. Everyone calls me that."

"Really?" she snickered. "Oh, man. You must hate your parents."

"Am I in trouble?" he asked, barely venturing to glance at her.

"I don't know," she shrugged. "Maybe your grandma called, but that might've been someone else. I don't know. All I know is they told me to bring you to the office. But for god's sake don't walk so close to me. Why do you smell so funny? Don't you take showers or what?"

"I don't know," he mumbled, hoping it was someone else's grandma.

But of course it wasn't.

"Sit down, son," the vice principal said, closing the door of his office. The nurse was there too, and she sat down in a chair next to Gay. Neither of them had ever spoken to him before.

The three of them sat together in the awkward silence.

"Your grandma will be here to pick you up in a few minutes," the vice principal eventually told him.

Gay nodded, looking at the floor.

The nurse spoke, her voice soft with compassion. "She said they found your parents, Cannon."

Gay looked at her, saw the wetness in her eyes.

"Alive?" he asked.

She shook her head.

Even the vice principal spoke quietly.

"I'm sorry, son," he said.

Gay looked at the floor again.

The nurse handed him a tissue.

"I'm not crying," Gay told her.

"One of your pimples is leaking."

She touched her own cheek to show him the place.

"Oh."

-- -- -- -- -- -- / -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On the way to the hospital, his grandmother insisted on stopping for gas.

"We have half a tank," Gay whined.

"A few more minutes won't make one bit of difference," she said, "and I don't want to run out of gas in this weather."

Of course he had to go inside and pay with cash because the batty old woman didn't trust credit cards.

"Will that be all for you, son?" the cashier asked.

Gay resented him for a moment. Suddenly everyone talked to him as if they were his dad. He considered snapping something sarcastic about his dad being dead, but he was too timid for anything like that.

"Yeah."

Nothing was the old guy's fault, Gay consoled himself. His parents were the ones who took the drugs. Nobody made them take anything. Nobody else made that decision.

They were the ones who passed out in a car out in the cold. Nobody else put them there.

The social workers had been talking to him about addiction, and one of them even told him about drug companies doing it on purpose in order to increase profits, but Gay barely understood.

Instead, he knew a truth no one else could understand.

The deeper truth, that Gay alone knew, was that it was his fault too.

His fault most of all.

He was even more to blame than they were.

He couldn't make them love him enough to make better choices.

He'd never had loving, healthy, normal parents because he didn't deserve them.

He was a fucking loser --

A FUCKING LOSER!

-- when he was alone, he he would smack himself in the head as hard as he could --

FUCKING LOSER!

-- smack! --

FUCKING LOSER!

-- smack! -- and now they were dead because he wasn't even good enough for them to want to live.

His parents had killed themselves rather than live with Gay's constant failure.

"I'm not going out like that," Gay was thinking. "I'll take care of myself with two guns, one on each side of the head. I'll do something right for a fucking change."

He'd thought about it many times before. Somehow imagining his skull exploding, his brains and blood splattering everywhere, gave him comfort.

It was what he deserved, he knew. It would make the world a better place.

He turned his face away from the cashier to hide his eyes.

Then he saw the lottery sign: nine hundred fifty million dollars.

Someone was going to win that. Someone would be celebrating that while he was figuring out how to get a gun or two.

"It's a lot of money," the cashier noted. "If I hit that pot nobody in this city will ever see me again."

"Me neither," Gay agreed.

He didn't know whether it was enough money to live on for the rest of his life, but he knew it was enough to buy a couple guns.

And that would be the rest of his life.

Beyond the sign, outside the shop, the wide flakes of snow slowly drifted down, all of them dead, silent and peaceful, feeling no pain, falling onto heaps of snow that had fallen before them.

No one else was in the gas station. The cashier seemed chatty and suddenly Gay didn't feel very eager to leave either. There was too much horror waiting for him out there.

"How do you get a ticket?"

"You fill out one of those papers and put it in the machine."

"How old do you have to be?"

"Eighteen."

"Then I'll take one."

"You old enough, son?"

"Eighteen today."

"I'll have to see ID."

Gay got out his wallet and slid his driver's license across the counter.

The cashier held it at arm's length to read the numbers, then he looked at a calendar, and back at Gay's license.

"Well, I'll be goddamned, son! Happy fucking birthday! You're a man now."

"Thank you, sir," Gay answered, contemplating which numbers to pick.

"Cannon Gaylord Hooker?" the cashier laughed. "I'm sorry, son, but goddamn. You gotta get that fucking name changed. Jesus Christ."

Gay shrugged, beginning to fill out the ticket, so the cashier changed the subject.

"You registered for the draft?"

"No. I've still gotta do that."

"That's a lottery you don't want to win," the old man joked. "I won in '67 and wound up in Nam."

"My grandpa was in Nam."

"Yeah? He tell you any stories?"

"Never knew him. Shot himself when my dad was my age."

"Sorry to hear that, son."

"Nah. Dad always said he got off easy."

"No, son, no. Don't think that. He must've been in hell."

"Well," Gay shrugged, showing the guy his paper, "shit happens."

"Sure does. Sure as hell does. Anyway, just slide that inside there. That's right."

As the ticket printed, the old man went on. "Lot of good stories start with those words."

"What words?" Gay asked.

The old man quoted himself: "'Just slide it inside there.' It's a dirty joke, son."

"Oh," Gay smiled insincerely, remembering that not only was he a virgin, he'd never even kissed a girl. His only experiences of sexuality consisted of assault by bullies pretending he was gay, saying stuff like, "Why are you crying, Gay Hooker? You know you like it, Gay Hooker."

"Well, that's your ticket. Just hold onto that and when they draw the numbers tomorrow, see if you win."

"Thanks," Gay said, turning to go. Some other customers had come in so he wanted to get out.

"When you win, you come back here and see me, alright? I'll take you out and we'll find some real nice girls to celebrate with us."

"Okay," Gay said, as if anything like that would ever be possible for him.

He stepped back into the horrible cold of a particularly bad North Dakota winter, realizing that the old guy at the gas station was the first person to wish him a happy eighteenth. He'd gone to school before his grandmother woke up, and probably no one at school even knew.

And now no one was going to say anything like that because this was definitely not a happy day.

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He forgot about the ticket until the funeral was over.

A preacher, someone Gay had never met, said some stuff about hope and God's love and mercy and the mystery of God's ways.

Gay hated the fucker for lying. If anything that guy said was true, his parents were burning in hell, and Gay would be joining them pretty soon.

But there was no use saying anything. His grandmother kept repeating that they were in a better place, and it seemed to help her, but the most devout wish Gay could manage was that they were no place at all, that their sorrows had ended, and that soon he would end his too.

A lot of people had shaken his hand, promising they'd be there if he needed them. He knew they meant it in that moment but he also knew they wouldn't mean it if he ever actually needed them.

Afterwards he and his grandmother sat, as usual, in the living room of their little trailer, dark except for the television, watching the game shows and then the evening news. His grandmother started snoring so he could've played a game as long as he kept the sound low, but he was too indifferent to bother getting up.

The evening news was the usual: an armed robbery, some politician caught having an affair, the weather would be turning warm soon, and then -- Gay almost jumped out of his chair -- the winning lottery ticket had been purchased at a local gas station, the one Gay had gone to, but no one had claimed it yet.

By the time he got his wallet, the news had moved on to a heartwarming story about some puppies who had been almost miraculously rescued from the cold.

He looked up the numbers on his phone.

In an instant he seemed to see all of them at once, to see that they matched, exactly, all of them, but he couldn't believe it. He had to be making a mistake.

He checked his ticket against the numbers over and over, one at a time, trying to figure out what his mistake was, checking each number individually:

"One? One. One? One. One. Yes, one. One. Okay. One. Thirteen? Thirteen. Thirteen? Really? Thirteen? Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen. One and thirteen? Yes, one and thirteen, one and thirteen."

Jesus cocksucking shit, he thought, when he finally realized he'd actually won.

He knew he was going to fuck it up somehow, so he looked up what to do on the internet, and he very carefully did everything they said to do.

Well, almost everything.

He signed the back and resolved not to tell anyone, but he had no intention of going on with his life as usual for a few months.

That was fucking bullshit.

He was going to get the money, blow it all on hookers, and shoot himself when it was gone. Nice and fucking simple.

He couldn't believe it was real. It was like his parents being dead. He'd wonder where they were and then he would remember. It didn't seem real.

Nothing ever seemed real again.

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About a week later, as he lay in bed between bouts of masturbation, tending a digital farm on his phone, he got the notification.

He had the money.

Not nine hundred fifty, no, because this and that and something else and the other, taxes and tricky banker shit he'd never understand.

In the end it was less than four hundred million.

The lottery people introduced him to an asset manager, a financial planner, and a tax accountant. He reluctantly took their advice and put most of it into some kind of fund.

Gay didn't like it, but they promised that it was the best he could do, and he didn't have the nerve to tell them what he intended to do, and he certainly didn't know anything better.

So a few hours later, looking at the numbers on his phone, he made the best plan he could think of.

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He snuck off the next morning. He left as if he were going to school, but as soon as he was out of sight of the house, he ordered an Uber and went to the bus station.

His ideas were already adjusting themselves. He had a budget, they warned him, of less than fifty grand a day. If he kept that budget, they promised, he'd never run out of money.

Now Gay didn't know a hell of a lot about prostitution, but he figured he could probably fuck a lot of women for fifty grand. Maybe, he just barely dared to hope, he could even afford to fuck some hot ones.

He began to think he might just fuck whores for the rest of his life, no need for a gun. Just on and on and on until he died of fucking too much.

He imagined himself dead with his dick sticking up like a little flagpole.

He even began to think of fucking whores as a way to spite his parents and everyone who'd ever bullied or mocked him. He imagined everyone seeing him behind some blonde, pumping away like a porn star, and everyone thinking they shouldn't have underestimated him.

He sat in the very back of the bus so no one could see his phone as he researched how to find prostitutes in Minneapolis. Everything he read seemed impossible to him: he knew he would get busted, first thing.

The lottery people had told him to travel abroad, and by the time he got off the bus, he was already planning to go to Amsterdam, Australia, Germany, Greece, who knows where, anywhere prostitution was legal, even countries he'd never even heard of like Peru, Mozambique, and Turkey.

But he wasn't going to do it wearing discards from Goodwill, so he began by renting a Thunderbird and going shopping.

The first thing was to get a new phone. He'd watched too much porn on his phone, so it probably wasn't secure, and he didn't like having his bank information on it.

Over the next couple of hours, with the help of two helpful but baffled salespeople, he successfully executed a complex plan involving four separate devices: a new phone that would be just a phone for him, nothing really risky on it but nothing he would fear getting hacked either; a new laptop, loaded up with antivirus stuff, to take care of his money; a different laptop for everyday use; and, finally, a great tablet exclusively for watching porn and researching prostitution. He got the best headphones too because he liked to hear the sounds maybe even more than he enjoyed watching the scenes.

That done, next he walked into the nicest clothes shop in the city (according to the internet) and got the best they had in his size: two suits and three leisure outfits, a collection of underwear and socks, three pairs of shoes, two belts, four colognes, two aftershaves, three watches, three sets of cufflinks....

The salesman was suspicious since Gay didn't look like the kind of guy who'd spend that much on clothing and clearly had no idea what he wanted. Apparently they called the credit card people, who called Gay, and when he confirmed that it was in fact him the salesman just happily recommended the most expensive items and just as happily Gay bought all of them.

He wore one of his new outfits out of the store, leaving his old ones in the garbage.

Next he treated himself to the finest steak in the the state, actually the first steak dinner he'd ever had, and it was fucking good.

While he ate, he browsed self-help books and websites on his naughty tablet. He started the evening curious about how to dress well and how to act at fancy restaurants, but as link led on to link, the algorithms worked their magic and very soon he found himself reading a lot of advice about how to get women to have sex with him.

Was it possible?

He could already see people treating him very, very differently than he'd ever been treated in his life. On his way to the bathroom, someone had stepped out of his way, and when he paid for dinner, the waiter called him "sir."

People seemed to respect him. It felt so good it hurt.

But would a woman actually want to have sex with him? Voluntarily? For fun and pleasure?

It was hard to imagine.

On the other hand, he might as well give it a shot, and since he'd discovered that the best gentlemanly shopping in the world would be found in London, he fell asleep early the next morning (having jacked off all night with his special porn tablet) in Minneapolis's most expensive hotel suite, planning to dress himself up even better in London and then try to seduce the women there.

English girls, the internet assured him, were easy, and London was full of tourists who were even easier.

Of course prostitution apparently wasn't legal there (even though London seemed to Gay like the kind of place where it would be), but if it didn't work out, he'd take his classy new lifestyle to a country like Australia.

Plus he'd learned that he was allowed to drink alcohol there, so he looked forward to studying up on beer, wine, whiskey, cocktails, whatever else there was like that.

A good, safe way to feel good, he thought (with cheerful self-congratulation). Something that wouldn't ruin anybody's life.

Not like the stupid shit his parents did.

-- -- -- -- -- -- / -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

His first problem was that apparently hotels have rules about what time you can check out, and he found out that he was supposed to check out only about five hours after he'd gone to sleep.

After solving that one, he encountered several more:

Apparently you can't just buy a ticket to fly to London. You need a passport.

Apparently you need a home address to get a passport.

Apparently you need references to get a decent apartment.

His accountant solved the latter problem by the end of that day, and Gay hoped the rest would quickly follow, but setting aside a year's rent left Gay over budget at the close of only his second day as a hundred-millionaire.

He could not get a full refund on the suite he'd reserved in London either. He'd reserved it for a month, and after he went ahead and canceled it, he realized he might have made it in time to stay there for a few days, but now he'd just have to pay for another hotel when he could get there.

He was too embarrassed to try un-cancelling his reservation.

He'd just spend less money tomorrow and get back under budget.

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"Cannon!" his grandmother cried. "Where are you? Why haven't you been answering your phone?"

"I'm okay. I just wanted to go away for a while."

"But where are you?"

"A place I know. A friend's house."

"But where, Cannon? You can go anywhere you want but you've got to let me know where you are. You can't do this to me! I just lost your --"

"It's okay, Mamaw, just relax."

"I will not 'just relax!' You better watch your tone with me, boy. I won't --"

"I just wanted to let you know that I'm okay. I'll call you again in a few days."

"Cannon, what has gotten into --"

He hung up and set his fancy new phone not to notify him when she called or texted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- / -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

His passport would be ready in two weeks, so he decided to go ahead and actually move into his new apartment. The maids at the hotel knew too much about him anyway.