A Rant on the Penny

If you were to offer me a penny for my thoughts, I would tell you that the penny is not worth my thoughts.

The truth is that the penny is a great blight on American life. Not only is it the world’s ugliest coin, devoid of any redeeming beauty, let alone value, but it serves only to render our desperate pocket and purse searches futile.

How many times do we find ourselves fishing for quarters in a sea of disgusting copper? By this I mean to say that the penny is to the quarter what Tacoma is to Paris. It stains our coin purse copper when it should be nickel and silver.

The truth is that I used to collect pennies as a boy, and ardently at that. As a bright-eyed boy with an obscene “bowl cut,” I had a Mickey Mouse Penny Bank, given to me as a present by my Auntie. When I told her I didn’t “do” Disney, she calmly assured me that if I saved my pennies judiciously, that I would one day become a rich man.

She lied.

I did all that she asked. I tore open couch cushions. I asked benevolent old men for extra change on hot days, holding out my hands like a character in a Dickens novel. I even scoured the pee-stained floors of bus station bathrooms. All this was done to make my plastic Penny Bank heavier with copper. And after around 7 months of exuberant penny-pinching, I was finally ready to take Mickey into the bank and redeem her.

That is when the reality of the penny’s inutility first dawned on me. You see, when I arrived at the bank with my Mickey Mouse bank in hand, the bank teller, a witch no doubt, told me that the pennies were “useless” in this form. I thought that if I handed over Mickey that I could perhaps receive a golden replica or something, but in fact, the bank would not even consider accepting my plastic friend and his copper guts.

“You’ve got to roll up your pennies,” she said, shaking her finger at me and looking at me with pure scorn. She handed me a few odd pieces of paper that looked like cigars with the tobacco sucked out of them and told me that I was to put the pennies inside this roll and then bring them back.

I almost cried. I had worked and saved and scrapped and dirtied my hands, all for naught. And now I was to go home and begin a newer, far less rewarding task of rolling up pennies. But cynicism about the penny had not yet conquered me. I knew that I had to empty Mickey of his pecuniary bowels. To accomplish this, I tore open the plastic fastener and let the pennies flow onto my bed. The sight of pennies “making it rain” on my bed would no doubt have been splendid, but matters were not as simple. What in fact happened was somewhat tragic. Mickey, perhaps in some secret move towards self-defense, refused to yield his contents so easily. The bottom fastener would not budge, despite my efforts and those of all my friends. My younger brother decided that the best course of action was to temporarily decapitate Mickey and thereby bleed him of his copper contents.

“But what about Mickey?"

“You can buy a new one with the pennies,” he said. “You’re gonna be rich, dude.”

So I followed suit. We went out to the garage together and found a pair of hedge clippers. Without any adult supervision (and of course without asking any adult if this was a good idea), we made quick and efficient use of the gardening tool. The blades were sufficiently sharp to decapitate, and Mickey’s head (and the money inside it) was soon ours (or rather, mine).

The sight of the money spewing about was gorgeous. No rapper has ever bathed so fondly in coin. But after taking a bath in slimy copper, I soon realized that rolling these babies up into money cigars was going to be a task far too tedious for me to accomplish alone. So I paid my amigo to help, thirty percent to be exact. As we rolled pennies, he siphoned many off for himself, to contribute to his own penny bank (he was smart and lucky enough to have a regular coffee can).

After immense toil and travail, the money cigars were ready. There were 9 in all.

Now what is especially unfortunate here is that I paid little attention to the question of how to properly roll these bad boys. Some were overflowing, others truncated, ugly, and somewhat deformed. Some looked healthy, like ripe fruit. Others looked drained and sickly, like bananas that had been bullied and insulted in early adolescence.

My fingers nearly bled from all of the money handling. But when my work appeared done, I asked my Auntie to drive me to the bank for the big pay day. When I arrived, the teller (and I kid not when I say that it was the same witch I mentioned earlier) shook her long witch finger at me and accused me of trying to cheat the bank. My monetary cigars were ineptly, dishonestly and vulgarly filled.

The bank wanted nothing to do with my pennies, or with me for that matter.

Forgive this digression. Let’s gather our breath and reflect on the basic “takeaway.”  Pennies mean little. They’re meretricious. They’re cowardly. They don’t roll well. They smell funny. They clog toilets. They are potentially lethal (if dropped from the Empire State Building). They make life harder for all. They taunt the poor and the very young into thinking that they have money. They clutter the pockets of the rich and fill with false security the bellies of starving piggybanks.

Doing away with these copper monsters would be good for all Americans.

 Let us decapitate our national piggy bank and start anew. Sorry, Mr. Lincoln. You can keep the 5-dollar bill and your ostentatious memorial, but we’re tired of your copper head.