Ghetto Currency

A few times in the past few years I've come across dollar bills with the "Where's George" stamp on them, with a website address. The idea is to go to the website, enter the serial number, series declaration, and then your current zipcode, and possibly an explanation about how you came to be owning the bill in question.

I'd had no luck entering the bills when we lived in San Luis, and over the three years we've lived in Brooklyn, I've pretty much ignored the stamps and website, that is, until last week.

I came across a bill with a "Where's George" stamp, with red-pen-circled serial number and series declaration, and with a stamp with instructions as well, like a defaced set of instructions disguised as trade-bait for beer. I went to the computer and logged in, entring the bill's information, and found that I was the first person to enter the particular bill. Now it had at least been entered...

A day or two later I received another bill with less graffiti, but the same "follow George at" stamp with the url stamped underneath. This time I entered it into the system and discovered that I was the second to look it up, effectively tracking it. 

This bill was initially entered into the system on February 5th of 2008, the Tuesday after Corrie's birthday and the Giants' Super Bowl victory. I entered it on July 9th of this year. In the seventeen months between when I entered it and its position was initially set, it had traveled a whopping one-and-a-half miles, possibly seven-thousand feet.

This doesn't surprise me. The cash reserves in this neighborhood, probably any neighborhood without high tourist traffic around the country, will stay in a sort of constant flux, like the surface of a deep body of water. The cash floats between bodegas, laundromats, Chinese food establishments and pizza places, and barber-shops. Maybe it makes it into a church collection plate, bundled into a wad and sent off to a bank, but since this is a low-income neighborhood (nee ghetto) there aren't too many banks, so when the Chinese restaurant or the bodega needs to get some more singles to do business, they'll invariably get the cash brought in by a church or other store-front that has made a deposit recently.

I should be even less surprised because of my own witnessing of this phenomena twice, the second time of which I specifically remembered, because it had happened once before. Occasionally a person can find a dollar bill that has a remarkable type of graffiti on it, or a memorable kind of wear and tear, or some other thing that strikes the visual cortex in your brain, making it stand out. There was either a Saturday or a Sunday that I got some juice, eggs, bread, and a newspaper from our local bodega, and received just such a single as I mention above.

As is the case with this kind of change, it comes home to sit on the bookshelf and wait to be needed. Corrie and I usually don't travel with cash on us, not for fear of being robbed, but cash is easier to spend freely, and free spending is not what we're about. So this bill sat on the bookshelf for maybe a week, when we decided to pick up some beer at the same bodega, and used it to pay. Maybe another week went by, and we got pizza (some of the best pizza I've eaten on consistency basis), and I received this certain dollar-bill again, as change, from the pizza place.

The first time this exchange took place, it was probably as change from the Chinese food store for the second "get", but I can't be sure.

The currency used on an everyday basis from this neighborhood is only removed when it needs to be destroyed.