Congratulations on Finding the Penny!

Your grandfather’s Indian Head penny has been in your family for four generations.  It’s a treasured heirloom, one that’s been hidden away from significant others, one night stands, familiar acquaintances, fling partners, assignation allies and relative strangers.  Your father gave it to you on his death bed, after he was shot in the stomach by a mescaline crazed Lou Diamond Phillips during what is now described in your family as “the worst birthday party ever.”  Since then you’ve been it’s keeper and, in return, it’s brought you luck.

Luck that you’ve used to make a killing for yourself on the stock market.  Sure, some of the credit is owed to the underhanded tactics you’ve used to exploit the pensioners, investors and business partners who have trusted you with their money.  But at least ten percent of it, and a bundle of the credit for you not getting caught exploiting people, is owed to the penny.

Which is why two days ago when you caught wind that the government was on to your dirty little scheming you opted to swallow the penny, rather than let it languish in an evidence locker somewhere.  So when the SEC burst into your loft apartment in Soho and pinned you to the floor yesterday, they didn’t find shit, just a bunch of files and records detailing your many, varied fiscal misdeeds.

Dumbshits.

But you’ve been worried since then about the penny and its well being.  You weren’t very good in school, and you can’t recall if copper rusts in people’s stomachs or if it can even move through your gastrointestinal tract.  You’ll be so nervous that, ironically, you won’t be able to poop for an entire day.

Well, today your “internal lockdown” ends, and you’re gonna up and shit into a bag in your cell.  Then you’ll carefully examine the contents of that big, sifting it around with your bare hand until you find a nice, hard piece of green tinted metal.   You’ll kiss it and rub it on your face briefly before realizing that, if you’re caught with it, you’ll lose it forever.  At that point you’ll shove it back up your butt.

Later on, when you’re released from prison years from now, you’ll attribute the fact that you weren’t violently raped for the first two weeks of your sentence to that coin, and it’s presence up your butt.  No one at the cocktail party you’ll be attending will have the heart to disagree with you.

Congratulations on Finding the Penny!