Prologue

When I was a little kid, our house was robbed. Someone broke into the house and made off with our TV and stuff.

The lower left corner of our bedroom window had been broken, a hole more than large enough for an entire adult arm to reach into and feel around. We had horizontal blinds, stained yellow from the ages with a hint of grey from the dust that my sister and I were supposed to clean off during weekly chores, but never did.

Stage-view, my father's bed was to the left of the window; my mother's, to the right. My sister and I shared beds with my mother because my father snored like a yeti.

The window had been broken in the middle of the night, and we slept straight through it. I was too young to think about it, really, so I'm not sure how a hole in our window equated to a missing TV. My guess, ex post facto, is that the culprit stole our keys off the windowsill or something and used that to gain entry into the house.

I remember that I was so astounded by the hole in our window, I actually stuck my head and shoulders through the hole and looked around the outside of our house. My uncle wandered into the room while I was half-hanging out of a broken window and yelled at me for being a dumbass.

-

When I was a little kid, my parents would take me groceries shopping with them because nobody was home to look over me, and I was the type of kid that was dumb enough to stick his head through a hole in a broken window.

Sometimes, when we got home, my mother would give me a dollar or some loose change left over from the shopping, and told me to put it away. I'd hide the money my parents gave me, and when I'd accumulated a sizable sum, my mother would ask me if I wanted to spend that money on toys or donate it to the Church or the poor, starving families of Vietnam.

I always chose toys, and my mother would scold me and lecture me on the importance of charity. I always wondered why she gave me a choice if she ended up making me give the money away, anyway.

I hid my money in a Pringles tube. The green kind -- sour cream & onion. And by "hid," I meant I kept it in plain sight on the windowsill where everybody could see it.

We were too poor to spend our money leisurely on things like a piggy bank. My sister learned from school that you could cut a small slit into anything and turn it into a bank, so long as money fit in it. I thought that was the most ingenious thing ever, so I took a Pringles tube and turned it into my personal piggy bank.

I think my sister had an original-flavored red Pringles tube bank.

I remember that at the peak of my wealth, I'd accrued $62 and some change.

-

When I was a little kid, some motherfucker broke into my house and stole $62 from a Pringles tube I had sitting on my windowsill.

I never really thought about it, but today I did, and it really pisses me off. Because -- I mean, really -- who the fuck steals money out of a Pringles tube? It's like, some son of a bitch was robbing my house, and then he decided he wanted a snack, so he popped open a tube of Pringles, and jackpot! He found money.

I was like three years old. Some asshole tried to steal Pringles from me and ended up stealing $62.