Write Club is a Chicago-based event where writers are pitted against each other (it’s friendlier than that sounds) to perform a 7-minute written piece inspired by one word. I’ve had the good fortune of performing three times already, and as I prepare for my fourth time on May 20th (G-Man tavern at 7:30 pm, for all you Chicago folks), I thought I’d share my debut piece.
Me, performing this piece in August 2022.
Almost none of this is true, but here’s how I imagine it could have happened:
Jordi Valdez is seven years old when he starts getting an allowance. It’s especially exciting because he lives in Mexico and at the time, the Mexican peso has a whole lot of 0s attached to it. He gets 50,000 a week! It only buys him a few bags of chips at school, but one of the perks of the very young is the optimistic insistence that any amount of money equals wealth.
That first day he is a king. He buys five different flavors. His friends, myself among them, ignore their own lunches and watch with hungry eyes. But a king can’t eat all he can buy, and so Jordi decides to become a generous king.
His friends feast, their always sticky little boy hands accruing more and more of the spicy umami dust, that red gold of snacking. They lick their fingers and look at Jordi as if he is the reason they can feel joy. Not least of all because Mexican chips are objectively the best on the planet.
The next day he has nothing left, and while there is leftover goodwill, talk at the cafeteria table about what a golden day yesterday was, Jordi feels the pang of not being able to provide. Not even the chips themselves, but just that joy. He thinks next week he will stretch it out longer, scoop out tiny bits of joy day by day, one bag at a time, maybe. But Monday comes and it is hard to resist another golden day. He spends.
Then come new pesos, and their cruel lopping off of those zero halos. 50,000 becomes 50. “I’m rich!” optimism notwithstanding, it’s hard not to feel the blow. For the first time in their lives, second graders grumble about the economy. They try to sell the old bills to collectors, but run into the obstacle of not knowing any.
Then the peso gets devalued, and the same amount of money brings in one less bag of chips. Even the adults, rich as they all are, worry about money. And Jordi starts looking at his measly 50 a week with the pessimism of someone who’s lived through several economic crises.
Winter break his family goes to Vail. His parents have saved up for this ski trip, miraculously spared by the peso’s shenanigans. They have a lodge with a hot tub and all the hot chocolate he and his sister can ask for. They have saved so they can say yes to everything, and Jordi takes note. Save long to spend big. Jordi shifts gears and decides to save his allowance. A year, he decides. Then he will splurge, treat those around him. It isn’t even the money he’s spending, he knows. It is how the day is spent.
Back in Mexico he makes the announcement that the Monday splurges are over. The cafeteria table is scandalized by this decision. His friends look down at their lunchboxes, their sliced carrots and cucumbers, and they despair, despite their tiny accompanying bottles of tajin. They yell about taxes, certain those are somehow to blame. They cannot imagine a year without the feasts, they have made mondays holy.
But no matter how much they beg, Jordi holds strong, knowing the day is coming when he will spend. He keeps his 50 peso bills in an emptied out stuffed tiger he won at a claw machine game at the Denver airport. The year goes by and it slowly grows plump again, feasting on weekly feedings of Jose Maria Morelos and Benito Juarez.
The lore of The Days of the Chips gets brought up less and less often. By summer it feels like an apocryphal legend, by next winter break it is forgotten, and Jordi is dying to blow all his savings, become a generous king again. But it hasn’t been that arbitrary year yet, and Jordi feels beholden to it, so it is back to Vail for another ski trip, biding his time.
Last year he was too scared to do anything but play in the snow and gorge on hot chocolate, but now he is wizened; he has savings. He skis the bunny hill and upgrades to the green circle within the day. Proud, his dad splurges and rents them a snowmobile as a reward.
With the sun and wind on his face, the blur of evergreens in the sea of white, Jordi feels like a dolphin, if dolphins had access to high-powered engines. A dolphin on a jet ski headed for the trees, that’s what he feels like. That is what saving provides.
He looks over his shoulder at his dad and he can identify the smile on his face as the joy of spending on others, and that is when he decides that on the day he returns he will buy all the chips his money can buy, even if it hasn’t exactly been a year yet. He will share not just with his table, but with everyone at the school who wants chips. Even the teachers, if they have not grown too old to crave that red gold that gathers on fingertips like spicy pollen.
It will be beautiful. And it will be all worth it. What is money, he thinks, as they speed through and around and toward those beautiful pine trees. What is it when compared to the joy of a day well spent, with people?
He thinks of that stuffed tiger and wonders if human beings have found a way to save days. To accrue them like cash. He would save that first day of the chips, and this one. He would save, even, the days after the chips, that buzz of remembering in the air.
And if humans have not found a way to save days, then he will spend them instead. Spend them well. If he cannot buy chips for everyone he will share his one bag. He will eat everything as if it’s covered in Dorito dust. He is eight years old and he is learning something big about life and he is headed for the trees.
And this is when Jordi’s dad loses control of the snowmobile.
But I gave the caveat that most of this was a lie, so let’s get back to fiction.
Jordi doesn’t die. The stuffed animal doesn’t get tossed out, the pesos within not lost forever. He gets to throw his planned feast, almost a year’s worth of savings gone in a flurry of crunching chips and crinkled aluminum. Everything he dreamed, even without the extra days of saving.
Since this is a lie, Since this is fiction, he gets many more days to spend, with chips and without, in the snow and in the city, with friends and on his own, playing with lucha libre action figures, planning his Halloween pirate costume. He’s never again quite as good at saving money. It just doesn’t seem right to withhold the joy. He sleeps through the few economics classes he takes. He never again chases the feeling of being a dolphin on a jet ski, though he does swim with dolphins, once, in Fiji.
And years later, on days when he has no money to spend, he sits in a park with a book or some friends and looks at trees and wonders how close he came to never spending another day doing anything at all.
We are all headed for the trees. Spend accordingly.