I knew I’d had a check stolen because I didn’t get a thank-you note. Three weeks after I’d dropped some money in the mail to a high school graduate, crickets. I logged in to my account to see if the kid had cashed it. He hadn’t, but somebody had.
I like to imagine that the criminal fished the envelope out of my New York City corner mailbox, which is more graffitied than the subway, with a wet wad of Bubblicious stuck to a selfie stick. In any case, did he bother to erase the graduate’s name and gift amount and replace them with his own name and magic number? He did not. He left the kid’s name on the front and wrote his own on the back. The names were so different, they might as well have been Stewie Griffin and Benedict Cumberbatch. Then he fed that check into an ATM, which swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
My bank’s branch manager said, “Yeah, so many checks go through the machines, we aren’t able to track fraud. It’s up to customers to catch it. We’ll have to close your account and open a new one.”
He delivered this news to me in the same Welcome to New York manner in which two separate Manhattan movie theater managers at two separate movie theaters had shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’ll give you two free tickets for your trouble,” when I reported that rats the size of cannonballs were rolling in the aisles. In other words, it is what it is.
When I told friends about my plight, they said, “You can’t send a check through the mail! You can’t put a check in one of those narrow money envelopes! You can’t use a BIC ballpoint; you have to use a gel pen!” I got as much sympathy as a kids’ birthday party piñata. The verdict was, I’d asked to be hit.
The last time I’d been robbed was on a winter’s night on a walk to see Messy White Gays at the Duke on Forty-Second Street. A pickpocket slipped his hand into my coat in Times Square and took my iPhone. I didn’t notice it was gone until my wireless headphones quit playing my John Irving audiobook. I stopped short and was like, “Wait, what happened to Queen Esther?”
My friends said, “You can’t walk around with your phone in your pocket!” Again, my bad. “What about your contacts! Your calendar! Your financial information!”
But all I’d lost was 106 pictures of one gorgeous husband and two now-dead cats. I don’t store anything in the cloud, I keep a paper agenda and address book, I don’t use bank apps, and I wrote checks and withdrew cash out of my now-closed account because I like to keep secrets. From my husband, from the algorithm. And I’m not talking huge secrets, like I have another family and three basset hounds in Virginia. I’m talking small secrets like how often I get my roots done and eat fat-free froyo with a double helping of chocolate sprinkles on top. My Mississippi Mama’s Mama called it Dead Cat Money. Meaning that if I want to go out and buy a dead cat, I have the money to do so without asking for permission from anyone.
Before the grad check debacle, I made a Dead Cat Money withdrawal and the teller had the nerve to ask me, “What is this money for?”
I replied to her with my sweet Southern Lady Alabama accent, “It’s none of your business.”
“But I have to put something in the computer.”
“Put none of your business.”
“I can’t give you the money unless you give me a reason.”
I said, “I have a personal checking account so I don’t have to explain myself to my husband. Why would I explain myself to you?”
“Should I put spending money?”
I said, “Do what you have to do.” The “bless your heart” was implied.
My friends said, “The teller thought you were being scammed. Con men claim to be the IRS and persuade people to withdraw their life savings.”
Talk about blaming the victim. My bank thinks I’m so dumb, I’ll rob myself.
So what do I do, open a “digital wallet” to replace my Dead Cat account? I don’t think so. Even though my bank and I don’t fully trust each other, Apple Pay doesn’t need to know what I do every three weeks in a townhouse apartment on the Upper West Side.
Helen Ellis is a Garden & Gun contributing editor and the author of five books, including the national bestseller American Housewife and Southern Lady Code. Raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, she lives in New York City with her husband, Lex.