$35

Thirty-five dollars is the perfect amount for a man to have in his wallet. It's enough to buy a good enough meal and have a beer with it. It'll buy enough gas to get you where you're going or pay for a cab home. A twenty or less and you have to watch yourself and wonder if an ATM is close enough to wherever you are. Over $35 and you may overspend on an impulse buy. A man knows he won't blow money on a shirt or a tie when he has $35, but he also knows he can get something on sale that's nice. 

Thirty-five dollars is what the Complete and Total Loser's father had in his wallet on the day he went to a hospital for his final stay in December and is the amount in that wallet now. 

The Loser's brother saw the wallet and told the Loser to take the money. (The Loser is poor and is looking after his late parents' house until he and his brothers sell it.) 

The Loser demurred.

The wallet, which the Loser bought for his father a couple of weeks after his mother died in October (it was not a good autumn for the Loser and his family) also contains:

• A Visa card
• A tiny square of printed paper with the number to call an insurance agent in the event of a car accident
• An American Express card
• A Capitol One card
• An Extra Care card from CVS pharmacy. You would not believe how much pharmacies were a part of the Loser's parents' lives in their final years
• A crucifix which the Loser found literally seconds before writing the sentence you are now reading. The Loser's father didn't believe in God but liked church for its communal aspects. The crucifix is just over an inch long and worn.
• The card you're supposed to have handy in case a parking official questions your handicapped parking placard
• A driver's license
• Five Forever postage stamps. Motif: The Liberty Bell
• Three blank checks 
• Four key chain cards, the kind you scan at supermarkets to get extra savings
• A business card. It bears the photo the Loser used for his father's death notice in his city's newspaper. In it, his father is smiling broadly. It's a good shot. One of the Loser's brothers disapproved of it, saying that he looked Jewish, but the Loser stuck with it. Photos in which his father wasn't smiling made him look dour, a characteristic no one who knew him would associate with his affable, genial dad. His father was 91 when he died and the likelihood of him selling another house (he was a Realtor) was remote. But he kept his license up and you never know ...
• On three small squares of paper, in with the cash, hand-written lists of phone numbers for doctors and family members. Two decades ago, you could criticize someone who didn't know his sons' phone numbers, especially if he just had three sons. Now, boomers often have two numbers in addition to their work numbers as they're reluctant to part with their landlines.

In his last years the Loser's father, though finally admitting to an at least partial retirement, never failed to go out and shop, even when he and his ailing wife had plenty of food and other supplies. The Loser chided him for such a waste of fuel and time, but he sees the purpose. America is a consumer society. I shop, therefore I am is not entirely a joke. The items in the Loser's father's wallet show intent, plans, preparation. He was out and about, a member of the public, a target of advertisers. He was somebody.

An partially exploded view of the contents of the Loser's father's wallet.

Sadie Hawkins Day

Sadie Hawkins Day is a day most have little use for now, belonging more to the time of the Complete and Total Loser's recently dead parents more than his own and certainly not the young people who he works with. Most of them haven't even heard of it. The Loser, even now, with the day irrelevant, likes to think a woman will make the first move. On him. Of course, the few times that's happened in the Loser's life have involved women he did not and could never have feelings for. Still, the fantasy remains.

He admires those who take chances, though, people with more guts than he. Someday his life will end and his only representation on earth will be bags of clothes and things no one has use for anymore. 

Bags of the Loser's dead parents' clothes wait to be picked up by sanitation workers. Many, many more clothes were donated to worthy charities. The Loser's two sisters-in-law handled the details of this.

Big Money

How often do you go to an ATM? The Complete and Total Loser goes pretty often, about once a week. The women he knows in his urban environment, go far more often, withdrawing small sums as low as $20, fearful of being robbed. (The Loser takes out $80, usually, up from the regular $60 he took out weekly in the 1990s.)

Recently the Loser was reimbursed for debts he paid that stemmed from events surrounding his parents' deaths last autumn. The normal thing to do would be to deposit the check from his their estate account into his bank account. Instead, the Loser decided to cash the check. 

He took it in twenties. The teller used a machine to count it, then counted it out by hand. The Loser walked out with a wad of cash he likened to what old-time prize fighters or gangsters would have in a roll. He put the envelope in a secret place no one will ever find (kitchen cabinet on the left when you enter from outside; second shelf, behind the box of recipes) and goes to it when he needs cash. Not counting the withdrawal fees, this will save the Loser enough time to make the risk worth it.

The Loser's money waits to be wasted.

The Loser's Mac

The Loser's Mac Mini is dying. The mouse cursor freezes in place as if tacked to the screen, a blue screen pops up and stays there for two to six seconds. It fades and all is well again until the next time, which may be from one minute to half an hour. It's unconnected to anything the Loser is doing and happens whether or not he's online. Disconcerting. The Loser has searched Mac forums and finds mention of it by others, but no resolutions offered. Tomorrow, the Loser will take his Mac to a genius bar at an Apple store. Imagine saying that to someone forty years ago: "I'm going to a genius bar at an Apple store." It would be nonsensical. 

The Aliens Among Us

It's a classy ride, the Complete and Total Loser's commute. The train creaks through rich Zip codes on its way to the third rate city the riders work in. Last week, Loser spied this dapper gent working on a crossword puzzle. He looked at the puzzle and saw that instead of words the man was filing it in with oddly stylized circles. Proof, of course, that he is not of this world. The Loser showed the photo to a young woman at work and she said, "Oh, he has turtle lips." The Loser had never heard the description before, but it's true, no?

This is big so viewers can see what the Loser is referring to in his post.

The Move is Complete

After a zillion trips up and down a winding, three flight set of steps (his back; his legs), the Complete and Total Loser is at last finished with his move. He put most of his crude and ugly furniture out on the street, where it was snapped up quickly by blacks in pickup trucks. Among the objects he put out were his childhood desk chair. He'd had it since he was ten or so, sitting his dawdling butt down to try (and fail) to study. The Loser may have been sentimental about the chair, but he knows that life is no more than a series of lessons in nonattachment. You can't keep everything, no matter how much it is valued, forever.

The Loser's childhood desk chair.

The Loser Moves

"It would be nice in some ways," the Complete and Total Loser said, "if I went home and found that my apartment building had burned down. I'd be rid of all the junk and I could start fresh."

He said this in 1992, just two years into life in his tiny apartment. Now, two decades later, he's at the end of a month spent moving and has just one day left. He doesn't see how he'll do it. The more he gets rid of, the more there seems to be. Objects requiring decisions ooze from closets and drawers. In some instances, the Loser has simply picked up drawers and emptied them into boxes he then tapes shut and labels sloppily if at all. 

He's too old for the endless trips down the three flights of steps and back. His left ankle is complaining. Will it hold for one more day? Suspense

There are more boxes than floor space in the Loser's apartment these days.

The Quiet Car

A commuter now, the Complete and Total Loser takes the quiet car. The quiet car is his region's transportation agency's way to try to make its notoriously poor service more tolerable by reserving the first car of each train for people not interested in talking to each other or friends on their cell phones. The Loser, having no friends and a poor conversationalist, takes this car. The quiet car's patrons are invariably white and over 30; the young, noisy and sociable people sit in the rear cars, which make up the majority of them. 

As the Loser sits in the quiet car, surrounded by people reading books, newspapers, and magazines either in paper or electronic form, he imagines what's happening in the rear cars. He pictures them brimming with people in colorful native garb, dancing, shouting, balancing baskets on their heads, chasing after escaped chickens. He knows this isn't true, but he likes the idea.

Not all is perfect in the quiet car. The trainmen seem to take great delight in using the primitive loudspeaker system to tell riders the names of the approaching stops, something they already well know. The train line has new cars, pictured, which prevent this by having recorded announcements by a computerized female voice. The volume is a rational one, but she talks far too much. Still, the cars are an improvement. They reach the level of quality the cars the Loser rode when he lived in Japan -- in 1986. Ah, America.

Riders ride in silence aboard a train car reserved for those seeking quiet as they commute.

Women v. Men

Why is it that when men tell women things about women they're told they couldn't possibly understand women because they aren't women yet it's just fine if women are cast as people who know and understand exactly how men think and behave? 

What to Do Now

Send the bodies to St. Bart's. 

That's what the Complete and Total Loser wants to do with his parents' remains. That's because he housesat for them for many years while they sunned on a tropical beach. Now they're dead and he's living in the house, having given up his cluttered, overpriced apartment in the city. He'll be here until he and his brothers sell the place in the summer. The Loser wants to send their ashes south so he can live as if they still existed and would be home in early March, ready for spring.

A picture of a St. Bart's harbor one of the Loser's parents took in 2007. The stopped going after 2008 because they got too old to cope with the cobblestone streets and lack of railings.

The Accomplishment

The Complete and Total Loser's greatest accomplishment of 2011 is one based on something he didn't do, not something he did do.

What that something was is this: After dropping a childhood friend off at the airport to return to his New England home from trip to attend the Loser's father's funeral service, the Loser did not pull into the garage of his newly late parents' house, push the button on the small device that opens and closes the garage door to close it, put the seat back, turn up the music on the CD player, close his eyes and wait for the carbon monoxide to do its work.
There are times that the things you don't do matter more than the things you do do. This is one of them.

A New Year

The years go so fast. Then you look at how many you've lived and it's such a small number. The total number is tiny and the number at the end, the number which shrivels and kills, is smaller still. Yet we live as if the supply of time is indefinite, which it is, of course, but not for us. Time is bottomless only for itself.

The Loser in Winter

The Complete and Total Loser is in the back seat of his eldest brother's Mercedes Benz while the three sons are on the way to a county courthouse to file papers in order to be executors of their late parents' estate. The car is huge and it's one of the rare times the Loser, a gimp, doesn't feel cramped in a backseat. Earlier, the Loser had mentioned how he likes winter. Now his oldest brother, the driver, says, "I can't see why you like winter. It's cold, it's dreary and grey." 

"Well," the Loser says, "that's three reasons right there!"

A skylight in winter.

The Year the Loser Lost the Most

The Complete and Total Loser's mother died October 25 of this year. His father, though old, was in pretty good health, died December 15, just 52 days later. The Loser never married or had a family of his own, so he is alone, rattling around in their house doing paperwork at his older brothers' command. He's feeling a little self pity these days, which is natural, he guesses. Sometimes he thinks no one he knows has lost more than he has in 2011. Then he thinks of how dumb he is. The answer is obvious.

The Loser's parents in the very early 1950s.

Hard to Believe

The Complete and Total Loser, whose parents died less than two months apart this fall, is finding it hard to grasp at the moment that people can simply die. Cease living. People die all the time and he knows that, and the Loser was present a week ago today when his father took and returned his last breath, but right now it just doesn't seem possible that he'll never be around again.