Straight Up, Hoes

It's like this: Christmas has nearly bankrupted me. Yesterday I looked up my checking account balance online, and I've got $2.87. At first I figured this couldn't be right, but I looked over all the transactions, and that shit was all legit. I'm poor, yo.

The deal is I get paid at midnight on Friday, January 7th. We'd made some plans for New Year's Eve, but now I've got to make my money go a long way. I suppose I could dig through all my Carhartts looking for loose change, but that will probably only get me another dollar and a half of breathing room. Which, you might guess, isn't enough to show me a good time on New Year's.

So last night then, I cleaned the bathrooms and kitchens, and one of my tenants tried to hit me up for a dollar. I laughed in that hilarious-inside-joke sort of way, and he wandered off to look for someone to buy his bus tickets, and then a somewhat novel thought occurred to me: I can shake down the tenants for donations to my New Year's Eve benefit.

Donations would be voluntary, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that anyone who doesn't donate has some skeletons that likely violate his lease. Naturally, anyone already planning to move elsewhere would get a free pass, but those suckers trapped into our low-rent housing scheme always seem to have spare cash for McCormick's Vodka and menthol cigarettes.

Besides, they all owe me for so dutifully cleaning up after them for this past year and a half. I'm sure they won't mind.