Animals (standard:adventure, 3904 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 28 2007	Views/Reads: 3506/2518	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
128 little gold animals become $ 12,000,000,000 underneath downtown Cincinnati. Truth really IS stranger than fiction.

ANIMALS 

When I saw the organ-grinder's monkey take a dime out of his tin cup and
give it to a tall, thin man with watery eyes, it left me thinking 
seriously about the bizarre nature of certain financial transactions.  
After all, didn't people invent money? 

I thought about it for thirty-three years and six months. Then I finally
did something about it. By now, of course, we don't have organ grinders 
and their monkeys are all in cancer research laboratories.  The tin 
cups have been replaced by aluminum and one dime will buy you two 
minutes on a parking meter.  The dime isn't even made of silver any 
more.  Things change. 

On August fifth, I woke up at exactly four-forty a.m.  My mind was lit
up like an operating room. Every detail of the scheme was sharp and 
clear. Each item in my plan bore a little white tag, sequentially 
numbered.  My fate was written on one, cryptic as a fortune cookie: 
"You will have gold pieces by the bushel". 

Only one problem: the bushel baskets.  The first one burst asunder
before it was half full.  It cost me a month to design a basket holding 
only half a bushel that would stay in one piece yet haul a ton of gold. 
 In practice, only gold certificates made of pretty printed paper would 
ever go in those baskets. Nevertheless, I had to be sure, in case some 
monkey actually fell for the scheme and demanded hard metal. 

The scheme. Oh, yes, the scheme....Hmmm,  I suppose there's no harm in
divulging it, now that I've made my pile.  Fat lot of good it'll do 
you. Nothing illegal about it, but I seriously doubt if anyone could 
pull it off again. 

You know, it isn't easy to be straightforward about this sort of thing. 
After all, the ethical approach is built on hard work, dedication, 
trust, confidence, originality, perseverance.... none of which played a 
role.  Down at the bare bones level, all I did was to make gold pieces 
and issue a certificate for each one.  They sold like hot cakes.  The 
power of advertising in airline magazines continues to blow my mind. 
Together with a highly personalized follow-up, it did the trick. 

I thought at first that there might be some kind of stumbling block -- a
law that says, "You can't do this," or "you can't do that."  Every 
phone call to the Treasury office led me to a different authority but 
in the end they all seemed to agree that I was doing something 
perfectly legal. 

To begin with, I made a generous bid on a whole square block of downtown
Cincinnati not far from Music Hall -- all decrepit hulks, burnt out and 
smelling of stale urine, rancid butter and other items of historical 
value.  You can imagine what it cost.  When I told Vern, my banker, he 
was delighted and offered me the seed money at an enticingly low 
interest rate.  We had talked about the whole scheme earlier, of 
course, and he had (most discreetly) pointed out which block to buy and 
how much to bid on it.  I even put in seven hundred dollars of my own 
money, for good faith. 

The week after closing, I telephoned the Chicago wrecking firm he
recommended.  They woke me at six a.m. to sign the papers. By noon, the 
buildings were dust and rubble.  That same day, I rounded up some local 
architects, and a couple of construction firms. It took them nearly a 
year to redesign the block. My nerves were frazzled by the time they 
unveiled the model and drew up the blueprints. 

Actually, Vern brought a number of influential people with him.  It
sounded very official when I formally told them to go ahead and build 
whatever delighted their fancy. This time it took six building and loan 
institutions to come up with the seed money for their fee.  Since I was 
responsible, every cent had my name on it. 

To make a long story short, I was deeply impressed with how smoothly all
the negotiations went.  I got a lot of free lunches out of it, and at 
one point the Mayor even shook my hand, with praises like "civic pride" 
and "benefactor". The permit-lady took care of all the permits.  Other 
specialists saw that everybody got together for decisions on time. I 
even had an alter ego to step in and take my place, in the event I 


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