Illustration by Jenny Bien-Aimé

When I was eight years old, my parents entrusted me with $16 in the form of eight $2 coins, an allowance for a school field trip to La Ronde, Montreal’s amusement park. Until 1996, the year during which the $2 tender in Canada was converted from a paper bill to a coin, my parents would have never, not in a million years, given me $16 to take along with me on a field trip, or anywhere else for that matter. As far as my mother was concerned, I had no business with paper money. However, on this particular morning in 1997, my father, quite uncharacteristically, reached into his pockets and offered me eight toonies.

“Why are you giving the boy all that money?” asked my mother, who had been eyeing the transaction discontentedly.

“Oh, it’s just some spare change,” my father replied. “In case of emergency.”

My mother grumbled an unintelligible response, but let me have the coins; whereas only a year ago, if my father had reached into his wallet and pulled out eight $2 bills and handed them over to me, she would have exploded savagely. She would have either thrown whatever she might be holding at my father’s head or reached for the nearest available object that could be thrown at my father’s head and, having thrown it, would have walked over to him, ripped the $16 out of his hands, and shoved them back into his wallet or into her own pocket. In fact, my father would never have offered me $16 in paper currency in front of my mother as it was so obviously an act that would have aggravated her.

My father’s unprecedented offer, as well as my mother’s tolerance, was intriguing. It seemed as if my parents’ emotions about money could be manipulated by something as simple as a change in its appearance.

While this was the first time that I had observed this behaviour toward money manifest itself in my parents, I was already intimately familiar with the ways in which money aroused different emotions depending on its appearance. I had this sneaky habit of roaming around our house for coins like a scavenger. During these hunts, I felt luckiest when I found coins in or under the couch, in the car, anywhere in our laundry room, or anywhere in our garage. I believed the coins I discovered in these circumstances were discovered honestly. The coins I found in drawers (in the kitchen, in the laundry room, in the wall unit that housed our sound system and television) were a morally grey area. I would try to ascertain whether these coins had been forgotten in their drawers, perhaps for weeks or months, or if they had been intentionally left there for safekeeping. If it was clear they had been forgotten, then I was happy to discover these coins and claim them; but if something intangible about their appearance, about the way they were lying in the drawer, told me that my parents knew of their presence, even if their knowledge of the coins might have been broad and abstract—even if I was confident that they would never notice if one of them went missing—then I felt guilty if I took any of them. I felt guilty for even considering whether or not to take a coin. I also felt guilty if I took a coin, any coin, that I discovered in my parents’ bedroom. Even if the coin was jammed under the base of my parents’ bedframe, and had obviously been lost, its location in my parents’ bedroom did not feel neutral. Such a coin had not been thrown in my path through the ordinary twists and turns of fate. I felt like a villainous thief if I pocketed these coins, like a person without a conscience or a moral compass.

In addition to the money’s location, there was also the issue of denomination to consider. I usually scooped up and pocketed pennies without a second thought. Nickels were small in surface area and value, but also thicker and more robust than all the other coins. A nickel weighed 4.6 grams, almost as much as a quarter, which weighed 5.05 grams, and more than twice as much as a dime, which weighed 2.07 grams (measurements which I conducted assiduously on the electronic scale in our kitchen). I always found it difficult to pocket nickels, as their weight was problematic, disproportionate in appearance to their five-cent essence. I usually ignored them in favour of pennies and dimes.

Dimes were the smallest, daintiest, and thinnest of all the coins. You could balance them easily on your smallest fingernail. I would often chew on dimes because I liked their metallic taste and the feeling of the thin, serrated edge lodging itself into different crevices between my teeth. In fact, I liked dimes so much and had such good feelings toward them that I almost never spent the ones I found, preferring to hoard them instead. I would occasionally take all the dimes I had accumulated out of their secret hiding place in my closet and lay them on the ground to examine them joyously, before chewing on them absentmindedly for hours on end. It was a minor miracle that I didn’t swallow about a dozen of them during the course of my childhood.

Quarters tugged at my heartstrings in both directions, almost equally. Quarters were not as thick and unpleasant as nickels, but they were unwieldy in size, and cumbersome to flip and play with. Additionally, the quarter’s purchasing power was 25 times that of a penny, and two-and-a-half times that of a dime. This purchasing power was a double-edged sword. I felt luckier when I found a quarter than when I found a penny, at least 25 times luckier, but I also felt 25 times guiltier. It was at least 25 times more important that I establish and reason through the circumstances of its discovery, to be certain that I was finding it and pocketing it in an appropriate and conscionable manner. This moral standard almost always proved to be one I could not satisfy for myself internally. I always felt a little wretched when I picked up a quarter, even if I picked it up from a sidewalk or from a trail in the woods. Then again, there was the superstitious delight of finding a quarter, which was a rare occurrence, and therefore accompanied by the feeling that fortune was smiling upon me.

Finally, the loonie. It was pure evil. I wanted as little to do with it as possible. I would rather have found four different quarters (for all the moral quandaries that all four findings might have presented). I hated the loonie’s eleven-sided polygon shape, how its edges were often blunted and beaten from use, instead of smooth and circular like all the other coins. I hated the loonie’s bronze plating (that would later become brass plating) to which dirt adhered, tarnishing it, rendering its golden hue murky and anemic.

If I pocketed a loonie, against my better judgment, I needed to be rid of it as quickly as possible. But disposing of a loonie was easier said than done. I usually spent my coins at the dépanneur. As I didn’t like to accumulate coins (dimes excepted), and wanted to leave the dépanneur with fewer of them than when I had entered it, spending a loonie (or even worse, two loonies) usually meant buying more items than I knew what to do with. Those items (gum, chips, candy, flimsy trinkets) would fill my pockets uncomfortably, or give me a stomach ache if I ate them all at once, making me feel nauseous and guilty.

Enter into this hierarchy of coins the toonie, eight of which my father would hand over to me on the morning before my school trip to La Ronde. The toonie was a void, like the vacuum of space. It meant nothing to me. For a person who had such strong and complex feelings toward all other coins, this feeling, or absence of feeling, was peculiar and bewildering. I would often ponder the toonie, while it sat in the upturned palm of my right hand, gently shifting my palm so that it might catch the light at different angles. The more I thought about it, the more the toonie seemed unreal, manufactured. Well, all coins were manufactured. What I mean to say is that it seemed fake, inauthentic. It had a nickel outer ring, a bronze inner core, and a polar bear on an ice floe embossed on its reverse side. These elements coalesced to form a coin which seemed excessively novel. I had the disconcerting impression that I was holding a knockoff, an imitation of money, and not actual money. I hoped that if I exposed the toonie to the right light, I might form a unique attachment to it, but the toonie remained silent, inscrutable.

Given my indifference toward the toonie coin, my behaviour during the field trip to La Ronde was predictable.

During lunch, as my classmates and I sat on picnic tables, eating hot dogs, burgers, and French fries, one of my classmates took three quarters out of his pocket and used them to play an arcade game that was beside the food stall where we had just purchased our lunches. The object of the game was to fish out various toys or stuffed animals from a large bin while operating, with a joystick and a button, a robotic arm and hand that was perched above the bin. When the player thought they had maneuvered the arm into a good position with the joystick, they would bash the button, and the hand would close in what looked like an attempt to secure whatever toy or stuffed animal the player hoped to acquire.

My classmate played three turns with his three quarters, and lost all three. The game was rigged against the player. Once a quarter was introduced, the whole machine began vibrating like it was experiencing an earthquake, making the robotic arm and hand more difficult to operate. Additionally, the hand and arm seemed at times intentionally unresponsive (often these were crucial times, when a toy or object seemed just within the player’s grasp).

I was sorry to see my classmate lose. Before he could walk away from the game, I approached him and offered him a toonie to let him keep playing. After all, it cost me nothing, emotionally at least. This precipitated a frenzy amongst my classmates. Where had I gotten this money? Did I have more of this money, of these toonies, wherever they had come from?!?! About 12 to 15 of my classmates congregated around me and rattled off inquiries about my toonies and whether I might give them a turn, and in that moment, I took all of my remaining coins from my pocket and slammed them onto the dashboard of the console, gifting them to my classmates.

My offering was applauded, but once I relinquished the money, no one paid any further attention to me. I didn’t even attempt to play the game once. I had no desire to play the game. I enjoyed quests for objects that were solitary, undertaken for private, personally significant reasons. The communal endeavour of this arcade, the pursuit of the toys my classmates hoped to snatch from it, was public, almost lurid, and antithetical to my introverted nature. Anyways, it didn’t seem like my classmates would have let me play even if I had wanted to. No one seemed inclined to offer me a place in line, or a turn at the arcade, though they were constantly trading and offering places in line to each other.

Three of my classmates won at the arcade and brought a toy or stuffed animal home with them. On the bus ride back to school, as I watched those three classmates with their toys and stuffed animals, and listened to my other classmates who couldn’t stop talking about the thrills and frustrations of their various turns at the arcade, I starting feeling a bit like a fool. When I returned home that afternoon, my mother asked me where the hell the $16 my father had given me that morning had gone, and why the hell I didn’t have anything to show for it.

“You don’t even have five or ten or 25 cents in change?” my mother yelled at me indignantly. “What could you possibly have done with all that money?”

I lied. Like many liars, I based my lie in truth. I told my mother about the arcade game, but said that I was the one who had spent all of my money on it. I told her that I hadn’t won a single one of my 64 turns, and as each turn had cost a quarter, I didn’t have any money left. My mother was irate. She would relate this story 10 to 30 times a year, whenever she wanted to reiterate how spoiled I was, how unappreciative I was of the value of money.

Despite my mother’s ridicule, I still thought it better to disappoint her in this way. I preferred that she think that I had wasted all that money chasing my silly and childish dreams, than to tell her that I had simply given the money away, given it away for everyone else to take a turn at the arcade, while not even playing a turn myself.

This realization had come to me on the bus ride back from La Ronde. As I contemplated the eight toonies I had lost that day in my mind’s eye, I experienced deep shame and embarrassment. I knew that I had behaved inappropriately, in a manner that was not in keeping with the unwritten rules which governed almost everyone’s emotional conduct toward money. What kind of a fool had I been to surrender $16 so amenably, so accommodatingly, without even being coerced or influenced? What kind of a fool had I been not to value, not just one or two, but all eight of my toonies, all $16 worth of them, when my classmates had spent the remainder of the afternoon obsessed with creating a system to allocate and trade different portions and values of my $16 amongst themselves, a miniature economy from which they had excluded me entirely. I had been a mighty fool, a mighty fool indeed.

Suddenly, the toonie coin, which had for so long remained inert, took on life and meaning. Over the coming days, months, and years, the two-toned coin’s allure would become so powerful that it would subsume my desires and disdains for all other coins. It was impossible for me to refuse the gaze of the toonie coin’s eye. The command of the stern bronze pupil and its scintillating nickel iris was absolute. I abandoned my pursuit of all other coins, and yearned only for the toonie.

Waseem Haja is a writer from Montreal. His writing has appeared in Weird Era literary magazine. He has completed his first novel, and is at work on a second.