ATMs and You.

It’s safe
to say that we have evolved from a cash culture to a digital one,
right? Debit cards, credit cards, online banking, and paperless bill
paying is the standard and not something for the cutting edge
technophiles that nasally snotch Lazlow caters to. My mother, a late
adopter of the internet, the cell phone, and the wheel… does it. That’s enough proof right there.

This past Saturday night we had a going away party for Misty Padilla,
a lovely and beautiful young woman, the leadoff hitter for our Friday
night co-ed softball team, and an all-around nice banana. The dinner
began with Mexican food and loads of booze, and then evolved into two
hours of no holds barred Whirlyball. For those who don’t know,
Whirlyball is the sport of the future if the future takes place in a
redneck ghetto and the skies are blacked out with nuclear ash. Played
in a court with two goals, ten people compete in bumper cars with a
wiffle ball and little skeeball “raquets”, passing and shooting and
ramming each other into oblivion. It’s a lot of fun and the very
definition of guilty pleasure. It’s hard not to ride around with a
silly grin on your face even though what you’re doing is the adult
equivalent of riding your Huffy in the cul-de-sac pretending you’re
Tron.

Yeah, we did that. A
lot. I made a point to class things up by either being Sark or Flynn.
Tron’s a pretty boy asshole and his thespian avatar possesses an
unnecessarily vowel crazy last name. We also played Aliens on our bikes as well as Death Race 2000 and if that’s too silly for you, go fuck your father in the mouth.

This
is what the derriere game of Whirlyball looks like. Click on the image
to see what art comes in last in history right behind Van Airbrush,
Disney Caricature, Rob Liefeld, and Jim Morrison’s:

Whirlyball
ain’t cheap even though there’s nothing cheaper. We play it at the
Roswell Town Center, a place historically grafted to my existence*, and
easily the most jaw-droppingly smalltime location on Sol 3.
There’s a movie theater. A bar (for coping with the location). A comedy
club (the joke is on you). A gigantic arcade (think Dave & Busters’
retarded asexual younger bipolar cousin). A putt-putt course (of course
it’s in disrepair you idiot!). A mini-race track (I’ve been there
twenty times and the place has been in operation maybe thrice and if
you’re seen driving there you might as well be in the Klan). A batting
cage (Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer not included). Other shit
(goes without saying). It’s actually quite huge all told. Also huge:
Iraq.

Lots of places to spend cash, even though the ownership doesn’t on maintenance.

One ATM.

The
loneliest number that you’ll ever know unless this is your hangout, and
then there’s a new number smaller than zero waiting for you.

A
million low-rent and silly things to do. One ATM. I wouldn’t be
surprised if it only dispensed pesos and suicide instructions anyhow.

And it was broken.
No one seemed in a rush to get it repaired either. Not even the guy
shooting himself in the management office or the chick hanging herself
at the windmill on hole #12. The cashier answered my query fast, as
she’d cut the wrists vertically and had “plans”.

Thing is: our
little cadre of softball legends [well, not really] had decided to
split the costs at the joint and though we all could have gotten cash,
we didn’t. As a result I was SOLS (shit outta luck at shithole).
I had to get covered by a teammate and I had to wonder what the fuck
kind of place only has one ATM to service thousands of people who made
a horrible social decision?

As dumb and midgetty The Roswell
Town Center is, the idea of one ATM is ludicrous. One ATM is good for a
pizza parlour or an urn shop. For a primate mecca it’s inadequate, and
I say that knowing that ‘inadequate’ is the endgame goal for The
Roswell Town Center. When they attain INADEQUATE, they are retiring.
They still have to hurtle over CANCEROUS, UNIRONICALLY SLOUCHED, FUCKED
BEYOND RECOGNITION, and PHENIX CITY, ALABAMA before that, so you can
hold off on your Whirlyball reservation for a while.

In reality,
a place in desperate need of arson like The Roswell Town Center should
probably have at least five ATMS and the ability to withdraw cash
through their cash registers, if for nothing else than for petty cash
to clean up all of the self-killed employees and patrons.

One ATM.

It’s
bad when you go to a gas station and they have those horrible little R4
units that are plugged into a phone line and have to dial out at 9600
baud to check and make sure you’re not using J.T. Walsh’s dead and
stolen debit card and the thing charges you $3.00 for the right. It’s
also bad when you go to an ATM machine and Maximum Overdrive happens.

It’s
worse when there’s one ATM and it is deader than the… wait one
second… OK! …deader than the guy who was just manning the
Whirlyball court. The pills worked! He’s an ex-guy.

Bottom line: ATMs
are easier to have than hair. If you’re either a legitimate business or
a soul-laundering front for the Old Ones [IE: Roswell Town Center], you
need to make sure your victims can pull money from their accounts to
finance your problems.

– Nick Nunziata doesn’t wish to walk around with a wad of dough all day long. He already has one massive wad to carry around.

*
The Roswell Town Center used to be called The Roswell Mall and from
1980 – 1990 I spent more time there than my own home. I lived there
practically and knew every nook and cranny as it morphed from being the
worst mall in Georgia to being the worst place in America to being the
Hellmouth to being God’s piss place. I’ll devote a whole blog to it one
day. It was a glorious/horrendous part of my life.