Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I’d heard of them long before I saw one in the wild. Rare, elusive, they were things of power and legend. Sure, I saw them in movies, but I knew those were fakes; we all did.

The C-note. The Benjamin. One hundred smackeroos.

I was nine years old when I saw my first one.

We were at Tiburon Tommie’s, the Chinese restaurant of my youth, a place where the drinks menu was long and fixed, and the food menu was short and subject to change. Hanging over the piers on Tiburon’s tony waterfront, Tommie’s was a massive warren of upholstered passages, a dark place that swallowed sounds and smelled of oiled teak, sweet rum, Old Spice, and salt air. It was also where my Grandpa Kelly (real name: Achilles), took us once each year for a family dinner, his treat.

These dinners were one of the few times I was required to wear a necktie. I also usually had to wear my camel-hair coat, a heavy beige thing of felted wool which made me look like John-John Kennedy and smelled of a wet wolfhound when it rained. Generally, the Giambastiani clan was not a “dinner out” family. We were more of a brunch at IHOP group. But once a year (for us kids at least) we togged up, piled into the Rambler, and headed down 101 to have a fancy dinner, courtesy of Grandpa G.

Grandpa Kelly (my dad’s father) grew up poor, had little schooling, worked shipyards during the war, and then drove trucks until he retired. By the time I knew him, what energy he had left he dedicated to maintaining the phantasmagorical Italian garden he’d built in his backyard. It was a kid’s wonderland, complete with an algal pond stocked with lily-pads and star-gazing goldfish, surrounded by raised-beds that he had built using hand-poured concrete dyed with food coloring. The gloopy concrete planters were studded with marbles, toy soldiers, and other found objects that he had pressed into the wet cement, and draped down their sides were the mosses, ferns, and flowers he planted in profusion.

Grandpa visited us every week or so, joining us for Sunday dinner, but he was neither talkative, nor a particularly affectionate grandfather. When he came to dinner, he brought a gallon jug of cheap red wine (which, inexplicably, was kept in the refrigerator), and while everyone ate and chatted, he’d sit in his spot near the head of the table and sip wine from his tumbler glass. His gaze would fix on some insignificant point on the tablecloth and he’d fidget with his dentures by popping them up and setting them back down so that they made a little fart noise.

Classic grandpa stuff.

At Tiburon Tommie’s, though, he was transformed. He sat at the head of the table. He smiled when the waiters recognized him as he ordered his mai tai, and I could see the twinkle of youth grow as the cocktails were downed and replenished. We were seven in all—Grandpa, Mom, Dad, my sister, my two brothers, and me—all enjoying the special time and laughing over dishes with names like moo goo gai pan and egg foo yuk. My kid brothers kicked and fussed in their booster seats. My sister looked bored and put upon. I purloined some of the small paper-wrapped bricks of Spreckels sugar for consumption back at home. But for Grandpa Kelly, this night, he was king.

When the bill came, Grandpa made a show of taking charge, and this year I watched as he pulled out his wallet. In years prior, I’d seen Jacksons and Grants flash from wallet to tray and thence to the waiter’s waiting hand, but this night he pulled out one solitary note.

I stared, and before I thought, I spoke: Can I see?

It seemed huge, but it wasn’t any larger than other greenbacks. Perhaps it was those zeroes after the one, all those striking, vertical lines in the block numbering. Maybe it was the crispness of it; it was so new, so untouched. Maybe it was the expanse of Franklin’s balding pate that set it apart. All I knew was that it was a thing I’d never seen, a thing I never thought I’d see. My fingers could feel the ink of its intricate filigree, sensed its thickness. And this beautifully crafted thing, this simple piece of paper, it was enough to trade for all the food and drinks we’d enjoyed. It was a sign not only of the bill’s potency, but of the importance of the gathering.

After that night, currency fascinated me. I learned about the engraving, read about counterfeiting, searched for the spider on the one-dollar bill, and tried to read the names of the states on the fiver’s image of the Lincoln Memorial. This fascination with the artistry was still strong when I got a job working in a bank, and swapped my own commonplace bills for the rare ones that crossed my teller’s desk.

Franklin still holds a mystique, for me, and of course, now that cash is giving way to funds transfers and credit cards, it’s likely to stay that way. I doubt that, were I to slip a Benjamin into a niece’s birthday card, it would be received with the gaping awe I would have expressed at that age, and I’m fine with that. They have their gift cards and their digital downloads. Good for them.

I have the feel of intaglio printing on laid cotton paper, the sound of the edge when flicked by a finger, the smell of the cured ink, and the immense detailing of acanthus leaves, spider webs, and the now-absent Hupmobile on the ten-dollar bill.

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