The Hobo Codes

Hard times in the Information Age has its own look.  It doesn't have the aesthetic of the Great Depression.  There are no Okies or dust bowls.  The sandwich board has been replaced by big cardboard arrows and bad news in the stock market doesn't come from ticker tape, it's scrolled at the bottom of twenty-four hour news networks.

At my bank, they used to keep CNN on a television that you could watch while waiting in line.  But, now, since the next piece of bad news could be that the very bank you're standing in is in serious trouble, the station has been changed to the most tedious, banal programming that cable television offers.  The NASA channel.

Last night I went to a bankrupt Circuit City and picked over the carcass of its going-out-of-business DVD section.  All movies are twenty percent off but, like when Tower Records closed, they might go lower.  Like speculating on stocks, you have to guesstimate if a $16.00 single-disk Juno or a $7.99 Ocean's Eleven will still be there when prices drop another twenty or thirty percent.

Like the elbows on a hobo's coat, the numbers on my cell phone are rubbed bare. I've mostly memorized where the letters are as I punch blank buttons to text in Coke Rewards codes.  The twelve digit codes are printed inside of Coke bottle caps and each code is worth three points.  Like a dish-water housewife trying to fill her book of Green Stamps, I've accumulated over 4,600 points.

A while back I got a sweet ihome with my points but these days there's not much offered on the Cokerewards site except magazine subscriptions.  For 200 points I can get a twelve-pack of Coke or, for a thousand points, I can get a one day admission to Universal Studios.  Nice offer, but I work there (it's where I got all the caps in the first place).

Summer tourists leaving a few thousand bottle caps for me to cash in are not the only perk of the job.  Once, a couple tickets to a Universal movie premiere trickled their way down the totem pole to me.  I brought my room mate, Ben and we walked the red carpet.  Bright lamps lit us up like the frigging sun as on-lookers and photographers on either side of us showed their disappointment that we were nobody special.

Inside the gala event, I got a taste for how the other half lives.  Bags of popcorn were set out for folks to just walk up and take.  To drink, there were bottles of water, Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite, lined up in even rows and all for free.  After the movie, the Hollywood community left their many empty Coke bottles behind in their seats.

I could have run through the aisles like a happy rat, yanking up the trash of actors, agents and producers; shoving a galaxy of redeemable bottle caps in my pockets and shouting, "Screw the shower radio, I'M GOING FOR THE SURROUND SOUND!"

But, the premiere of Elizabeth: The Golden Age was a classy scene and I preferred to make it from my close-to-the-screen seat to outside the theater with the sophistication of a man who doesn't scavenge bottle caps, pirate music, or hide DVDs in a doomed store so they remain unsold until prices drop.

So, if I do go into the bread lines, or have to live in a Hooverville with fingerless gloves, it'll be with a free bottle of Coke Zero and an amazingly discounted two-disk collector's edition of Once Upon a Time in the West.