Playing With Money / How a $95,093.35 junk mail check changed Patrick's life

Patrick Combs has a $300 shirt in his backpack. Literally. It's an old yellow shirt with $300 in one- and five-dollar bills pinned to it. Sitting in a Mission District café, he unzips his backpack to give me a peek and I feel queasy, like I'm looking at porn in a public place. Patrick has extraordinarily knobby, bony hands, and he slowly pulls the shirt, with its bills flapping and rustling, out into the light of day. (Is it worth noting that he once delivered a passing stranger's baby on Fell Street?) Laid out on the table, the shirt is less titillating, but still disturbing.

"Cash is very mesmerizing," he says, as the bills undulate in the light breeze. Last night, he wore the shirt into the Tenderloin to promote his one-man show. Some people told him he was being insensitive to wear that much cash in a place where so many people are poor; other people thought he'd be attacked. "When people asked if I could spare some money, it was funny. I mean, if you've got money in your wallet and someone asks you for change, you can lie and say no. But when you've got it pinned to your shirt, you have to be honest. So I gave money to anyone who asked." Tonight he intends to place $100 in cash on the floor of the theater where he is performing to see if people will steal it, touch it or ignore it.

Patrick Combs' official occupation is "motivational speaker," but where money is concerned, he is a social scientist cum practical joker cum performance artist cum subversive element. He has crossed more money taboos than most of us have even thought of. Eight years ago he received a junk mail check for $95,093.35 and deposited it in his bank account. Through a series of banking errors, Patrick's check cleared: The money was deposited in his account and his bank was left holding the bag. Appropriately, "Man 1, Bank 0," is the name of the monologue that Patrick performed at the SF Fringe Festival last week. "I feel that the more playful I am with money the more I can reach my goal of never feeling bad about it," he says.

If you spend time with Patrick Combs, he will look you directly in the eyes, he will consider your questions thoughtfully, he will touch your arm when he makes a point, and he will tuck his dark brown pageboy behind his ears when he's gotten so excited that his hair has fallen in front of his eyes. You will soon notice that his bone structure is more prominent than most people's, not in an unappealing way, but in a way that suggests that you are seeing through his skin to his skeleton -- that his body is as transparent as he says his motives are.

Perhaps if Patrick was a painter, or another one of San Francisco's sex-positive comics, or even a junk-bond trader, his motivations would not come under such scrutiny -- but money, as they say, changes everything. And there's something about Patrick's attitude toward money, his playfulness and his boldness, that makes people uncomfortable. From this discomfort comes the temptation to judge once and for all whether Patrick Combs is a brilliant joker or a jerk.

So, let's start with the check. Back in 1995, Patrick had just written a guide for college students on what to do in college so they could get their dream job. The book is called Major In Success, and it launched, in a very fledgling way, Patrick's motivational speaking career at universities and corporations. At the time Patrick lived in the Haight, had about $200 in his bank account, and frequently shared ice cream cones with his girlfriend because, he says, he couldn't afford two cones. Lack of money was making his life difficult -- every parking ticket felt like the end of the world.

Patrick had grown up with very little money, the second son of a single mom who worked as a licensed nurse in Bend, Oregon. Even as a child, Patrick had done work like picking strawberries to contribute to the family's upkeep. The family rule was that money the boys earned was divided three ways: one part for the family, one part for the savings account, and one part for the boys to spend. So Patrick did not take money lightly. But he wanted to.

One day, Patrick opened a piece of junk mail and found a letter promising that if he sent money to their company he would soon be receiving huge checks in the mail just like the sample enclosed. Patrick stared at the junk check, made out to him for $95,093.35, with an authorized signature. In one sense the fake check was a depressing reminder of how broke he was, but Patrick saw an opportunity for some bleak fun. He thought it would be a funny joke to deposit it in his account, giving bank employees a laugh when they discovered that some idiot had tried to cash a junk mail check." So he giggled as he typed in the amount of the deposit, 95,093.35. "I didn't think I was sticking money into the machine," he says. He didn't even bother to endorse the back.

Much to his shock, the check cleared ten days later. (As he later learned, the check met the nine criteria of a valid check and the words "non negotiable" printed on the front did not negate it. The junk mail company had succeeded in making the check look real. Additionally, the bank missed its own legal deadline to notify him that the check had bounced as a "non-cash" item.) With "money" in his account, Patrick became obsessed. "The excitement of that much money was offscale," he says. "It was an addiction. For two months I obsessed on whether I should take the money or give the money back. I put my bank on speed dial and dialed it every ten minutes. I worried constantly that it would go away."

As the summer passed, Patrick did not spend the money -- he couldn't decide whether or not it should be his. Eventually, he had the bank issue a cashier's check for the exact same amount, which he put in a safe deposit box. He had converted the electronic money to something more real. Shortly afterwards, security people from the bank began harassing him to give the money back. By this time, though, Patrick was getting advice from everyone. He had put his story on the Internet and was getting letters from people daily, telling him to keep the money. "I realized that a lot of people were willing to set their values aside if the sum was large enough," he says. One guy said, "So what if you lose all of your friends. You'll have 95 grand and you can get new ones."

The money that had started as a joke became two new problems. First there was the ethical problem: was the money really Patrick's? And second, there was the legal problem: was it legally his? Ethically, Patrick couldn't ever quite justify keeping the money. "I kept coming back to the Robin Hood concept," he says, "I hate banks. How about if I take the money from the bank and give it to the needy? That's righteousness!" Still, the more he thought about Robin Hood, the more he was convinced that Robin Hood was wrong.

When the bank served him with legal papers to try to keep him from cashing the cashier's check, he realized he needed to stop playing and make a decision. "What had started as a joke had become standing up for my rights," he remembers. "But it turned out that these bank people didn't like jokes." The bank didn't even want to admit that it had made a mistake when it put the money in his account.

Patrick, though, still had another card to play. He took his story to the Wall Street Journal. When the story came out, he was asked to be on Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, ABC Nightly News, Montel, Donahue and Hard Copy. He spent weeks ping-ponging across the country doing TV appearances. Everyone told him to keep the money. There was even a precedent for keeping the money -- a car dealer in the Midwest had advertised coupons which would entitle the bearer to $500 off a new car. When a woman came in with a pile of coupons and asked for the car for free, a judge said they had to give it to her. (They had failed to write "one per customer" on the coupon.) If Patrick kept the money, it would be through a similar legal loophole. Patrick decided he didn't want to be the "loophole guy." "There was no way I was going to be that guy. Why can't common sense rule?"

So in October 1995, on the day of the O.J. Simpson verdict, Patrick gave the money back and in return got a letter from the bank stating that after Patrick's mistake of initially depositing the check, the bank had made a string of mistakes and was at fault. When Patrick left the bank, there were no TV cameras. "It was so perfect. So flat. There was no reward whatsoever for doing the right thing. It was like I was winning something by giving away the prize." He laughed when he saw a sign held by a homeless guy, "My dog needs a sex change," and gave him $5. The next morning, some media people left messages on his answering machine saying they were "disappointed" that he didn't keep the money. Patrick had become famous because he represented a perverse American dream of getting money for free. When he gave back the money -- the ethical thing to do -- he became a disappointment.

To Patrick, the whole episode was a lesson in the power of money. "Now I see how bad I wanted to keep that money," he says, "but in the end I'm really happy I had such a hardcore experience with this drug called money. I don't fantasize about large amounts of money anymore." He's decided to become "more playful" about money so that he can reach his goal of never feeling bad about it. "The less attraction to money, the less pain," he says. "The more neutral I can be about money, the better."

Since depositing the check, Patrick's money problems have mostly gone away. His motivational speaking career has grown to the point where he now does between 30 and 35 gigs a year bringing home "just over $100,000 a year."

But he continues to set up little experiments. One day he decided to give a hundred dollar bill to the next person he saw who he thought needed it. "It sounds simple but it was excruciatingly hard," he says. "Because it was so much money, I felt the confusion. As I gave it away, I heard every voice speaking in my head -- it's too much, what will he do with it? Why not give a dollar?" But half an hour later he felt extraordinarily relaxed -- as though he'd had a massage. "There's some sort of lizard part of our brains that wants to hold onto money," he says. "It's our food supply."

And Patrick kept working on the story of the check and posting it on his Web site (www.goodthink.com). Over the years, he's gotten approximately 15,000 emails about it. About a year ago he got his 75th rejection letter from a publisher. No one wanted to publish the story of the junk check. So Patrick decided to put a tip button on his Web site, allowing readers to send him a tip through PayPal. For the first few months he got very few tips and lots of hate mail. Then he took one of the hate mails and posted it next to the tip button along with his own rebuttal, explaining that he'd worked hard to write the story. "And BOOOM!," he says, "the tips came in."

He opens the logs on his computer to show me -- more than 800 people have tipped him in the past year. Two have sent $50, and several have sent one cent. Most have sent between $5 and $10, saying his story offered them more enjoyment than a movie. Strangers with screen names like "pumpkinhead" and "moggs" send him between $300 and $500 a month. Of course, he still gets hate mail too. (Patrick says he's made between $2,000 and $3,000 this year in tips.)

Patrick keeps the tip money, though he says he gives $5,000 to $8,000 in royalties from his book Major in Success to charity. Mostly, he says, he keeps the tips because they bring him "energy, joy, and a positive stroke." "I'm building my confidence as a writer," he says, "and every tip is a vote of confidence." He also says the tips reaffirm his belief that people are essentially generous. He says that when it's not exciting to find the tips in his email box, he'll start giving them to charity -- just to make it fun again. "I really want to consciously create my relationship with money," he says.

Patrick says he's not sure why people want to give him tips, but I have a theory. It takes about an hour to read the story of the junk mail check. That hour resembles a theme park ride through your emotions about money: exhilaration, fear, doubt, mistrustfulness, hope, suspicion, righteousness, vengeance, anxiety, and finally, a sort of satisfied disappointment. Having gone through this whirl, readers want to play with money themselves. There's something wonderful (and scary) about the way Patrick Combs strips meaning from money. People want to join in the fun, so they send a tip.

Patrick's one-man show in the Tenderloin was sold out this weekend. He told his story passionately and the audience loved it, cheering against the bank and for the slacker with the junk mail check. There was a strange building excitement in the theater as people imagined themselves with that much money, becoming involved in the fantasy and the justifications. And in the theater, all of us became a bit guilty. We in the audience were implicated in Patrick's scheme, because who among us has not had the fantasy that he lived? And how many of us would have given the money back?

And the money on the floor? The hundred dollars in ones and fives? Some people walked on it, some people stepped carefully over it. Most pretended to ignore it, as though they were too cool to concern themselves with a PILE OF MONEY. No one touched it with their hands. After watching for a few minutes I went to stand in the middle of the money, kicking the five dollar bills into a little pile like they were autumn leaves. It was fun.

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