According to the Camel Cash Catalog it's like real cash subject to rules and restrictions. Camel Cash comes in the form of Camel Bucks, which are little rectangles of green glossy paper stuck to the back of each pack of smokes, each slip of paper with a picture of Joe Camel's floppy dick and nutsack face resting on the breast of a frilly colonial times shirt where George Washington's picture would be on a normal dollar. You collect Camel Cash and send it in to buy items they sell in the Camel Cash Catalog. If you collect a lot, you can get some really cool shit.

My mom had been hiding her Camel Cash from me. It was disappointing, because up until then she had been my biggest source. In the kitchen garbage the empty packs I found had already been stripped. Even the half-smoked packs scattered on the coffee table in our smoky apartment had already been harvested. I was pissed because I knew she had no intention of ordering a Camel ball-cap or a Camel insulated travel mug. I figured she was just jealous of the huge volume of Camel Cash I had accumulated, both from her and from dumpsters behind bars. She had said things that proved to me she was jealous. One night she came into my room after she got home from work. It was after midnight and she was still wearing her waitress uniform. As she stood there idly moving the stacks of Ziploc bags full of Cash I had on the top of my dresser, each Ziploc containing a thousand Bucks in neatly rubber-banded stacks of one hundred, she'd said "I wish I had the time to play with Camel Cash." I didn’t know why she was angry. "But I have to work."

Later I was riding in Julian's rusty Caprice Classic, the car's sprung trunk banging beneath its bungi cord, Julian drinking out of a can of (what must be warm) Natural Light beer clenched between his polyester-snugged thighs on the cracked vinyl seat. "Let's go for a ride," Julian slurred at me. I could tell he was the kind of drunk that makes him fatherly toward his girlfriend's teenaged kid but with a sort of emotionally vulnerable look in his eyes that makes it easy for him to get angry. He drove me around the neighborhood, the car veering between parked cars along the street, Julian sucking beer off the bottom of the black wiry mustache he was so proud of.

Julian gave me his same old advice on not to get girls pregnant, telling me how much money he had to send back to Texas for child support. I'd had lots of advice from guys dating my mother, which I always ignored with good reason because my mom wasn't known for picking winners. A fact I knew on account of the more than natural amount of time we'd spent, me and my mom and whatever guy she currently had, standing around in the front yard with cops all around who referred by first name to both me and my mom, whose name was Mariel.

So I was riding in Julian's car, biting the loose skin off around my fingernails and spitting it off my lips. I looked down and saw the corner of a Camel Buck in the pocket on the inside of the passenger door sticking out from under some crumpled fast food napkins. Which is where I guess my mother had been hiding them from me.

"Camel Cash!" I shouted. It must have surprised Julian because his head swiveled over fast to look at me and the car swerved. He just missed a van parked on the side of the street.

"Goddammit!" Julian shouted, followed by a long string of Spanish curse words he'd once translated for me as being about an old goat that's not worth any money and what a man could do with that goat who hasn't been with a woman in a long while.

"Mariel," I said, "was stashing her Camel Cash in your car."

"Well if it's her Camel Cash," he told me like I was a little kid, "she can stash it where she wants."

"It’s mine now," I told him. I started gathering it up and smoothing it into stacks like a cashier does with real money.

"That’s not your Camel Cash," Julian told me.

"I'm collecting it. I'm going to get the go-cart."

"I never had a go-cart growing up."

"Don't you want me to have a better childhood than you did?" I asked him. Then I had to stifle a laugh because that question was a puzzler for Julian. He started gnawing on his mustache with his bottom teeth like he does when he's thinking. But then I started getting nervous because I could tell he was reaching the part of his drunk on the dark side of feeling fatherly and emotionally vulnerable.

Julian is only five foot two, even though he's got a wrinkled, leathery face that makes me think he's fifty. He's like one of those little kids that get old too soon on the Maury Povich show. I'm Andre the Giant compared to him. And here's a secret about Julian: those polyester pants he wears are boy sized. I was sitting on Mariel's bed once when he came home with some new clothes in a JC Penny bag. He was taking the tags off the kind of pants he likes – dark polyester ones with thin fabric belt loops and a little metal hook on the inside instead of a button at the top of the zipper - when I noticed that they were juniors. "You wear boys pants!" I shouted. I was really giving it to him because finally I had some dirt on the guy. All of a sudden he got angry and pulled a knife out of nowhere, thin blade snicking out of mother of pearl and chrome. He was standing there, knife low in one hand pointing at me, his other arm held up and out to the side, hand like a shark fin. He was standing with all his weight on one foot in a pose that looked to me like he thought he was the fucking karate kid. When I started laughing harder he pulled his yellow golf shirt up with his free hand to show me a puffy, pale scar that started below his belly button and curved up to just below his hairy nipple on his smooth, brown and otherwise hairless chest. I was kind of scared but I told him getting cut didn't prove much. He said if I ever laughed at him again, ever, he would give me a scar to match and I could tell by his dark shiny eyes squinting at me that he meant it.

But there was like a treasure chest full of Camel Cash in that car door, and I needed them bad for a reason I'll explain in just a second. "I'm taking these Camel Cash," I said. Julian's marionette arm shot over and grabbed onto the stack of Camel Cash I had in my hands, pinching it harder than I thought a little guy like that could. With his other arm on the steering wheel and his foot on the brake he started pulling the car over to the side of the road. I was afraid of what his other arm would do when it could come off the steering wheel so just before the car came to a stop I let the stack of Camel Cash go and swung open the door. I grabbed two big disorganized fistfuls of Camel Cash from the car door and ran off into the rain-soaked neighborhood, leaving the door swung wide and Julian shouting at me out the open door to come back and close it, spilt beer all over his boy-sized dark polyester pants.

The go-cart, to me, wasn't about having a happy childhood at all. Contrary to what I'd told Julian, the go-cart was about making me a man.

I'd met my girlfriend at a picnic in a park. Neither me or my friends had been invited to the picnic, we were just there playing soccer. The picnic was a huge crowd of people milling around a van with its back doors open and two big Stereo Exchange speakers blasting out bass-heavy music thick with accordion and tuba. Our soccer ball was swallowed up by the picnic crowd when it rolled into the thick forest of legs and cowboy boots.

I went in after it and met her standing in the middle of the crowd. She had two pitch-black braids down the front of her chest over top of a t-shirt she'd cut the neck out of in a big V down to between her tits. I found her with our soccer ball in one hand and a red plastic cup of beer in the other. She gave me the cup and I felt her fingers on the bottom pushing it up as I drank while she whispered I should hurry before somebody saw. She was watching me tight with mischievous brown eyes. She gave me our ball back then but held onto my shirt and made me wait for her phone number that she wrote on a piece of napkin that had been wrapped around a piece of corn. I didn't know her name but how could I not call her after that?

She had two hours after school when her parents weren't home. She told me on the phone that I could come over. There were no buses that went out to where she lived but I was not going to wait to turn sixteen and get a driver's license with an invitation like that. That's why I needed the Camel Cash.

The go-cart came in its own truck on a wood pallet all covered in shrink-wrap. I waited only as long as it took to drain the gas out of the landlord's lawn mower. In a cloud of blue smoke and with Camel Joe's floppy dick and nutsack face painted on the hood and leading the way, the go-cart sped me along the route I had traced on a map that had come to look like a completed maze on a pancake house placemat.

She was waiting for me, legs dangling from the porch swing, bare knees under a sun dress. I was glad she did all the talking. She had that mischievous look in her eyes. I was afraid if I talked my voice would tremble or I would say something stupid and ruin everything.

Then when she called me, weeks later, she was crying. It was like I didn't even know her. I made the mistake of telling my mom, who didn't say anything but harrumphed in a smoky way like a dragon might who doesn't really give a shit about anything anymore. Julian thought it was funny. "I told you!" he said. "You didn’t listen to me but I told you!!" He was laughing like I'd never seen him laugh before and calling me a word I knew meant "little man" in Spanish.

So I just stood there in the smoky living room, and there wasn't anything I could do. The sun was coming in sideways through the yellow nicotine stained windows of our apartment and I could see that on the coffee table was a pack of cigarettes with a green piece of glossy paper sticking up out of the plastic wrap that I knew was a Camel Buck.

I didn't have the Camel Cash leather jacket. I didn't have the crystal Camel Cash ashtray or the Camel Cash change purse. I didn't have the Camel Cash official regulation-sized billard table. But I left that Cash where it lay, realizing then why maybe my mom was angry.

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Brian Morris was born in 1975. He works as a lawyer in Chicago, where he's also a serial writing workshop participant. One of his stories appears at Thieves Jargon.com. He claims to have been blogging since before blogging was cool, at http://www.houseofnoh.com/blogger.

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