Free Hatched by Robert F. Barsky Page B

website to also pay his heating, telephone, and electricity bills. And, he learned from the stupid robot, he had dated those payments to yesterday afternoon.
    Furthermore, by shielding his checking account from undue spending on food, he’d accidentally overdrafted instead, causing his fucking fraudulent bank to impose $36.00 in fees for each bounced payment, for a total of $108.00, and then he overdrafted again on each food purchase he’d made at three different places. So for a total of $41.26 he had racked up $216.00 in fees, and would be charged again by each biller for having bounced checks to them, which would add another $75.00 to the mess, for a grand disaster fee of $291.00.
    $291.00.
    $291.00 represented more than two weeks of food. Even at Fabergé Restaurant that amount would pay for twelve different eggy ideas that would contribute to his egg manuscript.
    “$291.00. In fees. To a fucking, fucking, fucking bank. Shit. Fuck. Fucking banks!”
    He felt better for a moment, elucidating his fucks. Now he felt worse. What the fuck was he supposed to order in order to stay at Fabergé Restaurant today?
    $291.00 in fees.
    “What the fuck!” And that wasn’t the end of it, he suddenly thought. Since yesterday, he had used his check card for little purchases, including a chocolate bar in one place and a carton of chocolate milk in another. He had used it, well, let’s see, six times? Seven times? He couldn’t remember. There was also the beer he had purchased in the convenience store, and then there were those tissues he bought a few minutes later when the can, shaken more than it could stand, exploded its frothy contents all over his hands and clothing. He feared sticking to the inside of his skateboarding gloves for the next three weeks, so in an uncharacteristic moment had bought a handy little pack of Kleenex tissues, for $1.18. “Those little Kleenex tissues would now cost . . . um . . . $37.18 with the service charge. Fuck! Fuckity-fuck!” And there’ll be service charges of $36.00 for each of the other purchases. He dared not add it all up.
    “Fucking rip-off fucking banks.”
    Then there was the broken parking meter he’d used when some guy in a bookstore told him that he wasn’t allowed to park the truck where he always parked when he went in to browse this month’s Vanity Fair and Skateboard Digest . Holy Shit. He didn’t dare add up those damages either, for fear of total despair, the enemy of creativity.
    “Banks,” he thought, “are the enemies of creativity. Fuck!”
    His thoughts turned to salvaging the disaster by finding enough money to at least cover the little purchases, but how was he to get around the service charges? He would have to go back to his bank and beg forgiveness, as he’d done in the past, and hope that the teller would be sufficiently sweet, or perhaps hot on him, to save him from this ruin.
    “Oh, and by the way,” thought Jude to himself. “Who the fuck ever allowed the banks to deduct $36.00 per transaction in fees, when each purchase had already passed through his stupid account, electronically? And what kind of bloody computer takes days to process a $3.00 transaction? Better still, what kind of a sadistic bastard decided to steal, in $36.00 increments, from the poorest clients of the banks, with total impunity? Who? And how the fuck is it possible that charges that run through the bank instantaneously are also just ‘pending’ for days afterwards, even though they aren’t fucking ‘pending,’ because they appear instantaneously, because banks use computers as means of defrauding their clients, and then use delayed accounting to add service charges to people who can least afford to pay them, obviously, because who the fuck else has less than $100.00 in their account when they go to buy fucking groceries, chocolate bars, and Kleenex?”
    “None of your fucking stupid business,” he thought, and then smiled to himself.
    “Well, whoever he is,” he