THE MONEY MAN

Back in my hometown of Forest Hills, Pennsylvania there were four Irish buddies who also were neighbors.

They were life long friends as well as drinking buddies and spent a lot of time over at Delaney's Morning Star Inn on the Greensburg Pike - within crawling  distance from their respective homes on Avenue "F".

To personalize the story I'm about to tell, their names were Timothy "Timmy" Carr, Martin " "Marty" O'Toole, Treymont "Trey" Surrey, and my Dad, John "Sully" Sullivan.

As you might guess from his given name, Trey was the one who came from money and was by far the wealthiest drunk in the bunch.

His Uncle, Samuel Surrey, had died and left Trey, Sam's only heir, a considerable amount of money. Trey only spoke of the generosity of his Uncle Sam whenever he had a "wee too many" shots of Ireland's finest whiskey.

Trey had added to Sam's fortune over the years in ways that were kept secret even to his close buddies - Timmy, Marty & Sully.

Sully dies. They lay him out in Wilmderding, Pa - his home town - at Bill Scott's funeral home.

"Scotty" was another of their buddies. It was a tradition with the guys that whenever a friend died and was layed out at Scotty's, the Irish cronies would get together back in Scotty's private quarters and have their own proper celebration of the deceased's life.

Knowing they were coming, and also that they were always referring the families of several other of their recently departed Irish buddies to his establishment, Scotty would thoughtfully order in a case of Jamisons Irish whiskey in advance of their arrival.

Well, on the day of Sully's funeral the guys were going at it pretty good back in the kitchen - their black mourning suit coats thrown on the nearest chair  or the linoleum floor -and were enjoying their usual private wake - when Scotty came back and announced that the pastor and the mourners had left and everybody was now headed for the cemetery.

Scotty said, with more than a little impatience, "So if you want to say your last goodbye's to Sully you better do it now as I'm closing up and locking the casket."

The guys stumbled out to the parlor, slightly disheveled, but now properly attired. They were all in a row, looking like three tipsy penguins, and there before them was Sully in his finest suit - the only one that didn't have holes in it resulting from the ashes of his ever present pipe.

They stared in silence until Timmy finally spoke up. "You know, Sully's going off without a dollar to his name, so I'm putting 100 bucks in his casket. That way he will have a little financial security up there in Heaven."

He promptly reached into the hidden drinking money pocket of his wallet and took out a wrinkled "Franklin", which he placed in the casket under my dad's right hand.

Marty  looked at him and, slightly slurring his words, said, "OK,  big spender, I'll raise you another hundred". Reaching into his own hidden stash he proudly retrieved  two crisp $100 bills which he also put under Dad's cold clenched over- sized paw.

Trey watched his two buddies and said, "I'll be damned. Here you guys are saying goodbye to Sully, one of your dearest friends, and all the money you can raise for him is $300? I'll take care of that right now!"

With that, Trey quickly wrote out a check for $1,300 and said, "Sully's worth at least a grand". He also placed the check under Dad's hand and retrieved the three hundred dollar bills from the other two mourners.

Marty was outraged and snorted, "Trey, what the hell are you doing? We gave him cash and - you're giving him a check - an IOU? What could you possibly be thinking?"

Trey looked at them with a twinkle in his eye and replied, "I like to think of it as making a contribution to Sully's 'trust fund' in Heaven."

You see, that's how "Trey Surrey" became "the money man" and Sully's "security" quietly went down the tubes.

(Can't wait to see what happens with the (not in crisis) Social Security "trust" fund.)