Make Money Without Working!

One summer I was unemployed and less than broke so my two roommates and I went to the plasma clinic to apply for a part time job selling plasma. There I was, in my business attire having just come from another fruitless job interview, sitting in a crack neighborhood on green pleather sofas which have had God knows what oozed upon them. We begin the three hour interview process to determine whether we can sell our blood for fun and profit.

And I do not joke about this being a part time job. The nurses know all the people in the waiting room except for us, the three would be superheroes of The Plasma Team.

There are prizes to be won if you donate twice a week, every week and the nurses are calling people to invite them in to donate (keep in mind this means "sell") and loudly suggesting regulars' names who they will phone next. The atmosphere is that of a party, or a corner bar.

And everyone there looks like an tweaked out playa, some are sleeping on the mystery couches, neither a thought in their heads nor a tooth in their mouths. A guy is rapping. Some have open sores. All have torn sweat-stained clothes except the college students doing this for beer money, and we can identify them not only by their evidence of good nutrition but also by the fact that they are all wearing shirts which proclaim the name of the college down the road.

An unfortunate looking middle aged woman goes outside and sits down in the ashtray. The screening questionnaires are far more concerned with whether we have mad cow disease than with what drugs we may be diffusing into the blood supply.

And then the door opens, and the most notorious refugees from my block swagger in; keep in mind we are 45 minutes from home and now The Hustler (a fat guy who wears a t-shirt that says Hustler), the Emo Guy, (who is always seen with different hair dye but the same pair of girls' trousers) and members of The Family Reunion (approximately fifteen people live in this one bedroom house until the police come and throw them out later that summer) have arrived carrying a six month old infant in a car seat.

"I'm sorry, but no one under eighteen is allowed," says the nurse kindly to the young woman holding the car seat.
And the young mother replies, "I'm 20."
"No, I mean the baby," explains the nurse.

But the Hustler and the Emo Guy need their money bad, so they make the baby and its mama wait outside in the 95 degree heat.

Finally the Plasma Team gets evaluated. We are sequestered together in a room with a nurse and we answer the HIV questions together, as we have no secrets at this point. Each of us by law must read aloud separately our pledge that we understand the questions we have been asked and have replied no to and passed with 100% the written test on AIDS awareness. A test that should have been administered and graded decades before anyone in the building thought of having their veins opened in public.

Then after waiting for hours, one of us is rejected permanently on the basis of a history of prescribed anticoagulants, the use of which ended over a year ago. Another is sent home due to inner ear inflammation. And the third lucky bastard gets left behind by the other two members of the Plasma Team to collect his monetary prize while we go sulk at Barnes and Noble on the middle class side of town for the hour and a half it takes to centrifuge out a pint of plasma and replace the red blood cells.

Then the piece de resistance, a staggering stinking man with bloodshot eyes who has been sleeping in a ditch, comes in as we are leaving. Now, you can be sent away for intoxication, body odor, or the staggering which could be a result of mad cow disease if you have been to Europe but somehow I don't think this guy could locate the UK on a map (or his ass with both hands and a flashlight) much less has he been to Europe to contract mad cow. And as we wait and watch and giggle, he is promptly rejected at which point he screams on his way out, "I knew this would happen!" This outburst was almost worth the ten dollars spent on gas to get there and the disappointment of eating cereal for supper again.

But my glee soured when I got home to see The Hustler and The Family Reunion having a huge party across the street, financed by their blood money.

Still, the lone successful member of The Plasma Team did buy me a half gallon of cookie dough ice cream with his earnings.