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BANKS have broken the Irish State and changed the lives of millions of its citizens. They are among the most despised institutions in Irish life and these circumstances make it an ideal time for Patrick Combs to bring his comic one-man show to the country.
On March 16, Man 1 Bank 0 will be in Ennis and in it, he tells the story of what happened when a bank put $95,000 into Patrick’s account in 1995 after he had handed in a junk mail cheque for that amount, just for a laugh.
The Californian told The Clare Champion about some of the madcap events that inspired his play.
He explained the type of cheque he brought to the bank is quite common Stateside.
“Junk mail cheques are very popular in the United States; it’s an advertisement, it includes something they’re trying to sell you and the point of the cheque is to tell you that if you were to buy what they are trying to sell you, you would be making this much money soon. They make the cheque look real, they put your name on it, but then they write ‘sample’ on it.
“I brought it (the junk mail cheque for $95,000) to my bank because I thought it was funny. If I went to restaurant this evening in Dublin and brought a big wad of Monopoly money with me and when they gave me the bill if I put down a few $500 monopoly notes, my expectation would be that the waiter would either go ‘that’s not really money’ or he’d laugh and say ‘that’s funny-now where’s your real money?’ All I thought I was doing was putting Monopoly money into the bank. I didn’t even sign the back of the cheque, I put a smiley face on the back of it.”
He never thought the bank would take an obviously phoney cheque as the real deal and he didn’t think about it very much for a while.
“I forgot about it when they didn’t call me. I went back a week later and I was just hoping I’d have $20 dollars in there. As I was walking away from the machine I glanced down at the receipt and I couldn’t believe my eyes that I had a bank of $95,000! I was shocked. I knew instantly they’d accepted the fake cheque as if it were real.”
Even then he didn’t really expect that the money would stay in his account for very long.
“I just kept walking home and I started waiting. My assumption, and all my friend’s assumption, was that it was a mistake. Everyone has seen a mistake in their account and they know it’ll be gone in three days. I just thought, okay, it’ll be gone in three days and I started checking my bank balance to see when it’d be gone. Thirty of the longest days of my life later that money was still there.”
At that stage he decided he’d call to the bank directly and tell them what had happened. Then he found out how far things had gone.
“I thought ‘it’s been a month, I’m going crazy checking my bank balance every five minutes. Let me go down and tell the bank what’s happened here.’ I went down to tell the bank and the branch manager looked it up and he said ‘Oh no, Mr Combs, you’re mistaken; that money is legally yours because that cheque cannot bounce after ten days no matter what’.”
On hearing that he went to a law library for the first time in his life, checked out the legislation for himself and found out the bank manager was correct.
The story was still only beginning. At this stage he was still expecting to give back the money and wouldn’t have minded doing so.
“What happened next is the reason why I have a one-man show. The bank phoned me up and I already knew the call was coming. I thought it was going to go like this, I thought it was going to be like ‘Mr Combs, we made a mistake, we can see we made a terrible mistake, but we can see you haven’t spent the money after a month and that’s remarkable, because most people would have. We really appreciate that so can we have our money back please and is there any way we can thank you for not spending our money? Like, can we give you a thank you card or free checking for a month?’ If they had done that I know myself all too well that I would have said ‘of course’ and it would be over.”
But when the call came the bank were trying another tack and sought to intimidate him into handing back money, which, at this stage, bizarrely, was legally his.
“At that point I could actually say that I thought I loved my bank. But what they did, their very first contact about this, was basically from their rottweiler, their pit bull. They found the meanest person in the bank and had that person call me up. Without ever meeting that man I knew that he had a military buzz cut, was a former Navy seal and that he hated people like me.
“What he did was start screaming at me from the get-go, that he was going to send me to jail, that I had been wrong, that I had committed a crime and if I didn’t give the money back right away he was going to put policemen at my door.”
Patrick asked for a letter from the bank in which they would request the money back and which would outline why they were looking for the money back but they declined to put anything like that in writing.
At this point he spoke to his mother who was fearful and a brother, who gave him some practical advice.
“I called my mother and I thought she’d think it was great that I had $95,000 and I’d gotten it by this crazy happenstance. Verbatim, she said ‘oh son, for $95,000 they’ll kill you’ and she was serious. I don’t know where she banks but she was serious!
“It just scared the hell out of my mother so I thought I needed to call someone else and I called my older brother Mike who is a very conservative guy, who never thinks I’m funny. Again this where the story turns. He said to me ‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight Patrick. You put a $95,000 junkmail cheque into your bank as a joke. Are we related?’ I said to him, ‘Mike, what would you do?’ He said he’d get it in cash to have control over this money, so they can’t just deduct from your account. Make them ask for it. I got it out in a cashier’s cheque and get this – I didn’t even leave my bank with it. I locked it in a safe deposit box at the bank, but now I had control over it.”
Only people close to Patrick and the bank’s employees were aware of the situation, but with a stand-off continuing, he made it public knowledge and rather unwittingly he reached a huge audience through the English speaking world’s financial bible.
“The bank were being so threatening when they would talk to me and they kept refusing to give me the letter I requested that I went to the newspaper, I went to the Wall Street Journal. One of the funniest things to me is that I had no idea the Wall Street Journal was a financial newspaper because I had never read it! I just heard that it was a good newspaper. I happened to call them first and they loved the story and they ran it on the front page, that I had $95,000 locked in a safe deposit box and the bank wanted it back and I’d gotten it from a junk mail cheque.
“Act three of the play is about when it exploded into the international news. Exploded. Suddenly Letterman’s calling me, Jay Leno is calling me, Good Morning America and the New York Times. It put a lot of attention on me. Crazy characters started coming out of the woodwork and I act them out in the show. For instance, the number one banking/legal expert in the United States of America came out of retirement to tell me the money was legally mine. A sympathetic bank employee began sending me secret documents about me from within the bank. He’d write in crayon on them, ‘Viva La Revolution’!”
He is reluctant to say too much about how the story ends. “What I will tell you is that the last two minutes are the best two minutes of the play.”
An American reviewer said the comic value of watching a bank beg for its money back is priceless and Patrick says people love seeing a financial institution get one in the eye.
“I love letting people know through my own story that you actually can stand up against banks when they’re behaving badly. You can. It’s frightening, because they’re bigger and they have more money but my story is a reminder that when you have rights you can stand up for them. I love watching people get to have a laugh at the expense of banks who have behaved badly to a lot of people.”
