Homeless Man Buys House With Smiles

DES MOINES, Iowa - Homeless man Darrell “Skunkbite” Pringle has purchased a home using the smiles he collected over the years. The home, a 2,700 square foot building in the heart of Des Moines, has a street value of over 900,000 smiles. Pringle said he stumbled on the idea for his now iconic saying - “Anything helps, even a smile” - when a passerby said he didn’t have any change to give “but he’d give me a smile if that’d help.”

“That’s when it hit me,” Darrell told reporters. He went on to say that he originally didn’t know what to do with the smiles beyond storing them in his imagination. Ironically, at the advisement of fellow drifter, Clem “Don’t Trust Anyone” Ford, Darrell put the smiles into a trust fund where they increased in value over the years as people became more depressed and smiles became rarer.

“Clem told me that Euros and Dollars tend to fluctuate in times of economic instability. Smiles, however, are not only stable, but tend to increase in value during economic depressions. When the economy flat-lined a few years ago, I realized I was sitting on a goldmine.”

Darrell said he plans to use some of the smiles to purchase a Go-Kart factory “The idea is to put these smiles where my mouth is. Go-Kart enthusiasts have the lowest occupational rate of suicide in the free world. It’ll be nice to give back some of these smiles.”