[pre]The first time a child discovers the concept of money is a very strange moment in its life. Usually, it occurs after some fat uncle asks the child to grab him a beer from the fridge, an act rewarded with a quarter, or if the uncle is less generous, a nickel. After the child looks for the can he was formerly forbidden to touch, he brings it over to his slothful relative, and is handed a shiny coin. The child has no idea what the significance of the coin is. It has a funny feminine looking head on one side and some type of building or animal on the other. It might be a tiny portrait of the uncle in younger years, but then what is the eagle on the reverse? A deceased pet, perhaps. [/pre]
[pre]The mystery will continue to elude the child until he enters a convenience store, and for the first time watches the people. They all line up at the counter and then show a pimply young teenager what they want to buy. If he approves, they can leave. To gain his approval, they give him money, in the form of paper and coins, similar to the coin he received from his drunken uncle not so long ago.[/pre]
[pre]The idea of earning money comes a little later. My idea was an epiphany, some delightful revelation sent to me by a fiscally astute angel. I was to start a cleaning service, and I was to name it Clean Sweep. I had no proclivity for cleaning, and dreaded the Saturday straightening of rooms. But somehow the idea of straightening other people’s appealed to me. Mowing the lawn of your neighbor was entirely more enticing than doing your own.[/pre]
[pre]When I told my parents about my endeavor into free enterprise, I got a mixed reaction. My dad immediately began dreaming of a global corporation of seven-year old sweepers, armed with Windex and a rake, taking the world by storm and lifting America’s economy to a new height. My mother simply paused to smile from her work in the kitchen. “That’s nice dear.” Back to the Brillo.[/pre]
[pre]I knew enough about the business world in second grade that I understood I needed advertising. I found four pieces of yellow construction paper, only three of which were used, and for the next two and a half hours I made Clean Sweep’s posters. They were brilliant. Done entirely in blunt pencil, Clean Sweep was at the top in curvy bubble letters, followed by a lengthy description of our business. “Interiors/Exteriors! We clean everything for a low, low price. We’ll do lawns, curtains, bathrooms and more!” I had no idea what doing a curtain would involve, but was certain that I could figure it out when the time came. I put my phone number at the bottom of the sheet. I grabbed my handy Scotch tape and trooped outside, blazoning my business to the entire neighborhood, contained within the area I was allowed to travel. Our block without crossing the street. Then with a little invisible tape and a whole lot of love, I hung up the three posters on a tree and two telephone poles. From there on it was easy. Just wait for the phone to start ringing off the hook.[/pre]
Luckily, no one called before I realized that I had no employees. I hustled down to John-john’s house. John-john was three years older than me, but only about half my size, so it would be easy to be his boss. He was an angry kid though, and I was slightly afraid of what he might do while cleaning steak knives. But I put the thought out of my head and walked up onto his porch.
“John-john’s not home. Go away.” Out came a voice which felt like gravel being thrown into your inner ear. It belonged to a woman named Betty, John-john’s grandmother. She was about one hundred and eighteen years old, and was the color of day-old roast beef. Betty was the only constancy in the neighborhood. Every day, all day, she sat outside on her small wicker chair and smoked Marlboros for hours on end. In the middle of the night, you could look over to their porch, and see a tiny red dot, moving back and forth, like a pendulum. The rhythm was almost soothing. Inhale, wheeze, exhale. If she was a chain smoker, her chains would’ve been too much for Houdini. “My doctor tells me I need the sunlight. That’s why I have to sit out here.” Apparently he had forgotten to tell her to lay off the cancer sticks.
“Where is he? The car’s here.”
“He’s upstairs playing with his Lag-Ohs.” Wheeze.
“So he is home.”
“Not for you he ain’t.”
Had I been a bolder child, I probably would’ve gone in and found him, but I was too timid for such a revolutionary action. Betty was the guard to some mysterious portal. If only there was some way to get her to succumb to my will. I had heard about hypnotism from my dad. Swing a little thing in front of them long enough and you could get them to do all sorts of weird things. Not that he had ever really succeeded in doing it, but it seemed likely enough.
As I was about to run home to get my pendulum, John-john trampled onto the porch. He ignored me and went over to tell his grandmother something. They whispered secretively, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly left out.
“Hey, John-john. Wanna be in my business?”
“What business?”
“I’m starting a cleaning business.” They both stared at me. John-john with eyes, Betty with cranial cavities. “We’re gonna clean everyone’s house in the whole neighborhood!”
“What the hell for?” I hadn’t really though about that. I’m sure there was a good reason. I stood awkwardly on the porch, trying to remember what I was doing.
“Umm, money.”
“Oh. Ok.” After that he was on board, and we recruited one more employee, the borderline retarded Vietnamese kid from across the street. We called him Bee-bee. Everyone in our neighborhood and repeated syllables in their first name. We were a team, the Clean Sweepers, ready for tidying, conquering messes the block over.
Three days passed, and there were no phone calls. I tried to give my employees hope, boosting their morale with kind and encouraging words. Bee-bee couldn’t really understand what I was saying, and quit. But at least I still had John-john under me. My pension was safe.
Betty got wind of our situation, and being the kind patroness she was, hired us to clean her house. Though I tasted nepotism, I accepted graciously and desperately. I arrived at the house, eager to clean. Betty sent us in for the rundown.
“I want you to clean the upstairs. All the rooms, especially mine. John-john knows which one that is. I want you to fold the laundry in there, and then I want you to vacuum the rugs.” This seemed reasonable. At least we weren’t painting.
The upstairs smelled of cat piss and perfume from Sears. I contemplated going home to get a grass mask, and then thought better of it. John-john showed me which rooms we were to clean. “This is my mom’s room. She sleeps here with her boyfriend. We don’t hafta clean this room. She likes it dirty. This is my granma’s room. I’ll be in here.” It was convenient for John-john that the Sega was in his granma’s room, because he had to spend an awful lot of time cleaning it. It was necessary to warm up the Sega first by playing Sonic twenty-eight times.
I began in his mother’s room, even though we didn’t have to clean it. I wanted to earn the hefty sum that awaited us. I stood looking at the room for a couple minutes, realizing that there really was not much I could do. I couldn’t do anything except pick up dirty clothes and throw them in the hamper. “John-john,” I shouted. “Where’s the hamper?”
“Just throw them on the floor. We don’t use hampers.”
I carried them down to the basement, where I suspected that the washing machine might reside. It did, and with total uncertainty, I dropped them in front of the Whirlpool, as if offering sacrifice to an angry god.
Then came Betty’s room. I made her bed, constantly working around John-john’s butt, which was planted firmly on the mattress. There were some suspicious-looking lumps in the sheets, which may have housed any number of household oddities, but I was content with my work.
I moved on to the laundry. At this point John-john was long gone. Alone, I delved into the plastic laundry basket, trying to be as task-minded as possible. I had never folded clothes before, spoiled by my mother’s fear of inadequate youth handling the laundry. As I removed each article, I examined it, trying to reason how best to fold it. A shirt was already in kind of a square, so if you just folded in the arms, then you would be set. Pants were easy, just fold them in two. I knew how to do socks. Simply put together and roll into a happy pair of bunnies.
Then came the bottom of the basket. These were mostly bras. I didn’t know if bras needed to be folded, but she had told us to fold everything in the basket. I wondered if I needed to clasp the ends together before folding. I tried, but was not successful. It’s a miracle of female anatomy that they can clasp bras behind their backs. To me it is the eighth wonder of the world. So I took the beige floral cups and stacked them neatly into one another, making a tower of lingerie. The awkwardness of touching Betty’s underwear was diminished by having made it into a piece of art.
After we (meaning I) had vacuumed the rest of the uncovered areas of carpet, we (meaning we) waited silently by the door. Betty was actually inside, looking around for another crate of cigarettes. She was wandering through the dining room, making mucous-layered grunting noises as she shuffled across the linoleum. After nearly twenty minutes, she came back in the room and faced us. This was the moment I had worked for. My first paycheck, crisp and big.
“Thank you boys.” She reached into her pocket. The tension in the room was so thick you could’ve packaged it and sold it as discount cottage cheese. She clasped her hand and stuck it out to us. “Here you go. Have some candy.”
Candy. Lousy fucking candy. I had put my heart and soul into that woman’s own laundry, and what did we get in return? Peppermint Patties. Well, at least it wasn’t Mounds.
After leaving Betty’s house, I knew the business was doomed. John-john had given me his resignation on the porch, and all the flyers had somehow been ripped down. I was never again to entertain thoughts of entering the corporate world raw. You had to go in through a path already made, and work your way up. That was the secret.
“Hey, Tim. My dad’s gonna pay me ten bucks to spray down his car with a hose. Wanna help?” Oh, I wanted to all right.
Years later and after a move to a new neighborhood, I had another encounter with employment. Our neighbors were two sweet old people, and they had a daughter who married a yuppie. Typical. The yuppie, who did not know us at all, arrived at our doorstep and offered us a job.
“Hi, my name’s Jason, and I work for blah blah blah. I’m looking for some young kids to help me out with some of my workload. It would only be a couple of hours a week and they could do it all here at home. I would pay them well, and the work’s not difficult. What do you say?”
Jason had a thin red beard that had somehow managed to cling to his smooth, yuppie complexion. He was not well-built, but not slight either, and his voice had all the charm of a commercial. Had he not been so damn bubbly, he would’ve been easy to like. His wife was a nonentity, floating around him like an intravenous bag filled with secular joy.
“I need to discuss this with my family,” said my Mom. “This is quite a big thing for children to undertake.” Of course, there was no resistance from me and my sister, who were still awed by that quarter given to us by our filthy uncle, or our dad, once again dreaming of an early retirement.
We were given the title of Official Envelope Stuffers. There was not much of a job description at first. I was a little baffled by it. I wasn’t sure what we would be stuffing the envelopes with. I had heard of stuffed shells, but they were stuffed with ricotta cheese, and that would get sloppy in the mail. Of course, there were stuffed animals, but I’m sure there were better ways of sending cotton.
When the envelopes finally arrived, I was disappointed to find that all we were stuffing them with were letters. It was for some healthcare agency, an HMO employing child labor for advertisement. We carried the boxes filled with stationery down to the basement, and began working. At first Elizabeth was set on her work ethic, which was mainly do yours and I do mine. But after this failed, we decided on an assembly line model. She folded, and I stuffed and licked. I was given the licking job because she feared that if she cut her tongue, cockroaches might grow inside the wound. I cut my tongue twice, but there were never any cockroaches.
The licking seemed to be the best job, because you got the little bonus of the taste of the sealing glue. What the taste actually was is hard to put a finger on. Sweet, with a hint of industry. After hours of licking the glue, you even got a small high, equivalent to huffing a lot of helium or sniffing Wite-Out. The excessive giggling worried my mom, and she bought rollers to use for the envelopes.
This did little to help the depression that came with the job. After the excitement of putting paper letters inside eight by ten sheaths wore off, there was very little one could be happy with in the job, except that it paid eight dollars an hour. My sister would turn on the radio, and we would while away the hours listening to music that I did not yet know was bad. She became very tense while working, trying to maximize her output. I worked very slowly, worrying that I had put the letters in the wrong way somehow, and going back to check constantly. “There is no wrong way!” she would yell.
Several thousand envelopes passed through our hands. Then, the envelopes stopped coming. A month passed, and no sign of stuffing material. This was worrisome. Maybe Jason had fallen into some trouble with the Yuppie mob. The goons might’ve broken his 401k plan. Eventually we realized we had been fired with no notice. The realization was a shock, as it seemed completely unwarranted. We got a fruit basket with a little note. “Thanks for all your help!” Exclamation point. No damn exclamation point was needed. We got the message loud and clear, you whiny bastards. If you want your letters folded in perfect one third ratios, go hire some Cambodian sweat shop laborers. You can improve the third world while you’re at it.
In our old neighborhood, there were not many choices for what you could do with your money. Most of the birthday and sacramental money was immediately funneled into a savings account by our mother. “You can put it towards college some day.” I didn’t know of any colleges where two hundred dollars would cover much more than a latte, but she insisted. So our money sat there, the interest accumulating at the breakneck speed of a dollar eighty nine a year.
When ever we needed quick cash, we broke into our change banks. The only things to buy were pretzels at school, or candy down at the corner store. Candy was eternally more appealing to the burnt, stale pretzels provided by the Catholic soft pretzel maker. Catholics are inferior to Jews in making soft pretzels and Lutherans to making hard ones. But we beat them in making tiny, unappetizing, unleavened wafers, which can be eaten liberally before consecration.
The corner store was owned by a Vietnamese family, as was everything else in our neighborhood. The storeowners were constantly watching public television. You could walk in at any time of day and see someone watching Sesame Street while the mother was in the back ironing. It was amazing that they had so much to iron, but it was probably fitting, because at any given moment, there might’ve been twenty children in the family. It was never really clear whose children were whose, and there were some who might not have belonged to anyone.
But genealogy aside, the corner store was a place of joy. Nowhere else could you get so many Swedish Fish for such a low price. There were all sorts of wonders. Ketchup, for one. No one called it catsup. It was ketchup, and it was delicious. We put it on every damn thing we could find. In Philadelphia, food is looked upon as being ketchup-challenged. To cure this malady, all that is needed, is a little ketchup. And at the corner store, ketchup was cheap. Seventy-nine cents a bottle. The simple joys of life.
When we weren’t buying ketchup or partially hydrogenated corn syrup, we were probably buying onion rings. The onion rings were a double-edged sword: they were entirely delicious, but entirely not onion rings. A single bag could cause enough digestive traffic that your intestines would be more clogged than I-95 on Thanksgiving.
Bee-bee would often sit on our porch in the morning’s eating his balanced meal of onion rings and Coca-cola. My dad would repeatedly offer to make him some pancakes. Bee-bee had no idea what he was talking about, and continued to eat the fried rings of air everyday. When his brother finally told him that we were offering him food, he sat on our porch throughout the day. It was like feeding one of the animals at the zoo. One taste of Herr’s, and they’re Yours. Forever.
My dad then also became Bee-bee’s tutor, an effort which fizzled out over time. Bee-bee stopped coming for breakfast, and apparently joined a gang. We found it hard to imagine that he would ever be of much use in a robbery or anything like that. But I suppose that he could’ve gotten many more quarter bags of onion rings if he robbed a bank.
When my uncles stopped giving me quarters to fetch them beers, and instead in drunken stupors offered me some, I realized I had reached a milestone in my life. I was no longer a child. I was a financial adult, capable of taking fiscal responsibility for myself. Of course, I had no money, so it was never really an issue.
