170: If I was going to . . .
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home,” Chapter 9 begins
9
IF I WAS GOING TO START buying Veronica flowers and candy and taking her out on dates, I was going to need money. I received a small allowance from my parents, quite a small allowance: twenty-five cents a week. Of course in those days—and the days that I’m recalling were those days—a quarter was worth something. Something, but not enough. I was going to have to get a job, and the first thing that occurred to me, doubtless the first thing that would have occurred to any boy my age in a situation like mine, was a paper route. The boy who delivered the Babbington Reporter looked at me with incredulity and glee when I asked him whether he ever thought of retiring from the newspaper business.
He recovered quickly. “Nah,” he said. “It’s too exciting.”
I walked alongside him while he delivered the papers and tried to collect from each customer. The Reporter was published on weekdays only; customers paid twenty-five cents a week for it, delivered. For two or three hours I walked the route with him and worked to persuade him to give it up. My argument ran along the following lines, which I’d based on comments I’d heard Mel Allen make before a broadcast of an old-timers’ game: there comes a time when the veteran has to step aside to give the rookie a chance, has to recognize that the river of life is flowing on and it’s time he drifted on with it, has to recognize that someone else may need the work more than he does, that there are other kinds of work that he can do because he is older, and that it is meet and right that he do that other work, whatever it may be, and let another boy deliver his papers.
“All right,” he said, after he had delivered the last paper. “You win. I’ll sell you the route.”
“Sell?” I asked.
“Sure. Let’s say a dime a customer.”
“Well, I—”
“You have to give me all the money I’m owed, too.”
“Owed?”
“Yeah. Not everybody pays on time. Didn’t you notice?”
“No,” I said. I had been too occupied with the task of convincing him to surrender the route.
“You don’t know much about the newspaper business, do you?” he asked.
“No,” I confessed.
“You’ll learn,” he said. He pulled the strap of his newsboy’s bag over his head and thrust the bag at me. “It’s a deal then, right?”
“Right,” I said. I was so pleased to have the job that I accepted his terms without bargaining, without even considering that bargaining might be possible, establishing that day a habit of thought that has made me pay too much for most of the things I have bought since.
I borrowed, from Guppa, the money to buy the route and pay the bills of all the customers who were late in paying. I was to pay Guppa back at the rate of a penny per customer per week, but I was determined to collect all the old debts in the first week. When I stopped at the home of the first deadbeat on my list and she told me that she couldn’t pay me because she didn’t have the right change, I stood speechless in front of the door for a moment before I remembered that I had change.
“I can give you change,” I said.
“Of twenty bucks?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” I admitted.
“You better try me next week,” she said. She closed the door. I got onto my bike and rode to the next stop on the route.
I soon found, to my surprise and disappointment, that not only did I have a hard time getting my customers to pay me, but even when they did pay me I didn’t get to keep the twenty-five cents that they paid for the Reporter. I had to pay the Reporter, in the person of their agent, Mr. Creeley, who threw the bundle of papers into our driveway every afternoon, four cents for each issue on delivery and somehow get the money from the customers. From the first day, I was sinking into a hole. Fortunately, Porky had an idea about this problem too.
“You’ve got to look at it this way,” he said. “What are your customers paying you for, or I should say, what would they be paying you for if they were paying you?”
“The paper,” I said, trotting all my naïveté out for Porky to chuckle at.
“Oh, no they’re not,” said Porky. He chuckled at my naïveté and tousled my hair. “If they were just paying for the paper, they’d pick up a copy at the corner store, but they don’t. You see, you’re not selling the paper.”
He paused to unbutton his pants and tuck in his shirt, providing, through this business, time for me to wonder what on earth he was getting at, so that when he made himself clear I would say to myself, “Ah-ha! So that’s it.”
“You’re selling service,” he said. “The service of delivering the paper to them. If they’re not paying you, it’s because they think they’re not getting enough service.”
“But I’m never late,” I protested. “And I—”
“I know, I know,” said Porky. “You’re going about it completely wrong. You’re just doing the job the way it’s supposed to be done. You’re not late, you don’t miss a day, you don’t complain, you don’t cause any trouble. They think your job must be easy for you—too easy. You notice I didn’t say that they think they’re not getting good service. I said that they think they’re not getting enough service. You see what I mean?”
I did see what Porky meant. I saw it very clearly, and I took action almost at once. On the next collection day, I delivered all the papers about an hour later than I usually did. I bandaged my right arm from the hand up to the elbow, smeared dirt on my cheek, and put a Band-aid on my forehead. With the paper, I delivered a halting apology for being late. As if reluctantly, I allowed it to be understood, in response to their questions, that an enormous dog had attacked me just as I had begun the route, knocking me off my bicycle and scattering the papers, and that I had lost time picking up a new batch of papers, having my cuts and scrapes bandaged, and getting the first in a long and painful series of rabies shots. Not only did I collect from every customer, but I took home far more in tips than I earned on my markup.
[to be continued on Monday, January 10, 2022]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 170, Mark Dorset considers Naïveté; Life: Metaphors and Similes for: River, Sports (Baseball); Life Lessons Unlearned: Bargaining, Negotiating; and Business Practices: Sharp and Shady from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.