171: I began giving . . .
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home,” Chapter 9 concludes
I began giving outstanding service, or the illusion of outstanding service, every payday and on any other day when an opportunity presented itself. On rainy days, I rolled the newspapers in wax paper. I learned to ask about customers’ children, grandchildren, pets, arthritis, or whatever else interested them. I often apologized for the paper itself, anticipating the complaints of the customers that an issue was too thin, that the news on the front page was all bad, or that three words had been misspelled in a single headline, and I offered to knock a penny off the price of such defective issues and absorb the loss myself on the grounds that it embarrassed me to charge full price for “a rag like this.”
On one occasion, inspired beyond anything I’d done before, I tore the front page of one copy and put it at the front of the stack in my canvas bag. At each customer’s door, I would pull the torn copy from the bag and say, “Oops, can’t give you this one,” then add, with a wink, “I’ll have to give that one to somebody else.” They loved it. Of course, when I got to my last customer, Mrs. Blynman, I had no other copy for her. To Mrs. Blynman I said, “I can’t give you this. It’s torn. I’m going to ride my bike downtown to the Reporter printing plant and get you a fresh copy.”
Mrs. Blynman didn’t say anything. I started down the walk. Suddenly I turned and ran back to her door.
“Oh,” I said. “Before I go, could you call my mother and tell her I might not get home for dinner, Mrs. Blynman?” I asked.
Mrs. Blynman said she would. Again I started down the walk. Again I turned suddenly and ran back to her door.
“And ask her to save me a piece of her birthday cake, would you please?” I said. Mrs. Blynman swallowed hard, insisted on taking the torn copy of the Reporter, and pressed a dollar bill into my hand.
I collected on Thursdays. Each Thursday afternoon, when I got home, I would spread the money out on my bed and count it. I kept a ledger, and I also made a graph that showed how much profit I had made each week. On a slip of paper in the back of the ledger, I calculated how long it would be before I had enough money to take Veronica on a date. I paid Mr. Creeley with the change and with the oldest, dirtiest bills, and I kept the newest, crispest ones for myself. On occasion, when my mother was ironing, I would get my capital out and press it. It was on one of these occasions, while I was ironing my money, that the thought ran through my mind that I had enough to buy a model plane kit with a real gas engine.
How strange it is that one’s mind works independently of one’s efforts to direct it, that the solution to a knotty problem eludes one through hours of concentrated effort and then appears unbidden but certainly welcome while one is running to the dock with the last of the trash cans, hoping that the trash boat will wait. Only when the image of the model plane kit appeared in my mind did I understand that I would rather have a model plane than go on dates with Veronica McCall, and the question returned: “How am I going to get out of this?”
The next morning, while my classmates and I were seated in our classroom, holding manila cards with new schedules on them, puzzling through the schedule and Mr. Simone’s explanation of it, the door opened, and into the classroom walked Stretch Mitgang, the boy who had won at Simon Says on the first day of school, the boy who hadn’t been certain about whether he should stand or sit. He stopped just inside the door and surveyed us. From his bravado, the defiant way he chewed his gum, his slouch, the way he hooked his thumbs in his pockets, I understood why he had come into our classroom. He had been sent back, thrown out of the sixth grade. From the way his eyes rested on Veronica and the way she turned abruptly away from him and tossed her hair, the way she pouted and pretended not to have seen him at all, I understood that Stretch might be the answer.
[to be continued on Tuesday, January 11, 2022]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 171, Mark Dorset considers Innocence, Loss of; Lying, Dissembling, Acting; Improvisation; Money, Attitudes Toward and Thinking 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.