PINTA PARADE

 

 

 I am twelve years old. It is late summer of 1989. I have just entered sixth grade.   One Sunday morning there is an ad in the paper. They are looking for a paperboy in the area.

 The ad says that you need to be at least twelve years of age.

 

 



                                                                 ***

In the autumn I play in two soccer leagues. When I arrive home from my second game of the day there is a man with what looks like South American skin talking with my mom on the front steps.   I am wearing my shin guards and my knee-high socks. I am wearing my cleats. For a moment I wonder what the man is trying to solicit funds for a religious cause. I wear very thick glasses. Dad tells me to be careful every time I give the soccer ball a header because I have already shattered two pairs.

The person who is talking to mom has parked in front of our house so dad idles and then stops his car in front of Bernie’s.

Dad is still driving old cars from the mid-seventies that wind up in the shop once a year and end up costing him a pay check.

Mom has a smile planted on her face

 

“David, this is Maurice. He is from the Journal Star He is here to talk about the paper route.”

“I always encourage all of my paperboys to play soccer.” He notes.

I tell him that my main discipline is long distance running and track and field and I will probably not be able to double-dip in high school and only focus on running He smiles. He  comments that he likes my shin guards.

Maurice continues to ask me about soccer. He asks me what positions I play. I tell him that I am primarily offense and that my main discipline is trying to score.

He talks about the route.

“It is a large route. About 100 houses. You’ll basically have all of Sherman and all of Moss avenue from Western to Sterling.”

Maurice Alwaun notes that there were two or three boys who inquired but I seem like I have my head on my shoulders so to speak.

“I knew when I saw you playing soccer that I made the right decision. I always encourage kids to play soccer.

I nod. For some reason I think he is from Brazil.

Mom keeps on noting that the route is a big responsibility. Maurice Alwaun tells my mom that  we are to meet him Thursday morning at the corner of Ayres and Waverly, next to the West Peoria fire department

Later that night after we pray around the dinner table Dad will ask me if I heard Maurice Alwaun say that getting the route was a gift from God. I nod my head. I didn’t hear him say this.

I lie and tell my father that I did.

 

 

 

Due to the success of Tim Burton’s Batman it is hard to traverse a block without sauntering into a high school kid dressed in a tinted shirt with the silhouette of a bat planted in a yellow egg.

At Logan pool David Best quotes line from Jack Nicholson’s Joker. There is wait til they get a load of me and where does he get those wonderful toys.

Everyone is singing the Party man by Prince. Everyone is doing the Bat dance.

It is fall 89 and superman is completely forgotten.

 

 

 

                                                                           ***

The night before I go to bed early. I set my alarm.  At 5:30 am idle in the car outside the fire station. Maurice shows up. Fifteen minutes later. He apologizes for being late informing both myself and my mom that he has several routes he has been filling in for.

It is five-thirty in the morning. Maurice tells us that it varies on the times that the bundles of papers are dropped off but normally around this area its between four and four thirty.

“The earlier you can get here and get the papers out the better.”

 

The papers arrive in twin heaps and bushels on the corner of Ayres and Waverly, in front of the west Peoria Fire house, tumbling out from the side of a purring white van momentarily idling, bulbs of human breath distilled, evaporating like transitory cartoon bubbles ferrying dialogue found in animated avenues and blocks in the Sunday funnies. The inserts arrive on the side also tossed from the van like errant cargo. The heaps are respectively trussed in neon yellow strap that if you turns the heap over and twist in a certain way releases itself like a bra. There is the fresh smell of ink splattered on paper. There are headlines. The word JOURNAL STAR appears scrolled across the front in palatial font.

Maurice talks very fast. He is from Lebanon but lived in Brazil.

Maurice counts the papers, flipping through his fingers counting them in hushed acceleration, bulletins flapping patting each other in blurred succession. There are sixty-four houses lined up on  Sherman route. I am given a sheet that looks like a connect the dot sonogram, stating the address of each sleepy-eyed domicile.  

We walk up to the somnolent-ridden foreheads of the houses I have seen my entire life.

He rubber bands the paper as he is walking up the sidewalk and tosses it underhand as we near the porch.

Just get it next to the door unless the customer has requested a special place for it.” He notes.

 

Mom has decided that she will go ahead and rubber band the papers in the back seat as to facilitate the process. Maurice seems grateful and  accepts the scrolled inky diplomas in bushels of three or five.

The house on the corner Moss and Cedar that is the size of an upside down tugboat where the pirates live—eight men who walk around west Peoria without wearing shirts always conveying a 24 pack of cheap beer, starting neighborly illicit bonfires in their back yard cackling throughout the blanket of the night. Next to the house is a Polish pipe-fitter who drinks in the Southside, doesn’t tip and has a front porch full of cats.  There is emerald hyphen with the words Bergan, the street where Aunt Jan (not my biological) aunt lives whose street sign is always uprooted and plucked during the Bergan Spalding annual homecoming game. Maurice and I continue to march, each slinking down a respective side of the street , tramping below the furrowed half-arc  of the flickering street lamps which in the summer time almost always has a static of whirring insects attached to the bottom like a black veil, almost always dissipated in a series of blinks as the sun pushes tangerine planks of light across the east, the KOFFEE SHOP on the corner of Western and Moss where your parents don’t eat because a steady barge of cigarette smoke exits the side door in flaps accompanied by the smell of sausage and thoroughly greased eggs, wafts of coffee served in urns offering trickles heard a block and a half away.

We continue to walk.

There is the circular house that was once rumored to be an observatory that is a complete diminutive brick zero where joey Nelttner used to pun that he would love to live because his mom could never tell him to go stand in the corner. There is Bernie’s with carpeted emerald steps that used to belong to Misses Carrigan from England whose granddaughters with proper accents used to come and swim in the kiddie pool my dad had in the backyard.  Next door I have the Wahl’s, family  who had a dog who looked just like Lassie named Ivy whose daughter Theresa was our babysitter and whose backyard the entire neighborhood lads gather to shoot hoops.

The Wahl family sits on the porch in a domestic cluster of cheeks and chin bones and smiles. There is two or three dogs. Roger who is in his late twenties and wears tattered jeans and no shirt and is always shooting hoops. Kevin who you hear incessantly  wailing on his drum set down in the catacombs of the house.  Next to the Wahl’s house on the left-hand side of the road is a shop that was once Luanne’s dance studio but is now a labeled West Peoria trading post and will later,  in the mid-nineties, become a new age bookstore where members will meditate, exuding breath in calculated increments into the hushed street of autumnal evening in the mid-90’s—dad, informing us later not to go over there since they are alighting the wicks of incense that smells like hemp. Next to the trading post is the Blue-willow house where Misses and Mr. Chipman live. Mr. Chipman is a plumber and local boy scout leader.

I delver to Paul who has the dead tooth and who stole firecrackers out of his father’s bedroom and had me light it and it blew up in my face.  I deliver to the sexy-middle age lady who lives across the street from Tim Flanagan’s house who always comes home wearing sexy business outfits with her hair rolled up. And who you can see taking off her shoes and untucking her blouse the minute after she opens the door.

 

Houses continue to emerge as silhouette with shingles. I walk past the corner of Waverly and Moss, where the uncle to the manual cross country coach lives. There are several houses on the right hand side that our over 100 years old and are reminiscent of covers culled from William Faulkner novels.

I delver to the run-down insurance building on the corner of Western and Sherman, next to the pharmacy that used to be a 7-11 where the fat warty lady told me that I couldn’t come in and look at comic books unless I was planning on buying them and I harbored incriminating nightmares about her showing up to my house with a gun late at night.

The west side of Moss avenue the houses begin to sprawl. There is a house with a lawn that looks digitally enhanced with a gazebo in the front that is into some sort of crafts. Maurice tells me that I am to go around the house to the back and put the paper into a diminutive side door attached to the garage. There is a house that looks like it could be usurped from the opening credits of Silver Spoons.

Most of the houses have some sort of dangling lamp affixed to the bottom of the porch ceiling that is illuminated. When Maurice is a good six-to-eight feet from the door he swings his hand back and then forward and then releases them as if allowing the ink to periodically fly     

   There is an agitated frenzy to his gait, somewhere between a jog and being disqualified in the Olympic trials for not completing the proper heal-toe- step of a speed walker.  He seems somehow capable of folding the paper with one hand while slicing on a rubber band.

 Next we have the white house which looks like the White House.” He says, noting that he thinks this is one of the houses that I will have to collect from. 

  At the end of the route I am exhausted. Maurice looks at me and smiles. He tells me that I did a good job. He tells me that he will see me tomorrow.

"The world doesn't stop," He proclaims with a smile.


                                                                       ***

When I am done with the route I realize I don't have to go to school even though it is a Monday.

It is Columbus day.

I have the day off.

I think about the miniature replica of the Pinta down in the basement.

I sleep all day.

                                                                      ***

  

We have four Nintendo games now.” Patrick notes. “Ninja Turtles. Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt and Paperboy.”

 

“Mom bought us Paperboy cause when we rented it from the place that Amy works she said it was the calmest she had ever seen any of her children play in front of the Nintendo, and she said if its keeping them this calm its like having a baby-sitter she doesn’t have to pay for.”

 

Patrick inquires if I want to come over and play Paperboy after school.

 

I tell him I can’t stay too late.

“I need to wake up early and do the real thing tomorrow.”

 

 

 

 

                                                  ***

I am collecting. I feel like Zacchaeus. I go to the houses I know. I stop at the Engles first. It is late October 1989 and the paper is two-dollars and 45 cents.  This includes six days plus a Sunday paper that is the size of a bassinet unsuspectingly placed on the doorstep of an orphanage on Christmas morning

 

“Most people pay in the mail but there’s about twenty I need to collect from.” Maurice notes.

 

Maurice tells me that the majority of the money I collect I will be able to keep as my salary. Maurice notes that collection is good because I get to keep the tips.

There is a book with a leather casing the size of an algebraic calculator

The collection book is flimsy. In autumn 1989 is 35 cents, fifty cents on Saturday. One dollar on Sunday. People who subscribe to the journal star save about fifty cents a week, two dollars a month.

“Usually the best time to go collecting is on a Saturday.” Maurice notes, “There will be some weeks when the family is not home or out of town and you can’t catch them

Maurice tells me also that some families like to pay two weeks at a time.

I am reminded by mom that I am to be careful about going into people’s houses because, while they are neighbors, they are also technically strangers.

Every time I knock on the Wahl’s front door I am greeted with a chorus of high-pitched barks. With seven kids its hard to fathom where they keep all of their progeny stowed

\I collect from the drunken Pipe fitters wife. I collect from Mr. Endres whose son Matt and I used to be best friends until I got glasses and he wouldn’t stop teasing me. I could from Mr. Sparks whose son Jason is a wanna be stud. I collect from the one black family on the street who always keep their lawn and house impeccably clean.

 On Moss I collect from the White House “that looks like the White House”, whose teenage daughter from Notre Dame opens the door and smiles every time she sees me.

All I can respond to her conviviality is the price of the paper.

Two dollars and forty-five cents.

 Mid-way down Moss avenue I collect from two cousins who live together.

Inside they have a room dedicated to a country and western Singer I have never heard of before.  They are always friendly. The older man with the teddy Ruckspin moustache always smiles when he sees me and tilts his head and says ,Looks like you want a little bit of money.”

They tip me an extra two dollars every week.

 

I collect from Terry Inman. Terry Inman’s casa has a weird Euclidean front porch and next to his house is Paul’s who is my age and has a dead tooth and goes to a catholic school somewhere in Peoria.  The summer before I started my route  Paul filched a loosely woven grille of Blackcats from his dad’s tool shed and handed me a match and one exploded in a vacuum puff right in front of my forehead..

There is always a 12 pack of BUSCH  in Terry Inman’s front lawn.  Somehow High school kids who are juniors have deemed it their personally smoking pad. Terry sits on the picnic table all day and cracks open can after can.

 Terry Inman who used to go to my parents church in the early 70’s until his wife died of cancer and he became a working class drunk. Terry Inman who moved to the house next door, the house that is the size of a shed, where he can be found in his front yard chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes and choking aluminum cans of Miller High life into a thin torso snap before christening open another one in a spume of copper fizz.

When he asks me my name he recognizes me.

He tells me to tell my parents that he thinks I am doing a good job.