In the morning 90 minutes before dawn the
neighborhood becomes alive. The houses are sentences I diagram in Mooney’s
grammar classes, each house a vowel, waiting to be spliced open, an advent
calendar with soporific eyelids waiting to be peeled back and unearthed. There
are narratives behind the lids of each house There are secrets. The sleepy lids
of each living room drape yawning in pink-dyed am somnolence. I realize that if I place the paper in the
screen door of houses my patrons won’t have to traipse out into the cold to
procure their copy. Sometimes I place the paper in the mailbox so the patrons
don’t have to bend over. If there is a porch that is unlocked I slip in through
the mail slot.
I
dip in my satchel, groping another paper, I continue to row on. Past Terry
Inman’s house who used to go to our church until his wife died in her late
thirties and then raised two adolescents with a cigarette in one hand and a
beer in the other.
***
“Thirty
bucks a week!!!”
Well
I actually rake in close to sixty. Then I give my parents’ half for helping me
out, but with tip I usually end up with thirty bucks a week.
All
of my friends are looking at me in the jowl-animated astonishment of
adolescence..
Mom
says that ten dollars of what I bring home will go into a savings account. I
begin to tithe at church. I make an ethical calculus about giving ten percent
of everything I make to the Lord.
I
always seem to have money in my pocket. Green rectangles adorned with Masonic
Sanskrit and Latin quotes and treasury signatures with green visages of
mushroom-shaped presidents splattered in the center like crop circles.
I have
money to walk down to the convenient store on Western avenue next to the New
Hardees where I got in trouble for trying to thumb through a Playboy when I was
eight. I have money to walk down to the comic book kiosk inside Bogards and buy
the latest issue of men with X or super planted in front of their names
respectively. I have money to loan friends for candy or pop. I have money o
splurge on the latest release at Co-cop records across the street from the
theatre they just demolished on Main.
Suddenly I
have money in my pocket. Suddenly everyone is my friend.
***
The house that looks just like the White house has a
mail slot. With the exception of Sunday I can wedge the paper through metallic
slit spawning nominal creases. The husband is a plumber. He se seems to always
thank me for taking the time to walk up the steps and place the paper all the
way though.
“It’s so nice waking up and not having to go outside
and fish around for the paper and just have it nice and warm and waiting for
me.”
I tell him thank you. I try not to think about the
daughter who always smiles when she says my name. She is a sophomore in high
school and has a twin. Last week when I went to collect she was wearing a nightgown
and pink slippers and had her hair wedged in a side-pony tail.
She kept smiling when she saw me.
She keeps calling me Dave like she has known me all
her life.
**
A week after Columbus day there is an ad in the
paper. The Tower of Pisa is sprouting from the earth as if inflicted with
Morningwood. Somewhere during the year before I feel the need to tell my father
that I don’t need them to come into my bedroom when I pray. I wake up with my
mom flicking on my light switch, a spume of light exploding above my
acne-riddled twelve year old forehead. When I arrive to the sunken blue of the
front porch dad will have the papers in twin heaps.
He shows me
the ad with the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is a contest for paperboys.
“You have to be a paperboy for over a year to
enter.”
I have been a paperboy for just over ten days.
I fold the paper up and convene with my route.
I wonder what it smells like in Italy.
***
Last year was my first year to run track and
field. The first day Coach Money had
each of us run around Logan field and I lead the entire way and lapped seventy
percent of the school until the final 100 meters when I was caught by two upper
classman. Coach M is impressed . The two older classmates who nipped me at the
finish line are hunched over and exhausted
and I do another lap as a cool down.
I stay with the lad from Concordia for the first two
laps. He makes his move entering the third. I am in fifth grader. My
asymmetrical-askance glasses seem disproportionately tottering on my skull.
Kick as hard as I may I fail to catch him and he continuously nips me by five
seconds.
A rival.
I go to the track everyday. Dad times me twice a
week, his body casting a lighthouse shadow like a needle to a vinyl as I orbit the track.
This year I catch him. It seems like he is trying to stay with me the
first lap then I pull ahead.
Dad tells me that he is proud
***
The cover looks like you are ensconced in a cosmic
frame witnessing the last botanical species on the planet bloom and then
incinerate in an exclamatory Phoenix trail of dust. It is wilting in front of you.
There are songs that are considered in our church to
be blasphemy.
Songs about a
halo.
Songs about a
personal Jesus.
Songs about being violated by the drips of silence.
Songs about feeling all alone.
***
“He used to be an active member of our church.” Dad
tells me, talking about Terry Inmann. “He wife had cancer and died when she was
really young. Maybe in her mid-forties. They have two kids. “
Dad tells me that he kinda stopped going to church
after that even though the elders came and gave him a visit.
Father’s voice smells like instant coffee and
peppermint. After dad takes off his orange cap his hair looks like an unkempt
perm.
“Has he ever bothered you? While you were collecting?”
“He’s cool,” I tell my dad.
I tell dad that he’s a big tipper.
Dad tells me
still to be careful because, with alcohol, you just never know.
The next day I do my route there is an old man
waiting for me outside his house, next to a flag pole he put in because he is
patriotic. It is five in the morning. He looks like he is about ready to break
into a rendition of taps. It is the same
man who yelled at me for being on his grass while I was playing with Matt
Endres and he sat on his porch two years ago, before I got glasses. He is up
early waiting for me. I wonder if he is pissed.
“Young man I’d like to have a word with you.” He
says, rather sternly as if I am about to be dishonorably discharged from my
military unit.
I say yes. He is a world war two vet. He is wearing
almost impenetrable sun glasses.
There was the time last summer after my annual
birthday sleep over where we eat pizza and play role-playing and video games
all night that I rubber band his paper like a relay baton and hurled it front
across the street and it almost briefly hit his roof and knocked off what was
either a shingle or a twig.
“Young man I’d like to shake your hand.” I’ve never had my paper delivered so
promptly. You are the best paper boy we have ever had.
I am shy. I shake his hand.
I tell him thank you.
***
“David, you know that kid you used to play soccer
with?” I nod and say yes.
“Well he won.”
“Won what?” I retort, unsure.
“That trip to Italy that they had an advertisement
for a couple of months ago. That
Columbus trip Apparently he is a paperboy too.”
“He’s going to be going to Italy?”
“Keep on waking up early and doing a good job on
your route david.” Mom tells me, adding that I never know what will happen,
adding, in post-scripted
We call him crazy legs. He is like me only he is
three years older.
I am in sixth grade.
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