I... Uh... You owe $2.75...
They say that smell is the best thing to jog your memory. On Saturday SharkBoy and I wandered into a dollar store inside Jamestown (Speculate as to why in your head. Please don’t ask) and instantly we were hit with a cloud of stale beer and lingering cigarettes (in a Dollar store? Really?). Like a sledge hammer to my brain the memory of being a paper boy, back in Brockvegas, when I was 13 oozed out of it’s hiding place.
I had a route with about 20 to 30 subscribers that displayed a perfect cross section of social classes living in Brockville: I delivered to both rich and poor in my 6 block radius. Back in the day, kids, to collect from each subscriber we use to have to knock on their doors and hole punch a corresponding card we carried around with us on a ring, like a cardboard jailer’s keyring. Taking money from people was one of my first life lessons regarding credit, payment and service.
Most people paid on time. Hell, some people left envelopes with cash in it taped right there on the front door if they knew they weren’t going to be home. This was the 70s in a town less than 2000 people, remember. Then there were the deadbeats. Funny thing was that the deadbeats lived in both the expensive mansions (“My good boy, I have paid. I sent a cheque to the Recorder and Times just this morning!”) and the slipshod abodes.
I have only one strong memory of collecting money while doing this job: the apartment building on Bethune Street.
This particular deadbeat lived on the ground floor apartment, it’s door just across the stairs in a Victorian home that had been converted into many apartments by some clumsy handed carpenter many years ago. You can imagine that it was a massive house in disarray: David Fincher would have gizzed over the crumbling rot of the molding, the high cobwebbed ceilings, the torn wall paper.
I had stopped delivering papers to this particular guy a couple weeks past, but he still owed me at least a month’s worth. We were instructed to stop delivering after a second week of non-payment and hand the account over to the office another two weeks after that. I felt sorry for the guy. He was always polite, in a boozy chum sort of way, and I knew he was sad for some reason. He would offer me smokes or a beer and I would nervously decline (I was 12!).
However nice he was to me in the past, this was my last attempt to get payment. I knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked again. Shuffling. Moaning. Uh oh.
The door opens and I’m hit with a blast of stale beer. Cigarette. Puke. These sensory markers just added to the sight that stood before me. He was a handsome guy with a kind of faded football star build; but today he was at least three days without a bath. His housecoat hung loosely on his shoulders. No shirt, revealing a hairy chest that would normally make me notice but today it was overshadowed by a protruding gut that frightened me. And good lord… boxers. Open boxers. The root of his dick jutting out from the fly saying “Hey Kid! Mind turning out the lights?” He wasn’t hard or anything… just… not covered enough.
I’m stunned. As I stand there processing all this in he leans in close: “Whaaaaa…”
Imagine I’m Ripley and he’s the Alien from Alien 3. That’s how close and awkward it was.
Needless to say he didn’t have the money.
This morning as I’m running through Cabbagetown at 5am I’m watching beat up old cars driven by tired guys, delivering papers so they can afford a 1997 Taurus. . No kids doing this kind of work these days. The printed word is on it’s way out, so they say. Maybe that’s a good thing.
