Everything Is Wrong with Me (13 page)

“I was wondering if I might be able to buy some fireworks.” I was rattled—I didn’t mean to blurt this out like I did. I didn’t stand a chance of scoring now.

“Well, I don’t know.” Henry smoked a third of his newly lit cigarette in one drag. “Does your dad know about this?”

“Yeah, he knows.” I figured, what’s one more lie? “He’s just working a lot and he’s gonna be working a lot over the next couple of days, so I figured I’d ask you.”

The moment of truth. Henry took another third-of-a-cigarette drag, smiled, and said, “C’mon in.”

In moments, I was walking out of Henry’s house with plastic bags full of fireworks. I met David around the corner, and we stuffed our backpacks before heading off to the neighborhood. Like two junkies, we ripped into the brick of jumping jacks and lit some on the way home, even though it was daytime, just to feel the magic. And the magic, it was good.

And once again, FM Enterprises, what we called our business using the initials of our last names, was up and running. A start-up, we only sold the basics: firecrackers, jumping jacks, bottle rockets, and Roman candles, keeping simple to build capital and maximize profit. The order I got from Henry was the same order that my dad had gotten. He was surprised that I had the cash to buy $64 worth of fireworks, but I told him that it was recently my birthday and this was part of my present. $64 bought us:

• One brick of firecrackers (40 packs) for $9
  
• One brick of jumping jacks (48 packs) for $13
  
• Twelve packs of bottle rockets for $7
  
• A case of Roman candles (24 packs of 6 candles each) for $35
  

Our wholesale costs per item were then as follows:

• One pack of firecrackers: 23¢
  
• One pack of jumping jacks: 27¢
  
• One pack of bottle rockets: 58¢
  
• One pack of (of 6) Roman candles: $1.45
  

When we sold packs individually, we charged:

• Firecrackers: 50¢
  
• Jumping jacks: 75¢
  
• Bottle rockets: $1
  
• Roman candles: $3
  

It figures that it was this part of the business I loved, the nerdy side. Before embarking on selling the original load of fireworks, I had guesstimated the cost per item based on what I thought he had paid for them. After buying our own, I learned that I was right and the prices we set on the first batch of fireworks were correct and sound. Finally, all that stupid math had a practical purpose.
*

With the second shipment of fireworks secured back at my house, David and I were overjoyed and went about gettin’ that cash. Sales continued to be high, as David made hourly bike runs to and from my house, dropping off money and picking up more fireworks. I kept all the cash in a “safe,” which was actually a broken jewelry box that I picked out of the trash. It didn’t even have a lock on it, but I continued to call it a safe and be secretive about it to give David the impression that I knew what I was doing and I was a professional. Image is important in any new business venture.

As the money continued to come in, I started dreaming big. I figured that this would go on forever and David and I would be millionaires around sophomore year in high school. In the meantime, I was planning on going to Tower Records to buy every CD they had. In a month or so, I’d ask my mom about getting a cable line in my room, so I could get a TV—“Jimmy’s family was getting rid of one” would be my reason for the presence of the television, when in reality I was going to head to Sears up on Oregon Avenue to buy the sweetest TV they had. And of course, my Sega Genesis would be hooked up to that gorgeous television, which I would play for approximately six hours a day. Video games, music, a giant TV—this was the life.

Or it was going to be. I never physically sold fireworks—that was David’s job. At first, we were selective about to whom we sold. We didn’t want some idiot getting hurt or some moron getting caught and ratting us out to his parents. David would only sell to friends or friends of friends whom we could trust. But the lust for more money and power made us sloppy. And by “us,” I mean David.

If you wanted fireworks, you had to order them from David. David would come to me and I’d fill the order. Then he’d go out only with that order, get paid, and come back and give me the cash for safekeeping. Whenever he went out on runs, David carried only the fireworks necessary to fulfill the order. In this way, if anything happened to David (that is, he got beat up or otherwise lost the fireworks or money), we’d only lose that particular order. We didn’t just set up shop on a corner and offer fireworks for sale. We were a serious business, not a fucking lemonade stand.

On a Thursday afternoon, David came by my place to make a run. I gave him the stuff and off he went. I was expecting him back in a half hour, probably less. But when an hour had passed and he hadn’t returned, I grew agitated. I set off on my bike to head to Second and Mifflin to the schoolyard where David made the deal, but there was no sign of him. I went around the Park and couldn’t find him there. I drove by his house and knocked. No answer. I went back to my house and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Nothing from David. But instead of going out again, I figured I’d stay in the house, in case he was trying to find me and we kept missing each other.

Around dinnertime, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“You’re lucky you answered the phone, boy, and not your mother.”

It was David’s mom, Eleanor.

“My son came home earlier today to get a Lunchable and guess what I found?”

“Um…”

“Let me tell you something,” she said, on fire: “If I ever catch you and my son selling any more fireworks, I’ll shove those fireworks right up your asses and light them! Do you understand?”

Fuck. “Yes.”

“Now I’m not gonna tell your mother about this, because I know how upset she would be. But that’s it. You got it?”

Fuck. “Yes.”

“Good.” She hung up.

Fuck.

A Lunchable, a Lunchable, my kingdom for a Lunchable.

And with that, FM Enterprises closed up shop. While I can’t say that the remaining fireworks were destroyed, I can say that they were not sold. Mine and David’s friendship remained strong, though to this day I don’t understand why he couldn’t have gotten the damn Lunchable
after
dropping off those fireworks. But then again, Lunchables are certainly delicious, so I can’t blame him that much.

This is my grandpop.

And somewhere, my grandpop watched the rise and fall of my little empire, laughed, shook his head, and took a sip of his Manhattan. Jasper…so much to learn.

Chapter Seven

Uncle Petey

U
ncle Petey moved to my block when I was eleven years old. He wasn’t my uncle, but that’s what I and all of my friends called him. I realize that anytime the moniker
uncle
is applied to a man, it conjures up all sorts of different images: an unshaven middle-aged man in a raggedy cardigan who promises you Skittles but instead gives you the ol’ pat-down in his car; a
Sopranos
-esque goomba with tacky jewelry who yells a lot and strings together incoherent phrases like “bragadadooche!” and “madadeesh!” a confirmed bachelor who shows up at holiday parties in neatly pressed clothes with his “roommate” Jonathan and uses adjectives like “delicious” and “gorgeous” while talking to your mom and the women in the family about a great new moisturizer he’s using, while Uncle Joey and Uncle Eddie get into a shoving match in the living room over who was the better Eagles quarterback, Jaws or Randall.
*

But Uncle Petey was none of these things. In many ways, he was your average nineteen-year-old kid. A little on the short side, with a slightly high-pitched voice and mousy features, he had an easy laugh and a thick South Philly accent. We called him Uncle Petey because he actually was the uncle of one of the kids I hung around with, my buddy Screech.
**
Screech would talk about how cool his Uncle Petey was so often that the name stuck in our circle of friends. We, even his own nephew, never called him “Uncle Petey” to his face, but rather only when referring to him in the third person. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that Petey would have been pretty weirded out if he knew we called him “Uncle Petey.” What nineteen-year-old wants a gang of kids calling him “uncle”? I’m starting to feel a little uneasy even writing about it.

Petey was more like an older brother to us than anything else. A big part of being Irish Catholic is having an intense disdain for your siblings. I would guess that this disdain is directly inverse to the income of your household; the less money you have, the more you despise your siblings. One bathroom and two bedrooms between three or five or seven brothers and sisters isn’t going to ease the tension any. Those of us who had siblings were not close to them—especially at that age. We no longer viewed our brothers as friends, teammates, or partners in crime as we did earlier in life, but rather as potential foils, pains in the asses, and
Mommy said get out of the bathroom—I have to poop!

But in Petey we found that older brother. It was only a matter of time after he moved onto the block that Screech would take us over to his place, where we could hang out in peace, without our parents or brothers and sisters bothering us. His house was an escape for us, where we could go to get out of our own homes, listen to music, and talk about things that interested us (especially sports and these fascinating things called “tits” that were starting to appear on the older girls). While we did most of this in the room that Screech claimed as his own, we hung out with Petey quite a lot, too. Petey was like us in many ways—a big kid who liked to play video games, curse, and break balls. But in other ways Petey was what we aspired to be: a man who knew about shit. To be a man who knew about shit or a man who knew shit was the neighborhood ideal, someone who was respected and who could dole out advice on any number of topics. Petey fit this profile. He knew a lot about sports. He knew (or claimed to know) a lot about women. And he knew a lot, a whole lot, about gambling.

Petey was a gambler. I’m not talking about cards or casinos here, but about sports. Pro and college football, baseball, pro and college basketball—hell, even figure skating, swimming, and gymnastics—there wasn’t much Petey wouldn’t bet on. Normally, this type of behavior could land a man in a lot of trouble. After college, I spent several years working in homeless shelters throughout the Northeast,
*
and many of the sad stories of the shelters’ residents started with gambling problems. But Petey was good at gambling. Nay, Petey was
sublime
. Gambling, he’d tell us time and time again, was not about luck. It was about science. And Petey was a scientist par excellence.

Petey was also a bookie. For a percentage of the winnings, Petey took bets for someone. Petey was the neighborhood point man for that someone, taking bets over the phone and in person from guys in our area. Each week, Petey would collect and account for the all bets and money that he had handled during the week and pass this on to that someone. That someone might pass them on to someone else, who would then pass them on to someone else, all the way up the line to I-don’t-know-what. I’d rather not think about that and I’d certainly rather not explore this here, lest I wake up in the morning with “Slow your roll, fat chops” painted in pig’s blood on the door to my apartment. So let’s just leave it alone for now.

Excellent gambler/bookie was an entirely acceptable profession in my neighborhood. It was even looked upon admirably. Nobody I knew grew up to be a doctor or a pilot or an inventor or anything cool like that. Once you graduated from high school, the laws of the neighborhood dictated that your career choices consisted of longshoreman, electrician, mechanic, roofer, or something similar. Each is a worthy profession in its own right, but not exactly what us kids aspired to be. If you could spend all day taking bets, studying sports, and yelling at horses, well, that’s not a bad gig at all. It sure beats tarring a roof on a hot summer day or driving a forklift on a pier in windchills hovering around zero.

Being a gambler also gave you a certain neighborhood cache, for two reasons. One, it’s a social profession. It requires you to be friend, confidant, and consoler to many people. Because Petey wasn’t running the operation himself, he was never the bad guy. He was just taking the bets for someone else. He commiserated with those who lost, because he knew that feeling, too (although in most cases, considerably less than they did). Because he was so affable, he developed friendships with those from whom he took bets. And like your local dry cleaner, dentist, or barber, his business grew from referrals. Word of his charisma spread and eventually he was handling many, many bets, which in turn meant greater neighborhood “fame.” Second, Petey made a lot of money doing what he did. And in a working-class neighborhood, few things garner respect or power the way that money—spent properly—does. Money was a tricky thing. If you spent it on extravagant things like nice cars or jewelry or big fur coats, you would be ostracized, called arrogant, and branded with the worst insult of all: someone who forgot where he came from (possibly because you dress like a pimp). Petey didn’t wear jewelry or furs or drive around in a brand-new Cadillac; he had “The Bull,” a mid-’80s Chevy Nova with peeling black paint and a “plush” red interior. By being down-to-earth and not living a garish lifestyle befitting a successful gambler and bookie, Petey showed us that it’s okay to have money, but you have to spend it wisely.