Suckered by the rich guy
by David Benjamin
MADISON,
Wis. — For a while in grade school, I was friends with a kid named Fat
Vinny. He wasn’t friends with me. Fat Vinny had no friends. He was the
most hated kid in school — no. In the whole town. Other kids despised
Fat Vinny so passionately that they threw things at him on sight. They
attacked him on the playground, cursed him and spat on him. Kids hated
Fat Vinny so much that he hired other kids as bodyguards. I remember a
boy named Dennis who worked for a while as Fat Vinny’s muscle, until
finally, Dennis quit the job in disgust and went to confession.
Disgust came naturally in any contact with Fat Vinny. He was corpulent, vulgar, obnoxious, arrogant and mean. Also, he was rich.
I
don’t mean to suggest that Fat Vinny was wealthy in the same sense that
Myrna Loy and William Powell were rich in the movies, or Howard Hughes
was in real life. Fat Vinny was kid-rich. He walked around with paper
money in his Hopalong Cassidy wallet. He actually had a wallet. Most of
us carried our infrequent money in the change pocket of our dungarees.
The coin of the realm for kids in 1961 was the dime. A dime was the
price of a Coke. It was the price of escape into the otherworld of
Superman, Wonder Woman, Dennis the Menace, Sgt. Rock and Turok, Son of
Stone.
Tomah, the hamlet where Fat Vinny and I prowled Superior
Avenue, boasted two dime stores. The rare plutocrat kid who got an
“allowance” from his or her profligate parents received once a week two
dimes and a nickel — which, for me, would translate into two comic books
and a Milky Way. That’s if I’d ever gotten an allowance. Because that
weekly windfall was beyond my mother’s wretched means, I scrounged the
way every other kid did — hunting for deposit bottles, worth two cents
each at the Red Owl or the A&P. I did ten-cent errands for generous
grandparents. I substituted for Freddy Poss and Kevin Clark on their
paper routes. I mowed the odd lawn, washed the occasional Chevy,
shoveled snow and, of course, robbed my mother blind — a dime here, a
quarter there, whatever she left unguarded for more than thirty seconds.
Fat
Vinny disdained dimes. He had dollars. He had fives and sawbucks. A kid
with five bucks in Tomah was John Beresford Tipton. Fat Vinny dropped a
fin every time he bought a cherry Coke at the Rexall’s drugstore soda
fountain. High-school seniors watched enviously.
I don’t mean to
suggest that Fat Vinny came from money. He didn’t live amongst the
doctors and insurance brokers on Lake Street. Like me, his home was a
bleak second-floor apartment above one of the stores on Superior Avenue.
Fat Vinny lived over the Firestone tire shop, I over the S&Q
Hardware. Neither of us had the regular presence of a father. The only
indication that Fat Vinny had ever had a father was the World War II GI
.45 that he flashed the first time he took me home.
Vinny
pointed it at me and said, “Kapow.” I reacted with a casual smile,
because I didn’t then know him very well. I figured that a) the gun
wasn’t loaded and b) he wouldn’t squeeze the trigger on a friend.
But Fat Vinny had no friends.
Fat
Vinny got kid-rich the hard way. He was a dealer, trader, scammer and
grifter beyond his years. He spoke to grownups as an equal and he
subcontracted with kids who thought fifty cents was the ticket to Easy
Street.
Take, for example, sidewalks. When it snowed in Tomah, a
few dozen kids would hit the side-streets with shovels, offering to
clear their neighbors’ walks, stoops, driveways. For a half-hour of
shoveling, your typical housewife would fork over a quarter — four bits
if she was deranged with Christian munificence.
Fat Vinny didn’t
truck with housewives. His clients were the bars and supper clubs,
groceries, banks, cafes, shoe stores and barbershops along Superior
Avenue. Fat Vinny catered to nervous capitalists who had to clear their
piece of sidewalk before the sun was up and the shoppers were abroad.
Fat Vinny cornered the snow removal territory pretty much from Kenny
Wilde’s Sinclair all way north to the Conoco station. He dealt directly
with Heilman at Heilman’s Bakery, with Erwin at the Erwin Theater and
with my aunt Bernice at the Bassinet. There wasn’t another kid in town
competing with Fat Vinny, first because they didn’t have Vinny’s jugular
instincts and second, because Vinny got there first.
For
publicans and beauticians, five bucks per storefront per snowstorm was
the price of doing business. For a kid, it was somewhere over the
rainbow. Fat Vinny counted on that, because the last thing he wanted to
do was shovel snow. He sharecropped the actual labor to other kids, who
hated him, but took his money, thinking we were climbing onto the gravy
train.
We each shoveled six or seven stores. We each got a quarter.
In
the beginning, I went out of my way to befriend Fat Vinny because I saw
other kids abusing him and I took pity. I apologized to him one day on
behalf of all the kids who were calling him a warthog and a greaseball.
He accepted my sentiments graciously, took me under his wing and
introduced me to his philosophy of predation, venality, greed, cheating
and creepiness.
Although I started out pitying Fat Vinny, I
stuck with him because, well, I’d never seen so much money. I succumbed
to an illusion that afflicts anyone who chooses to tolerate the
cruelties and grotesqueries of the cold and grasping rich. I harbored
the hardly secret hope that some of Fat Vinny’s unseemly bounty would
trickle to me. A little did, but he reaped a fiver for my every two
bits. And while I sowed, Fat Vinny sat back, smoked a Camel, and reaped.
It
all came home to me over the hardware flyers. Vinny had cornered the
trade in penny-savers — eight- or twelve-page newsprint flimsies that
had to be stuck, by hand, behind every screen door on every street in
town. The Coast-to-Coast store produced them regularly. So did the Red
Owl and Walgreen’s. Vinny was the delivery man. He gathered stacks of
flyers and handed them out to other kids. We shlepped them hither and
yon, all on a sweaty summer’s day, on our Schwinns and J.C. Higginses.
One day, Fat Vinny bestowed on me, his friend, the best route and the
most flyers. He said I’d get a whole five bucks when I was done, just
come back to the store.
So, six hours and about 600 flyers later,
I staggered into the store and asked the owner for my pay. He looked at
me funny and said he’d already paid Fat Vinny. Go see him.
It
was summertime and kids were scattered. I didn’t see Fat Vinny,
anywhere, for more than a week. He’d gone, overnight, from unavoidable
to invisible. When I finally found Vinny and asked for my five bucks, he
gave me the answer that suckers always get from the rich.
The
reason I thought about Fat Vinny was Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House
physician who was intoxicated by his proximity to the richest guy (or so
he says) to ever darken the Oval Office door. When Ronny gushed to all
the world about the bloated president’s glowing health, Fat Donny saw a
pigeon primed to pluck. He decided he’d give the kid all the hardware
flyers to deliver.
Ronny is still learning the price of cozying
up to rich guys who know how to get more out of you today than you can
get back in a thousand years. When Fat Donny took Ronny aside the other
day, he told him the same thing Fat Vinny said to me in the summer
before I started seventh grade at St. Mary’s School.
“What five bucks?”
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
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