Mom would take us to the grocery store when we didn't have school. We would head straight over to the toy section whilst Mom bought her boring food items. We would admire the plastic swords, the rubber balls, etc. But that only lasted for a few minutes, as the toy section at Macey's is pretty minimal. After that, it was sneaking candy out of the bulk candy section, and then walking down the aisles looking for Mom.
Sometimes we were lucky enough to go to Kaybee toystore in the mall. That place was like Willy Wonka's as far as I was concerned. All those action figures! All the lego sets! Matchbox cars! Basketballs, footballs, sports stuff galore! It was impossible to figure out where I wanted to spend my 10 dollars. It had to be a good enough toy to last an entire year.
One year I bought a Lego set. You can't get a very big lego set for 10 bucks. I usually put it together in a day or 2, then tried to make other things with the same set, but it always ended up being a house or a building, nothing cool like a plane or a helicopter. I quickly realized that Legos lost their appeal pretty quickly for me.
Then one year I got Gibby for Christmas. Gibby (who my mom called "Gibson") was my first stuffed animal ("stuffedy"). He was a lion with a big long tail. He was pretty big, too, a lot bigger than the hand-me-down crap stuffedies we got from our siblings/neighbors/gutters. Brian got himself a hippo he named "Blab" and we started playing endlessly with them. Mostly sports or wars. After that, we started to spend all of our income on stuffedies. I started accumulating lions, and Brian hippos.
Me with Gibby, Brian with Blab, Kurt with Mikey (who was worthless), and Heidi with her crap stuffedy just trying to be includedWe outgrew the stuffedy phase around age 10ish and I became focused on one thing: candy. I needed candy, and I needed it always. We didn't get an allowance in our house, instead, we were paid in candy bars. If you did your job every day that week, you got a candy bar. If you cleaned your room every day and made your bed, you got a candy bar. If you mowed the lawn you got THREE candy bars. Natch, we fought over who got to mow the lawn, because you could just knock that out in one day. The everyday jobs were the tough ones. Almost nobody cleaned their room or made their bed, that was pretty much impossible.
The problem with the candy bars is that even if I did everything, the max for candy bars was 5 per week. In what universe is 5 candy bars enough for an 11 year old? I'm a growing boy! How am I going to gain any weight without stuffing my face with enough Starburst to put a racehorse to sleep?
Lucky for me, the neighbors needed a babysitter while we were "off-track". For those of you who didn't have year-round school (pretty much everybody), we got a month off in the summer (July), and then 3 weeks off at 3 different times during the year. We were usually track "A", which was the best track, where track "E" was the 2nd best and track "D" kids were the losers. The neighbor kids were also track A, so I watched them for 3 weeks for $1 an hour. The best part about that wage is that I thought I was ripping THEM off. 7 bucks a day to watch Price is Right and Crocodile Dundee I and II? Sign me up! At home, Mom was making us slave our free days away with menial tasks and "character-building" activities, making us learn and junk. If we wanted to learn, we'd go back to school! And the only TV we could watch was the morning PBS shows and the afternoon ones. In the morning, we had Captain Kangaroo and Today's Special, while the afternoon shift gave us Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and Barney at the 1:30 slot. Barney was intolerable and couldn't be tolerated, and neither could Mr. Rogers once I got to a certain age, but Sesame Street was always entertaining. Today's Special was fascinating and creepy at the same time, and I always couldn't bear to watch when Jeff got switched to a mannequin or back to a human via his plaid hat. Haven't I already discussed this on the blog? I feel like I have.
Anyway, watching PG-13 movies taped off the TV at the neighbor's while making filthy lucre was my idea of a good time. And I could take that money and ride my bike over to the Fruit Stand. However, I discovered that the Fruit Stand was robbing us blind with their 50 cent cans of pop and 40 cent candy bars. If I rode my bike the mile down to Storehouse or Macey's, I could get candy bars for 25 cents each. How could they afford to give away their candy for practically nothing?! How were the employees not buying out all the candy as soon as it hit the shelves?
Mom wasn't a big fan of me spending all my money on things of no lasting worth. So these trips had to be done on the sly. The easy part was getting the candy; the hard part was getting it into my room so not even my brothers discovered it. I wasn't worried about them ratting me out, I was worried about them stealing my loot. Once, my buddy Joel and I had a particular gluttonous trip to Macey's, not just stopping at candy bars. We raided the bulk candy section and bought a couple packs of Old Home donuts. Usually, I would jam the candy in my pants and walk in through the back door and scurry up the stairs whilst the unsuspecting Mom toiled away at her piano lessons. But these donut boxes were too big to fit in my Toughskin-brand jeans, so I climbed up the apple tree, jumped on the roof, and then snuck in through my bedroom window. No one was the wiser!
The problem was getting cash in my hands. I would get paid via check, which would require Mom to take me to the bank and put it all (minus 10 percent) in my savings. I couldn't just say "I'd like 50 clams back, please" without Mom giving me the stink-eye and a lecture about saving money. So I had my millions (probably around $150) in the bank, but I couldn't get to it. So one day I noticed one of those withdrawal forms. It needed a signature, so I came back another day on my bike (on a day that I was ditching school, no less-this was in Jr. High) and forged Mom's signature after practicing. The teller, who happened to be in my ward, wasn't fooled, and ended up calling my mom. Busted! She told me to come home right away because I was in big trouble, mister!
When I was about 14, I got offered some employment from my Teacher's Quorum advisor. He owned a packing company, and if I could make it down to his warehouse in S. Provo, I would make 5 bucks an hour. 5 bucks an hour!?! And you're sure this is legal, right? This kind of money doesn't come around every day. Pretty much my job required taking a stack of folder papers and adding an insert. For about 4 hours every day after school. After about an hour of this drudgery, I realized that 5 bucks an hour was not NEAR enough money. I quit after a few weeks, realizing that some jobs were just not worth the pay.
So I decided on a new career: dishwashing! We had an "in" with the owners of Magleby's, and they hired us on at 4.25/hr. Now you may think that dishwashing is pretty much as low as you can go on the employment chain, but I would point you to the packing plant. Dishwashing was a pleasure cruise compared to the packing plant. In fact, I loved it so much that I picked up extra shifts as much as I could. The fact that everything I wore reeked to the heavens and my hands had 2 new cuts every day didn't stop me. I even got a few of my friends to work there, Baldwin, Jonny, and Andy. It became a big party.
After about a year of that, I turned 16. Big Judd from the ward had purchased 5 Buck Pizza in Orem, and he said if I got a car, I could get a job as a delivery boy. Not so fast there, Big Judd. I'm very happy in my current career. How much did it pay, I asked. 5 bucks an hour, plus tips. Well, I'd gotten a raise to 4.75/hr, so the 5 bucks wasn't that great. How much are the tips, usually? About 40 bucks a night for a 3 hour shift.
Where do I sign?
Thus began the beautiful friendship. I bought a buttermilk-colored 1985 Toyota Tercel with poo-brown trim. Then I just sat in my car for 3 hours, drove around with pizza, and collected my tips at the end of the night. I even got paid 75 cents for each delivery for gas money! Then the summer came and I got a day job as a lifeguard at the local country club where the sun was always shining, the food was free, and the women ran rampant. Add that to the 50 bones a night I was making and it pretty much goes without saying that I was living large. After a full day of basking in the sun and cruising around town, I'd go to Macey's and get drunk on Shasta and high on candy. Baby Ruth's were always on sale at 4/1.00. But this fast lifestyle came to an abrupt halt. I was fooling myself not thinking it would ever catch up to me. One snowy night in January it did, and I got in an accident. Dad forbade me from delivering pizza ever again. He paid the 1500 in damages to the other driver, as my insurance didn't cover "commercial delivery". I had to work it off that summer.
How, you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked. He made me help him with his computer program all that summer for 5 bucks an hour. That meant I had to go into his office at 8 AM, which might as well be 4 AM for a 17 year old boy wasting his last free summer ever toiling away at dead-end jobs. Of course, the irony is that I learned how to program, then I wrote my own program for pizza restaurants, sold it to 20 different 5 Buck Pizza franchises, and paid my way through college with that. It also got me my current job, because we all know my slacker GPA wasn't getting me any great jobs, but running my own company did.
Now? I still buy candy by the truckloads. I went to Costco and bought a box of 72 Snickers. It was gone in a couple of months. I bought 3 boxes of Tangy Taffy (now Laffy Taffy) online. Cost? 80 bucks. I have a slice in my budget carved out for this. Tithing, mortgage, utilities, candy, food. In that order. One month we were low on cash so we substituted Twix for hamburger. Nobody noticed or complained.
I only have one regret: my teeth hurt.
