There was almost no way to get money. Fay, the Cat Lady, sometimes had a returnable Coke bottle or two to give away if I asked—the large size, twenty cents deposit each. Allowance was seventy-five cents a week, enough for a few candy bars, but I did the math: it would take years to save up for something big like a bike or a telescope. K. A. Polzin
I tried some of the boy jobs advertised in magazines: selling greeting cards or seeds door to door. Almost no one wanted either. What little money I made went to shipping the unsold stock back. K. A. Polzin
When broke, I’d troll the candy aisle at the Lucky, and when it was empty of shoppers, slip a Kit Kat into my back pocket. It was a perfect fit—didn’t create a bulge to give you away. I’d scan the ground for cigarette butts to smoke—they tended to accumulate in the gutter, blown there, or carried there by the rain. K. A. Polzin
The first of the month, I got a ten-dollar bill to pay for my monthly reduced-price school lunch card. It was the kind of money you could do something with, and the temptation finally got to me. One month, I bought a wrist rocket at the Kmart, walking the two miles each way on a Saturday, then went without lunch for the month. But I underestimated how hungry I’d be. I had to beg friends for food. Few were generous with their lunches, most were annoyed to be asked, but Steven Parker became my savior, giving me half the hamburger from his box lunch every day. It became our ritual, such that I began to feel comfortable pocketing the ten dollars at the beginning of every month. I’d buy some toy I wanted and eat like a king for a few days—Perky Pies and frozen malts, bags of Wampums, Charleston Chews. Then the money would run out, and I’d be back to half a burger with the reliable Steven. K. A. Polzin
Then my oldest sister decided to throw a Ronald McDonald carnival, a prepackaged neighborhood event that raised money to fight muscular dystrophy. The first step was soliciting donations to fund the costs. The kit included official Ronald McDonald donation cans. K. A. Polzin
My older brother and I volunteered to go door to door with the cans, and we received what to us was a shocking amount of money, more than we’d ever seen, perhaps twenty or thirty dollars. We quickly agreed on a plan. We gave a nominal amount to our sister for the carnival, an amount a person might reasonably be expected to collect, and kept the rest for ourselves. Then we snuck out to collect all day Saturday and Sunday, street by street, ending up in neighborhoods we’d never seen before, and returning home late in the evening. K. A. Polzin
Even with my older brother taking more than his fair share—the way of the world, it seemed—I was still rich, rich enough to buy my school lunch card that month as intended, rich enough to pay for my Kit Kats at the Lucky, my cigarettes from the machine at the laundromat. K. A. Polzin
I remember the carnival making a little over a hundred dollars, about what we’d pocketed in donations in the weekend leading up to it. The carnival felt like proof to our neighbors, if not to ourselves, that my brother and I really had been funding an event, that we weren’t desperate, greedy little liars, and though our donation cans may have been grubby, their paper covers worn through by our sweaty hands, we were telling the truth. We were good boys. K. A. Polzin
