7.JULY.00
Today
was my youngest son's 29th birthday. So in honor of him, I am posting
this bit of flash fiction I wrote a while back. It's loosely based on
an incident in his life...Happy Birthday, Al!
~~~
From
Classics to Pop
Wandering
along the lakefront path, the kid pulled the old lady grocery cart partially
filled with books, college texts, high school algebra, an anthology
of great literature, titles by Camus, Sartre, Kafka...
“BOOKS
FOR SALE,” read the scrawled sign on the cart.
Broke,
he had hit upon the idea of dumping all of his books into the
shopping cart and hitting the Chicago streets to sell them...a novel
idea, he had thought wryly. Surprisingly, people actually had been buying
them....a quarter here, and fifty cents there. This tall lanky kid with
shoulder length hair, smiling, friendly faced, hawking literature from
a grocery cart no doubt had a certain appeal.
Tired,
he took a seat on a park bench next to a homeless man, musing about
the possibilities of making this into a temporary career.
“With the
right marketing and a constant supply of books....of course, they’d
have to be free....and I’d have to have good weather...and better shoes,”
he thought....
His feet,
clad in his holey hi-top sneakers were killing him.
Letting
the idea go, he absent mindedly looked out over the lake. The bum’s
plea slowly entered his awareness.
“Got some
spare change, buddy, a couple of bucks maybe for a meal. I ain’t eaten
in a while.”
Well acquainted
with hunger himself, the kid answered.
“No, man,
I can’t spare any cash. Food for thought is about all I can spare at
the moment.”
“How
about a book?” he asked. Reaching into his cart and retrieving
Candide, he handed it to the bum. Kafka would have been a bit much...hope
was required here after all.
Looking
at him strangely, the bum took the book and moved off, mumbling to himself.
“Ten-fifty
in total sales”, the kid thought to himself. 95°. Humid as hell.
Sweating. “Ten-fifty’s not going to go far and I need something to drink.”
He looked
idly at the other wilted people passing by. The idea hit him in a flash.
Stuffing the cash in his back pocket, pulling the cart with the remaining
books, he headed into the city to a grocery store. He had enough cash
for two cases of cold pop, on sale, and a bag of ice. On a day like
today a cold drink was more of a commodity than a book. He figured to
himself, “At seventy-five cents a can, I can parlay my ten bucks into,
maybe, thirty-six dollars.”
Trashing
most of the remaining great ideas of the western world, he loaded the
iced pop into the cart on top of the few remaining books which served
as a retaining wall. He moved out into the street and headed back to
the lakefront, selling the pop along the way, and patting himself on
the back for his ingenuity.
Ingenuity
was exactly what it took to survive on the street.