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Shovel 1 | Jul 12 2002

I was somewhere near or perhaps at the top of Maxwell Street when a man approached me, I think in a car.

Either he was in a car or had been in a car and had just gotten out; definitely a car was involved.

I honestly don’t know what I was doing there alone. When I look around in my memory of it, there’s no one anywhere but me and this car guy. So it was like everyone was at school or something, which very well may have been what was happening.

On second thought I don’t think he got out of the car. Instead he drove up and talked to me from it, but never got out.

Did I want a job, he asked, or something to that effect.

Actually he first wanted to know if I lived near there, so I said yes, I believe, since I did.

I think I started the next day. I remember meeting him or someone, probably the kid I was replacing or maybe both of them, on a certain corner. A shopping cart was involved, and folding.

I liked folding and still do. Folding was the best part.

The worst part was collecting payment. Half the people on my route never paid me. Some outright hid when I came to collect. I don’t remember how the system worked exactly, but however it worked, I had to pay in advance for the papers, which meant I never made a penny from being a newspaper boy.

I quit after less than a month.

I don’t remember anything else, not the actual delivery part, nor getting up early, nor the guy’s reaction when I quit, nor anything else except some vague business of standing in a sad person’s sad apartment, just inside the door, waiting for him to get the money he owed me. I had never been anywhere so sad except maybe my own house, only I hadn’t quite realized that yet. I mean about my own house.

Sometimes when I’m done reading a paper, I fold it the way I was taught to, in thirds, tucking it into itself.