Suckered by the rich guy

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?”