Eat, drink and buy Jawbreakers

by David Benjamin

“A penny saved is still just a fucking penny.” —Dan Lok

MADISON, Wis.—One of the drawbacks of vegetating in front of the TV after a hard day at the keyboard is the intrusion—and merciless repetition—of ads that seem conceived to rankle my nerves and make me talk back to the screen.

For example, every time the garrulous Nervive geezer gazes down from the landing and says, “It looks like an ordinary staircase,” I fight the urge to shout back, “Goddammit, it is an ordinary staircase.” I think I actually hate the ghoul who—cheerfully—announces that his father, “in the best shape of his life,” dropped dead of a stroke, after which he conveys the macabre consolation that the best thing Dad ever did was leave behind his life insurance.

Of course, my attitude isn’t all not cranky and rancorous. There are ads that I more than tolerate. I have a crush, for instance, on the Denver Mattress blonde and I freeze in place whenever Glenn and Phil—in front of a fifteen-foot mountain of toilet paper or Cheerios—bellow the latest special at Woodman’s, the local grocery that beats all get-out (“¡Ay, caramba!”), because “Were employee owned!”

You were? When?

One of the most troubling ads in the current cycle snuck up on me. At first, I didn’t pay much heed to its vignettes of youngsters earning money doing odd jobs. But after a dozen viewings, I recognized implications in the oily paternalism of this Chase banking commercial about “managing” the income of schoolchildren.

“Just one one damn minute!” I said to the TV.

The kids in the ad, hustling for a buck on the block, were doing some of the same chores I did, like every kid I knew. I mowed lawns, pulled weeds, laid sod, delivered flyers for the Coast-to-Coast Hardware, planted spuds in my grandfather T.J.’s fields, shocked oats on uncle Carl’s farm and shoveled shit in uncle Claude’s barn. One of my steadiest sources was pop-bottle redemption, two cents apiece, twelve cents a six-pack, and 48 cents if you could snag a whole case from behind the Red Owl store and redeem it up the alley at the A&P. Of course, the tycoons among us, raking in as much as three dollars a week, were the kids with paper routes. I never had my own route, but I walked in clover whenever I subbed for Kevin Clark, who delivered the Milwaukee Journal, and Freddy Poss, whose 120 La Crosse Tribune subscribers made him the Cornelius Vanderbilt of paper boys.

This was all ad hoc and under the table. Until I got a weekend job at age fifteen and Octopus Car Wash issued me a printed paycheck, I rarely set foot inside a bank. I knew no kids who “banked.” Kids had no concept of money management—which is why the Chase commercial is an occasion for moral outrage.

In the ad, a little girl, ten years old, sits tiny at a big table in a bank, across from a smarmily friendly “financial adviser.” The kid shoves a few stacks of cash toward the guy. It’s maybe fifty hard-earned bucks (equal to about a cool fin in my day). The unseemliness of this confiscatory scene is further soiled by the presence of two more grownups—the girl’s parents (well, actors playing her parents) (Okay, they’re all actors, including the little girl, who’s probably 23 and married! But the depth of pretense only aggravates my pique.)

This outflanked, outnumbered TV kid, voluntarily handing her dough to a grownup under the supervisory glare of two other adults, tramples every sacred principle of juvenile profligacy. The prime directive, since time immemorial, is that when we’re kids, we don’t save. Instant liquidity (in banking terms) is the point of being a kid. We don’t invest. We have no interest in interest. We get money and—as fast as we can find a vendor of anything remotely kid-worthy—we squander it.

Kids, as free and guiltless at the First Amendment, know instinctively: You gotta burn through your pittance before it scorches a hole in your hip pocket and fries your little ass.

When I was a kid, a nickel wasn’t legal tender, it was a Milky Way or a pack of bubble-gum that you threw away and baseball cards that you kept. A dime wasn’t an investment in my future, it was Superman, Batman or Scrooge McDuck in 24 stapled, four-color, mind-rotting pages. A quarter wasn’t security for my golden years, it was a whole Saturday inside the Erwin Theater with Chucky Dutcher, watching Journey to the Center of the Earth five straight times, subsisting only on a dime’s worth of Jawbreakers and a ten-cent Nesbitt’s orange.

The fiscal essence of being a kid—at least in an apparently bygone world of investment counselors too busy and dignified to wait on children—is utter irresponsibility. It is an Epicurean fatalism that eats junk, swills pop, makes merry and stays ferally alert to the next odd job, the next scrounge, the next hustle and the next windfall of birthday money wrapped in Hallmark treacle.

Yes, of course, when I was a kid, I saved. We all squirreled away some of our meager revenue. But this was tenuous virtue that applied to an item or event of epic significance. From Easter ’til July, for example, I built up a stash—concealed from my thieving brother Bill—that would underwrite two days of orgiastic indulgence—in rides, ring toss, penny arcade, caramel apples and corn dogs at the Monroe County Fair. Saving also applied, grudgingly, to major capital outlays—for a push-button Zebco reel, or a rubber-coated baseball that wouldn’t rip open from bouncing it off a cement stairwell, or a new tire for a disabled bicycle.

(Without a bike, a kid was a leper on a desert island, left out of everything, forsaken by everykid.)

As long as I was a kid, no grownup ever had any idea whether I was broke or flush. Every kid I knew, whether his old man was a cranberry tycoon or an unemployed gandy dancer, pled poverty to mom and dad, cadging, groveling and searching the creases in the couch cushions. Every kid posed to grownups—especially the old ones with soft hearts—as a hollow-cheeked starveling whose sole sustenance was burdock roots, tree bark and the occasional booger. We went barefoot in our most raggedy dungarees and sat in the dirt, picking the scabs off our bug bites.

The Chase commercial, with its grade-school miser, isn’t just incongruous. It’s treason against the very ethos of kidhood. No kid in his or her right mind, wants to be a grownup, with matue responsibilities, with money that has to be managed and used to buy stuff that’s no fun.

The commercial contains, when I look closely, a paradox that defeats its purpose. As it starts, the little girl is rampant in the neighborhood, unaccompanied by parents—because they’re at work, where they’re supposed to be. The girl finds jobs, makes deals, works without supervision and collects her pay, all by herself. She needs no guidance to square the circle of kid finance.

In reality—not in a commercial—she knows that as long as she’s a kid, her mission in life is to snag every dime, two bits, dollar and sawbuck that lands in her lap, and tuck it deep before other kids know she’s got it. Above all, hide it from mom and dad and then, as soon as some useless trinket or comic book catches her eye, don’t think.

Indeed, one of the classic funny-pages motifs, and a role model for kids tempted to save their windfalls, is a pauper—Blimpy, Gladstone Gander or Joe Btfsplk—pulling out his pocket. It’s empty. A moth flutters crookedly away.

That’s your ticket, kid. Take Joe Btfsplk to heart. Don’t plan. Blow your wad. Fritter your fortune. See free your moth. Beware of J.P. Morgan coming your way, with his mahogany cane and velvet homburg. Flip him the finger, cross the street and kiss tomorrow goodbye.