Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [73]
But that was mild compared to some of my brother’s other pranks. He once actually sawed our mother’s couch into three pieces. With a hand saw. He thought it would look more glamorous as a sectional. My poor mother didn’t. She wanted it up against the wall. In one piece.
“Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.”
Then I became an entrepreneur. I learned very early on that there were lots of ways a kid could earn money.
It all started when I ordered a bunch of junk from the back of an old Red Ryder comic book, stuff like fake flies in plastic ice cubes and dog vomit; joy buzzers and soap that turned your hands black—all this crazy stuff that’s designed to give a kid power. In the ad, they said, “Send no cash”—they’d send the package COD, which was great because I didn’t have any cash and I didn’t know what COD meant. I thought I was the only kid in the world who had figured this out. You get all this stuff for free!
So I sent in my order, and it came to about eleven dollars—which was a lot of money back then. I came home from school one day and my mother was standing there, looking at all of it.
“Did you order this junk from a comic book?” she asked.
“Yes!” I screamed, so excited I was practically levitating.
“Well, you can have it when you pay me back,” Mom said flatly.
“Remember, we’re all in this alone.”
That stands in my mind as the greatest singular life lesson she ever gave me.
“How’s a kid supposed to get any money?” I wailed. And that’s when my mother gave me the idea of starting a little business, which is exactly what I did. I’d perform services around town. I’d walk your dog. I’d take out your garbage. I’d go to the corner store for you. Whatever you wanted me to do. It took a lot of dimes to get to eleven dollars, but I did it. I was very industrious.
One of my later jobs was to babysit, and I’d often ask my friend Susie to help me. After we put the kids to bed, we’d go through the parents’ drawers together and see their private stuff. We’d find Trojans and sex manuals. But I’d been attracted to sex manuals for a long time before that.
“I wonder if evolution is like a scientific experiment
that ran out of grant money.”
Of all the characters at the D’Elce, Mrs. Rupert was definitely the most mysterious. She was a botanist and the only person in the building who had venetian blinds, so you could never see inside her apartment. She’d only use her front entrance, the story being that someone had once walked in on her. So she kept her refrigerator pushed up against the back door. We never quite knew the details. To all the kids, she was just “the crazy lady.”
One day, when I was about eight, Mrs. Rupert convinced my mother to let me come over to her apartment to walk her dog. I went over that first night and made a friendship that would last for the next four years.
After I gained entrance to her inner sanctum, we had a whole ritual. I’d go over after supper, walk her dogs for fifteen cents, then spend the evening with her. We’d listen to the radio and read the New York Times. She always made me look up the words I didn’t understand. After we finished the Times, we would have tea and little petit fours.
Mrs. Rupert was like a girlfriend, but definitely an unusual one. She told me all sorts of wild stories. She said one of her plants was the same kind the pharaohs had used to silence their servants in Egypt.
“They’d put a piece of the leaf on the tongue, and it would paralyze the vocal chords,” she said ominously. She once caught me trying to snap off one of the leaves. I guess I wanted to try it myself, or on my kid brother.
Mrs. Rupert’s and my big weekly ritual was to go shopping together every Saturday. We’d go to Hudson’s, and I’d have to wear a hat and gloves and carry a little girl’s purse. She was teaching me to be a lady because she’d somehow decided I was the kid in the building who had the most potential to rise above my station.
We’d take the Hamilton bus downtown, and along the way she’d give me all these little pointers:
A lady never carries parcels if she can