In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [66]
But one summer I discovered the only completely satisfying and genuine experience that I really wanted. The Black Jawbreaker. They got ahold of me the way Hashish gets a stranglehold on a Lebanese rug merchant in a Middle Eastern den of vice and degradation. Day after day, with every last cent I could scrape up, it was nothing but Black Jawbreakers. I became an evangelist, convincing others—Schwartz, Flick, Kissel—until one day the inevitable finally happened.
The store was full of steelworkers and kids. Pulaski’s screen door was banging continually. The flies were flying in great formations around the light bulbs and clinging like tiny clusters of dead grapes to the spirals of flypaper that hung from the ceiling.
Pulaski was back of the hand-operated lunch-meat slicer and a short, angry lady was leaning over the Toledo scale, fixing him with a beady eye. Pulaski was alone in the store that day, and the tide was coming in. For at least forty-five minutes he battled the salami buyers and the guys who wanted the work gloves. The flies hummed; the heat came in puffs through the screen door.
At least eight of us milled around the glass case, the Jawbreaker Fever hot on our brows. Pulaski ignored us as long as he could, until finally he dashed over behind the case and opened negotiations.
“All right, what do you want? Quick!”
Flick led off: “Gimme some Root Beer Barrels.”
“How many do you want!”
Flick: “Gimme four and one Mary Jane.”
Pulaski rushed back to the meat-market counter, filled a container with a mess of sauerkraut, weighed it up, shoved it across the counter to Mrs. Rutkowski, said:
“I’ll be right back,” and rushed back into battle.
“They’re six for a penny. Mary Janes are two for a penny. D’y want Mary Janes or Root Beer Barrels?”
“Gimme four barrels and one Mary Jane.”
“Fer Chrissake!!”
Nine Tin-Mill workers came in in a covey, hollering for beer. Mrs. Rutkowski, in broken English, said something about pickled pigs’ feet. Pulaski retreated and started handing out bottles of beer and Polish pickles. Flick hollered out:
“I only want four barrels.”
Pulaski, for the sixty-third time that day, weighed his left thumb, the heaviest in Northern Indiana, along with a couple of pork chops. Everything was on credit anyway, so it really didn’t make much difference. The Depression was like that.
The place was getting crowded. The flies hummed on and the screen door banged. Mrs. Rutkowski angrily yelled something that could have been Lithuanian, and Pulaski rushed back to the candy counter. Looking right at me and completely ignoring Flick, he said:
“Awright, what do you want?”
He knew what I wanted very well, and before I could even open my mouth he belted me with this thunderclap:
“No more Black Jawbreakers unless ya take one Red one for every Black.”
They were two for a penny. I hated Red Jawbreakers!
“I am getting stuck with too many Red Jawbreakers.”
This was the first time that the laws of Economics and Human Chicanery had impinged on our tumbleweed, windblown lives. For a second we said nothing, stunned.
“What?”
“I said no Jawbreakers unless you buy Red and Black.”
There wasn’t a Red Jawbreaker man in the crowd.
“Make up your mind. D’ya want ’em or not?”
We looked in through the curving glass case and saw that beautiful tray of magnificent Jawbreakers, almost all Red, the few remaining Blacks spotted here and there like diamonds in a bank of blue South African clay. Flick said:
“Red Jawbreakers!”
Schwartz said:
“I’d rather have some rotten Tootsie Rolls!”
I thought it over. For as long as I had remembered, Jawbreakers were two for a penny. Black Jawbreakers. Two for a penny, and now, in effect, the price had doubled. I thought about it. Finally Pulaski’s face loomed over