My mom made great egg creams. She was not so great at paying bills on time.
I remember losing my first tooth and putting it under my pillow.
No tooth fairy came. I woke my mom up to complain; she said the fairy was on vacation and I should try again.
This went on for weeks. Finally my mom reached into her tip cup and gave me four quarters. Which was a good deal because she let me keep the tooth.
All tooth fairy transactions went like this, until I was just given permission to reach in the cup without asking.
Customers were taught that an orange handle meant decaf; then the cups, sugar, and milk were pointed out. They got this lesson once. From then on they knew how to make their own coffee.
If a fresh pot was brewing, my mom would show the customer the trick of swapping the coffee carafe with their cup.
The first part of making your coffee was to push me or my siblings out of the way. The coffee area sat on top of the ice machine, which we were always reaching in. This was because nearby, the floor had a small hole that went all the way down to the basement.
Our ice cubes were just a touch larger than the hole’s opening. I’d place a cube on top of the hole and pull my fingers away quick. My brother would then stamp the cube down to nowhere. Repeat, forever.
After-school duties included: pulling chicken and turkey off the bone, grating cheddar, decorating the crisscrosses in a ham with cloves, emptying the ice bucket onto the sidewalk, clearing/wiping down tables, folding napkins, rotating milk, filling in bins of candy, noting when we needed more Tootsie Rolls, and taste testing soda.
The Tootsie Rolls were for Debbie. The Peanut Chews for Tommy. All the candy was bought with a customer in mind. The Fun Dip was for me and Minda. Fun Dip = an envelope of powdered sugar that comes with a stick made of solid sugar. You are supposed to dip the stick in the powder and lick it slowly, eating the powder and the stick at the same time, enjoying the many states of sugar. My sister and I would tear the powder off and just eat the candy sticks, always putting the powder part back in the dispenser box.
There were at least three customers that liked the powder, but not the stick. Often I would go for my Fun Dip and find sticks with the powder already ripped off.
This was part of The Store’s magic. As far as I could tell, only a handful of people on earth would want to eat Fun Dip with no stick, and they all happened to visit The Store regularly.
One customer that came in would tell us to pinch at his face. His skin didn’t look different, but when you pulled, it stretched off his jaw like a circus tent.
I learned to pray from TV. I’d do it from time to time. Often, before I went to sleep on the bookshelf that was my bed, I would say to myself, hands clasped together like a roof, “Please, God, let Plastic Man come in The Store tomorrow.”
A customer once showed me how to fold a napkin into a chicken, bunny, and erect penis with balls. Some guy who ordered a shepherd’s pie taught me to understand fractions. Not just how to do them, but why. If he had been a regular, there is a chance I might have become an engineer.
How to fold a napkin
When my brother Charlie was 14 he needed to learn how to wire a double throw light switch. It was for homework.
He was in The Store, books spread on the table in the big booth.
It seemed easy but he couldn’t figure it out.
A double throw has two switches. It is the type of switch used at the top and bottom of stairs to control the same light.
Sitting near Charlie was an architect named Ed. While Ed ate his soup, he tried to help. The soup was finished, but they were both lost on the switch. “I’ll be right back,” said Ed.
Ed ran to his studio two blocks away and grabbed a folder of blueprints and diagrams, and they both learned how to wire a double throw switch together.
At this same age Charlie was running a bulletin board, the computer kind, not the cork kind. It was a BBS (bulletin board system), a terminal other computers could connect to like a website, but this was before websites existed. It ran off our home phone line and a Supra 14.4k modem. Charlie’s board was named “Ultima BBS.” He originally called it “Ultimate BBS,” but at the time BBSs didn’t have images, all the graphics were made of text (ASCII art). When Charlie was drawing out the name, by the time he got to the “ma” of “Ultimate” he had run out of room.
Charlie used BBSs before he ran one. He would post messages, meet users, play games, and, best of all, download pirated software.
Though the software ended up costing money, because all this was done over the phone line, and this was back when a call to Minnesota from New York was long distance. Charlie would download all night, racking up phone bills. My parents were pretty tolerant. They had this belief in supporting us in whatever we were passionate about, even if it was self-destructive or cost-prohibitive.
Charlie remembers he was a dick sysop. Ultima visitors had to jump through hoops. The board had different levels of access, and posting requirements. Charlie felt like God; he could watch and see whatever the users did. He had the power to disconnect them or bestow “elite status.”
People would send him money for better upload ratios. A user named “Lord Jadawin” once sent him three hundred dollars. He used the money to buy a 44meg Syquest hard drive cartridge.
Charlie loved hearing the clicks in the middle of the night. There were inter-BBS games, where his BBS would play another BBS like fighting robots. The phone bills went way down because people were calling him. He didn’t need to call out; all the software he could want was uploaded to Ultima.
People uploaded shareware and pirated video games. They also uploaded thousands of dollars’ worth of new desktop publishing applications like Adobe Photoshop and Quark Express.
In high school Charlie began typesetting The Store’s menu in Quark and printing it on our Apple laser printer, pamphlet style. My dad now through Charlie could change the menu anytime he wanted, which was always.
One day a customer, a regular, came up to my dad and said he saw Charlie’s name on an FBI list. The list was of people the FBI was planning to investigate for software piracy.
I know parents are supposed to feel pride when you graduate or get married. But I don’t know that from experience, I know it from movies.
Because this moment of finding out Charlie was on the FBI watch list to this day fills my dad with that glint in the eye.
Charlie has no such glint. He just recalls getting a “ferocious” warning from Dad that some regular heard that his board was about to be raided by the FBI. He didn’t believe he was in danger, he thought that the customer was full of it, but he was tired of the clicks in the night, and this was a good excuse as any to shut it down.
If you were a regular you got special treatment. Extra cranberry sauce, a sandwich named after you, a tip on an apartment around the block.