“He looks like an undercover priest.”
This was Alf again—his family was Catholic and he was always warning us about undercover priests, holy men who dressed in plain clothes and patrolled Wetbridge looking for troublemakers. Clark and I told him this was bullshit; there was no mention of “undercover priests” in the dictionary or the encyclopedia or any book in the library. Alf insisted this secrecy was deliberate; he claimed that undercover priests lived in the shadows, completely anonymous, by strict order of the Vatican.
We sat on the bench for well over an hour, and Clark started getting impatient. “This is hopeless,” he said. “Let’s go to Video City. We can rent Kramer vs. Kramer.”
“Not again,” Alf said.
“It beats sitting here all night,” Clark said.
Video City checked for ID and refused to rent R-rated films to anyone under the age of seventeen. But Clark researched their inventory and discovered a number of PG movies with shocking amounts of female nudity: Barry Lyndon, Barbarella, Swamp Thing. The best of these was Kramer vs. Kramer, the 1979 Oscar winner for Best Picture, starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. The story—something about two grown-ups getting divorced—was insanely boring, and we always fast-forwarded to the forty-four-minute mark, when Dustin Hoffman’s hot one-night stand gets out of bed to use the bathroom. What follows are fifty-three seconds of jaw-dropping full-frontal nudity filmed from multiple angles. We had rented the movie a dozen times, but never watched more than a minute of it.
“I’m tired of Kramer vs. Kramer,” Alf said.
“I’m tired of sitting on this bench,” Clark said. “None of these people are going to help us. Operation Vanna isn’t working.”
“Traffic’s picking up,” I pointed out. “Let’s give it a little more time.”
In the late afternoon, the trains started arriving every fifteen minutes, discharging dozens of age-appropriate male passengers, most of them carrying overcoats and briefcases. They filed past Zelinsky’s on their way out of the train station, and a few ducked inside the store for cigarettes or scratch-off tickets. But we watched them march past without saying a word. We couldn’t bring ourselves to ask any of them for help. They looked way too respectable.
“Maybe we should call it quits,” I suggested.
“Thank you,” Clark said.
But Alf was already pointing across the street to the train station. “There,” he said. “That guy.”
Emerging from a crowd of suits and ties came a young man dressed in denim cutoffs, a red flannel shirt, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. I felt like I’d seen him before, maybe hanging around the parking lot of Wetbridge Liquors. He had hair like Billy Idol, bleached white and spiky, sticking straight up.
“He looks . . . fishy,” I said.
“Fishy is good,” Clark said. “We want fishy.”
“Excuse me, sir!” Alf called.
The guy didn’t miss a beat. He veered toward us like fourteen-year-old boys flagged him down all the time. The mirrored shades made it impossible to read his expression, but at least he was smiling.
“What’s up, fellas?”
Alf held out the twenty bucks. “Can you buy us some Playboys?”
His smile widened. “Vanna White!” he said knowingly. “I heard about these pictures!”
“Three copies is twelve dollars,” Alf explained. “You could keep the change.”
“Shit, man, you don’t have to pay me. I’ll do it for nothing!”
We stared at him in disbelief.
“Seriously?” Alf asked.
“Sure, I grew up around here. My name’s Jack Camaro, like the car.” He shook hands with all of us, like we were old friends. “I’m glad I can help. You guys need anything else? Penthouse? Cigarettes? Maybe some Bartles and Jaymes?”
Alfred counted twelve dollars into his palm. “Just three Playboys.”
“We really appreciate it,” I told him. “Thank you.”
“Three Playboys,” Jack Camaro repeated. “No problem. You guys sit tight.”
He stepped inside Zelinsky’s, and the three of us stared after him, slack-jawed. It was like we’d summoned a magical genie to obey our every whim and command. A moment later Jack Camaro exited the store and returned to us, still clutching the twelve dollars.
“I just had a crazy idea,” he said. “Are you guys sure three copies is enough?”
“Three is plenty,” I said.
“One for each of us,” Alf said.
“Just hear me out,” Jack Camaro said. “I bet your school is full of horndogs who want to see these pictures. If you bought a couple extra magazines, you could charge whatever you wanted.”
We all realized the brilliance of his proposal and everyone started talking at once. Most of our male classmates would happily spend ten or fifteen or even twenty dollars to own the Vanna White photos for themselves. Jack Camaro suggested that we allocate “rental copies” for everyone else; we could loan them out for one or two dollars a night, just like the movies at Video City.
“You’re a genius!” Clark exclaimed.
Jack Camaro shrugged. “I’m an entrepreneur. I look for opportunities. This is what we call supply and demand.”
We dug deep in our pockets and pooled the rest of our money—another twenty-eight dollars. Jack Camaro would buy ten copies for a total of forty bucks, but we insisted that he keep one of the magazines as a service fee.
“That’s too generous,” he said.
“It’s the least we can do,” Alf insisted.
He took our money into the store and we returned to our bench. Suddenly our futures seemed alive with hope and possibilities. With Jack Camaro’s help, we could all be entrepreneurs.
“And make a fortune!” Alf exclaimed.
“Take it easy,” Clark told him. “Let’s not get carried away.” He urged us to be sensible and invest our profits into more magazines—not just Playboy but Penthouse, Hustler, Gallery, and Oui. “I’m talking hundreds of copies. If we have enough inventory, there’s no limit to this thing!”
Alf announced his plans to buy a Ford Mustang; Clark said he would pay for surgery to remove the Claw; and I would help my mother with bills so she wouldn’t worry all the time.
These dreams lasted all of six or seven minutes.
“Sure is taking a while,” Clark finally said.
“It’s rush hour,” Alf reasoned. “The store gets crowded.”
But we’d been watching the door the whole time, and no other customers had entered or left the building.
“Maybe he’s an undercover priest,” I suggested. “Maybe he and Zelinsky are calling the Vatican.”
Alf turned to me, angry. “That really happens, Billy! You don’t hear about it because undercover priests don’t want the publicity, but it happens!”