The other memory of my grandfather I have is going drinking with him. This was just after my brother was born in 1983. My grandfather would come around the house, pick me up, and take me out to give my mom some peace. Then grandpop and I would hit the bars. I’d get a Coke and he’d get a grown-up drink (always a Manhattan) and I’d watch him go around and talk to everyone in the bar, hamming it up one moment, having whispered discussions to the side the next, pats on the backs and handshakes all around. Meanwhile, I sat there occupying myself with the plastic sword-shaped drink stirrers, which I would use as weapons for my GI Joe guys, which I would bring along on these trips to keep myself occupied. After a bit, we’d head to another bar and the scene would repeat itself. By the time we were finished, I’d have pockets full of these little swords and a belly full of Coke.*
For the child who has everything: Legos and a block of “Oink” ham (stipend for later-in-life therapy not included).
I’d also leave the bars with a fistful of money. All the older guys my grandpop talked to would make a fuss over me, messing my hair, calling me “champ,” saying things like, “Jasper, how are you doing in school?” or “Hey, Jasper, how about them Phillies?” These men always called me Jasper, likely because my own grandfather also called me Jasper. For some reason, Grandpop Brennan had a bit of trouble with the name Jason, which in the early ’80s was relatively new (or newly popular). So when my grandpop would introduce me to a friend as “my grandson Jasper,” I’d have to correct him and say, “No, Grandpop—it’s Jason, not Jasper!” Grandpop would take a sip of his Manhattan, laugh it off, slap me on the back, and say, “That’s what I said! You’d better take that fudge out of your ears!”** Possibly because they felt bad that my grandpop continually screwed up my name, the older guys I’d get introduced to as Jasper/Jason always ended each hello by giving me a dollar bill and buying me a soda. Since we’d go to several bars an afternoon, I’d end up with ten or so dollars. Not a bad haul for a four-year-old, so I was able to find it in my heart to forgive both them and my grandpop for calling me Jasper. Then I’d return home to my mom and wreak havoc, since I had just had thirteen Cokes in four hours.
I loved these trips to the bars, both going on them as a child and reliving them in my memory when I got older. Until a few years ago, I thought these drinking sessions with my grandfather were his way of bonding with me. Sure, maybe it’s not entirely healthy to bring a child to a bar, let him watch you drink, then drunkenly drive him around to several other bars, then drop him off at his parents’ house so hopped up on caffeine that he’d run screaming through the house with his pants off yelling that he was the Lizard King. But in a strange, semidysfunctional way, there was something sweet about the whole thing; a grandfather getting his grandson prepared for the lifestyle that he would take to so readily later in his own life. Kind of nice, isn’t it?
But then I got older and I realized that the original intention of these trips was not to bond. Nor was it to prepare me for later life. My grandfather was out “collecting.” And he was using me as a decoy.
After serving as a chef in the merchant marine in World War II, my Grandpop Brennan, like all the other men in the neighborhood, became a longshoreman.* When he wasn’t cooking, a longshoreman was basically what he was in the merchant marine, assisting the navy by transporting goods and supplies, so the transition to civilian life was easier for him than many. But working longshore was just his day job, a legitimate way to pay the bills. He had other, more interesting pursuits.
My grandfather was a number writer. This was the job for which he was known all throughout the neighborhood. Number writing is an old-school form of gambling. Though it still exists, it’s a dying art, slowly being fazed out by the rampant sports gambling of today. Back in the old days, the state lottery system didn’t exist. So organized crime took it upon itself to create one. Number writing is an intensely complicated (and secretive) type of gambling. Whole books can be written about it.** But I’ll give it to you in a couple of paragraphs.
The one-sentence explanation is that number writing is essentially a private lottery run by organized crime. I am hesitant to use the term organized crime, as it conjures up images of burly Italian guys in bad suits. But it’s the term to use because a) number writing was (and is) highly organized, and b) it is illegal. You would play numbers like you play the lottery today, but instead of going to a machine, you’d go to a guy like my grandpop. He’d take down your number and how much you wanted to bet. For example, 789 every day for two dollars. The winning number is not determined by drawing with numbered Ping-Pong balls but by horse races. The first digit of the three-digit winning number would be based on the winners of a certain number of the races. For example, let’s say that in the first three races of the day at X Racetrack, Horse 2 wins the first race, Horse 6 wins the second, and Horse 1 wins the third. These three numbers (2-6-1) would be taken and put into a mysterious mathematical formula resulting in a single, one-digit number. That single, one-digit number would be the first digit of the day’s three-digit winning number. The process would be repeated, where Races 4–5–6 would provide the second winning digit and Races 7–8–9 the third.
The “bank” or “backer” is the man who announces the day’s winning number. This is a man who is fairly high up in the system and, as the name implies, fronts the money (he could either be the end of the line or someone could front money to him, leading further and further up a hierarchy). He then would call his bookies, sitting in bars all over the neighborhood, who would then relay the winning number to his “clients,” the people “in his book.”* My grandfather started as a bookie-level number writer, then became a backer. It was a profession that suited him, as it required him to do his two favorite things: be social and drink. Since he was very, very good at these two things, he became very, very good at being a number writer.
This side business allowed my grandfather to provide a good life for his wife and six kids. My father, who grew up on powdered milk and didn’t have a steak until he was on his honeymoon, always called my mom “rich” for her seemingly opulent childhood, which included annual family vacations down the shore and more than one toy on Christmas. And while the money was good, the excitement of knowing that Daddy was a popular bookie made it even better. My mom speaks almost fondly of a time when she was eight years old and their house was raided by a squadron of undercover vice cops. My grandfather and his partner were upstairs when it started—the photos on the walls shaking as the police kicked down the door. Inside, six children ranging in age from one to fifteen sat dumbfounded when the police burst into the home. As the police rushed upstairs to apprehend my grandpop, he came out of the bedroom and surrendered. But before being taken away, he asked if he could get his kids out of the house—he didn’t want them to see their father being led away in handcuffs. The police agreed, so my grandfather went and said good-bye to his kids—Mikey, Joey, Kathy, Anne, Maureen, and the baby, Billy. He gave each a kiss and promised them everything would be all right, but to Billy he gave something else—his scripts of numbers. The numbers were always written on rice paper so that they could dissolve quickly if they needed to be flushed down the toilet. My grandfather had stuffed them down his pants when he heard the raid coming, and now he removed them and stuck them in Billy’s diaper. If they had been confiscated in the raid, not only would it have been proof of his involvement in gambling, but he also would have had to pay out hundreds or even thousands of dollars in lost bets. The kids were taken from the house, moved only a block away by my grandmother to my grandfather’s sister’s house, my Great-Aunt Mary. When Mary discovered the numbers stuffed in Billy’s diaper, she panicked and—sure enough—flushed them down the toilet. My grandfather was released after a night in jail, and his first order of business was to go around to Mary’s house to pick up the numbers. When she told him that she had panicked and flushed them, he got so enraged that he didn’t speak to his sister for over a year, so upset was he that he had to pay out
all that money.
So when my grandpop took me out on these bar trips, he was, more or less, using me. That’s not to say that he didn’t like showing me off to his friends and acquaintances, nor is it to say that we didn’t have a good time (see: GI Joes, Cokes, plastic drink stirrers), but my primary purpose was to serve as a decoy. I was there to throw off suspicion from the cops who regularly harassed him. If he were alone, he’d look more like he was making the rounds. If he had his grandson with him, he was just showing the kid off. * He did the same to my mother and her brothers and sisters when they were kids, so when I was old enough, I became one of the next generation of decoys.
More than a number writer, my grandfather was a true street entrepreneur who always had a scheme or a plan and was never afraid to have someone in the family involved. When his son, my Uncle Joey, got a job as a teenager at the local supermarket, my grandpop would head down during Joey’s shift and “buy” turkeys, hams, and meat, then take them and sell them down at the waterfront to his coworkers and longshoremen buddies. The same happened when my mom worked at Toys ‘R’ Us when I was a kid. As a kid, having a mom that works for Toys ‘R’ Us is the equivalent of me now marrying a brewer or someone who owns an onion ring factory. I had a direct connection to Shangri-la, and I was crushed when she finally quit to take another job. It was worse than learning there was no Santa. If he had lived to see it, my grandfather would have been crushed when she quit, too, since he was using her in the same way that he was using my Uncle Joey. Especially around Christmastime, my grandpop would go to Toys ‘R’ Us during my mom’s shift, fill up his cart, and wait patiently to be checked out by her, even if other lines were shorter. She’d scan every second or third item, my grandfather would pay, and then take the toys straight down the waterfront for resale. In this way, he was like a modern-day Robin Hood. Well, not really, but it sounds kinda nice.
That was my grandfather, street entrepreneur, number writer, fun son of a bitch. Wheeling, dealing, always having a good time, and perhaps influencing me more than either he or I knew.
Like many young boys, I was fascinated with fireworks. What’s not to like, really? Let’s see, there are explosions (check), noise (check), light (check), and the potential for extreme finger-losing danger (check, check, check). One of my favorite times of the year was when the Phillies would have their annual early July home stand to coincide with the July Fourth holiday. Each night, over three games, the sky above Veterans Stadium would be filled with exploding light: the flares of the reds and blues and greens dancing above our heads.
My mom and dad (or one or the other) always took me and my brother and sister to see these fireworks. We’d drive up to the Lakes, the park that neighbored the Vet, and make a nice little evening of it. My friends would be there with their parents, and so we’d run around, play Wiffle ball, and carry on. Meanwhile, our parents would talk, drink beer, and barbecue while listening to the game on the radio. One of the dads would announce that the game was over, and my friends and I would fix our attention on the night sky, hoping to be the first to see the opening flare of the light darting upward from the stadium.
And then, with a sonic boom, it began; our heads pointed skyward to catch the show of noise and light. I’d sit there silent, neck arched, mesmerized by the display. The sulfur burning off from the fireworks, mixed with the smell of the grass and the grilled meat; the blasts of light reflecting off the car windshields, parked on the grass with their hatchbacks and truck beds open; the humidity and the thin layer of mist that hung on me like a cloak; the booms and ooohs drowning out the sound of Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn on the Phillies postgame show coming from the radio—these are some of the finest memories of my youth.
As I grew older, I learned that fireworks didn’t just come in the sky-exploding variety. I knew about firecrackers but didn’t consider them fireworks, since all they did was make loud noises and blow shit up. I was totally behind the blowing-shit-up aspect of the firecrackers, but what most interested me were projectile fireworks, such as bottle rockets, which could be fired at people and stray animals; light fireworks, like jumping jacks, which looked like firecrackers but instead spun noiselessly in a ball of light; and my favorite, the Roman candle, which combined the best aspects of the bottle rocket and the jumping jack, as it could be fired at people and stray animals with much more accuracy than the bottle rocket and would light up brighter than any jumping jack.*
But these fireworks, though awesome, were hard to come by. We only got see them on the Fourth of July when our parents lit them (we were never allowed to even get near them, let alone fire them off). Otherwise, we were fireworks-less 364 days a year. Until I met Henry.
The idea for the fireworks business was mine. Let’s be clear about that right away. David will tell you that he was the mastermind behind our enterprise, but that is simply not the truth. I won’t belittle his contributions to the business, because they were indeed significant, but it was my brainchild. All mine.
Now we can move forward.
After my parents’ divorce was finalized, my mom, brother, sister, and I moved back into our old house and my dad moved out. He bounced around a few different places before settling down in what had been his brother Mikey’s house. The house was on a street called Beulah Street, which at the time was not a nice part of the neighborhood. However, despite this, or perhaps more appropriately, because of this, the street was like a family. The good people of the block banded together to create a safer environment for their families, resulting in a true sense of community.
One of the members of this community was a guy named Henry, who lived across the street from my dad. A middle-aged Italian guy who smoked three packs a day, Henry delivered pizzas in the neighborhood for my favorite pizza place, Two Street Pizza. But Henry’s real passion was not pizza. It was fireworks—glorious, glorious fireworks. Shortly after my dad and Henry made acquaintances, no doubt having bonded over their mutual love of and admiration for Marlboro Reds, my dad took me over to Henry’s house and into his basement. I was around eleven at the time, young, impressionable, and always looking for new ways to hurt myself and/or get in trouble. And then I saw Henry’s basement.
The basement was filled with fireworks. And I mean filled in the most literal sense—there was not two square feet of space that wasn’t covered by some sort of fireworks. All I saw before me were mounds of mounds of packages, Chinese lettering, and crinkly red paper. Henry had all the normal fireworks that I enjoyed, but in quantities I had never seen before: cases of bricks of jumping jacks, firecrackers, Roman candles, and bottle rockets, stacked on top of each other, several rows deep. He walked carefully around the room, pointing out and explaining to me the fireworks that I was unfamiliar with. But I was too dazed to notice. I had found where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
These were the years that my dad was still feeling guilty about the divorce, so I walked out of Henry’s basement with more fireworks than I could carry—surely enough to last me for the next few months.
(I’d be back for more in a week.)
The next day, I took some of my fireworks around the Park, the concrete playground where my friends and I hung out at the corner of Second and Jackson. Once night fell, I pulled some of the jumping jacks out of my pocket and lit them with matches I had taken from my house. In that very instant, I transformed from “that nerdy kid who I hear kisses his hamster” to “Holy shit, that guy has fireworks!” Remember, we were just kids at this point, in only fourth or fifth grade. Fireworks are to fifth-graders what sex is to high school kids: mysterious, tantalizing, and terrifying. Also, highly addictive.
After the display was over, a display which consisted of me gingerly lighting single jumping jacks and throwing them as far away from me as possible so as not to get hurt, my friend Jimmy the Muppet came up to me.
“Yo, you got any more of them?” he asked.
“Yeah, I got some more at home, but I ain’t bringing them out.” The last thing I ne
eded was for everyone to make a big deal over the fireworks. Don’t get me wrong—I liked the idea of the uptick in popularity that being the proud owner and displayer of fireworks would no doubt produce, but if my friends knew how many I had, they’d be hitting me up for free packs. And the older kids…forget about it. If they knew I was holding fireworks, I’d be beat up and picked on into oblivion and left without a single bottle rocket to my name. So I intended to ration them out, using only a pack here and there, and preferably when no older kids were around.
“I don’t want you to bring them out—I want to buy some off you.”
Jimmy and I snuck away from the crowd and I took him around to my house, where after promising him not to tell anyone how much I had, I sold him a pack of jumping jacks for seventy-five cents. Since I paid nothing for that pack, I made seventy-five cents straight profit. And it was right about here that the lightbulb went off.
I could sell these fireworks.
It would be really easy, too. I had more fireworks than I knew what to do with. I could keep them for personal use, but they were almost a burden. As I knew, my friends would constantly beg me for free packs, and the older kids would make sure that any cool fireworks I brought around the Park would be confiscated via wedgie. By selling them, I wouldn’t have to deal with this and could make some money. And if I was selling them, the older kids wouldn’t take them. Selling them was a way to legitimize the fact that I had them and portray myself as a businessman. The older kids could be dicks, but they weren’t about to rob me.
Yes, I could sell these fireworks.
And I could make a lot of money.
After all, no one else sold fireworks. Or rather, no other eleven-year-old sold fireworks. Maybe some adults sold them, but they surely wouldn’t sell them to kids, something I had no moral objection to doing, since I was a kid and all and these were my friends. One look at the jumping jacks or one thought of the potential destruction the firecrackers could cause and my friends would be desperate for more. How could they not be? And after that first taste, if they wanted more, they had to go through me, since I was the only game in town; without even realizing it, I had single-handedly cornered the market on illegal fireworks, with one bulk purchase from my supplier, Henry. I had the product, I was the only one with the product, and I was looking to liquefy.
Everything Is Wrong with Me Page 8