Two Weeks As a Book Peddler

There was a wall in my childhood bedroom, lined with bookshelves. It held novels and all sorts of different books, from classic fairy tales to graphic novels, but my all-time favorite had to be the gigantic encyclopedia-sized book, filled with Mother Goose rhymes, Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Those whimsical, mysterious and sometimes dark stories were absolutely captivating.

My father, a bibliophile, instilled in his children his love of literature. Every other weekend, Dad would bring home a book, until my room resembled a library. When the shelves were full, the books were placed in boxes under my bed.

We weren’t wealthy; we were firmly middle class. My father taught high school, while my mother worked as a lab technician. We lived in a scheme (suburb) built on an ancient farmland, at the foot of a low mountain. It was built as part of a government program whose aim was to increase housing. Each street was lined with generic copy and paste houses. With additions and remodeling over the years, a lot of the generic houses morphed into the personalities of their owners. We were comfortable in our generic house, in our little part of the world.

My little primary school was about a fifteen-minute walk away from my house. It sat next to an abandoned fish farm, dotted with many acres of square-shaped ponds, where it is said that crocodiles roamed. It had no library. On Fridays, the teachers never teach, so I would bring a few books to school. I was known as the book guy. Kids would huddle around my shoulders, peering through their pages and hungrily digesting their contents, while our teacher would occasionally pop her head into the room and ask us to keep it down.

One Friday, a book I brought to school captivated one of my friends. The book kept him entranced and took him away from our usual antics at lunch period. During recess, he sat under a tree, combing through its pages, oblivious to the games on the playground. After school let out, he asked me if he could borrow the book for the weekend. I could tell that he genuinely loved the book, so I let him borrow it.

However, when I asked him for the book on Monday, he said he had forgotten. "Why don’t I just pay you and keep the book?" he said. I jokingly told him a dollar. To my surprise, he happily offered me a dollar. Perhaps this was his intention all along. Needless to say, I took the dollar, and in that instant, I’d significantly increased my lunch money, sweet, and my two weeks as a book dealer started.

The next day, I brought more books to school, and at lunch, I did my dealings beside the concrete water fountain. And for the next few weeks, my customers increased. I sold some of my most treasured books, the ones that kept me up all night, anxious to turn the next page.

I convinced myself that the books I sold were because I’d already read them, but the truth was, I had a soda, chip, and candy crush. and I had found a way to fund my cravings.

I hated the lunch the school provided. The buns tasted like cardboard. Every time I drank the milk, I could feel the undissolved powder that had been used to make it in the back of my throat. So, at lunch, those who could, went to the higglers (vendors) who lined the chain-linked fence of my school with their sweets, beverages, and long-cooked foods. They were always happy to see us and greeted us with eager smiles. My best indulgence was fried chicken, sold in brown paper bags. The paper bags were always greasy and soaked with the flavor of the chicken, so sometimes I ate the bags too.

Before my book dealings, my lunch money was limited. I always had to decide which food I should spend it on and have enough money left to get snacks, on my way home. However, I was a high roller now, and I didn’t have to choose between a patty or bagged chicken anymore. I got both.

On our walk home from school, we would stop at a wooden shop perched on the side of a dusty road, where I would splurge on my friends, buying them sodas, chips, gum, and all the other guilty amenities of a ten-year-old.

I was living the high life until, on a Friday, as he occasionally does, Dad brought home another book and a bucket of KFC. He entered my room to add the book to my collection. He noticed the rows of books on the shelves were loose and lopsided, with gaps between every other book. In my greed for candy money, I forgot to replace the books that I took from the shelves with the ones from under the bed.

“You sold the books, didn’t you?” He didn’t ask me if I had lent out the books or given them away. He just knew I sold them. Maybe it was the extra candy wrappers in the trash can, or it could’ve been the constant smell of gum coming from my room for the past two weeks that gave it away. I don’t know how he knew I had sold them, but he knew his son well enough to know that I had.

He looked at me and said, “Go get them, now.”

He pointed to my sister, “You. Go with him.”

She tried to protest, but he wasn’t having it. He knew that my sister was usually my lieutenant in my madness, so he probably thought she was in on it too. But my book peddling endeavor was a one-man initiative.

The sun was angry that day, and so was my sister. A few hours had passed since our repossession book quest began. My sister was none too pleased with me as we rode around our neighborhood, from one house to the next, dodging potholes in the streets and watching children play in their yards. She complained about being punished for something that I did.

She sulked as she rode her pink and white bicycle with a deep-set and swept-back crowbar handlebar. Strapped to the front of her bicycle was a pink, plastic-woven basket with white sunflower decorations. In it were the books we’d collected so far. I felt a little guilty as I watched my poor sister lug all those books around. She never got to enjoy the rewards of my deals; instead, she had to suffer with me in the fallout.

My penultimate stop on my quest was at the home of one of my best friends; the one who sparked my entrepreneurship, my first and best customer, Jeffery, whom I fondly called Jet Lee. From a ten-year-old’s perspective, that was a clever play on his name.

Jeffery was the best Stucky player on the playground. "Stucky was our version of tag." He had a wicked sidestep. His jukes would leave the other kids' legs wobbling for the rest of the school day.

He reluctantly returned the books to me, but he understood my situation, and I understood his sadness at having to give them up. He was grateful for the time he spent lost in their pages, which took him to fantastic places and let him experience wondrous creatures.

However, his gaze lingered on the book he had originally borrowed, and a shadow of longing crept into his eyes, like a lover whose soldier had gone off to war, knowing they might never see them again. The book that started it all, “Where the Wild Things Are.” I remembered the look of happiness, the wonder that spread across his face as he began to lose himself in its pages. I remembered the same feeling when I first read it and realized how much the book meant to him. He thanked me with a nod when I handed him back the book. I knew the book was with someone who loved it as much as I did. As I rode away, he told me I didn’t have to repay him.

My next stop was Rohan’s house. He was a richly melanated fellow with big brown, intelligent eyes. He was the youngest in my sixth-grade class and just as vivacious a book addict as Jeffery. When I explained the reason for my repossession quest, he returned a few books and held the rest hostage until I paid him back in full. I reminded him of the situation, but it appeared to only strengthen his position. He thought that maybe it was a ruse, a long con, to sell the books and then ask for them back with some sob story, using my sweet little sister to gain sympathy.

I was too exhausted from my quest to argue, but I was flattered that he thought I was on his level of intellect to come up with a con that elaborate. My sister was still complaining, so I relented. The sun was kissing the horizon anyway, and I’d spent enough time sweet-talking my way into getting my books back, so I decided to head home. The rest of my customers, I told on Monday that they needed to return the books, for a refund, of course.

It was a quiet ride back to our house. The only sounds were the clank of my sister’s bicycle fender every time she hit a pothole and the crunching gravel beneath our wheels. As we rode, the low sun painted the deep blue sky in shades of yellow, orange, and red. By the time we got home, it was completely dark outside.

Our father, who was sitting on the verandah, stepped inside as we rode up to the gate. My sister threw her bicycle to the ground, and the books from her basket scattered onto the driveway. She ran to the garden hose and quenched her thirst. I picked up all the books I could carry, hoping that my sister would get the rest. When I walked inside, my father was sitting in front of the TV. I was anxious, and prepared myself for a lecture, but he just ignored me as I walked by, and kept watching TV. Relief and shame, I felt all at once. I hung my head, went to my room, and returned the books to the shelves.

Every day, I used my lunch money to refund everyone, and my candy, soda, chips, and, in particular, my greasy brown paper bag addictions suffered as a result. For the rest of the month, I had to eat the buns and wash them down with milk from the government lunch program.