I didn't have a newspaper route like those all American boys riding their bikes with their dogs woofing after them. What I had a wagon full of Goldblatt's circulars. My route was Central Park to Lawndale, 55th to 57th, every single house. I still remember the little store in the middle of route in the middle of the summer with the Nehi 16 oz'ers in all the colors of the rainbow, fresh as a trout from the cooler filled with water and ice. Finished it off in three or four swallows, a big belch, a store-filling sigh, and then taking hold of the wagon's handle and putting my little shoulder to the wheel of commerce. In the middle of winter in the middle of the route my fingers would freeze around that wagon handle.
But they paid me, real dough, I don't know maybe a couple bucks, but in those days you could take your date to the Ritz with that and order steak dinners for the two of you and have a bucket of ice filled with Nehi bottles of every hue.
And you got like points too, they were kind of like green stamps and when you accumulated enough of them you could get an item of merch. And the first item I got was a ruby red transistor radio. All the squares were in their houses watching their stoopid tvs while I was walking the wild bounding mane of 55th to Kedzie to 59th, to Homan and then back again, and I never got bored because I was listening to Dick Biondi.
He was a cool guy, a very cool guy. I was a pretty cool guy myself with my ear to my radio, a pack of Viceroys in my shirt pocket, my collar maybe pulled up, but of course nowhere as cool as Dick Biondi.
Thus went many of the nights of my high school days. But when I went down to Champaign that was all over. Shortly after that there were the Beatles and those really cool guys The Rolling Stones on their heels and not to long after that drugs and psychedelic music. I never looked back.
I had heard a little after I started college, that Dick Biondi had been fired for telling this joke about Dick Biondi baseball: The boys kiss the girls on the strikes and the girls kiss the boys on the balls.
Never really happened as I think I knew even then, but it sounded like a pretty cool move for a very cool guy. Good for him I thought as I lit up that joint and put the Doors album on the stereo.
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