"God throws money out the window" my mother always said. What she meant by that was unclear to me as a boy, and remains something of an enigma today as I totter towards the grave. But she was convinced it was a true saying, and that it covered a lot of ground when it came to economics.
I first heard her say it when my dad won a pink Cadillac convertible with a raffle ticket purchased from one of the priests at Saint Lawrence in Southeast Minneapolis. The raffle was to raise money for renovating the grade school. Someone with very pious bad taste had donated the vehicle, and when my dad drew the winning ticket he immediately loaned the car to his crony Skeets to drive up to Northern Wisconsin for the smelt run. Inordinately fond of smelt fried in lard, with the heads still on, my dad licked his chops in anticipation of Skeets returning with brimming tubs of Osmeridae -- but when several weeks passed without Skeets or the Caddy returning dad became restive.
"Damn that Bohunk!" he griped to my mother. "You can never trust a Pollack to do anything right!" Dad liked to mix his racial epithets the same way he liked to mix whiskey and 7 Up. Skeets eventually showed up, sheepishly explaining that the car was now part of a fish hatchery in Lake Superior for reasons that remained rather hazy and indistinct, but involved a case of Leinenkuegel's and the daughter of a resort owner whose hair was not platinum after all.
"There goes our trip to the Corn Palace!" dad said, rather cryptically. "And I just paid fifty bucks to have that thing repainted black."
"God throws money out the window" said mom, just as cryptically.
As I grew older but no sharper I wondered about money -- how to get it, how to spend it, but mostly how to get it. I held several menial positions while in high school, scraping together a pittance that would not have fed Mahatma Gandhi. I hated to work after school; it took me away from the mellow and soothing influence of the flickering television screen. I had the ambition of a garden slug.
And then I answered an ad in
LIFE magazine and found myself a pupil at Clown College in Venice, Florida. Ringling Brothers decided I would fit a large number of their already-made show costumes, so I was hired at the staggering salary, to me, of ninety dollars a week.
Suddenly in the chips, one of my first extravagances was to buy all the White Castle hamburgers I could hold. I thought they were the most delicious and elegant comestibles on earth when my dad brought them home on a hot summer evening as a way to keep mom from getting heat stroke in the kitchen. But I was only allowed two of them. Now that I was earning my own money, I ordered a dozen of 'em when the show played Indianapolis, and ate every blessed one. Then went to the ER to have my stomach pumped -- which cost a heck of a lot more than the the twelve sliders did.
So I was out the cost of a dozen White Castle burgers and the ER fee, which I recall was about fifty bucks.
After that I limited my splurging to books. I haunted used book stores like a ghoul in a graveyard, pawing over Asimov paperbacks and crumbling Book of the Month Club hardcovers like Osa Johnson's
I Married Adventure. My roomette on the train quickly filled with so many books that I was hard put to pull down the Murphy bed and latch it to the opposite wall so it wouldn't bounce back up in the middle of the night, with me in it.
While ninety dollars a week seemed a princely sum to me, it did not impress my co-workers in clown alley. The other First of Mays found ways and means to expand their income. Bear worked cherry pie, helping to set up and tear down in each town, for which he earned an additional twenty-five dollars each week. Chico loaned money to the improvident roustabouts, demanding and getting an astounding vigorish. Others formed liaisons with gullible showgirls and lived off of them.
Still, at the end of that first season I had managed to put away a tidy sum in the bank. I moved back in with my parents with free room and board and smugly awaited events.
I pass over many of those events to the year 1986, when the cry rang out through my own little family of one wife and six kids, "We've got to cut back on spending!" This hallowed trope from many a TV sitcom and B movie was inspired by the escalating cost of providing for a growing bribe that insisted on eating three times a day and wearing clothes that fit. Such unreasonable demands never seemed to stop.
I'd spent many a season on the road as a clown; some of them had proved profitable, and some had not. Now it seemed the unprofitable seasons were outnumbering the profitable ones to a distressing degree. I had to map out a plan of action to keep the wolf from licking the rosemaling off our door.
First on my list was a call to my parents, asking for a temporary loan to help pay for some unexpected car repair bills and a swingeing great doctor's fee stemming from two of my boys believing they could coast safely to the ground from the roof of the house with the use of cardboard wings. Their fuselages had needed major patching up.
My dad said "No" and hung up. This I had expected. But mom had a soft spot for her grand kids, so I called again when dad was at work. Her response was sympathetic but also negative. It seemed that dad was soon to be retired from Aarone's Bar and Grill, where he had worked and drank for some forty years. So, mom ended sadly, there wasn't anything she could do because . . . "God throws money out the window."
So I took a second job selling educational video cassette tapes in the evening over the phone. It was just as exciting and profitable as it sounds. As this was the winter off season, I was working days as Santa Claus at the Rosedale Mall.
Just as we began to pull ahead financially the one and only upstairs bathtub popped a rivet; the resulting leak left a sinister brown boil on the dining room ceiling. The plumber's inspection revealed pipes so rotten with age and rust that the repair bill would surpass the annual state budget for Guinea-Bissau.
We worked out a payment plan with the plumber, a Mr. Dix whose little white van featured a grinning man in blue overalls with a balloon over his head reading "When you're in a fix, call Dix!"
It certainly was a fix; there would be no Christmas tree that year and no trip to Grandma and Grandpa's up in North Dakota. Presents would be of the Dollar Store variety. But at least we'd have a bathtub again. In the meantime, a jury-rigged system of buckets and tubes in the basement provided an interesting demonstration of hydraulics as applied to the principals of bathing.
I cursed myself as a fool for buying a home; I should have invested in a trailer, and then we could all have traveled together when I hit the road as a clown! In the winters we could snuggle down at a trailer park in the Florida Keys. Now we had nothing but bills to look forward to until the sun rose in the west.
Christmas came and went, and it was not as cheerless as I had dreaded. The kids played outside in the snow while Amy and I shredded Past Due notices into doilies for the dinner table -- which featured a steaming pot of mac and cheese, with canned peaches for dessert.
When the large check arrived from an old clown alley pal, in repayment, he said, for several gag ideas I'd given him when he went to work for Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers, I could only shake my head and repeat "God throws money out the window."
