The Side Effects of Endorphins

This in excerpt from a short story I can’t quite finish. Maybe somebody will have a better idea for the life of a Paperboy.

It is never a day off when you have a paper route. The people of Mountain Park want their daily paper. They want to do their crosswords, read the obituaries or the local sports scores. The local paper even covered the marbles tournament. They want to read in the paper that it is going to snow even though the paper arrives after it started to snow. Still, they love their paper.

As a 12-year-old I read the newspaper every single day. I enjoyed it as I would spread it on the floor and read the box scores, and the comics on the next page. One thing I never fathomed as a paper boy was that my customers liked the papers all that much. It never dawned on me they did not mind paying for the newspaper.

It had been snowing haphazardly for the last few hours, as I approached the barn where they dropped off my papers. The “Reading Eagle” truck slowly made its way up the hill and sat with the motor idling. The driver callously tossed a bale of my papers into the snow along the side of the road. He told me there was a promotional insert to put in each of the papers. I detested that part of having a paper route. I would take one newspaper, one insert and stuff them into a plastic bag. The people on my route they wanted a dry newspaper. I was already thirty minutes behind as I wanted to go back to bed. Somewhere in the process I simply skipped putting the advertising inserts into the paper. Who reads those anyway.

I walked through the newly driven snow past a dilapidated barn. I occasionally tossed all the inserts into that barn. I tossed, this batch on top of many scattered batches from before. In retrospect, I was an unwanted cog in a bustling industry. I had kept the advertising promos from my clients, and nobody really knew. I was paid a penny an insert.

As the name shows, Mountain Park sits on a series of hills. I did not realize it at the time, but I I was in decent shape. I would trudge up and down those hills with 30 pounds of paper on my back. At the age of 14 having a paper route was a premiere job. It led to an improved standing in life. I got to know the people on my paper route in unexpected ways. At fourteen it felt like the normal progression through life as that is all I knew.

Delivering the papers as the mindless fun part of having a paper route. Occasionally, I would miss someone along the route and there was someone wanting to buy a paper off me. How the business worked, was that I had to pay the newspaper company back at the end of the week. This meant I had to go door-to-door collecting money from people there were no such things as electronic transfers and debit card.

I had a little hole punch that I would punch a hole in people’s cards when they paid. My customers paid me in quarters and occasionally in dollars. For someone, my age, I was never really hurting for cash. So, collecting money to me was paying the neck. Most of the money rolled in at the beginning of the month some people would pay their bills upfront for the month or even for the quarter. I will be rolling in cash at the beginning of the month and struggling to pay for my papers by the end of the month. There were mornings where I paid the paper company and quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies.

I took a second this morning to reflect on being a paper boy.  I wish I was a better paper boy but is what happens when you roam the planet with a not yet fully developed brain. You make bad decisions and hopefully learn from them.