On being a paperboy
Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash
If you've ever been lucky enough to be a paperboy in the suspended hush of a Brooklyn morning, then you held the quiet heartbeat of the world in your hands.
Streets everywhere are silent in the moments before dawn. But the morning streets in Brooklyn, compared to all of the others I’ve ever known, always felt more pregnant with the expectation of the day’s bustle. Maybe it was the way the sunlight would look, creeping up along the brickwork of western walls with a bold line between sun and shadow, between light and dark, between yesterday and today. I’d later come to recognize that light in Edward Hopper paintings, but way back then I hadn’t known anyone else had seen it in just that way. As a boy, this singular moment felt very much like my own found discovery.
Any Brooklyn morning back then, Gram is asleep on the fold-out couch at the time I have to take the newspapers on their march around the neighborhood. Her hands are still tucked under her cheek as she sleeps on her side, like she’s in prayer. I notice her good strong chin when she sleeps like that. She sticks it up in pictures and occasionally at me when she asks me to pluck little white hairs out of it because she can’t see them. Ma is also asleep then, one bare foot hanging off the edge of the bed freed from blankets. Sometimes that foot shakes up and down as she sleeps. My brother’s also asleep in the sagging full-sized bed we share. Maybe a year or so from then we’ll get brand new twin beds when Ma gets a Christmas bonus from the real estate outfit on 56th Street in Manhattan that she works for as a receptionist. But until then my brother and I start off nights on the points of the mattress’s smile and eventually roll down on top of each other in the dip.
The newspapers are out on the stoop, wrapped tight in a very large black garbage bag. On weekdays and Saturdays, I just dump the whole bag into the grocery cart Gram and Ma take to Key Food and bounce it down every crooked stoop step. But on Sundays I have to put the main section in with all the supplements that had been delivered to me the day before. I usually do that work at the kitchen table in a steady rhythm. A couple of weeks into the job and I can do it in just minutes.
The man who is my boss has delivered my papers in the wee small hours. I have no idea how many paperboys he has to deliver big black garbage bags to. I have no idea about him at all really. He’s not a main factor in my life, just the man who gives me lists of names and addresses. Once a week I collect cash from customers, then hand it to him and he hands me back some cash as my cut. And then I give half of that to Ma. This rhythm of all this is no different than the rhythm of putting the Sunday paper together with the supplements. It’s just what you do.
Being a paperboy is my first job. I’ll get another job in a few months when the summer comes and the school janitor needs some help cleaning out the basement. I’ll be 13 and will have two jobs, one before school and the other after. It makes me feel good about myself.
My route is maybe about 10 blocks, from Huntington Street up to Union Street and back again, between the two main streets, Clinton and Court. There’s a lot of customers on all those side streets, so I always loop up and down the blocks, like stitches going in and out of a button. Each block is rectangular, each fronted by even rows of attached houses with brownstone or redbrick façades. Almost every house has a stoop with stone steps and black wrought iron railings. Each house is usually two or three stories high, not counting the half-submerged basement that some people new to the neighborhood call the “garden apartment,” because it has access to the backyard. Some of the rowhouses are wide, others narrow. A few of the redbrick ones have had their fronts painted white or light brown or blue, but most people have been sandblasting them back to their original brick if they can afford it. This is the beginning of gentrification, but I don’t know the name or the idea at 13 years old. I just love how all the houses are starting to look the same and cleaner and sharper than I had known them. Our house’s tan and brown paint has been peeling for a while and I had never noticed it until a girl from down the block started making fun of it—and us.
Two or three families occupy each house. Back when these houses were first built, it was one family per house, but that was long before the days that I’m pushing a grocery cart full of newspapers before them. In a lot of these houses, members of the same extended family occupy different apartments. That’s how it is at my house, which is smaller than most of the others in the neighborhood. I live with Gram, Ma and my brother downstairs and my aunt, uncle and two cousins live upstairs. We have separate kitchens and bathrooms and all that, but we’re in and out of each other’s places all the time, sometimes too much so. Both places are small, tiny really, with just a kitchen, living room and a pair of bedrooms in each. I’ll never understand just how small and cramped and old my house is until I go to college and visit friends in the summer who live in houses in the suburbs that look like the ones I see in TV sitcoms. But our house is always clean and smells of good Italian cooking and warmth.
Delivering papers makes me imagine the lives of the people who read them. I don’t interact with them much, except when I get paid. Few ever invite me in. I usually stand out on the front stoops, rain or shine, and wait. An old lady sometimes invites me in to offer me hot chocolate on a cold day. She’s got a living room with couches and chairs covered in plastic slipcovers and a big thing hidden under a sheet in one corner. I don’t know what it is, but I think it's weird. I mention it to Ma, who knows the lady. She tells me it’s her fake Christmas tree. She keeps it up all year, this old lady, then pulls the sheet off every December 1st, adjusts a few ornaments, then turns on the lights. After the Epiphany, she covers it back up. It’s a little weird to my mind, but her hot chocolate is always great.
When I ring their doorbells on Sundays to get paid, it’s usually later in the morning or early afternoon. I find all kinds of people in various states. Some look like they had been in bed five seconds before and show up in underwear or robes, with stuck-up hair and crusty eyes. Some come to the door dressed up for church or company, with old men smelling of Old Spice and cigarettes and old women smelling of powder and perfume, like the makeup counter at Woolworth’s. There’s also harried moms who yank the door open and yell back to some unseen kid to fetch a purse and hungover dads who ask me through squinted eyes to come back next week. Everyone’s got a life or a story. I just don’t know them apart from these moments. To me, they’re just customers. To them, I’m just the paperboy.
What I do know is that they all read the papers and sometimes complain about the state of them on rainy or snowy days. I try my best to give them a clean paper but I always find myself stammering out apologies because I’m too shy and too dense to realize that some of these people might be letting their papers sit out in bad weather for one reason or another or are just lying to me. Understanding why people do or say things only comes to me later in life. Right then, I’m fairly certain they’re right and I’m a moron.
I want to do my job right, so I can get paid and also because I get tips sometimes. I think somehow every little bit helps Ma. I don’t want people to complain about their papers because then I feel like they’re complaining about me and I might lose my job. I still have yet to learn that some people are just complainers even though I hear people complain all the time.
I don’t complain much. I keep my mouth shut. I don’t ever talk to people about the fact that we don’t have a lot of money or that my parents don’t live together because my dad’s a drunk or that my grandmother once had something called a nervous breakdown or how my father hardly sees us and never gives us money. Nobody wants to hear it. And if they do, nobody will understand it. So I stuff all that down and share it with just a few people, hoping they won’t love me less for admitting it or leave me on account of it.
In the sliver of light before dawn, I walk the streets under the arching tree branches and watch them move from brown and bald in winter to sweet-smelling and budding in spring to blooming in summers of sizzling asphalt. From the outside, all the houses are connected, block upon never-ending block, on and on. In a lot of them, they read my newspapers. The same newspapers. A seed is planted in my soul without my realizing it. I’m unconscious of it for a long while as the seed’s roots reach out for nourishment. It’s the writing that connects them, I realize, it’s the stories told. I want to know how to do that, how to tell a story, how to connect people all over, no matter who they are. I push my cart, toss my paper, move to the next house, on and on, reaching for another and another.
This is what I’m supposed to do. I’m 13. I’m a paperboy. In a few months, I’ll be a janitor’s assistant. But someday I’ll be a writer.
