Bobby paid me back before English next day. He only had $1 so he was going to skip again. I loaned him another dollar before lunch. I told him I wanted another three cents next day. I had an extra dollar.three next day before English. This got to be kind of a habit. Bobby was kind of forgetful, and I had an extra fifteen cents every week. Ray usually sat with us, and he thought the whole scam was hilarious.
Ray forgot his dollar one day and asked me for a dollar. I reminded him the extra three cents. He was fine with it. Ray was also generally buying Betty lunch, and it was Bobby and Kathy, and Darren, Fred, and Joey at the baseball table, and the scooter bunch with Walter, and I guess I was really eating lunch for free that year. I might hand out thirty or forty dollars at noon every day, but I always got it back next morning in English, and everybody had lunch. Sometimes I’d forget my own dollar, then pretty soon I just stopped bothering Dad. He had work and stuff. Grownups have lots of things to do every day.
Actually I talked to Marge the lunch lady and got a discounted rate whenever I had a hundred lunches. She would just write them down and I’d pay everybody off. There was some teachers in there, who got their own discounts, and had another computation, and usually it would be three or four o’clock before we got it all worked out. The bank would be closed, and Marge would give me the deposit to drop off on the way home. First thing in the morning, I would give her the receipt from yesterday, and the twenty dollars to start out the register with.
Marge had more free time, and was getting her hair done, and was talking to Ellen the principal’s wife, and after Christmas I was also doing the high school, our other middle school, and three elementary schools. The elementary schools were just paper transactions, because little kids didn’t carry money every day, and just charged til the end of the month. I only charged two cents a day for little kids, just for the tracking fees. But the high school was big dollars. I think some of those kids had two or three lunches every day. The football guys all went through the coach, but if they ate three lunches, it was nine cents. We had a system, and it worked, and everybody benefited. People would join in at the beginning of the year, pay their dollar membership, and not worry all year long about lunch.
I had a kid in every school to do the early morning transactions, and all I really did was bring around the little bags of money in the morning to start, and take all the big bags to the bank at night and drop them off. But I was doing the whole county, and my bicycle just wasn’t making it, so I got the Maserati. Like the sales guy told me, it’s not like $350,000 all at once. It’s only $1,000/month. I have people eating lunch for $1,000+ every day.
Except for Saturday and Sunday, which was a problem. Me and Jenny were sitting on the patio at Starbucks up on the hill one Saturday morning, just vegging out and doing our e-mail, and people watching over at the MCD across the street, when it hit me. It was Saturday, and we were watching people eating lunch. Actually breakfast, lunch and dinner, and actually all day long, from five o’clock to after midnight. Not only MCD, but KFC, Subway, Panera, Raisin Cane’s...
I’m all out of school now. At this stage of my life I guess I would be in ninth grade. I guess I would be learning this algebra stuff, and maybe reading books about Chinese people, or Indians. I mean, I have Google on my phone, if I need to really know something. Me and Jenny manage most everybody who eats anything in Philly, New Jersey, and most of the way out to Pittsburgh. I got people everywhere making sure everything runs smooth. Frankie Soprano goes and sees my little problem people now and then. There’s no real problems.
Jenny says we got a fershur meeting with Bobby and his girlfriend Pammy tomorrow at Starbucks, so we got to be there. They want to buy a house or something. :)