The Homeless Millionaire

I was up before six the next day, and at the colporteur by twenty to seven. I had taken the haversack I'd brought from home for books and other stuff connected with my studies. The place was milling with guys, not a single woman, and all of them had alcohol on their breath, including the fat unshaven guy that I'd met the previous day.

The thousand leaflets turned out to be a thousand sets of leaflets, three to a set, and my haversack was too small to hold them all. I had to beg the fat guy for something to pack the ones I couldn't fit into my haversack. After wagging a fat finger in front of my face, he rummaged under his desk and gave me an old plastic shopping bag advertising Dominion supermarkets. One of its ears was torn. I put the remaining leaflets inside and wrapped everything into a bundle, and put it under my arm.

I was assigned an area covering half a dozen residential blocks. At first I thought myself lucky, because some other guys were given tiny areas consisting of just two or three blocks. I wondered how the hell they’d be able to get rid of all those fucking leaflets. But they were the lucky ones, not me: they got high–rises, and went into the lobby and got rid of a hundred leaflets in one go. My area was all detached houses. I was overjoyed when I came across a fucking duplex or a rooming house, and could leave more than one.

Practically all the houses had a mail slot in the front door, so each time I had to walk up to the door. After half an hour of this, I started cutting across the front lawns, but I just couldn't do more than three a minute. It worked out to ninety cents per hour. Then I had a brainwave, and started checking each entrance for the number of bell pushes by the entrance. I counted the knockers on the doors separately, so that if there were a couple of bell pushes and a knocker, I left three sets of leaflets.

It started to rain just before midday and that compounded my misery. I had been running around with those leaflets for over four hours by then, and had distributed less than half. I smoked a cigarette under a tree watching the raindrops splash on the ground.

When life kicked my ass like that, I’d start imagining all kinds of stupid things in a fatalistic kind of way. I thought maybe I was getting punished for acting like I did towards my parents. I knew they'd be worried, if only because they were control freaks: situations they couldn't control freaked them out. They couldn't really relieve the pressure by beating up on Josh either, because he wasn't due home for another week: he was at a camp, training with the varsity football team. He was probably having a great time, getting drunk and getting laid left, right, and center. He sure as hell wasn't distributing leaflets in the rain.

What made everything even worse was the fact that this was a Saturday, and many people were having a good time at home. I sometimes heard people partying inside when I slid the leaflets through the mail slots. When that happened, I slunk away like a dog hit by a stone.

I had been looking forward to my exile in the cottage belonging to Roch’s parents. Now I saw myself as an impostor, not much better than a thief, living in someone else's home on borrowed money… Standing under that tree, with water dripping on my head, I got into such a tailspin that if I had a gun I would've shot myself right away. Guns made it very easy to kill people, including yourself. Guns made killing sexy in a way, as long as you were the one pulling the trigger.

I had to smoke another cigarette to bring myself back under control. Then I returned to distributing leaflets at supersonic speed. After three hours, I still had two hundred left. I was wet and exhausted and very hungry, so I just stuffed them into a convenient trash can. I wasn't going to distribute advertising leaflets ever again, they could call and check on my deliveries if they wanted to, no problem.

When I got back to the colporteur I was so tired I was tripping over my feet, and they paid me out my five bucks right away, no questions asked. They likely thought I’d done an honest job, being worn out like that.

I left the colporteur and went to the same McDonalds I'd been to the previous day. I wolfed down three dollar combos, and the girl at the register giggled when I walked up to her for the third time. I saw her exchanging comments with a friend while I was eating. I had taken off my jean jacket—it was sopping wet—and they’d probably noticed how skinny I was, and were wondering which concentration camp I'd escaped from.

I bought beer with the remaining two bucks I'd earned that day, and got home on my last feet. Roch wasn't there, as usual. I drank one beer and it just totally wiped me out; I started falling asleep while still standing. It was lucky my mattress had been moved downstairs. I went up to it and toppled over and went to sleep instantly.

I was woken up in the middle of the fucking night by Roch. He was shaking my arm and saying:

"Mike. Hey, Mike. Wake up.. Mike."