I had found a small fortune on the bus while sweeping for my father. Looking at the bills, I didn’t want to come out of the bathroom. Somehow the darkness of the outside outhouse felt safe. Still, I had to think quickly before somebody came looking for me. Robert Wagner was my favorite actor at the time. He played in a show called “It Takes a Thief” as a super clever and audacious thief. I was absolutely convinced I looked like him, especially when I wore a black turtleneck that belonged to my brother. I wanted a turtleneck of my own so that I could wear it all the time. Every day I combed my hair like him as well. What would he do in this situation? I put on my best Robert Wagner face and bravely came out of the bathroom walking past my brothers who were looking at me with suspicion(so I thought). I just returned their look with a cool scowl, went to my bed, and hid the wallet under my mattress. It was time for bed and my brothers again asked me why I was so quiet because usually we talked and talked in bed. I didn’t answer them and that night I didn’t get much sleep.
Twenty three Quetzales was a lot of money. My dad at the time earned twenty five Quetzales for a weeks work and managed to support a large family like ours on that amount. A kid could buy four pieces of candy for a penny. You could buy a good size popsicle, a cucumber, an orange or a mango with pepita, for a penny or two. For an eight year old, this was an enormous amount of money! I didn’t say anything to anybody, not even my mom.
It would be fun to be secretly rich. Extremely rich! I could buy anything my heart desired which for the most part had something to do with food and fun snacks.
However, being secretly rich can be kind of a lonely. I was used to doing everything with my brothers and it took a lot of thinking to figure out ways to buy things without them knowing I had money.
In those days we would get a penny when we went to school to buy a snack at recess, sometimes I would buy a piece of sweet bread that they sold in school, they were nice big delicious pieces. They were best with the powdered milk they used to mix and serve in school for free. Sometimes my mom didn’t have any money to give us. When I went to school with my new fortune, I decided to buy a snack for a kid who came from a very poor family and never had money for a snack during recess. I told him he could have anything he wanted so he got himself a big mango with pepita and a big radish with pepita too. I will never forget the grin on his face as he tore into that mango. The juice ran down his arm all the way to his elbow. He didn’t even noticed nor did he wash his hands when he was done eating it. He just wiped his hands on the side of his pants as he walked away declaring me his best friend.
I liked the feeling of being able to make somebody so happy and I could certainly identify with him. The best part was that buying something like that, didn’t affect my fortune! I actually went to school a few days in a row because when I was in school I could buy stuff without my brothers knowing about it. I would buy snacks for the kids that usually didn’t have money and before I knew it, I was surrounded by a lot of friends all of them claiming I was their best friend! I remember walking the hallways during recess surrounded by a bunch of renegades treating me like a king. It was all fun until the teacher got wind that Robin Hood was in town and was planning to have a talk with me about where the money came from. Most likely she was going to ask me to bring my mom in. As you can imagine it was not normal for a kid my age to be going around spending money. When a kid was found spending money it was assumed he was stealing, either from his parents or from somebody’s piggy bank. I left school and went back to hang out with the shoe shine boys at central park.
Time went by and I was getting tired of sneaking around so, of course, I consulted with my brother Armando and told him how I was feeling stressed out. I didn’t like keeping a secret from my mom. I had bought a bunch of things for myself and the kids at school and still had a lot of money. He just sat there quietly and made understanding noises as he listened to me. Then, very generously, he offered to help me spend the rest of the money and boy did he ever have the ideas on ways to spend the money!
Continued in Part 3…
The plot thickens!!!