Of Beetles and Angels by Mawi Asgedom Read Free Book Online Page B

kind that Redd Foxx owned in the TV show
Sanford and Son
— and we would roam from home to home.
    We always started by sweeping pebbles and dirt from the driveway and finished by sealing the cracks with tar. Laboring under the hot, summer sun, we fried.
    “You’re getting darker,” my mother would tell us. “This job is killing you, you should quit.” But twenty dollars a day was too much to pass up, at least for a while.
    Eventually, as luck would have it, my brother met our good friend, Jim Settacase. Jim ran his own cleaning service and he paid us with checks.
    Despite the checks, working for Jim was worth it because he paid a whopping seven dollars an hour. More important, he toiled and smiled and laughed alongside us, until we almost looked forward to work.
    I never saw my brother that next summer because he worked nights, cleaning the Toyota dealership with Jim, and I got a day job flipping burgers and cooking fries.
    Jim encouraged Tewolde and taught him to build from almost nothing. So at age seventeen, my brother ventured out and started his own cleaning business. “Working for somebody else, I make seven dollars an hour, but working for myself, I can make up to twenty-five dollars!”
    Tewolde’s business grew with the help of a high-school psychology teacher named Mr. Wimpleberg. He met with Tewolde after school and taught him how to market to different kinds of customers.
    Tewolde passed on the lessons to me: “You see, Selamawi, there are A-type customers, B, and then C. C brothers would never pay a dime to have someone clean for them; they are like us — they’ll clean it themselves first. B brothers have enough money and can be convinced, and A, well, forget about it with A. That’s where ALL the loot is.”
    So my brother printed up his impressive black-and-white cards that said “ProClean: No One Cleans Better,” and he was in business. Soon he had a chiropractor’s office to clean — twice a week, forty dollars for two hours.
    Soon after that he started cleaning windows — who could have imagined that you could get paid seventy-five dollars to clean windows? — and then word spread about his business.
    That’s when he started to dream: “Forget this fifty here and hundred there, let’s make some real money. Selamawi, I think I can make thirty thousand dollars. Maybe I shouldn’t even go to college next year.”
    So he looked for business opportunities and began staking out the three-floor Wheaton Public Library.
    He awoke with the night cleaners, arriving right after them, and carefully documented their errors through the windows. Returning during the day, he snooped around some more and talked to the day janitor, whom he had known for years.
    I told him he was crazy. “Look, bro, how many of them does it take to clean that place? I’m not gonna wake up at four A.M . to clean it with you — I gotta study and sleep and run cross-country — and you can’t do it by yourself.”
    But he was determined. His new heart had been inspired by his faith in God, and he believed that God wanted him to try “impossible” things. He kept watching the janitors, hoping he could approach the library’s management. One day, he might convince them that he would do a better job than the night cleaners.
    But Tewolde never talked to the management, and he never graduated from high school. A drunk driver killed him midway through his senior year.
    One close friend, our white grandma, brings him up every time we see her:
    “You know, your brother was the most precious boy. I remember how at church, I would go up on the second floor after the service, and I would see all the high-school students. You know how high-school students are, they refuse to say ‘Hi’ to you if you are old, even if they know you and have known you for years, because it is not ‘cool’ to acknowledge old people.
    “But your brother, no matter who that boy was with or how many people were in his way, he would always leave his