Rubber Balls and Liquor by Gilbert Gottfried Read Free Book Online Page B

of drug abuse, and it was all the rage.
    (Ah, life was so much simpler back then … just ask Norman Rockwell.)
    You’d see kids walking down the street in the middle of the day with their noses pressed into brown paper lunch bags and think for a moment they were inhaling some exotic new blend of tuna fish sandwich. Or, they’d be sitting on a stoop, passing a bag back and forth, and you’d wonder how many bites there could be in one little tuna fish sandwich, that so many people could share it.
    As a result of all this glue sniffing and apparent tuna fish sandwich sharing, there was an ordinance passed in New York City restricting the sale of model airplane glue. Under the new law, you couldn’t sell model airplane glue unless you were also selling a model as part of the same transaction. It was a stupid law, really, because it didn’t account for those actual model airplane hobbyists who might have already purchased their model and simply run out of glue, but my father wasn’t the sort of businessman to question a new local ordinance. He only cared that he could make money from it, so he dusted off the cheapest model airplane kit he could find on the back of one of his shelves. In fact, it was the only model airplane kit in the store, and it had been there forever. It was a Wright Brothers model, and if I’m not mistaken it was actually made by the Wright Brothers.
    Like every other item in the store, my father had pretty much given up on the thought of selling this one model airplane kit, but then this ordinance happened and it was a regular Christmas miracle—except for the fact that it was nowhere near Christmas at the time. This one model airplane kit was so cheap my father could price it for about a quarter. Also, it was so cheap that if you bothered to actually build the model and then stood back to admire your handiwork, it would fall apart if you looked at it too closely. Whatever wood there is in nature that’s flimsier than balsa wood, that’s what they used for these kits. He put this one model airplane kit next to the rack where he kept the modeling glue, hoping the nutty neighborhood kids would reach for it so they could go off and get high without breaking the law. The model was like a necessary ingredient, the key to the whole transaction, but he knew the kids didn’t give a shit about the model. He knew all they’d care about was that it only cost a quarter.
    But get this: the first group of kids who bought the cheap model tossed it in the trash as soon they left. My father found it in the garbage can by the side of the store later that afternoon. This was the Christmas miracle part of the story. The kids hadn’t even opened it, so my father picked it up and brought it back inside so he could sell it again. And again. It got to where the kids would leave the store and he’d count to three. Then he’d go outside and reclaim the unopened kit. Over and over, he did this. For years, this was our major source of income, all these quarters, until the neighborhood kids found some other way to get high and my father was stuck once again with this one cheap kit, which I believe he finally took as a tax deduction.
    He was ahead of his time, my father, one of the original recyclers. And a regular entrepreneur. Some kids, they get to walk around the neighborhood boasting that their fathers were in the airline industry, or that they worked at the airport, but my father the model airplane magnate was in a different end of the business. The lower-than-balsa-wood end.
    I don’t want to give the impression that my father played fast and loose with the law in his hardware store, because that certainly wasn’t the case. There was nothing fast about him, just loose. In fact, there was one time when he was so completely not fast that the law caught up to him. Specifically, it caught up to his brother, my Uncle Seymour, who ran the store with my father. Why