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Chapter 1
I am Outstanding

How i got this crazy accolade that came with a plastic, faux wood-grain plaque, i'll never know. i had to be the worst paperboy ever. I think that they just needed a body from "downda line" (See Heynabonics) to fill the slot that week for The Scranton Times / The Sunday Times Outstanding Carrier Salutation. I always wondered how they had assessed that I was 'Outstanding', maybe they had really meant that I was outstandingly abominable as a paperboy and they were making an inside joke. "let's make this guinea dumbo think that he is a great paperboy, when he really sucks, we know it, but he may not know it", but i think that they were just scrambling to find someone to write about, to fill out the page.

I basically had about 30 customers, and if I ever delivered the papers non-stop from beginning to end, it probably would have taken me 45 minutes or less to complete the route. but because I started delivering late as it was, (school was over at 3pm, then I'd binge on candy bought at JOHNNY'S Store and daydream for 2 hours and then start the papers at 5pm) and because some of the customers' homes bordered on woods, half way through the route I would drop the undelivered papers in the bushes and go bb gun hunting or exploring in the forest, for an hour or more sometimes, and then customers would be calling my parents' home wondering where the damn paper was, it was past 7pm at that point. this happened regularly. and i would oftentimes just outright miss a house or 2, as i was pretty much in my own world most of the time, and these customers would also be calling, looking for the paper.

and if the suits at the paper ever polled my 30 customers, maybe half of them would have a tepid, blase opinion about my delivery skills, the other 13 would give me maybe two stars out of ten, and two customers in particular would have 2 thumbs way down. the first customer was actually an old married couple, in their 70's, they tipped me a dime or whatever monthly--i didn't care about that because, as you will see below, the entire amount i collected from a customer was basically all tip money to me. but all of a sudden during the summer of '75, i was not able to obtain the monthly bill money from them, and they owed me for two months, $2.35 x 2, big bucks back then, and i was a tad impatient. so i had had enough of their dodging me and pretending like they were not home every time i rang the doorbell. maybe it was that depression-era mentality that caused them to not want to pay me and part with that precious $4.70

so one saturday afternoon, i stood on their front porch, knowing that they were home, and rang their doorbell for a good half-hour straight, it was pretty crazy. i guess they got the message, because the old lady, now wearing the meanest wrinkled face i have ever seen, threw the door wide open and started in on me, and these are her exact words (my memory is average to good, but this one is indelibly etched), "you can take this newspaper, you and your entire family, and wipe your god-damn asses with it, you misers and penny-pinchers, here's your god-damned money ", and she threw the bills at me. so that was the end of that customer, no more paper to be delivered there.

and the other customer, same thing, he was an old bachelor, but he only owed me for one month. i was real insistent and impatient with him, and he pulled this laying low on a saturday bullshit and pretended he wasn't home also. he wasn't sleeping, cuz i could hear noises going on inside, and i was not having any of it. but i only stood there about 15 minutes as opposed to 30 minutes and held his doorbell in. it was a strange but efficient doorbell to press, maybe it was mis-wired, but i didn't need to keep pumping it, i just needed to hold it in and the chimes kept chiming, for 5 minutes straight. he also freaked out and whipped open the door, threw the money at me, cursing and what not, but he didn't quit the paper, he stayed on as a customer. so i guess i maybe would not have gotten this silly award if the paper brass polled my customers, but on the other hand they still may have chosen me anyway.

and unbeknownst to the people who gave me this award, my money management skills left alot to be desired also, but this was none of their gawd damm business anyway. once a month the district manager would come to my home to collect the 'bill', and 99% of the time I didn't have enough to pay the bill, and my mother would have to dip into her purse to make up the difference, awfully gracious of her.
How could this be? How could I not have enough money to pay the bill? all things being equal (and they rarely ever are), the money I collected from each customer monthly, plus the tips, should have more than covered the bill, and whatever was left over would be my earnings. I came up short mostly because I spent almost immediately what I collected from the customers, on reese's cups and soda mostly, and chocolate milk at JOHNNY'S STORE, I spent so much that I never had enough to pay my bill. and maybe this was part of the reason why i missed some customers' homes on a regular basis: i was enjoyably high on sugar, because my normal, daily gluttonous routine was such that before i would start delivering the papers, i would buy and consume one 12oz container of orange drink, one 12oz container of chocolate milk, and 3 packs of reese's cups, with 2 cups per pack. this ate up a lot of funds, but what else is money for anyway. and that is why i didn't care if customers left a big tip or not, because i considered all of the $2.35 i collected off each customer monthly as tip money, even though a large portion of that $2.35 should have been earmarked for paying the bill.

and also when the carnival came to town once a year, I would go there and spend more money on games, rides, food, stuff like that, and especially I was addicted to the ' wheel ', one of those contraptions where this guy spun the wheel that had numbers on it, like domino numbers, and if the pointer landed on the number on which you had placed money, you won. but, the black hole that it was for me, I never won much, lost mostly. but the point is, if I ran out of money at the carnival, usually while i was playing the wheel, and if it wasn't too late at night, but it usually was, I would go collect the monthly newspaper bill money from the customers who had not paid me yet that month. then i would have more cash and head back to the carnival and spend all that also. and by the eighth grade i was already drinking boone's farm and colt 45 in the woods with my friends, and if i needed some quick cash for some more beverage or tiparillo cigars, i would hit up a customer or 2.( this one customer, who was in her jammies, asked me one time, at 8:30pm, why I was collecting so late-- I just bullshitted her basically.

on average, if the bill that the route manager came to collect from me monthly was $24, my mother would have to put in a third maybe, so it cost my parents $8 per month for 3 years for me to have a paper route. looking back it was not really a bad deal for them, as most of my friends got 'allowances', which my parents would have none of (we had 8 siblings total in our family, ranging from 1 year old to 15). so let's say my 'allowance' was $2.00 per week (the $8.00 that my parents contributed to my paper route bill), it was a far cry from the $5.00 or $10.00 that some school mates received weekly from their parents. and maybe because these chums didn't have to work for their bread and thus were taught no work ethic, they ended up as pimps and drug dealers possibly. but regarding the dough that my parents contributed to my monthly bill, i think that once in a while they had to pay the whole amount, especially around the 4th of july, because i would spend all of the money i collected from customers on the purchase of fire crackers, bottle rockets and 4 oz. rockets that me and my friends did delinquent things with, like shoot at people's homes late at night using the rockets.

one time, me and one of my friends had it out for another 2-faced friend of ours, and this 2-faced kid (who we mistakenly called 'Cyclops', we should have called him 'Janus' or 'Cerberus') had a younger brother, maybe 7 years old. so, under the ruse of camping out one night in my back yard, at 3am we snuck over to the house of the 2-faced kid and his family, and put a pack of fire crackers on the bedroom window ledge of the younger brother, and connected the fuse to a cigarette timer, a simple but ingenious device. this cigarette timer gave us a good 10 minutes to scram and get back to my yard, so we lit the cigarette, ran back to my yard, settled into our sleeping bags, and waited. when the cigarette burned down to the filter 10 minutes later, it ignited the firecrackers, all hell broke lose and we laughed our proverbial asses off. it was so still and quiet at 3:10am, that those popping sounds could be heard for miles possibly. we later found out that this little kid was scared out of his wits and it was real pandemonium for that family at such an early hour. but the most bizarre part was (and this is how dense i was at the time, not that i am less dense now), the mother of the scared-out-of-his-wits little boy called my friend's mother and my mother that morning and told them what we had done, with no evidence or anything. but they all knew we did it, and they knew that we knew that they knew that we did it, and of course we just denied it while our noses grew and grew, but there wasn't much sleeping outside for the rest of the summer. (see the section below, my delinquency quotient) but anyway, in the month of july, between buying candy and soda at the tooth-rotting store, and fireworks, i was flat broke when mr. costello came calling for the monthly paper bill, and my mother paid the bill out of her stash in her wallet.

another time, my father gave me this little money canteen that I could clip on my belt, miners used to put calcium carbide lantern fuel in it or something, but i remember the first time I clipped it to my belt and went collecting the money from the customers. in my delusional state, I thought, " I am real organized now, and determined to not pre-spend the bill money, i have the bills on this side of the canteen, the coins on that side, and i will have enough to pay the bill to the newspaper when the nazi district manager mr. costello comes collecting." well that lasted about a day or two, I stopped using the money canteen and went back to my old ways, just stuffing money in my jeans pockets or wherever and spending it like there was no tomorrow, but of course tomorrow came and I did not have enough to pay the bill etc.

calcium carbide container money canteen

also, i have cousins who live in upstate new york, and every summer or so they would come down and stay for a week and play with me and my younger brothers, and somehow I got them to help me with the papers, i think that I made it appear fun, because i don't think I ever paid them anything (cheap bastard that I was/is) nor did I buy them any candy nor soda at the store. i remember a couple of instances, it could have been with them, or with one of my younger brothers, or all of them, there was this one customer on my route whose home was at the end of this long yard, I hated that house because of the long uphill walk one had after dropping the paper off. so I invented a game to see who was the fastest runner to the home, I would time whoever I enlisted that day, I would give them the paper and say, "GO!", and they would take off running as i counted out loud, "1 mississippi, 2 mississippi . . .", and they dropped the paper off and hustled back to beat some arbitrary record that I had concocted, and of course there was no prize nor anything if they had beaten the phantom record.

I had enough of this paper route business, so after 3 years i was relieved when a young girl from the neighborhood expressed interest in having a paper route, I was more than happy to pass it on to her. and by that time, 9th grade, I was getting jobs unloading and washing tractor trailers and heavy equipment, and the pay was much better, and nobody came to collect money from me, money which I didn't have anyway, but hey, some people were better at managing a paper route and money than I was, it worked for them as a job, for me it was torture, but it did provide me with spending money.

THE AFTERMATH

and then there was the "busting" at school upon the publication of my above accolade, which involves a whole drama with my mother. so when the suits at the newspaper gave my parents a ringy dingy to let them know that I had been duly chosen that week to be the outstanding carrier, unfortunately I was not home at the time, and my mother fielded that crucial phone call. the woman or man from the newspaper most likely asked my mother some questions, pertaining to my interests, hobbies, and the like. the conversation may have gone something like this:

Newspaper Employee:So Mrs. Aversa, where does Marty go to school, and is he involved in any extracurricular activities?

Mrs. Aversa: He attends Scranton Preparatory School, the Cavaliers you know, (hear 'The Scranton Prep Fagala Song')
Note: I am not endorsing the ideas expressed in this song nor homophobia, I am just relating what I heard when I was in high school. kids in my hometown would sing this to me when i got off the public COLTS bus on my way home from school, ballbusters all. and if these ballbusters were in a particularly foul and bullying mood, they would sing an encore and follow the Fagala Song with the 'Marty Farty Song'. and just to clarify further, most likely i was bullied and my balls were busted because, from what i was told, i was a terror to the little kids that lived in my neighborhood, maybe it was just karmic payback. i do remember one instance when i coaxed a 3 or 4 year old girl from the neighborhood to eat a teaspoon of dirt, told her it was 'delicious', and after she spit it out she went screaming and crying all the way home---i think her family hates me to this day.(and fyi, COLTS stands for Carries Old Ladies To Scranton, and not County of Lackawanna Transit System, as some might suspect.)

and for the sake of the male students who attend Scranton Prep, the heterosexual ones anyway, i think that the school hierarchy should re-name the mascot, maybe they should call themselves the Scranton Prep Bulldogs, or Scranton Prep Stallions. below is my actual Prep license plate memorabile circa 1976, and my edited version that i will use to make a new mascot proposal with, being i am an alumnas and have a say in the matter, to the school hierarchy.

Original Scranton Prep License Plate, circa 1976

My New Proposed Scranton Prep Mascot
and License Plate, circa 2010

Mrs. Aversa(cont'd):and he is on the wresting team and he belongs to the ski club.
I was on the wresting team for about 2 days, couldn't hack it, plus dudes' balls were in my face half the time, and i think that one time my hand inadvertently rubbed up against the ballsack of some grappler as i tried unsuccessfully to pin him down, and that was one time too many. but if some dude wants other dude's balls in his face, more power to him, whatever makes him happy. but i will give my mother the benefit of the doubt on this one because the person who called from the newspaper to declare my outstandingness and ask these boilerplate questions may have called during the 2 days that I was on the wresting team, and my mother would have thus told him or her the truth. I WAS ON THE WRESTING TEAM! , for 2 days anyway. and if I had already quit the team and my mother knew this, and still told the person on the phone that I was on the wrestling team, then that is a whole other story. My above plaque reads "March 12, 1977" so I would need to do some research, but I doubt that wrestling season and the first 2 days of practice began 1/3 of the way through the spring semester, it most likely began in the beginning of the semester, say, in january. whatever. (today, march 31, 2010, i just googled 'high school wrestling season', and i found an article on wikipedia about USA high school scholastic, greco-roman style wrestling, and it read that the season begins in october or november and goes til february or march. so if this is true of the 1976-1977 Scranton Prep wrestling season, then it would have been about 6 months from the date i had quit the team, after the first 2 days of practice in october or november, until i got this crummy award in march 1977, which would mean that my mother reeeeaaaly stretched things a tad by saying in march that i was on the wrestling team. what are ya gonna do, hyperbole makes the world go round)

regarding the ski club: i had heard in school that there was a ski trip to elk mountain, so i decided to go in order to attempt to fit in with this new crowd, because basically I was an insecure 9th grader with braces, a bad complexion and who had little or no friends at this new school in another town. (and i wish someone back then would have grabbed me by the shoulders, would have shaken me and said, "look son, you got a bad haircut, you wear glasses with coke bottle lenses, you got zits and blackeads all over your face and you got braces: there ain't no fitting in for you.") anyway, i just wanted to put myself out there, take risks so to speak, mingle with this new crowd, maybe make a friend or 2 on the trip (didn't happen). so, I definitely do not remember joining any club, it was just a one shot deal, I was just gonna go on one of these outings and see what the hell skiing was like. the skiing part was fun, but the overall trip was a waste of time really for me, as I could have been back in my home town sleigh riding and taking swigs from a stolen whiskey bottle with my boyhood friends in the woods. ok experience though, and i sometimes like to try new things just for the hell of it, but the main point is, my mother told the person on the phone that i was in the ski club, her second half-truth or even non-truth.

Newspaper Employee: So Mrs. Aversa, does Marty have any personal hobbies, and if so, can you tell me what they are?
Mrs. Aversa: As an "athlete" (quotations mine), he plays baseball, football and basketball. (all true, participating in team sports while growing up was fun for me, even though I pretty much sucked at every sport I tried to play ) He also has tropical fish as pets (true), builds model cars (sad but true) and he collects coins! (absolutely not true, and my mother's third and most glaring non-truth that would have severe repercussions at school)

the emotional scars that I still carry, stem from those few words that my mother uttered: 'he collects coins', and she might as well have added, "he collects butterflies and ladies' lingerie also". i do not think that there is anything wrong with collecting coins, butterflies or ladies' lingerie, to each their own, but it's just that my mother spoke the wrong words at the wrong time in my life. if i was in the 6th grade and i got this award, no one in my 6th grade class would give a shit most likely, as one classmate collected all kinds of tiny fire trucks, and another had a real neat collection of jigsaw puzzles, so that when he completed a puzzle, his father flipped it over and taped the back so that it could be framed. but announcing to the world while i was in the 9th grade that i collected coins didn't help me look cool in the least, and while i was at it i should have also just put a piece of masking tape in the middle of my glasses on the bridge and carried a slide-rule in my hip pocket and a penholder in my dress shirt pocket, 9th grade girls really like that stuff.

the only coins that I liked were not antiques that you could collect, you know, like doubloons or pieces of eight or whatever, the coins that I hoarded and loved were the ones you could plop down on the wheel of fortune thing at the carnival or spend on reese's peanut butter cups. the longest time I had a coin in my possession was the one time I had just collected coins from a customer, and I didn't make it to JOHNNY'S STORE in time before closing to spend these coins. if the store was still open, those coins would have only been in my possession for 10 minutes or less. so I just went home, coins in pocket, and decided to spend them the next day. So the coins stayed with me overnight, and if the by-laws of the coin collecting club contained a stipulation that if one has in his or her possession any type of coins for at least 24 hours before it can be called 'coin collecting', then yes, i was a coin collector, and my mother would have been correct in telling the newsperson that i was indeed a coin collector, but there was no coin collecting club nor by-laws of any kind, as far as i was aware at the time, and as far as my mother was aware of at the time, unless she really knew of such a club and such by-laws.

in fact, and this was before I had a paper route and I was a few years younger, but one of my older brothers did collect coins, he had them neatly laid out in these blue cardboard folders with holes in them, the holes were the size of the coins, and there were 18th century silver dollars, silver dimes, wheat pennies, buffalo head nickels, silver half-dollars etc, and I 'collected' his collection of coins, every once in a while i would swipe a half-dollar, as i needed money for soda and reese's cups. he had a bunch of these folders, and he had moved out and was onto other things by his freshman year of college anyway, so he didn't notice as these coin folders were jammed in a drawer in some closet. so maybe my mother was right, i DID collect coins, in this definition of a coin collector: a coin collector is someone whose sibling lays out silver coins in blue coin folders, and who cashes in these sibling's coins, who steals them and spends them at their face value, not their market value, so that a silver half-dollar would buy 50 cents worth of candy, tastycakes, pixie sticks and other sundries, instead of selling the coin at the coin dealer store for $5.00 or whatever it was worth at the time.

Folder for Losers

there was also this other cache of coins that i really loved to collect, and i have the catholic church to thank for this cache. these coins were initially bound for the collection basket at any one of the sunday masses. the church was kind enough to give every member of my family, all 10 of us (2 parents, 8 kids) our own boxes of empty envelopes that were to be filled with cash and dropped into the collection basket every sunday. up until a point when i was in the 8th grade i really loathed going to sunday mass, but then all of a sudden, and everyone lauded my choice to start going to mass regularly, i began 'attending' the sunday morning, 9:30 mass. my siblings either went to the later mass at 11am, or went to a sunday evening mass in another town, which i encouraged, or the didn't go to mass all if they were old enough to not be swayed by my parents' admonitions, in which case they would have reached the 'i don't give a flying fuck about going to the money-grubbing mind control mithras sun worshipping pagan cult ceremonies anymore' phase.

the reason for all of this new-found piety on my part? my parents prepared all of our envelopes in the morning, let's say they put 25 cents in each child's envelope, and dollar bills into their envelopes, and sealed them up and just laid them out on the table, my mother usually prepared these or had one of my older sisters do it. and whomever happened to be going to an early mass, and if the envelopes were prepared in time, would take the stack en masse and drop them into the collection basket, that is if he or she made it to mass. what a damn mother load was there, and the catholic church was rich enough i concluded, they would not miss this $3 or $4 from the aversa family. and JOHNNY'S STORE was open on sunday mornings also, so as i headed on foot in the general direction of the church at about 9:20, no one could see my detour, nor see me rip into the envelopes and put the bounty into my pockets and enter the sacristy of Johnny's store. and of course i had to be real careful and make sure i destroyed the torn, now empty envelopes, and burning was the preferred method. this idea of taking the envelopes, skipping mass and spending the money on candy at the store instead, did not originate with me, as i had faintly remembered, when i was very young, maybe 5 or 6 years old, a story circulating about one of my second or third cousins who lived far away in another state. apparently he had done what i was now doing, but he just left the crumpled, empty envelopes in his pants pocket and his mother found them. ya, dude, gotta be real careful about that shit---but i forgot about this episode, and then one day when i was 14, i remembered that story and resurrected the tradition.

i guess i committed 2 mortal 'sins' in one fell swoop: i ditched mass, and diverted the funds from the catholic church to me. i don't think that it was technically stealing though. it would be stealing if i grabbed a handful of full envelopes from the church basket at mass, now that would be stealing, so maybe it was one 'mortal' sin and one' venial' sin. but the farcical element enters in also, because it didn't matter if i had committed 2 mortal sins or a 1000 mortal or 10,000 venial sins, i could just be absolved of these sins by going to confession the following week and performing my penance, which was for me at the time a farce also. and this overall relative concept of 'sin' in general cracks me up, ya got mortal sins, ya got venial sins (and i would like someone to explain to me the difference between the 2), ya got councils and august bodies determining what is a sin and what is not, and that could change over time also. i think it used to be a sin for women to go to church with their heads not covered up with some ridiculous hat or other, but now it's OK for them to do that, but i could be wrong.

and did this same company that used to sell indulgences, telephone 'God', or whatever their relative concept of a 'higher power' is, and find out from Him or Her what is a sin and what isn't? i gotta do some etymological research on this word 'sin' and see who the hell first used it.
but here's how things maybe would have gone down with the priest in the confessional booth:
(i wait in line for about a half hour, along with the rest of the hushed crowd, then it's my turn, i enter the confessional booth. i get situated, it's real dark in there, the priest slides open the door between his face and my face, i could smell the cheap wine on his breath)
Me: Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it has been 7 years since my last confession. I accuse my self of these sins. (this part cracks me up also, I stand as both the accused and the accuser, I could make up whatever crap I wanted to make up, which i used to do all of the time.)
Priest: Proceed my son, what sins would you like to confess?
Me: Father, I took the money, destined for the Sunday Mass collection basket, and kept it for myself, as I was supposed to take the envelopes, all 10 of my family members' envelopes, to Mass and give them to y'all, but instead I ditched Mass, took the money out of the envelopes, hung out at Martha's Store and spent it on babyruth bars, sim-sims, punks, reese's cups and chocolate milk. (so as not to reveal to the priest what neighborhood i lived in, and thereby possibly giving away my identity, i would have told him the name of a corner store in another part of town. and this also means that i would have lied to the priest in the confessional booth, thereby possibly piling another sin on top of my mountain of sins.)
Priest: Is that all my son?
Me: Yes, Father . . . .Oh, i just forgot, one time I took the Lord's name in vane, and another time I learned about the facts of life by masturbating to and splooging all over a picture of Blair from 'The Facts of Life', while i had a small carrot stuck up my ass. ( www.lisawhelchel.com)
Priest: Bless you my Son, and i will have you know that semen also does flow in our Semenary, and that rectums are stimulated in our Rectories, so by the power vested in me from on High, I hereby absolve you of your sins, and for your penance, say 100 Our Fathers, 100 Hail Marys, 100 Glory Be's, and 100 Apostles Creeds. Go and sin no more.

right. so i would sit in a pew for a few minutes, pretend to say some prayers or other, and then get my ass out of there. other people might be there for an hour or more, as they were praying when i arrived at the church and still praying when i got out of the confessional booth, they must have confessed some bad shit to the priest. overall, what a great cosmology this was, i felt so clean after going to confession. but maybe there was some natural law that meted out its own justice, i don't know. so regarding these sunday morning church envelopes, i didn't want to raise suspicion, i did this occasionally, maybe once a month or so. "HIS HOBBIES INCLUDE COIN COLLECTING . . . . . .", indeed.

so, a'couple'a two, tree days (See Heynabonics) had passed since the newspaper addition in which I appeared rolled off the presses, so when i went to school on monday (the article appeared on saturday), the ribbing started. i think that the coin collecting part was the straw that broke the camel's back, the building model cars part didn't help neither, but the coin collecting part pushed the bully meter way into the red---and i remember this tall, 10th grade chap with acne, mike something or other, who started in at 8:30 am and didn't let up til closing bell, it's i good thing i only ran into him in the halls only 2 or 5 times. but of course others knew about it, so i just put on this fake, teeth-full-of-braces smile and laughed along with the rest of the crowd. dudes i didn't even know made comments, i think a guy on the wrestling team took umbrage with the wrestling team line. and, most embarrassingly, this way hot girl in my home room, who was untouchable to me, made her very first remarks to me, after 7 months of being in the same home room together, and her very first words to me were not, "do'ya wanna fuck tonight?", no, they were, simply and most cuttingly, "hi marty, i saw your picture in the paper, nice". that was it. I hope that she was so busy being hot that she didn't have time to read the article under my picture and name, but I doubt it.

POSTSCRIPT: I got no satisfaction nor logical explanation when I asked my mother about what she had told the newspaper person, it was just brushed off, and then I forgot about it, but scars still remain.

(Editor's Note- Mr. Real the Art Critic responds: "Aversa's timeline is all wrong. If he is claiming that he was in grade school up until 1976 when he entered high school, then this fictitious episode with the priest in the confessional booth would have happened in the spring of 1976 or earlier. So, there is no way that he would have even known, unless he could see 3 years into the future when the first episode of 'The Facts of Life' aired in 1979, that there was even a TV character named 'Blair'." )

CD Number 1 out now! You do not even need to buy it:

Chapter 1 I am Outstanding

calcium carbide container money canteen

these sites have some good gags, fake poop, vomit and other fun stuff

CD Number 1 out now!
You do not even need to buy it:

Chapter 1
I am Outstanding