#7 Daycare Salesman

Lucky Little

#7 Daycare Salesman

As soon as first grade ended for me, my family up and moved us to Alief. A small little community just outside of Houston, Texas. My brother and I couldn't be trusted at home alone while both my parents were working. We were known to scrap just a little bit. I think, also, my brother might have told my parents that each day, I'd go through a different part of the house. Every drawer, every crack of every drawer, every cabinet, every part of the refrigerator, every drawer in their room, the top of everything, and every box in the closet, and everything that might have been hidden in a shoe or a jacket pocket. I was going through that house. I didn’t leave one inch unturned.

I just wanted to know who I was. I saw these kids and these families and brothers at school that looked alike, sounded alike, and had a name that was their name, where my brother and I didn't look at all alike. There was no lack of love, but there was a giant hole not knowing who I was or where I came from or where I was destined to go or how long I'd be here or how long I'd be with the Littles or when I may be snatched or saved from this new neighborhood.

My brother couldn't be trusted to watch me during the day, so they enrolled me in a daycare center. A bunch of women started joining the workforce at the time so places to drop your kids off during the day were booming and they still are. You go to work to pay for the car and the gas and the clothes and the make-up and the and the lunches ..to have a little bit left over to show something for being away from your children all day. Tough case I guess for independent living. Tough summer for a kid to be in the pen all day. Off Kirkwood, between Beechnut and Bellaire. Little place just past the school. I know the school because I played little league football there. Soon as I had met Jimmy and saw the Houston Oilers cheerleader, I started watching a little football and thought, "This may be the way to meet those cheerleaders." By age eight, I was already playing little league football, Alief Youth Association. You'd pass by that school and that's where the daycare center was. I get in there first day, I'm seeing, hey, there's plenty of different kids, lot more white kids than I'm used to seeing, and a lot of pretty girls.

For breakfast, first day, I'm blown away when I find out the milk they give us is powdered milk, basically a boxed Carnation product that pours out flakes, white flakes, almost like you see in mashed potatoes these days. Then you add water to it and stir it up and you've got basically white water with I guess some fortified minerals in it. But I can tell you, it wasn't tasty at all. Seeing the disgust on everyone's face and knowing the chocolate Quik powder or Hershey powder I had at home, whichever one pays me, I knew I had a way to make some money. I learned how to make money at my old school. I learned how to save money, I learned how to use money the right way, and I learned how to hide my money in my sock so no matter how many times I had to pull my pockets out to show I didn't have any more money, I could be carrying from fifty cents to three dollars in my sock at all time.

Sure enough, a couple days go by, I sneak some powder in a lunch bag, before they had Ziplocs. Get it up to the daycare center. I'm charging like a dime, fifteen cents, twenty cents a spoon, and everybody's getting some of it. I must have made like five dollars. First day in sales, five dollars in chocolate, a sock that's got my change running down underneath my shoes, I've got so much change in it. We found a solution for that. Making money on my first week in the daycare center, I knew this was going to be a great summer.