Transcript: "Lemonade Stand", a Story By Matthew Dicks
This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks's story, Lemonade Stand, at a NYC Moth StorySLAM.
This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks's story, Lemonade Stand, at a NYC Moth StorySLAM. You can watch Matthew telling the story here:
Lemonade Stand, a story by Matthew Dicks
My parents didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up. My mom was a disabled pharmacist and my evil stepfather was a psychiatric social worker, which actually enhanced his ability to be evil but did nothing for his earning potential. But I was lucky as a kid because, when it came to managing the meager sums in our house, my parents were exceptionally irresponsible. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, and it was. In a lot of ways, it destroyed our lives and our futures. But at the time, I was a boy, and boys are like goldfish— we can only see nine seconds ahead. So, all of my parents' irresponsible decisions totally made sense to me at all times.
We were hungry growing up. There wasn't always a lot of food. I was a free lunch kid, surviving on government cheese. But while we were hungry, we had five dogs at all times. The town limit, I think, was four, but we had five. As a boy, this was great because the only thing better than a dog is a lot of dogs. I loved that we had In Poco, Rags, Meiselmen (who was named after the doctor who did my father's vasectomy), Polly (who was always getting knocked up by the Pomeranian across the street), and Pac-Man (who was named after my mother’s favorite video game, which she played on the Atari 5200, the most advanced game system at the time). But it was attached to the only television in the house, which was a 13-inch black-and-white TV that, on good days, got three channels. Things just didn’t make sense, but they seemed so right to me.
When I was 10, the furnace broke—like, really broke, like it can't get fixed—and my parents' solution was, "We will be cold." And that worked. They were right; it worked, and we were cold. Then, the pipes started to freeze. The kids were already freezing, but the pipes started to freeze too. Eventually, they had to spring for a furnace. And for the next year, I just remember that birthdays were nothing, there was less food, and the electricity was getting shut off.
So, when I was 11, I decided I was going to take things into my own hands. I was going to change my dad. I was going to earn money for myself, so I opened a lemonade stand. My goal was to earn $100 by the end of the summer, which, at that time, would have been like a million dollars for me. I charged 10 cents a cup, which, if you do the math, means I needed to sell 1,000 cups of lemonade over the course of two months. But things weren't going well. I lived on a street where cars go by at 50 miles an hour, so they barely stopped.
But one day, a father and son stopped. As I was pouring the lemonade, the kid saw my brother's X-wing fighter at the top of the driveway. It was Star Wars, and it was the early ‘80s—Star Wars was everything. The kid tells me that he’s collecting action figures and is looking for Bossk. Now, Bossk is a bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back. He appears for like one second on screen, has no lines, but he has an action figure. And my brother has it. My brother has every action figure. I'm wearing my cousin Russell's hand-me-down underwear, and he's too big, so it’s like a lifetime of chafing for me, but my brother has every Star Wars figure in the world, because priorities are with my parents.
But I get an idea. I go to my bedroom and get my brother's Bossk figure, and I bring it down. I tell the kid, “Do you want to buy my Bossk?” I offer it for $2, which turns out to be a very low, low number. I didn’t know it at the time, but for me, it's 20 cups of lemonade that I now don’t have to sell. He buys it, and I suddenly realize I’m not in the lemonade business. I am in the selling-my-brother's-and-sister's-toys-out-from-under-them business.
So, I get my brother's action figures, strip all the Barbie dolls from my sisters, and get those clothes. I start selling the toys to the people who are stopping for the lemonade, and now I’m really making some money. When the inventory gets low, I go next door to my grandfather’s house because he has these great picnics on Saturdays. I start clearing the good food off the tables and bringing it down to the lemonade stand. The fried chicken is unbelievable, and people are buying it.
By early August, I have $100, and I can’t believe it. I put it in this little blue Cub Scout wallet and put it under my pillow for safekeeping. Two days later, I go into my bedroom, and the pillow is pushed aside, and the wallet is gone. I know what happened. I go outside, and an hour later, I find what remains of the wallet. It’s in the backfield, and the money is in shreds, just spread out around the grass. I find six dollars of the hundred. Pac-Man ate my wallet. He eats everything. And my wallet smelled like fried chicken. If my nose could detect the fried chicken, I knew Pac-Man’s could too.
The irony that it’s Pac-Man who eats my wallet is not lost on me. I cry. I cry like I have never cried before. My mom comes to me, and I’m weeping. She expresses the requisite sympathy, but then she reminds me that I still have six dollars, so maybe there should be like a $94 cry and not a hundred-dollar cry. She thinks she’s being funny, but I’m just crying. Then, she gets mad at me and says, “It’s only money. You’re being ridiculous.” She thinks I was saving the money for myself. She doesn’t know that that was like insurance money, that I was going to use that money the next time the furnace broke or the next time the electricity got shut off or the next time there just wasn’t enough at dinner for all of us.
And she’s mad at me because I can’t tell her that I’m trying to save money because I’m living with people who can’t always take care of me in the way that I think they should.
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