Thank You, Mrs. M
Copyright 2012 Kate Rothwell
Smashwords Edition
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Suz and Toni—and Jean Webster, of course.
Also thanks to Dr. Martin and to my own Dr. Madman, the prof who won’t read this book but has helped write it by talking science during dinner all these years. Phages rock, dude.
I love those dinners and you too. Not in that order.
Chapter One
Late August-September
The sleek silver oval lay in the palm of Ben’s hand. The sheaf of papers lay on his lap. Lots of instructions, most of them boiling down to one word.
Talk.
It took a while for him to figure out how to turn the silver recorder on. The thing was too damn slick. He gave it a tap for luck and began.
“You want honesty. An hour’s worth a day of normal speech, nothing prepared is necessary. Yeah, okay. But I’m pretty certain I’m not supposed to talk normally. No fucking way, because every other fucking word is fuck. Don’t fucking ask me why. Just the fucking way it is. Especially when I’m with Prophet and Repo. I’ll tone it down for you, okay? I assume you’re an old lady with some style. For you, I can stop.
“Hey, I try to talk any other way with Repo, who’s about six-three and two-thirty pounds, he’d beat the shit out of me. He was in the army for a while—got out as soon as he could—but he enjoys describing the ways to kill people with his thumbs. ‘Fu—eff, you’re an umbatz,’ he’d say. Effing crazy. He wants to be an Italian mobster and studies their jargon. I keep telling him there are very few African Italian American mobsters.
“’How’d the eff you know?’ he asked me. ‘You effing got some Italian in your mix?’
“Who da eff knows?
“Maybe you do, Mrs. Moneybags. All the background research your guys did. Some sort of agency, huh. Very mysterious. No, I won’t learn the name of my sponsor, although I may be informed that she’s female. No, I don’t need to fill out any qualifying paperwork. No need to demonstrate need by supplying bank statements—that don’t exist, by the way. ‘We have taken care of all that, Mr. Evans.’ The letter says ‘Your grades alerted us to your potential.’
“Bull. I’ve taken a class a year. Easy enough to ace school like that, huh? Especially a school like the one I currently attend. Nothing against it, but it’s no Yale.
“So I’m supposed to take the money and run. Just talk about every damn detail of my boring life. Be sure to answer the questions on this thirty-two page questionnaire and add details. Copious details.
“Heh. Now that you’ve got me hooked on the money, you’re gonna make me do the paperwork? I have to say it was a nice cover letter from your admin. ‘Ben, honey, you got the money. Get to work. Here’s a recording device to make the job easier. You pick emails or voice recordings. If you really must talk to someone, call this number, but we’d rather you didn’t.’”
He pressed the rubbery button on the recording thing and shoved off his boots. The talking was simply work in exchange for money he needed. Legitimate, easy work. No reason to be so annoyed.
He turned it back on.
“I just wonder, what will you do with an hour a day? I know the admin swore up and down these recordings are confidential, and even she won’t hear them, so what’s it about? You catch sight of my butt and wanna haul me into bed? You writing a novel? Names will be changed to protect the not-very-innocent? Are you trying to scrape together information to garner sympathy for underprivileged folks? God, that is fu—um, screwed.
“I don’t want to use somebody’s pity to get what I need. Are we clear on that? This isn’t about poor me, because I don’t need anything but your money. You want a story. Fine. An exchange.
“If you’re actually listening, pay attention to this part too, Mrs. Moneybags. I’m strong enough for anything I wade through every day. All of us are, Beeb, Junelia and me. Hear that? The only missing piece is the money.
“Yeah, yeah, I know some agency you hired got the basic facts about me, and you might even be psycho enough or bored enough to actually read them, or listen to this, so I won’t try to bullsh—lie to you.
“As you’re paying for this, I will give you the finest, grade A, real stuff. And I’ll even try not to lie too often. Just often enough so you can have fun fact checking. ‘He really drop out of high school when he was sixteen?’
“Nosy, aren’t you?
“So go ahead and listen. But please do not pity me because I don’t want or need sympathy. I want a scholarship and this is way easier than trying to go through the feds, the state and way fu—effing easier than filling out paperwork or, God forbid, writing essays for other scholarships. And Rodrigo’s gone so I can’t borrow any more. I couldn’t afford much with his interest rates anyway.”
He rubbed at the stubble on his chin and blew out a long breath.
“Back up. Start again with less of the attitude,” he muttered, and held up the recorder again. “No more ranting. Okay. Time to pick a random question from your list here. How about Previous jobs: descriptions and responsibilities and coworkers. Right. Big Roddy.”
He pushed his feet onto the sturdy wooden box they used as a table, knocking off an almost empty bag of Cheez Doodles. Party time for the local herd of cockroaches. He’d finish up the yammering and maybe clean. The place was worse than usual. He pulled in a deep breath and went on.
“My boss Rodrigo wasn’t a bad guy. A jerk on occasion, yeah, but mostly when he had to be. I don’t think he was related to me and he still gave me a job when there were better, older guys around. Paid under the table too. Course he had to, because I was nine or ten when I started. I’d work after school because Ma still wanted us in school back then and I loved the place. School, I mean. Roddy’s was okay.
“Old Roddy had pop eyes and a big wide mouth. Looked like bullfrog. He even sat at his counter with his arms kinda bent like front legs. Ribbit. Big beefy guy with almost no hair except on his back and lower arms. Told me he rubbed special oil in to get the hair to grow and I believed him. Not a good start to our working relationship. He didn’t think much of my skills even when I got older. I think he hired me because he liked my mom. Hell, everyone did, until those last couple of years when she came undone. That was what she called it, like she was a pair of running shoes. ‘I’m coming undone,’ she’d announce in case we forgot what she was up to.
“You know she was a drunk but you don’t know she was basically an okay person. Yes, you sure as hell can be both, but I bet even in your world you’ve seen that. Your world probably would have given her better quality liquor—maybe she’d have dried out at Betty Ford or wherever the rich drunks go these days. We tried to dry her out once and she just drifted further away.
“Ma didn’t bother with other drugs. White wine was usually enough for her, coke if she could get it, which wasn’t often. She wasn’t addicted to cocaine, only alcohol, cigarettes and Cool Ranch Doritos. Anyway, she wasn’t like some of the other women around here.
“She worked, usually watching people’s kids. She didn’t turn tricks. No, my mama wasn’t a ho, sorry. Yeah, sometimes guys gave her money, but it’s different because she only went with guys she knew and cared about and the money was a gift, like. And she picked guys who wouldn’t treat her kids like crap. She loved us for a long time, even cared for Pasty for a few years—at the start. He was about two or three when her laces went too far undone. For me, she was a pretty good mom. Okay? That enough about her?”
He glanced down at the instructions. Education and background of parent. Parental Ambitions.
“Goddamn. Why do you care about Ma’s ambitions? You should only be concerned with mine. I will take the education you provide for me and use it to cheat the government for my gangsta friends. That’s a joke, Mrs. Moneybags. I don’t have gangsta friends. Unfortunately. They’d give me a loan if I asked and I wouldn’t have to do this talk, talk, talk.
“Repo and Prophet barely have enough to get by. They occasionally encounter money, but a party, jewelry—sometimes for a girl, gas for a car if they have one that week, a few lottery tickets and the cash is gone again. ‘No point in paying effing bills,’ Repo once said. ‘Doesn’t effing slow them down coming.’
“Right. Ma. She almost finished high school but dropped out. To have me, I think. Told me once she had wanted to be a teacher. She practiced on me. Never said a thing about how she missed a lot of life because I came along. She read to me, played games. My first memory is taking a bus to go to a fancy-ass preschool she signed me up for. I loved that ride almost more than the school. She’d let me stand on the seat and look out the window. Sang ‘Wheels of the Bus’ under her breath so no one else would have to hear her. She sang better than me, but that’s not saying much.”
No wait, he didn’t want or need to get into this kind of detail.
“Anyway. Maybe you’re right to ask about her ambition because she’s the only reason I ever even thought about school or college. Doubt it would have occurred to me otherwise. Not something we discuss around here much.
“Extended family? No idea. A woman visited once, told me to call her Aunt Leona. That’s all I can remember about her except she had long, bright pink fingernails. She was probably Ma’s sister because we didn’t do that aunt and uncle thing with friends.
“Ma moved from some town in Massachusetts before I was born. I think her father or maybe her mother beat her. She only hinted and maybe she just didn’t want to answer questions. The thing about Ma is she refused to hit, ever. Shriek, yeah. She would not beat on us. Said it was a bad thing to do to kids, and the choked way she said it, I guessed she spoke from experience.
“Eventually she had four of us. Except for Junelia’s dad, who died in a car accident, we didn’t know whose dad was whose and no one is going to pay to find out. I think Junelia’s dad was Ma’s favorite. He was a good guy. She disappeared for a whole week after we heard about him. Huh. You know what? This stuff is dull.”
He closed his eyes. “I would rather take a nap. I got back from work at four this morning. See what a sacrifice I’m making for you? Sleep is precious stuff, I’m telling you.
“Anyway. I’m the oldest by three, four years and I got the best of Ma. She used to laugh with us. You know how kids always are yelling ‘Hey, watch me, watch me’—she’d watch and applaud. She could even whistle through her teeth. Taught me how.
“But later, no. She was done with the reading and stuff by the time Pasty came along.”
Had he wandered off track? He turned off the recorder and looked at the list of questions. On and on, they went. Lists of impersonal questions interlarded with “suggested” nosier ones. Work history followed by Impression of first day of work. If no job, income sources.
“As if,” he muttered in his best mall girl imitation. He turned on the recorder.
“Work. Right. Mostly I worked for Rodrigo. I did deliveries for him. No, I don’t know what the eff—what was in the bags, envelopes or boxes I delivered. Drugs? Chicken livers? Dog food? Human body parts? I didn’t ask and I didn’t care. I got steady money. Pretty good pay. I did other stuff. Cleaning up his storefront, worked on his car and in a garage when I learned some about engines, that kind of thing. After school.
“Ma was rotten at the paperwork for benefits and to tell the truth, I was too. I’m getting better but it’s amazing I managed to ever get my ass in gear to enroll for any classes. Prophet nagged me to do it, to tell the honest truth. ‘God gave you the gift of smarts. Use that miiiind, Ben-ja-min. Use it or spit in the face of God!’
“But back to the list. Yeah, okay. Sources of income.
“We had some months when my pay from Rodrigo was all we had. I held back a few bucks, and gave most of it to Ma until I figured she drank the money or gave it away or lost it. After that, I started opening the bills and going downstairs to give the money to Mrs. Prichart, our ex-landlady. Did your people know about Bitchheart? Yeah, I see you got her name on here. Your guys are thorough. I’ll tell you that.
“Did you actually talk to her? Did Bitchheart tell you what she offered when I turned fourteen? Bet you can guess. Yeah, that’s right and in exchange for a chunk of the rent. I was as horny as could be. What would you do, Mrs. Moneybags?”
He stared down at the recorder, which didn’t even whir as he spoke. Only a steady little red light told him it was working. “Now why did I tell you that? Listen, I didn’t like doing Mrs. Bitchheart. It was gross. No, it felt just fine, but it was pure skank that I got off on it. The woman gave me a raft when I said I wanted to stop. She jacked the rent way up. An ego boost, let me tell you.
“’My services worth that much to you?’ I told her. Thought she’d burst a blood vessel, she got so angry. Hit me hard enough. Got a scar to show for it. Ma didn’t ask why I insisted on moving.
“Seriously, why did I tell you about Bitchheart?
“Let’s talk about you, shall we? You ever go to bed with someone so you don’t lose your apartment? That how you got your house? Marry someone rich, maybe? Am I offensive? Oh, do pardon me.”
He squeezed the recorder in his hand and laughed. “What the hell? Why am I being so unpleasant to someone I never met and who’s giving me money? Funny, isn’t it? I mean, yeah. You’re giving a deprived boy a hand up and he’s biting your goddamn giving hand. Fu—heck if I know why. But since I’ve started…naw, never mind. I’ll cut you a break for now.
“Right, what’s up next. Father.
“Chances are my father could have been the guy Ma called asswipe or the one she called Handsome Cheese. Asswipe’s easy. Never met him, but from what little I’ve heard, yeah, he lived up to his name. He was a married guy, I think.
“I have no clue where that name Handsome Cheese came from. They eat cheese one night? He have holes in his face like Swiss? Who knows? I asked a couple of times. She didn’t say a thing about him. Seriously closed-mouthed about Mr. Handsome Cheese. And so was everyone else I know, because they didn’t know who she meant either.
“When I look in the mirror I think he’s white or maybe Puerto Rican. Junelia says she thinks there’s some Indian in me. Like India. Because of my eyes. Or maybe Indian like Native American because of the shape of my face, cheekbones.
“That’s what I look for when I gaze deep, deep into the mirror. Not zits or ink smears. Ancestry.
“I tried different ways of saying the words Handsome Cheese aloud, Hasencheese? Hasincha? Just in case Ma was just playing around with his name. Ma ignored me. I even looked through the phone book for a while. Kept me busy. But naw, turns out thinking of him as just Handsome Cheese is more fun. Yeah, all in all, I prefer to think of myself as the son of Handsome Cheese, man of mystery.
“Hey, whatever my roots are, you know I’m bilingual. Not Spanish, not much, just enough to get by. I mean English and English. Your type and mine. Since about high school I learned careful diction and enun-cee-ation.
“After a single college class, I even learned to stop pulling out the multisyllabic mothereffing mouthfuls. You people don’t trip over your words when you go too fast. No giveaway worse’n someone trying to get his tongue around a word he can’t act-tual-lah say ’cause he’s only seen it written and never heard the word before.
“I do your language. But if I forgot to turn it off? Wham. My ass was against the wall. Shitforbrains. I blend, always have. Jeans, not low-riding, tee-shirt, hoodie, no flash, no bling, nothing that screams I’m out to conquer the world, mothereffer. I got a leather motorcycle jacket but it’s old and beat so no one’ll try to steal it, I hope.
“Oh. And the books. I learned to ditch those, too, except at home. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me, interview some kind of sociologist or psychologist. Why the hell do so many of the dudes in my neighborhood loathe learning? Mistrust schooling?
“Not the girls so much. And not the little kids’ schools. No, those are okay. It’s like if you like learning too much, you’ll end up being called an asshole. Getting good cars, money, good electronics—those are fine, respectable goals. But when you’re sixteen and go in for too much school and you’re labeled a snot, trying to impress everybody by talking shit. People think you’re just trying to make yourself look better than them. A poseur. Now that’s a poseur’s word.
“Get too many degrees and you deserve to get your ass whipped. Lawyers are the worst. But everyone in every walk of life enjoys a lawyer joke, huh?”
He looked down at the sheet. Siblings.
Not yet, thanks. It had been close enough to an hour anyway.
“Okay, I got to get studying. Don’t want to waste your money on a crap student, right? Bye. I have to read some article about the origins of scientific protocols. I suck at reading, gives me a headache, but I love it.”
He pushed the little recorder into his pocket. Tomorrow he’d upload the file onto a school computer.
* * * * *
The next day Ben forgot about the questionnaire until midnight. He flopped onto the couch, shrugged off his jacket and flicked the silver thing on.
“Sorry. Don’t have time for questions today. I’m too beat to give a full hour ’cause I had to go on a Beeb hunt. Now he’s getting older he’s getting better at sneaking out, that a-hole. I’ve learned I gotta got see if he’s in bed, and at ten when I checked Pasty’s and Beebo’s room—just Beebo’s now—anyway when I checked, sure enough, he’d taken off. So I grabbed the K-bar knife Repo managed to, uh, extract from the army and went on a Beeb hunt. Naw, I wasn’t going to stab the moron. Just standard procedure to carry. SOP.
“Don’t get the wrong idea, Mrs. M. There are good people around here. Ms. Lopez in our building—she’s an angel. The old guys down the street are funny as hell. At night we even got ourselves our own neighborhood watch. Pink. The woman always frowns like she smells something stinky and you’re it, but Pink’s not bad. She keeps track of everyone who walks past the stoop where she hangs with another old lady, the one who actually lives there. Junelia calls that lady a witch ’cause she looks the part. A face wrinkled more than a prune and hair dyed dead black. She won’t talk to anything male so I don’t know her name.
“‘Seen Beeb?’ I asked Pink.
“He under the bridge.’ Pink’s nose got broken a long while back and she always sounds like she had a cold. ‘Hanging with those bad DPs who stole my check. Right outta my box. Stole all my money.’
“Pink always claims people steal her check, but as far as anyone can figure she doesn’t have a fixed address with a mailbox. Pink’s got it right about the Decker Parks, though. Those DPs are bad news. They’re nothing national or big. The only good thing about that set is they’re equal opportunity idiots—a hybrid gang that’s called. All kinds of cretins in the DPs. So. Yeah. Back to my Beeb hunt.
“I ended up going to Repo’s apartment first. He’s good at rousting Beeb, who’s kind of scared of the big guy. We went to the bridge and grabbed that pain in the ass. After we got home, Beeb slammed the door to his room and refuses to talk. Now there’s a loss.
“Holy crap. He’s gonna go ape when I tell him the news. You already ponied up for college and books. We’re getting the first installment of stipend money soon. And we’re out of this place as fast as I can shake the dust. Another neighborhood.
“Yeah, I bet Beeb’ll carry on and run back, but so what. Maybe moving’ll help Junelia get over the sulks about her latest boyfriend. He’s been seen dry-humping a high-school sophomore named Betsy.”
Ben yawned. “Getting away from here. Very. Good. So good I promise to stop getting bent about talking. Hell if you told me to strip down and sing falsetto love ballads, I’d do it. But Mrs. M? Trust me. You’d be sorry you asked.”
* * * * *
As he held the recorder the next day, the small oval shape actually cheered him. Mrs. Moneybags’ silver worry stone. He sprawled over the sofa and began. “I bet you wonder what else I’ll do with the money. I’ll get myself a computer for school. I owe Rodrigo’s widow a boatload of money. Her, I’ll pay right away.
“The fu—effing hospital is still after us about Pasty. Sometimes I think we should go after them instead. I mean, hell, did they do their job? I don’t know. Junelia and I talked about finding an ambulance-chaser lawyer, but neither of us wants to think about that last year or talk to anyone from the hospital again.
“Go, run fast into the future. Junelia sang that song after we decided to just let it go. She got it right. Run, rush far away from the past. You’re just lucky I’m not trying to sing it at you, Mrs. Moneybags. I croak like Rodrigo did. Frog voice.
“Anyway, that’s the time Junelia and I and Prophet talked and drank beer and decided to let go. We lit candles and drank too much. That’s the night Junelia went out and got a tat on her upper arm.
“’Pasty’ looked pretty damn funny written on her dark-gold skin, darker than mine even, but I didn’t tell her that. Doubt she figured out the word. The tattoo’s cute. A little rose on the Y. Would have made Pasty laugh his ass off. ‘A rose? Hey, no way. I wanna be a tiger, Juney,’ he’d say.
“Okay, Pasty. Sibling. Dead. Want to hear about him anyway? Sure you do. He got sick a lot. Complained about headaches. Complained about weakness. Complained and complained. We didn’t have insurance so we were gonna wait it out.
“Then he had these seizures. Holy crap, I will never forget those.
“He was sick a long time.
“Huh, what about the others during that time? More than a year. Beeb missed weeks of school because I wasn’t there to get him up and ready for class. I was the only one who gave a rat’s ass about that kind of thing. Still am. Big old nagging Mama Ben.
“Never even really thought about it but I guess while we were at the hospital, Beeb spent all day watching TV. Junelia was thirteen and a pain in the rear. I was sixteen. Not old enough to be Pasty’s guardian so I had to rouse Ma to keep the authorities from snooping around.
“I had to be there. I stopped school, I stopped everything then. Pasty would flip out if I went for a goddamn pee.”
He fell silent. But then he managed to talk some more.
The words came slowly but he closed his eyes and described the long hours at the emergency room that first night, Pasty whimpering on the hard plastic molded chair next to him, leaning on his arm.
“We finally got on a bed and I just lay down next to him. Noisy damn place but I fell asleep. He didn’t. They sent us home that night. Finally got it into my head that he was really, really sick, but the hospital sent him home. Two nights later, the same thing only this time they let him have a bed faster. And they gave me a number to call to schedule an appointment for a CAT scan. Three weeks later. Yup. By then he was finally in the hospital. He’d lost about ten pounds which was a lot for his little body.
“I hated them then. Hated him too. All that whining. ‘Ben. Ben. Ben.’ He’d say my name over and over. I drove my hand through the wall then so I wouldn’t drive it into him.”
He broke off and studied the silver disk, wondering how to erase the section. No. No one’s really going to listen to this, he told himself and he could talk again. Otherwise, the words wouldn’t come out as easily and the he’d have to work harder at the moneybags assignment, as he called it. Philosophy was already taking up too much of his time—didn’t need any more time suckers.
He touched the edges of the disk with his thumbs and looked across at a picture Beeb had drawn at school—a basketball player with ten–foot-long legs.
“After that, when he was in the hospital, they paid attention. Test after test. Lots of needles and then chemo. He wanted to go home. Blamed me. If I hadn’t taken him to that place, he wouldn’t have gotten that sick. He yelled and cursed me, but if I left the room, he’d scream way worse. I tried to get Ma in there but no, not her, goddamn undone…never mind. She couldn’t help it, okay? I figured that much out. Took a while, but I get it. The woman couldn’t cope with life. She just cried and collapsed when she went to hospital which made everyone ask questions.
“Right. Pasty needed me there, they told me. Go get him under control or we can’t stick him with needles. I had to sit in that room. And when we went home. I had to sit next to the couch.
“I have this tat of a dragon on my left arm. I wasn’t even drunk or high when I got that. Just liked the idea of a dragon. No effing clue why. It didn’t hurt as much as they say. Tats aren’t that big a deal.
“Anyway, Pasty loved that thing, irritated my skin the way he’d trace it with his finger along the wings all goddamn night long. In the middle of winter, I’d wear short sleeves so he could get at it. I wish he’d had a blanket like Beeb did, but instead he had my arm.
“My butt got real lazy while he lay on the couch, which was my goddamn bed by the way. Poor kid made a mess on it a couple of times—I got another one from Roddy after Pasty, so don’t worry.
“Hell, at least Pasty let me read my books. And we’d watch movies. A lady from the hospital gave us a TV with a VCR built into it and all her kid’s tapes. We watched every one of them a thousand times. He didn’t want anything scary. Courage the Cowardly Dog used to be his favorite cartoon, but that was too scary.
“He watched Barney the Dinosaur toward the end. He made me swear not to tell anyone. No ten-year-old should ever be seen watching Barney, not even one who’s lying on a couch, wearing diapers, dying.
“You keep the secret too, okay? Promise? He sang along with Barney. Makes me choked up every time I hear it now. I love you, you love me. God, what a crappy song. I hear that guy’s voice. He did Chuck E. Cheese’s ads for a while. I heard it and I wanted to vomit. No seriously, it made me physically ill. I don’t hate him though. He helped ol’ Pasty.”
Ben sat for a while. He’d never spoken of Pasty’s whole life, short and unhappy, but now he recalled, with moments of pure joy. He’d never thought it out from start to finish before. And when he was finished, he felt as if he’d barfed up a rock. Raw, aching and not as heavy inside.
“Holy crap, I’m sitting here and I feel like I just got some kind of therapy or something, Mrs. Moneybags. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to have happen? You talk about hard things until they take up less room? Well, well, and the service is free too. Unless you want to send a bill. Dr. Moneybags, tuition paid and brains rinsed clean.”
Chapter Two
September-October
Ben worked on making another set of covers for his textbooks while he talked. The rustle of the paper shopping bags probably drowned out his voice, but that didn’t bother him.
“Covers wear out fast. Must be the way I hold the books or something. Gotta resell these babies later on. Don’t want anything to happen to them. Also, it’s just as well to have them covered up, hidden, if anyone stops by for a visit. Don’t know how they’d find out that the microbiology book costs more’n eighty bucks but that’s always a possibility. Don’t want to tempt poor Repo or Junelia’s worthless boyfriend.
“Repo’s a good guy but he tends not to think of stuff as possessions. More like objects convertible for ready cash. He gives as easily as he lifts. I mean once we had nothing to eat and the food pantry is once a week. And he showed up with about thirty pounds of cheese and a huge sack of apples. I think he must have raided some school lunch counter. We burped apples and cheese for weeks after we ate them all.”
As he worked, Ben talked about random things. Like the time he tried to wash Beeb’s old Ninja Turtles blanket. Or the fact that they keep their mother’s ashes next to the bottle of wine they’d found hidden in a suitcase. The silver disk was a silent tomb that took all his words and buried them. He liked that. And on top of that, it gave him money.