It was around March of 1972, about a month before my twelfth birthday when I got a door-to-door gig selling subscriptions to the Baltimore News American. My best friend, David, had persuaded me to try it with him. Our route manager overlooked the age requirement of twelve-years old and we rode along in the white van with him and his son, Mike. Me and David sat on overturned five-gallon buckets between father and son, as there was no backseat in that austere metal conveyance. Whenever we stopped in a pre-selected neighborhood, we would split into two separate teams and canvass the area. The manager took David and sent me with Mike, because neither of us had had any experience canvassing.

I can’t recall the name of the neighborhood, but it was out in the suburbs, in an area of drab houses in big scrubby yards, randomly spaced. This was not an affluent subdivision with cookie-cutter houses and rules subordinate to a community organization. As expected, we had encountered a bunch of “no thanks” and slammed doors, but Mike remained optimistic, having learned from his father that every “no” brought you one customer closer to a “yes”.

We came to a two-story house with dirty, faded white siding. The front door was open, but the full-length screen door kept the bugs out. I knocked on the flimsy wooden frame that had a thin rod of metal strung diagonally from top to bottom holding it together. We could hear banter between a woman and what was apparently her son. After about thirty seconds I knocked again. Just as I was about to knock a third time, a scruffy kid about my age, but shorter, appeared on the other side of the screen, and barked, “Whaddayawant?” past the cigarette occupying his surly mouth. This kid’s demeanor oozed piss and vinegar.

The first thing out of Mike’s mouth had nothing to do with the News American. Instead, he asked with the shock of the righteous, “Your mother lets you smoke??” I was more surprised at Mike’s surprise than I was at the smoking, since all my friends smoked. I was only eleven and had already been smoking for at least two years. When the kid responded, “It ain’t none o’ yer business”, I expected that to be the end of it, until Mike said, “Your mother doesn’t mind that you smoke?”
“Yeah, that’s right!”, the kid replied through the snarling chip on his shoulder.

At that point, the woman we’d heard earlier sidled up to her son and looked us over with an air of indulgent impatience. Now it was my turn to be incredulous. She looked to be thirty-something, and attractive in spite of a worn, hard face. Her long, straight dirty blond hair had the same drabness of the powdery asbestos siding on her house. She wore a threadbare, loose-fitting house dress that screamed domestic toil. The short-stemmed corncob pipe in her mouth caught my attention the way cigarette-boy caught Mike’s. Together behind their hardscrabble screen door, those two looked like something out of depression-era Appalachia. Channeling her son, she asked “Whaddayawant?” but with slightly less menace.
Expecting all hell to break loose if Mike starts in on this woman for her pipe, my relief when he started off with a sales pitch was all too brief; he broke it off to ask, “You let your kid smoke?”
“Yeah. What of it?”
“But he’s just a kid!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was torn between empathizing with the customers and their privacy, and loyalty to my sales partner — a lot to balance for an eleven-year-old. Confronting potential customers over personal matters, especially when they’re irrelevant to the mission, wasn’t in the job brochure. I didn’t sign up for this. And the mother was having none of it; being judged by some pre-teen twirp. “That ain’t none o’ yer goddamn business!” She didn’t bark like her son, but there was plenty of bite in her words.

At this point, her son started in on Mike, and they began talking shit to each other, which resulted in a challenge, with the mother’s blessing and her subsequent encouragement as the two antagonists moved over to the yard on the side of the house and started pounding on each other till they got to rolling on the ground. Not knowing what my role in this shit-show should be, I stood there pondering what to do if Mike started getting his ass kicked. Do I jump into the fray? Or do we both just slink away? And what if the mother started throwing punches? This wasn’t covered in the job description. My concern was short lived, as was the mother’s enthusiasm, when Mike straddled the son’s chest and threw a couple punches with the boy shielding his face with his arms. Mike sternly asked, “You give?” The son refused to yield, so Mike punched some more and asked again. The son tried to squirm out, but when Mike raised his fist to strike again, he said, “I give!”, which must have been a hard pill to swallow for a boy of such innate pride, and in front of his mother.

Needless to say, we didn’t get the sale.