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How i got this crazy accolade i'll never know, I think they just needed a body from "down da 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. 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 oftentimes, because I started delivering late as it was, (school was over at 3pm, then I'd daydream for 2 hours and 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 unbenownst to the suits that gave me this award, my money management skills left alot to be desired also, but this was none of their 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 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, and 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.( this one customer asked me one time, at 8:30pm, why I was collecting so late, I just bullshitted her I think, but she was in her jammies already)

another time, my father gave me this little money canteen that I could clip on my belt, miners used to put explosives in or something, but i remember the first time I clipped it to my belt and went collecting the money from the customers. I perversely thought, " I am real organized now, and determined to not pre-spend the bill money, and i will have enough to pay the bill to the newspaper when the district manager comes collecting." well that lasted about a week, 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.

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) nor did I buy them any candy nor soda at the store. i remember one time, 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 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 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 manging 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.

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 called my parents at home 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 asked my mother some questions, pertaining to my interests, hobbies, and the like. the conversation may have gone something like this:

Mrs. Aversa: He attends Scranton Preparatory School, the Cavaliers you know, (hear, " The Scranton Prep Song", note: I am not condoning the ideas expressed in this song nor homophobia, I am just relating what I heard when I was in high school), 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, but i will give my mother the benefit of the doubt on this one because the person who called from the newpaper 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 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 wresting team, then that is a whole other story. but she still may have been honest and said, on the phone, "he was on the wresting team", and the newspaper phone person, wax in ears possibly, may have heard "he is on the wresting team". so my mother is covered there also. 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.

regarding the ski club: i had heard in school that there was a ski trip to elk mountain, so i decided to go, 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 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 drinking shots of whiskey with my hometown 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. first mistake.

Mrs. Aversa: As an "athlete" (quotations mine), he plays baseball, football and basketball. (all true, playing team sports while growing up was fun, I would recommend it) He also has tropical fish as pets (true), builds model cars (true) and he collects coins! (absolutely not true, and my mother's second and most glaring mistake 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". now there is nothing inherently 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.

the only coins that I liked were not antiques that you could collect, you know, like dubloons or pices 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 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, my memory is hazy about this, 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 think that 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. so maybe my mother was right, i DID collect coins, in this definition of a coin collector: a coin collector is someone whose sibling collects coins, 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 (great for the teeth) and other sundries, instead of selling the coin at the coin dealer store for $5.00 or whatever it was worth at the time.

so, a couple of 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 camels 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 homeroom together, and her very first words to me were not, "do'ya wanna ball 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.