Selling Shit Door to Door

When I was eight my parents divorced. My mother moved into a duplex. The yard was officially quite small, but beyond it there was a giant field that sloped down hill to a creek.

The family that we shared our duplex with was Vietnamese. They had a giant garden outback and a pen of chickens that occasionally escaped and ran around our yard. There were three generations living in their side of the house. The grandfather, I quickly learned, would often go down to the creek with a net and scoop crayfish to bring back and cook. When I was young I sometimes accompanied him down to the creek, and he would show me in broken English how he went about catching crayfish. Eventually he let me borrow the net and go down to the creek on my own. While the idea of eating the crayfish was unappealing, I kept them for pets to play with.

As a child I was always trying to come up with schemes to make money. When I discovered that the local pet store would purchase my crayfish I began selling them at anywhere from $.25-$.75 depending on the size. Sometimes I even got a whole dollar for the big ones.

Over the summer after we had moved into the duplex my friend Sam and I were playing in the giant field between my house and the creek. In the midst of the field was an oasis of trees, which we had commandeered as our fort. On that particular day we were building a roof to cover the fort. We began by placing sticks in a checkered pattern across the limbs above us, and then scoured around for a way to fill in the gaps. We began by using leaves, but didn't have enough to finish.

After mowing the lawn my next door neighbor would always come and dump his grass in a pile next to our fort. Through rain and decomposition it meshed together into an ideal building material. We grabbed it in large handfuls, ignoring the foul smell, and used it to seal off the rest of the roof. As we did so, Sam began to tell me about how his father usually dumped their extra grass clippings in the garden, “because it helped the plants grow.”

“You mean like manure?” I asked. Sam nodded. “Don’t they sell that at the store?”

“I think so,” Sam replied.

“So maybe we could sell it and make money,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Sam replied skeptically.

“Yea, it’s a great idea,” I insisted. We returned to my house and grabbed a bunch of brown paper bags—the kind used to hold lunches for school field trips. We also grabbed one of my mom’s fancy serving trays.

Back at the fort we began filling the bags with what we kept referring to as manure. Apparently fertilizer and compost had not entered into our vocabulary by that time. We carefully placed the bags on the serving tray careful to make them look as appealing as possible.

We began with the Vietnamese family sharing the duplex with us. When we knocked on the door the grandmother answered. She spoke even less English than her husband. I cheerfully began my sales pitch.

“Hi how are you doing today? That’s good. Well, we are selling manure for people to use in their gardens. It makes plants grow. They are fifty cents a bag. How many would you like?”

The woman looked down at the bag that I was already trying to hand her. The bottom was wet and dripping with old rainwater. The smell was rank enough to convince anyone that it was in fact manure.

“No thanks” she said, and shut the door.

Sam and I looked at one another and shrugged. "What’s wrong with her? We wondered.

Next we went to my other next door neighbor’s house. They were a friendly old couple whose children had grown up and moved away from home. The husband was the one who had been dumping the cuttings in our fort in the first place, but the irony of selling him back his own decomposing grass evidently did not occur to me at the time.

We knocked on the door and his wife answered. I recited the rap to her. She smiled, gave us a dollar, and took two bags. Our first sale. I was a genius.

Sam and I agreed to split the profits 50:50, but with our current earnings that seemed impossible. “Don’t worry,” I assured Sam. “I’ll keep this dollar and you get the next one.” That seemed like the only fair way to go about it.

We walked up and down the street throughout the course of the afternoon taking turns talking to neighbors and selling them our patented manure-in-a-bag. Our success was sporadic, and it was not until the end of the afternoon that we made our biggest sale. An old woman answered the door. I explained to her what we were doing.

“Oh my God!” She gasped then disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with her purse, turned it upside down, and began to dump out all of her change.

I anxiously counted up all of the money and tried to hand her the appropriate number of bags.

“No, no,” the woman insisted. “You keep it.”

Sam and I walked away feeling confused. Why would she just give us money without taking our manure-in-a-bag? That just didn't make any sense. We shrugged the thought aside. Her loss.

By the end of the day we had managed to rake in a whopping twelve dollars. The best part of all was that we had no expenses. The compost was free, and the bags were paid for by mom. When we sat down for dinner Sam and I anxiously told mom the story of our great business venture and our ambitious plans to expand our market into other neighborhoods in the coming days. Mom was not as excited as we were. She got upset for reasons that were beyond me, and forbid us from selling any more manure-in-a-bag. When Sam’s mom came to pick him up she seemed equally unenthusiastic. But in the end it did not matter. We each walked away with six dollars. Not bad for a full day’s work.