My family didn’t have much money when we were just starting out. My father was a Presbyterian minister at a small church in Baton Rouge, which we had re-located to from Pennsylvania when I was still a baby.
The church was a double-wide stuffed full of folding chairs and layered with brittle wood paneling that was attached to nearly every surface of the trailer, except for the stringy indoor/outdoor carpet that served as roadways for my toy cars while my Dad talked about God.
The few members of the church were plenty loyal, but the paychecks were about as thin as the decorative paneling. We were moderately poor more often than not, but we weren’t destitute. We had money for the essentials. That’s all that really mattered. My parents fed and clothed me and my sisters (and later, my brother), and we never missed a Christmas. There were plenty of parts of my childhood that were traumatic in their own right, but our financial status was never one of them.
I think our money issues did affect me and my sisters in some way, though. Either that, or we were just a bit strange.
My sisters and I were constantly trying to think of ways to make money for ourselves. We started by taking our old, unwanted toys, fixing them up when possible, and selling them to the people in cars as they drove past the street in front of our house. We stood with Tupperware bowls filled with junk, hoping that someone would be compelled to pull over and buy something. We jumped up and down and yelled at them, but nobody ever stopped. Looking back on it now, that’s probably just as well.
We also tried to sell our toys to each other. We would set up an entire store in one of the rooms in the house, placing tiny strips of torn paper next to each item to indicate its price.
This idea worked better than the first, but we didn’t actually make any money since we would just pass the pennies back and forth to one another and trade out one broken toy for the next.
At some point, and I can’t pinpoint when it happened, my sisters and I decided that the best, and possibly only, way to make real money was to turn one of our neighbors into gum. Sticks of chewing gum, to be precise.
The neighbor we had in mind was a notably large woman who lived directly across the street from us. We rarely saw her. She came out of her house once each day to yell for her two sons to return home to her. She screamed each of their names a handful of times before going back inside until the following day when she would come back out and do it all again.
“Larry-Chad! Earl-Wayne!”
Then she was gone.
The woman’s name was Fat Judy McGee. Her name was not Judy. It wasn’t Mrs. McGee. It was always the full Fat Judy McGee without any deviation. As mean as kids can be, we didn’t intend for the title to be impolite or cruel. We honestly thought that was her real name. It’s just as well that we never spoke directly to her. She never found out the nice, little Edwards’ kids next door had tagged her with such a nasty alias.
I suggested to my sisters that we take one of our kitchen knives, a cheap, serrated instrument with a plastic, yellow handle, and carve Fat Judy McGee into very thin slices. Following that, we would take the slices and send them off to a factory somewhere; a vendor that happened to specialize in the task of converting overweight women into sticks of gum.
I know it sounds a bit gruesome, but we didn’t intend for it to be. It was incredibly innocent. When we imagined the process from start to finish, we didn’t see any blood or guts. We were about five, seven and nine. We were kids. It was harmless.
Well, not completely harmless. Fat Judy McGee would indeed have to die to make our gum, but aside from that slightly disagreeable incident, we didn’t see anything wrong with it.
I think we ended up losing interest in the idea within a few hours, but we would dredge it back up every once in a while for the next year or so, wondering if we could pull it off. It seemed strangely plausible in our odd, little minds. Still, it's probably just as well we never went through with it.
We all went on to get normal part-time jobs in our teenage years, having failed to start a business of our own. We came close to hitting it big, though. Fat Judy McGee gum could have been huge.
