Albertine Appears

My Finances Force Me to Act

    I was nearly broke, and I was about to enter the most important school year in my young life. I needed money. I considered begging, borrowing, or stealing it, but I decided that I was going to have to work for it.
    I didn’t like work, but I would do it when there was no way to avoid it. I had done casual work for years, after school, on weekends, and in the summer—mowing my neighbors’ lawns, pulling their weeds, washing their windows, even attempting to repair their radios—and I had delivered the local newspaper. Now, however, I needed something that would bring me enough money for the leisure pursuits that make a high school student’s senior year memorable, and enough to put on a show. I was somebody now, a young man of some standing in Babbington, and I ought to look the part. My parents couldn’t spare me more than pocket change, so I was going to have to earn some serious money on my own.
    When I asked myself whether there was any place where I would actually like to work, Porky White’s clam bar, Kap’n Klam, came immediately to mind. Working there was a possibility, but something about it kept me from embracing the idea fully. I didn’t know what that something was, not yet, but it made me shrug and say to my mother that I didn’t know where to look for work.
    “Flip through a magazine,” she suggested. “Look at the ads. They ought to give you an idea.”
    I did as she said, and it worked. I actually did discover a line of work that I would enjoy doing, but after some reflection, I concluded that photographers specializing in girls in bathing suits probably had experience and connections that I couldn’t acquire in time to earn some money to finance the pleasures of my senior year.
    So I walked down to Kap’n Klam. I bought a clamburger, and before I had finished eating it I knew why I didn’t want to work there.
    “I don’t want to work here,” I said to Porky.
    “Of course not,” he said. “None of your friends are here.”
    I glanced around the room. He was right. Although there were many customers from Babbington High, none of my pals was there.
    “Where are they?” I asked.
    “They’re over at the shopping center. It’s the latest spot. The trend-setters hang out there.”
    The shopping center had been built at the westernmost edge of town. There were many stores there, some large, some small, some swanky, some decidedly not. Porky had an outlet there, the second Kap’n Klam in the world, was a tiny place just outside the center itself, but close enough to attract shopping-center visitors.
    “How do you know that the trend-setters hang out there?” I asked.
    “How do I know that? I know that because I keep my ear to the ground, that’s how I know that. When the kids talk, Porky listens. Kids are a big part of our profits, Peter, and in the future they’re going to be even bigger. Kids like clams, they like to hang out, they drink soda by the gallon!, and they eat french fries by the ton. I can hardly keep up with them. When I overheard some kids talking about meeting at the shopping center, I knew what to do. Bang! I opened my little Kap’n Klam over there as fast as I could. And it’s working.”
    “But—why do they like the shopping center?”
    “Search me. I don’t know why, but they do.”
    “I don’t want to work there, either,” I said.
    “Why not?” he asked.
    “I’d be embarrassed,” I said.
    “Embarrassed?” he said. “There’s something about our venture that embarrasses you, Mister Investor?”
    “Waiting on kids from Babbington High would embarrass me.”
    “I wait on them, and it doesn’t embarrass me.”
    “It’s not the same,” I said.
    He looked at me long and hard. Then he frowned and said, “Yeah. I guess it’s not.” He thought for a minute, then he asked me, “How about observing them and reporting to me, keeping me up to date on the latest, whatever it is. Would that embarrass you?”
    “Do you mean spying?” I said with mock outrage.
    “Yeah. Spying. Why don’t you go over there and see what’s going on? Be my spy. Let me know how the trends are trending. Bring me reports.”
    I suppose that I should have suffered a period of anguished self-examination, an internal struggle over the ethics of spying, and that I should have subjected myself to a deep, searching, and painfully honest examination of the responsibilities of friendship, but I didn’t. I just asked, “How much would it pay?”