“Please Ma’am Please I just need $20 of sales to get a slap bracelet!” I’m sure I looked like a hard up Pixie Stix junkie the way I would hop and jump, rounding my eyes out for maximum pathetic size, brimming them with tears and letting loose with the deadly lip tremble (that only really works on anyone without kids). My parents would cast me out into the neighborhood to do my school’s dirty work. My mother would not ask of her friends, my father would not take order forms to work and brow beat his employees into purchases. I was alone in this multilevel marketing scam,thrust into a seedy underworld of guilting neighbors and grandparents, of knocking *gasp* on strangers doors.

I remember myself as the only kid who went and knocked on the door of the murder house. A year earlier our neighbor had been savagely shot and slashed while in his shower, my friends father discovered him nearly a week after his demise and the talk in the neighborhood was that his ghost walked that house howling for revenge. The people who subsequently moved in were treated like lepers but being a savvy kid,I was not going to let a murder, a possible ghost and the idea that the new people might be murder loving, corpse eating, zombie freaks stand between me and the Barbie Corvette I could earn by selling $300 worth of wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, and gift tags. After securing a 69 cent gift tag sale from the meek woman who peered out the door of the murder house, I was a neighborhood hero, though in the end a hero without a Barbie Corvette. I did manage to get that slap bracelet after my mother found me bawling over having only sold $1.83 worth of wrapping paper and accessories. Grudgingly she lifted the checkbook from her purse and wrote out a check for around $18.00 worth of the ugliest gaudiest wrapping paper to ever be inflicted upon the human eye. It lingered in our closet for years, though my slap bracelet was quickly taken away at school when I dared to publicly slap it onto my wrist (the county givith and the county takith away for the next sales drive I suppose).

I spent the best years of elementary school with neighbors door shutting in my face. I can’t blame them really. How many rolls of dove stamped gold leme wrapping paper can one home truly use? How many people want to fork over a dollar for a sub par chocolate bar that’s been melting in the stinky back pack of an eight year old? And who can afford to $25 dollars for a book of coupons that will never be used, right after spending hundreds of dollars to get your kid ready for their “free” government sponsored education? Not me.

I returned her sales packet with a note stating that we would not be participating in the sales drive. Long time readers may recognize this entry, it’s a redux from last year. If the pattern repeats it’s self, next month we will be asked to sell some crappy food stuffs which we can not ourselves consume being on a gluten free diet. The following month will bring us wrapping paper then… well you get the picture and it’s ugly.
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