The Myth of Wile E

When Life Won't Even Give You Lemons

Actually, I think I got to be pretty good at knowing the value of a dollar. When I turned ten years old, Daddy sent me ten dollars for my birthday. This was a dollar more than he'd given me when I turned nine. So, by Daddy's estimation, the value of a dollar equaled about one year of my life. Maybe that's what detectives in old movies meant when they said, "Life's pretty cheap to some people."

When I got the ten dollars, Mama said, "If you were smart you'd save your birthday money for something you really want. But you'll probably be just like your father, not knowing the value of a dollar, and you'll waste it all on candy. So don't come crying to me when it's all gone, because remember, I told you."

After much deliberation, I decided that the best thing to do would be to take my ten dollars and invest it, or better yet, start a business. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of professional opportunities available to ten-year-olds in that day and age. That was back before "tweens" were invented, and we kids were not highly valued by the business community. So I chose the entrepreneurial classic—a lemonade stand. After all, we did live in Southern California, where people were often hot and thirsty.

So I spent the ten dollars on sugar, lemons, paper cups, and one of those little plastic juicers that Speedy Gonzales could have worn as a sombrero. I borrowed the card table.

The very first day I made eight dollars and used up all my lemons. I was happy about having made eight dollars until I realized that because I'd invested ten dollars in the first place, I'd actually worked all day just to lose two dollars, which at Daddy's exchange rate meant one-fifth of my life down the drain. Plus, I'd have to use the eight dollars that were left over to buy more lemons. So I reinvested my eight dollars, and raised the price of my product. The next day I had fewer customers but I made nine dollars and had some lemonade left over. I didn't think it would keep well so I drank it. After two days of work, I had made seventeen dollars and spent eighteen. I had gone from losing two dollars a day to losing one dollar a day, which was a pretty big raise in salary, and of course there was the fringe benefit of free lemonade. Unfortunately, I needed to buy more sugar and paper cups and of course, more lemons.

I tried all sorts of different angles: pink lemonade, extra strong lemonade, extra sweet lemonade, spicy lemonade. I tried raising the price, lowering the price. But the best I seemed able to do was make about a dollar or two profit on any given day—less if it was cloudy or cool or a Wednesday, on which day, for reasons unknown, people just didn't buy much lemonade. And every time I made a profit there were ever more lemons to buy. Clearly it was going to take a long time to get rich this way.

Then I had a brainstorm. When I finally had twenty dollars in my pocket, I decided to make a valuable investment in my business: I'd just buy my own lemon tree and cut out the lemon middleman. With Dougie's old Radio Flyer in tow, I set off in search of a tree dealer.

I couldn't find a proper nursery within wagon range, but then I remembered the flea market. It was a mysterious operation that appeared in a weedy lot every Sunday morning and transformed back into trash and pigeons by nightfall. Mama had declared the place a heap of claptrap, but to me it was glorious. Granted, at first I'd been crushed to discover that "flea market" was not the same thing as "flea circus," but my disappointment vanished when I realized I was surrounded by grownups who still appreciated such treasures as fancy marbles and Pez dispensers. It gave me hope that not everyone forgot what mattered when they got older.

I knew the flea market would have lemon trees. I mean, someone was offering a collection of glass eyeballs ("near mint!"). Lemon trees didn't seem like much to ask for. And sure enough, I found a tree vendors' booth at the end of a long row which also featured roadkill taxidermy and mismatched hubcaps.