The best financial advice I ever received was from a guy who had just woken up alongside a riverbank after a 3-day bender where he and a buddy had consumed more than 5 gallons of beer via a Party Ball, which is exactly what it sounds like—a huge ball full of beer.
This was a little more than 20 years ago now. I was working for Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation, a job I’d done for about five summers, mowing lawns mostly, and keeping parks clean (I loved that job). I had a large riding mower with a 72 inch deck, and I was sitting on it under the shade of a tree, smoking a cigarette on my mid-morning break.
It wasn’t necessarily that his advice was anything that hasn’t been said before, but the manner in which he delivered what amounted to an epic speech with almost no feedback from me was unforgettable.
Anyway, every June when performance review time comes around at work, I usually get a raise. It’s typically just a cost-of-living adjustment, but still, I celebrate by buying and grilling myself a steak. I don’t buy the best steak (aged porterhouse would be my preference), but this year I had a thick ribeye, and it was good. Not great, but good, and I thought of that man and what he said to me then, and hoped he’d found his way to a good steak every once-in-a-while, too.
He bummed a smoke from me and then he began:
“Workin’ so fast you gotta take a break?”
“No, break time, 9:30,” I say to this man out of sight.
Pushing a gas powered tiller, he pulls up alongside me. The tiller is nice, and relatively new. He speaks quickly, his pupils nearly as small as the point of a pen, leading me to initially believe that he might be on some kind of stimulant.
“I just bought it for 150 bucks from some Chinese guy who lives in town, owns about ten apartments,” he says. His gums are outlined in black tobacco, contrasting, when he smiles, with his white teeth.
“I bought this so I can work, you know. I work at the same-day-cash thing, but sometimes they don’t have jobs. I do gardens now, for ten or twenty bucks, you know. Some guys won’t take jobs down there for seven bucks an hour. They wait for ten, you know, but ten don’t always come around. They go have a beer or play cards or something, I don’t know. Me, I take em. I do lawns too, with a lawnmower, but not a riding mower like that, that’s nice.”
“I got a Party Ball with a buddy. I said ‘Hey, let’s go drink this,’ and we did, for three days, and it was the good stuff, Budweiser, you know, and I’d wake up and pass out and after three days he’d say ‘duh’ and I’d say ‘duh?’ How the fuck do you spell duh? I was so stupid after that. I can’t spell too good. I read at a third grade level, you know, but I ain’t stupid. I can spell cat. C-A-T. But you start givin’ me them big words and shiiiit. My mom took me to the doctor when I was about 5, said I was hyperactive so they gave me a downer, you know, to keep me calm and shit, Milinall or something. I think I couldn’t get them words after that, you know, but I was good at math. I know my plusses and my take aways. I use a calculator for the big stuff though, like for the times—I use a calculator for that. I’ve got street smarts, common sense, you know?”
“I live on hamburgers. Some guys live on steak wages. I live on hamburgers, you know. Some guys try to live on steak makin’ hamburger wages, and it don’t work. I tried that. Gotta live on hamburgers making steak wages. That’s how you get ahead. I want to be the guy. The one behind the desk, you know, I’ve been in front of it, I’ve tried that. I’ve been the guy buying and now I want to be the guy selling. I go to work with money in my pocket.”
“You’ve gotta have your ducks in a row. You can’t have the big duck in the middle, the middle duck in the back and that little duck up front, you know, you gotta have em’ in the right order. But sometimes you gotta have the right ball, you know, so you can hit it, whack, out there… homerun… the good ball.”
Ain’t that the truth, brother.
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