THE PRIVATE STASH
The Old Town Hustle
The ghost of Old Town. I had seen them before, men who clawed their way out of the mud only to find the mud had a better memory than they did. This wasn’t a case for a filing cabinet; this was for a walk down memory lane, a long walk on a bad street. I didn’t head back to my office. I headed to the car, a faithful old Ford that knew the city’s back alleys like the lines on my hand. I drove, but my mind was in another time, another place, a place where the air was thick with the smell of ambition and the faint metallic tang of desperation.
I saw a kid, not much older than ten, with eyes that held the promise of a sharp knife. He wasn’t big or strong, but he was smart. He understood the city’s economy, the one written in discarded bottles and dented cans. He found a wagon in a junkyard, a pile of wood and rust that most would’ve kicked aside as worthless. But this kid, this Amos, saw an engine of commerce. He took two broken wagons and salvaged the best pieces to make one that held a straight line. He took a dozen discarded wheels from a pile of trash and found the four that would hold the weight. He spent that whole summer pushing it up and down the alleyways, under the hot sun, his hands raw from the frayed rope handles. He’d load that thing up with pop bottles that clinked like a poor man’s treasure chest and take them down to the deposit center. Every day, the same haul. Every day, the same grind. He did it all summer, a whole season of sweat and grit, and when it was all over, he had four dollars to show for it. Four dollars. It was all the gold in the world to a kid from Old Town, a fortune forged in hard labor and shrewd dealing.
Amos Makes his Move
Most would’ve spent it on candy or a trip to the picture show. Not Amos. He walked into that dusty little corner shop where the air was thick with the smell of cheap tobacco and stale coffee, and slapped down four wrinkled dollar bills for four proof boxes of baseball cards. A fool’s errand, a one-in-a-million shot at a good card, but in that stack of paper and ink, he found his future. He got lucky. He found three Yogi Berra cards. Then he did what all the best hustlers do. He didn’t sit on his luck; he worked the angles. He traded his whole collection—the Mickey Mantles, the Babe Ruths—to the other kids in the neighborhood until he had the last Yogi Berra card in Old Town. He owned the market. He sold those four pieces of paper for ten dollars a pop. Forty dollars. It wasn’t a fortune, but in the right hands, it was a start. He used that cash to buy a beat-up ’49 Ford from an old mechanic on the wrong side of the tracks. The rust was so thick it looked like it was bleeding, and the engine coughed like a dying man, but to Amos, it was a chariot of destiny. He and his old man spent every weekend of the next year fixing it up, a father and son with wrenches and grease, building something that didn’t just run, but ran like a dream. When he finally turned it over for a hundred bucks, his father wouldn’t take a dime. “It’s your car, son,” he said. And with that hundred bucks, a kid from Old Town started playing a new game, investing in penny stocks. He didn’t play the short game. He played the long one. By the time he was eighteen, Amos was filthy rich. He had come home, but he was a different kind of ghost now, one made of money and ambition.
