Money For Nothing

Looking Sideways For An Angle

You can bullshit the baker
And get the buns
You can back out of every deal
Except one

Tonio K., "The Funky Western Civilization"

*****

I’ll tell you how screwed up I am. After being inundated for months by commercials and public service spots telling me about the imminent changeover to digital television and what it means to me, I dutifully went on-line and reserved two tickets for converter boxes for my household, even though every television in my home is hooked to cable – yeah, yeah, I know Time Warner Cable is a monopoly and sucks, but it is better than nothing (though not by a whole lot.) The point is, I have no need for the converter boxes but, hey, they were giving them away so. . . I took my tickets to H.E.B. and picked up my two boxes, at no charge. They are now stacked on a shelf in my workshop, unopened.

I got the boxes even though I do not need them because I am constitutionally unable to pass up a free deal on just about anything, yes; but also because I figure at some point they will stop giving these boxes away, and will start charging for them. Which will immediately create a market for them on the side, at a discount. I could then sell my boxes at a reduced price, for cash, and still make a tidy profit. And doing so, tax free, would put me squarely into the shadow economy, the one that operates outside the parameters of the IRS and SEC and FTC and ICC and any other number of governmental acronyms you want to throw out there.

Most normal people who do not live in the tree-shaded, speed-bump festooned, manicured lawn-ed West End of Beaumont know there is a parallel economy out there that is always running alongside the official one. The 'official' economy being the one that is in the tank now, run into the ground by a bunch of well-dressed and –coiffed banking boobs who granted millions in home loans and whatnot to borrowers with the shakiest credentials imaginable, loans that Joe Blow down on the street corner would never have made. So now we have to give quadrillions of dollars to these fuckers to keep them from going under and dragging the world economy down with them, for good. The official world economy, that is.

Oddly, and Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes could explain it all better than I, when the official economy screws the pooch, so to speak, the shadow economy, the one economists and politicians call, with much disdain, the “Black Market”, actually thrives. This is the economy of the pawn broker, the loan shark, and the bookie; but also of the guy who mows your lawn, or sells you his vehicle but insists on cash only, or who shines your shoes at his stand in the bank lobby. Billions of dollars are exchanged this way every day, untaxed and unaccounted for by any government agency.

I know most of this sort of economic activity is at least mildly illegal, and it probably costs me money is some way, but I have always looked upon it with some favor. I think I am as attracted to the quasi-rebel spirit of it as much as the practical advantages; the attitude that, hey, we will participate in your capitalist economic system, okay, but we are going to make some of our own rules.

To be honest, I led a fairly sheltered life growing up, at least early on, and I really knew very little about this alternate economic system, one that operates every day more or less in plain sight. It wasn’t until I met up with my father-in-law that I got a real inkling of it.

*****

My father-in-law was a great guy. He didn’t think I was, at first. We had been dating a month or so when my wife decided we were serious enough that I needed to get to know her parents, and vice-versa. So we would go over to their house and she and I and her mom and dad would sit in the living room and make small talk. My mother-in-law was great, but it was all kind of awkward anyway, especially when my father-in-law, after saying maybe two words, would sit back in his easy chair and lift the Auto Trader or whatever it was he was reading up in front of his eyes. And that was it; no more participation out of him, or even another word. Afterward, my wife would say, “I think my dad likes you,” and I’d be thinking, “What?”

Eventually, though -- and I have no idea what it was that brought him around – he decided I was all right. We were pretty tight after that. He had a really nice shop in his backyard -- a second two-car garage, actually -- where he had all his tools and maybe a car he was working on and a stereo and an antique Coke® machine that dispensed Michelob Light™ beer. He would get home from work and head out there, come in for dinner then head out there again, until it was time to come in for good, to take a shower and go to bed. When my wife and I would visit, especially after we were engaged and every single conversation between her and her mother involved some aspect of wedding planning, he and I would escape to his workshop, where our mutual aversion to girl talk and fondness for tools and beer caused us to bond, I guess you could call it.

My father-in-law had a regular job, as a tradesman in a local refinery, and he made decent money. I gathered most of that he turned over to my mother-in-law, for household expenses and such. For his own money, he had a whole other thing going on, on the side.

He bought and sold used vehicles continually. He had everyone in the family trained to look for cars and trucks on sale. It was really weird to be driving along the freeway and suddenly have my wife whip a notebook out of her purse and start writing something down. It was the phone number in the back window of the pickup truck ahead of us, right there at the bottom of the “For Sale” sign. My mother- and brothers-in-law did this, too. It did not matter what the vehicle was; if my father-in-law thought it was a good deal, he’d buy it.

He never drove the same car for more than a couple of months. If someone made him a good offer, he’d sell. Three or four times, after I was married, he called and asked me to come pick him up; he had been somewhere and someone offered him $1500 for the Ford Ranger he was driving that week, cash. And so he sold it right out from under himself. Happened all the time.

He also bought and sold guns, and auto parts. He restored muscle cars, and he would buy and sell or trade for just about anything else one could imagine. All for cash only, none of it on anyone’s books except his own. He wore Red Wing™ boots everywhere, and it sounds like a cliché, but he always had a fat roll of hundreds in his left boot. And often some kind of pistol in the back pocket of his jeans, for protection or, if you offered him a fair price, for sale. Hanging around with him educated me in the ways of the parallel economy, and taught me how one could come out ahead on a deal if the price was right and one was willing to buy and/or sell just about anything, if so.

*****

I suppose I learned the lessons of my father-in-law well. I am not nearly as resourceful as he was, but I am not averse to jumping into a deal every once in awhile, if it looks like the real thing.

Like the day a few years back a friend of a friend approached me with a truckload of brand new HP laptops, in unopened boxes, and offered to sell them to me for $100 apiece. I think he or someone he new had jacked a container at the Port of Houston; but I don’t know that. I did know it was all illegal as hell, but I also knew if I bought the laptops, I wouldn’t have them for very long, so. . . I got him down to $75 and bought ten, which was all the cash I had on me at the time. Kept two of them for my kids, and sold the other eight at work the next day, for $175 each. I believe the statute of limitations has run out on that deal, by the way. Another thing I did was make quite a bit of cash right after Hurricane Ike, just driving around Beaumont after work with a couple of chainsaws and a mower and weed eater and blower and a pressure washer and generator in the back of my truck. I was charging a lot less than the price-gouging out-of-town a-holes were, to clean up yards and the like. And just so I don’t come off as totally rapacious, I was doing the same things for my immediate neighbors, only for free.

*****

I don’t know what the market will be, if there even is one, for digital converter boxes in the future. Everybody who wanted already has two of 'em, after all. However, it is not hard for me to envision people like myself getting so fed up at some point with Time Warner’s bullshit that they rip the cable out of the wall, and from the back of every TV set in their home.

When they do, they will need some converter boxes, for sure. And I will know one place they can buy them, cheap. Cash only, of course.

*****