Bartering With the Devil
My dad was an attorney. So was I. We worked differently. He bartered with his clients in exchange for doing wills and estates. He was that kind of guy. I would get up to his house for the weekend, see a bulldozer in the yard, and ask him what it was for. He would simply say, “Not everyone has the money to pay, but they have things that they would trade.” But what is a close-to-fifty-year-old Jewish man doing with a bulldozer in his backyard? Bulldozer things.
I worked for the government. 100-hour weeks for $25,000 to start. They weren’t bartering jack squat with me, other than for my soul. I had no large building machinery in my yard. I never wanted to do bulldozer things. But I always wanted to be like my dad.
My mom was a paralegal. She worked hard. She helped everyone. She would never have bartered with anyone because she would have just done it for free. Honestly, my dad would, too, but he also liked trading for weird things. I often wonder what I would have traded to make my mom unsick as a teenager. Anything. She would never have let me barter with the devil.
I used to hit tennis balls to my dogs, Bert and Ernie, with a baseball bat for hours. If you’ve never done this, you can’t imagine how enjoyable it is. In the summers, I would hit or throw the tennis balls into the ocean, and they would go after them. I can see them swimming, panting, and lying in the dirt. Tennis ball slobber and heaving chests, and a boy with his dogs.
I have a cousin who stole an entire inheritance from my sister and me. We thought he was kind of a nice shlub, helping my Aunt and Uncle in the elderly years. We were wrong. I wonder what he will have to barter when the time comes. Karma.
In middle school, I once wrote something distasteful about the principal in bubble letters on a piece of paper. I wrote it in bubble letters so they wouldn’t know my handwriting. I was a smart kid, but not as smart as I thought. They called me into the office, and I almost let out a small turd in my tighty whiteys. He asked me to write in bubble letters on a piece of paper right then. They didn’t know the level I was at. I made the letters insane on purpose. I never got in trouble.
One of my best friends at camp growing up borrowed my Grant Tennis sweatshirt. It was one of my favorite sweatshirts. After the evening activities, we would all flee to random dark spots at camp to fool around with our girl or boyfriends. She went on the raid trail with my sweatshirt on, with another one of my best friends. She gave him a handjob, and he ejaculated onto the sweatshirt pocket. We had laundry every week at camp. She asked me if I wanted it back. I passed.
I wonder what the universal payback is for peeing in a pool. I did it so often as a kid, it’s kind of alarming. When I heard the tall tale about the club putting dye in the water that would activate when you peed, I got a little nervous. So, next time I went in, I let out a tiny trinkle. No dye. Waterfall.
It’s weird seeing your high school friends still act like their high school selves on social media when you are over fifty. I guess it’s not so strange. We all become older versions of ourselves, but we don’t change that much. Douchebaggery is still douchebaggery; it just has less hair and a beard.
A loud fart in a movie theater is funnier than any scene in any movie that has ever existed.
© Jonathan Greene, August 14, 2026
