Big Money

When I returned to my father’s small and slightly dilapidated office on the near South Side of Chicago in 2003 for the first time in several years, the most commonly spoken words by both him and the two drivers still left employed in his messenger service were ‘big money’. Everyone in the office said it, my father included: ‘big money’, with extra emphasis on the ‘b’ so that the word, despite its natural brevity, always came out sounding as if it consisted of two syllables. Money was always the object of the sentence, even if it was only implied, but to hear the men in my father’s office speak of it, it was only its size that mattered. If there was such a thing as ‘little money’, and in my father’s messenger service there was plenty, it was hardly, if ever, spoken of, even though it comprised the vast majority of everyone’s day, from the envelope that needed to be delivered from the South Loop to the north-west suburbs in no particular rush, to the lone box waiting to be ferried three blocks away. These minor deliveries were what kept the company running, and what paid the weekly, tax-free salaries of the constantly rotating list of drivers who could be found sprawled out in various positions on the few chairs that had been scavenged for the office. And yet like anything else on a small scale, they were generally hated by the drivers, who saw them only as a distraction from the potential big payday waiting in the shape of a fifty-box rush-hour delivery that was bound to come.