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.

In a city as sprawling and as proud of its architectural grandeur as Chicago, such an emphasis on size seemed only fitting. Everything surrounding my father’s office was big, and the men working with him rested in that shadow. The office was on the second floor of a two-storey building, just around the corner from a fast-food Greek takeout restaurant and a strip mall better suited to the suburbs, and yet less than a quarter of a mile away stood the Sears Tower and a dozen other skyscrapers whose shadows were literally cast over the office and road every afternoon. Size was paramount in a city like that, and if the immigrant men working with my father had to share only one word in common, it would have certainly been ‘big’. What else could they say about the city they now found themselves in and about their dreams, and all the things that threatened to derail them, except that they were big?

The messenger service had been around for close to a decade by the time I returned to briefly manage it. My father at sixty had been diagnosed during a CAT scan with a large, cancerous tumour in his left lung. He never smoked. His drinking was confined to a weekly beer and, on even more rare moments, a glass of Scotch or cognac. His work kept him in solid shape; his arms and legs were even now still lithe and stronger than mine. He chided me constantly to eat more fruit and to pray – his twin pillars to having a long and healthy life – and yet bad luck, genetics, or unknown environmental factors won out, and he was scheduled to have at least one lobe of his lung removed.

I knew the general outlines of how the business worked, and who my father’s major clients were, having briefly participated in the time-honoured tradition common to all small-business owners of taking their sons to work with them. In junior and in high school I spent at least the first month of each summer working with my father. I would help him or one of his drivers with the occasional delivery, or if my father was busy with the phones, which according to his rules always had to be answered by the third ring at the latest. I would wake up at seven a.m. or earlier each morning and dress in my father’s clothes. I’d take a cleanly starched white shirt from his closet and socks from his bottom drawer, and while he always wore a full suit, I was allowed to get away with slacks or khakis, so long as they were ironed.

Our house in the suburbs was three blocks from the expressway and only one mile away from the city’s border, so within minutes of leaving home we were heading straight towards the Sears Tower, which stood at the end of Interstate 290 the way I imagine castles must have once stood with an air of magnificent grandeur above the petty villages beneath them. Along the way we would listen to the morning news and once we had reached downtown, stop for doughnuts and coffee near the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The half-hour journey was one of the few rituals that we ever shared and, even at the time, seemed to be especially poignant precisely because of that. While my father and I were hardly strangers there was a gap between us that was not only generational but also cultural: having been raised almost entirely in the Midwest, thousands of miles away from Ethiopia, I spoke of dreams and privileges that he could have never even considered.

During the first years of what I now think of as my accidental apprenticeship, my father often took me to meet his clients. While I stood next to him, dressed in miniature, he would proudly introduce me as his son, who, at the age of thirteen, was certain to become a doctor and was a straight-A student, even if at the time I no longer was. As I grew older and more familiar with the routines, I watched him slip thin white envelopes with a hundred dollars or less in them to the young men and women who were responsible for deciding which messenger service deserved their company’s business, one of the facts of life that ranged from menstruation to his inevitable death that he no longer tried to shield me from. He called the women ‘dear’ and the men ‘buddy’ while flattering all of them equally.

Afterwards I would watch him descend from the twentieth- or thirtieth-floor mail room with a package in his hand, wrapped in a small rage as he spoke of the crooks and thieves that made business almost impossible and yet he knew he could never do without. At the end of each week, if all went well and his clients had paid their invoices on time, I was given a cheque disproportionately larger than what I deserved and perhaps even disproportionately larger than what he could afford. At the very most I had helped carry a few boxes, or perhaps I had sat in the driver’s seat of a car while it was illegally parked and had kept him or one of his drivers from getting yet another ticket, which leads me now to believe that more than anything my father was paying me to witness his life, and in more specific terms his life in that city so that I would know what to expect when I was older, so that I harboured no illusions or false sentiments of just exactly how all of this worked.