Uncle Johnny's Bail Money

When I was about 15 years old, I was futzing around (is futzing a word?) in the dining room , actually I think I was nosing around , no, probably fidgeting while my mother was lecturing me on the virtues of not hanging out in front of the Pizza Shop at the shopping center ( a treasured teenage congregating point)…I think her words were…”Boys don’t ask girls out who hang out at the Pizza Shop..they know you are always available, you’ll never get a Saturday night date doing that”.

I pondered that one, for a teenage second, wondering if that meant I could actually start dating.

As she was telling me this, my young mind started wandering along with my feet, I started circling, pacing about the dining room ,doing the teenage avoid-eye-contact-at-all-costs, trying to keep my mind off the lecture and wondering how soon I could go to the Pizza Shop.

I pass by the soup tureen. The soup tureen, that big honkin’ piece of silver status that never held an ounce of soup in all my days on this earth, ever.

I casually lifted the lid up off the big silver baby and holy Sonny and Cher, inside it was a roll of cash ( I later counted it, 500 clams)….

I looked up at my mom, who was cautiously looking at me, and said “Wow look at all this money, what’s this money for?”

Of course my mind is racing, is she leaving frumpy step father? Is she saving for an operation? Is this for me? Are we getting a pool? Can I come back later and peel off a few twenties that she would never ,never notice?

Racing I tell you, racing.

She answered succinctly and with a finality that meant, no more questions, “That’s Uncle Johnny’s bail money, don’t touch it.”

I put the lid back as if it was radioactive and left the room. I had completely forgotten about the Pizza Shop and started walking to the door and outside to sit under the trees in the yard.

Uncle Johnny, a name that evoked danger, darkness and omigod do I really have his errant DNA?

He drove a ’63 corvette and wrecked almost every Saturday night, he was wild and scary, he made stealth trips to …FLORIDA...he told us he sold acid at Woodstock and I always wondered if it was the BAD acid that Wavy Gravy warned about ….and what the heck is bail money?

Curious beyond belief, I rode my Schwinn up to the shopping center, past the coveted Pizza Shop and to the library where I look up (um by the way, this is the 70’s) the words “ bail money”…. Or “bail”…seems that wad of cash was there to secure a quick release from jail for scary Uncle Johnny.
Since we are talking the 70’s, automatic teller machines hadn’t been invented yet, keeping cash hidden in the house was the way to go.
And bail money is usually needed at 2:30 am never during banking hours…and by the way, the other definition for bail was “a container used to remove water from a boat” something to save a sinking ship perhaps?…hmmm.

So I was RIGHT…Uncle Johnny was not only scary but illegal! There was something not-quite-right about his trips to FLORIDA. I knew it! He had seen jail…touched criminals, walked the perp walk, omigod again…..or not, because of the bail money.

Now here’s were we get to the point of the whole story…don’t you just pray for this moment?

The point is, here I am , over 36 years later… sitting in my sunporch writing this ,while 2 plumbers dig a massive trench from our house to the gas line, which decided to die and leak gas into the air which I smelled last night and made the phone call that started a VERY EXPENSIVE CHAIN OF EVENTS.

But I don’t get too spastic, because I learned early on, from my mother, to be prepared, to save a little cash in the soup tureen in case Uncle Johnny gets thrown in jail…or a gas line needs to be repaired.

And THAT is the point of this story.

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