Making Money to Keep on Fishin’
My brother and I have spent our
lives making money where we could so that we could purchase more hunting and
fishing gear. This is a trait that we have inherited thru our red, white, and
blue DNA from our old man and am sure goes farther back than that. When we were
kids we would spend our summer days mowing lawns around the neighborhood and
then have our dad take us to the local sporting goods store to get new lures,
hooks, and if we had enough saved, a new rod and reel. My first job was working
at a Subway on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The great thing about that job was
I could cash my check in the Post Exchange (like a Wal-Mart for military personnel)
and the cash cage was right next to the outdoors and fishing goods. It was a
sign that I needed to spend every dime getting new fishing gear as fast as I
could rather than pay for gas so that I could get to work the next day. When we
got older, we stepped away from mowing neighbor’s lawns and did larger projects
like tearing down old sheds for people, cleaning up brush, scrapping metal, and
selling chickens and other critters. Raising money in this fashion always
seemed to give us as many wild stories as the fishing trips we went on with the
money we had made. My brother reminded me of several of these stories today as
we headed to a scrap yard with the old man to sell off some junk that had been
collecting around my dad’s property. Here is a couple.
Scrappin’
for Cash
One
day my brother called me and said he had some scrap metal he was loading up and
was going to haul off for some cash and asked if I wanted in. I had a little
scrap but he agreed to pay me half of what we made as long as I helped him load
up all his metal. I also found out that he had four tires with aluminum rims on
them. These four little gems were going to bring us a pretty penny but we
needed to get the tires off of them. Being that we were working a get rich
quick scheme, we didn’t want to take the time to properly remove the tires; we
needed to do it quickly so we could be rolling in the dough. Sooo, in our
infinite wisdom we decided to use a circular saw with a blade for cutting metal
to just cut the rubber right off of them rims. Yeah, I am sure there is someone
reading this right now that is slapping themselves on the forehead saying, “What
an idiot! Don’t do it!” Well, I did it. I revved the little motor up on that
saw and drove that blade right down onto that tire. Did I mention that these
tires still had air in them? BLAM! The tire exploded sending the hot rubber I
had just created in the cut right into my face and hair. I screamed and flopped
around on the ground holding my face while my brother howled in laughter.
“I
can’t believe you really did it! Wow, I never thought you would do it!”
He
kept laughing as I tried to peel the now sticky goo from my face and hair. A
glob the size of golf ball hung firmly in my hair like a wad of demonic flaming
chewing gum, which we had to remove with a pocket knife, leaving me to look
like Daffy Duck after Elmer Fudd had shot him in the face. I don’t remember how
much money we made off that load but I do know that all the pain was worth the
fish finder and cushioned seats I bought for my little john boat so that we
could pretend to be professional bass fisherman. The following weekend we
fished a small bass tournament with one of our uncle’s bass clubs. We pulled up
to the ramp with our john boat in the bed of our truck and parked next to a row
of fancy bass boats with 200 horse power motors on them. There was collective
laughter from the club members as we drug our beat up boat from the truck and
pushed it off into the water. They laughed even harder when they seen that we
had converted an old cooler into a live well to keep our bass alive while we
were fishing. Decked out in our bibbed overalls and working boots we smiled and
waved as we trolled out onto the lake while they all gunned their beasts up
into the river channel. We probably had one of our best days bass fishing and
quit an hour early so we could go up to the truck and eat our lunch. The fancy
boats came back one at a time, some smiling, some sad from a bad day fishing
but they all still had the energy to laugh at the two redneck brothers and
their raggedy aluminum boat. We tied for first in the tournament and I missed
big fish by one ounce. Not bad for a couple of dumb country boys; we collected
our cash and told them if they felt like giving us their money again to let us
know and we would be there.
Roosters
Lay Eggs
My
brother is more of a farmer than I will ever be; he actually paid attention to
what my dad said about taking care of animals and growing vegetables while I
spent my time chasing butterflies and picking flowers. Well, one night my
brother called me and said he was going to need some help getting all of his
critters to a big sale for such animals and like our scrapping job, as long as
I helped him get the animals there and sold them he would give me half of the
cash. We arrived at the sale and I found that I am quite the salesman. I was
working the crowd like a used car salesman suckering the masses into buying Hot
Wheels. “We got rabbits! Four dollars apiece or three for twelve dollars! That’s
right! It sounds crazy, so jump on it while we still have them!” I don’t know
if the people couldn’t work the math fast enough in their head or they were
just trying to get me to shut up but the rabbits went faster than donuts in a
Weight Watchers Clinic. We were selling chickens and goats, pot belly pigs; we
even bought several guinea pigs from a lady at a dollar a piece and then sold
them ourselves for three dollars apiece to kids as they passed by. The day was
going great, but we had one rooster that just would not sell. This thing looked
like it had crawled out of a pet cemetery, both eyes refused to focus on
anything giving it a look of chameleon and it may or may not have had both
legs. For whatever reason, I don’t remember why, but we moved this zombie
rooster into a new cage that just happened to have an egg lying in it from some
of the laying hens that we had already sold. That is when a little light bulb
burst over my head as I screamed Eureka!
“Looky
here folks! Got us a Rooster that lays eggs! Selling it cheap! Just five
dollars!”
A
man stopped and looked at me disbelieving.
“You
want me to believe that this here rooster laid that there egg?”
“He
did. He is in that cage ain’t he? So he had to have laid that there egg.”
The
man shook his head; he couldn’t fight with my logic and handed me five dollars.
I even let him keep the cage the rooster was in to sweeten the deal and he
walked away a happy costumer as me and my brother scrambled to load all of our
empty cages to make a break from there before he found out that he was had!
