It was a damn hot day in the middle of a hot summer. The heat made the Paper Girl think she might be gettin’ too old for this job. When she was eight, or eleven, or even fifteen she could take it just fine as she walked the three vineyard blocks she called her “territory”. But at seventeen, she thought, heat stroke was a killer.
Despite the danger she continued her daily routine of dolling out crisp, clean news, just as she had done every summer for the past nine years, just to pass the time. Each day around ten A.M. she would bounce through the neighborhood with her paper bag slung over her right shoulder and across her chest with her messy blonde hair dangling down. She always wore a smile and a sundress.
Most of the people she saw on her daily route were like her: rich vacationers there for the summer from Long Island or suburban Connecticut. These people were boring like her father; they didn’t enjoy the things she did, like fast jazz, corny comic books and cheap gin. Paper Girl was a free spirit like her mother had been, but she was having trouble remembering how her mother stayed so free in such a confining world as the one her father had built for the family.
The one local the Paper Girl encountered on her daily routes was Java Man, and this damn hot day wasn’t different from any other in that respect. Java Man came strollin’ up from the direction of the beach with his long brown hair, pushing his refrigerated cart from which he sold Iced Coffee, Iced Tea and loosely rolled joints. Every day the Paper Girl would casually toss him a paper, which he’d snag out of the air with one hand before handing her an Iced Coffee. They’d exchange smiles; his coy and arrogant, hers playful and whimsical. They never truly spoke beyond pleasantries, and neither knew the other’s name, despite the fact that they had slept together a half dozen times.
On this day, however, she opened that smile and spoke to Java Man. “Hey Java Man,” she said, “Think I can get a few of those doobies?” The Java Man’s arrogant smile turned into a speaking smirk as he answered “Sure, what’ll you do for me?” The girl’s innocent and head in the clouds smile changed as she bit her lip and looked right back at Java Man. “I’ll see what I can do. Just give me a handful of those joints.” Java Man laughed and dumped five or six doobies into Paper Girl’s news bag. “I guess I’ll see you later then,” said the Java Man as he wheeled his cart on and Paper Girl danced down the street, tossin’ newspapers onto doorsteps as she went.
That night after a visit to her favorite beach to throw rocks at seagulls, Paper Girl returned home with five or six loosely rolled joints in the pockets of her sundress. She sauntered past her father who was reading a John Grisham novel in the living room in his recliner. “Hi daddy,” she sang as she walked into the kitchen, not waiting for his classic grunt of a response.
She took out a mixing bowl, some brownie mix, eggs and butter. She mixed up a thick batter, and one by one she unrolled those doobies and dumped the contents right into the mix. “Hope you’re hungry, daddy. I’m making brownies,” she said loudly to the general direction of the living room. The Paper Girl had a stack of records and a game of Scrabble ready to go in the dining room. Java Man sat on the other side of the island in his one bedroom apartment, drinking his cheap gin, listening to fast jazz records as he flipped through his Archie comics, hoping that the Paper Girl would come knocking on his door like she did whenever she was fucked up and bored.
