Scrounger

I was an A-1 scrounger. No, that’s not a scavenger writ large. It’s a resource locator and redistributer extordinaire. It was the summer that my best friend and I ran a Tiki carving business in Baltimore. Tiki’s were hot for restaurants, homes, and small ones for personal jewelry. We’d set up a table at one of the fairs, and sell a selection of small jewelry items to the Hippies.

Now guard your tongue! My friend and I were not Hippies. We were Folkies, and never the twain shall meet. Right? But the craft thing needed supplies, and supplies cost. And the one thing we had little of was cash. So I became the scrounger. Often, scrounging involved exchanges. I’d find some good stuff that Oscar could use to make things at his floral emporium, and he’d pay us for it. Then we’d buy food and supplies.

I knew nothing of the urban terrain of the city, but my friend had grown up there and knew each and every inch. He’d give me tips on where to look. I also had to learn to take note of where to avoid – gangs, bad neighborhoods, and industries with nasty security.

The Underground Economy is us!

No, we weren’t stealing; we were early recyclers. A company would “discard” some wire, we’d find a use or user for it, and assist them in getting it off the property. It was a win-win proposition. We took care not to push our scheme into the theft of valuables that were not secured carefully. Some of the places would even point out what was trash. One person’s trash in the hands of an expert scrounger could become another’s treasure. We were a valuable part of the city’s underground economy.

We had fun and supported ourselves that summer in a generous fashion. But as fall came on, we both got itchy feet. Out came our backpacks and we resumed our Pius Itinerant ways – I off to Toronto, then back to Boston, and he down to Atlanta. We never repeated that particular scheme; it was an anomaly for us, but it established a pattern for me to always look for ways to reuse things.