My First Paid Writing Gig

GetWell_bear

In elementary school I had a friend named Donny—a small, double-jointed fellow who smelled of peanut butter. I remember him as having a fuzz-stache for as long as I knew him, but I’m probably just extrapolating back from junior high. Surely he didn’t have a fuzz-stache in second grade, when this story takes place.
In the fall of that second-grade year, Donny caught a bad case of pneumonia and was hospitalized for a few days. “Pneumonia,” one of my classmates intoned, shaking her head gravely. “Your lungs fill up. You drown from the inside out.”

“Your lungs fill up?” one of the boys asked. “With what?”

I didn’t have to ask. I knew what Donny’s lungs would fill up with: peanut butter. I pictured him in his hospital bed gasping for breath, every wheezing exhalation filling the room with the smell of sorrow and peanut butter.

In Donny’s absence, our teacher gave everybody a sheet of construction paper and assigned us the task of making Donny a get-well card. I wrote a poem on mine. I don’t remember all the details, but I was particularly proud of a couplet that went something like this:

He laid in the bed in his hospital room
And looked out the window at the yellow moon.

On the front of the card I drew a picture of Donny in a hospital bed, tubes sticking out all over the place, looking dolefully at a crescent moon framed in the window (and wondering, no doubt, if he would ever stand beneath an open sky again; I could be a melodramatic boy when I had a mind to be).

Donny recovered, and there was much rejoicing when his mother brought him back to Mrs. Curry’s classroom. My rejoicing, however, turned to bewilderment when Donny’s mother grabbed both my little hands and started speaking to me with a tearful earnestness that I had only seen on television.

“Jonathan,” she said, “I can’t tell you how much your card meant to Donny and to me—that you would take the time to write such a lovely poem.”

Well, for one thing, I hadn’t taken a lot of time. I had just found some words that rhymed and strung them together into something that made grammatical sense. For another, hadn’t everybody written a poem or something? For the first time it dawned on me that my classmates had probably scrawled “Get well soon!” on their construction paper, scratched out a picture, and moved on to the next activity. Obviously I had overshot the assignment. And this woman, overwrought with worry and relief, had mistaken my poem for a gesture of particular loyalty and friendship.

“You’re a sweet boy,” she continued. “Donny is lucky to have a friend who would write him a poem to cheer him up. A poem!”

Except that I hadn’t written a poem for Donny. Yes, Donny’s illness was the occasion for the poem, but I wrote it because I liked writing poems. I drew the picture because I liked drawing pictures. I liked Donny and wished him well. I certainly didn’t want him to drown in peanut butter from the inside out. But this woman was misreading the evidence.

“Donny’s father and I wanted to give you a little something to show you how much your card meant to us.” She started digging around in her big purse.

Now, this was getting interesting. I had heard of people getting paid for writing. I even had aspirations of writing for a living one day. But I had never dreamed of going pro at seven years old! What does a get-well poem fetch, anyway? Ten bucks? A hundred?

“We looked around the store for something we thought you’d like.” Donny’s parents owned a convenience store. “And with Halloween coming up, we thought you could use this.”

In two outstretched hands, she presented me with a tube of vampire blood. Vampire blood! Who pays a poet in vampire blood?

I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, and I still don’t. Surely there is some deep meaning in this payment in blood, but I can’t seem to get to it. Do you, dear reader, have any suggestions?