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How to Make Money Writing Mail Order Pamphlets

Toby’s dad, unfiltered cigarette constantly plugged between his lips, banged at an old Royal manual, turning out twenty-four to thirty-six-page booklets every working day.

These were promoted, alongside pitches for hemorrhoid creams or trusses, in boxed ads inserted into the low-cost classifieds of specialty magazines and obscure newspapers. Within days of the ad’s appearance, envelopes containing checks, money orders or wrinkled currency would begin trickling in. When enough money was collected to cover production costs of a particular work, Randy contracted to have it printed up and mailed out. Some pamphlets—one concerning chemical experiments that could be performed with common household products, for example—sold only a few dozen copies. Others, such as a new theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination, sold thousands and went into several printings.

Randy worked like a machine. Behind each sheet he rolled around the typewriter carriage invariably lurked a carbon and second sheet. He kept copies of everything he wrote in battered filing cabinets in case he needed to borrow from an earlier work for his latest masterpiece, a common practice. Even in his final weeks, when he knew he was dying, Randy continued to pour out words and suck in smoke. He sat hunched over the typewriter, bones showing through a sweat-soaked undershirt, working for thirty, forty hours straight to get down words before they were forever lost. “It’s my legacy, Toby,” Randy rasped when his only child begged him to stop, to save strength. He paused to draw breath and his exhale resulted in dry hacking with a gurgle at the end. “A last chance to leave my small, unique mark on the world.” He stifled a cough, patted the boy’s cheek with skeletal, nicotine-stained fingers and turned back to the keyboard.

When he got too weak to sit up, Toby’s mom rigged a table across the bed and his father continued to pound away. As weeks dragged by, the clack of keys became more hesitant. Pauses between bursts of inspiration grew longer. Randy skipped carbon paper then, as though it no longer mattered if what he wrote was preserved in duplicate. But out of long habit he used new backup sheets for each page he typed, to help cushion the blows of sharp keys against the beloved old Royal’s tender carriage.

Toby remembered his mother throwing out stacks of those almost-blank pages, marred only by blurry indentations, after Randy died. “But Mom,” he had complained, holding out for her inspection a sheet, pristine except for nearly invisible ghost marks, “they’re practically brand-new, perfect for drawing.”

His mom had yanked the paper away, stuffed it into one of many boxes bulging with blank reams stacked at the curb. “I don’t care. I want it all out of the house.”

Toby snapped out of his reverie and stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. Those pages of Dad’s, those second sheets looked just like these.

He began a third beer. He’d never read much of what his father had written—he’d never been inclined to read much of anything, outside the newspaper Sports section or the comics. But now he wondered what these pages contained and was eager to find out. His dad had probably written a pamphlet about how to raise the words. It was too bad Mom had sold Randy’s filing cabinets and chucked their contents when she moved to Missouri a couple years ago to be near her ailing sister.

Maybe you dipped sheets in vinegar. Or held them over a flame. Or painted them with carbon tet. What, Toby wondered, could he use? From cupboards over the sink he selected and rejected several household products before arriving at a possible solution: a canister of powdered graphite used to lubricate skids of stubborn windows and cranky doorknobs. If properly applied, it could be a variation on the old rub-a-pencil-over-the-message-pad-to-see-where-the-killer-went gimmick from a 1930s detective movie.

Toby sifted a quarter-teaspoonful of graphite onto a page. With a clean, dry half-inch paintbrush he moved the fine black powder around, filling tiny crevices. It worked. Words and numbers, fuzzy as if slightly out of focus, began to stand out.

Page 33: “…Human figures and symbols on the forty-four bark panels are still as brilliant as the day they were painted, eleven hundred years ago…”

Page 61: “…Colors, extracted from various native plants and earths, including such esoteric sources as…”

If it was all this dull, he had a long, tiring job ahead. Best thing was to organize pages, then see what he had. He looked for a dimple at the edge of each sheet, dabbed graphite, and when a number showed, filed the page in correct sequence. In the middle of the job, the phone rang. Toby padded into the living room, to answer it. “Toby Rew?” It was a woman’s voice, in the flat, nasal tones of a native upstate New Yorker.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Desdemona Colangelo. You’re the painter?” She sounded young.

“That’s right. Where’d you hear about me?” Toby always conducted an informal survey to determine the efficacy of his minimal advertising campaign. So far, word-of-mouth from satisfied customers had a big edge, although he had gained a few decent paying jobs off business cards tacked, stapled or taped in bars, restaurants, grocery stores and other establishments where there was a bulletin board, heavy foot traffic, and passersby had idle time on their hands.

“I don’t remember,” Mrs. Colangelo said. “Is it important?”

“Not at all, just curious. What can I do for you?”

“Do you do interiors?” She had a lisp that turned every “s” into “th.”

“Sure. It’s a specialty of mine.” Damn! He hated interior work, especially in summertime. Many older city houses didn’t have air conditioning. He’d lose gallons of sweat coating one stifling room after another. People were often too lazy in warm weather to bother moving furniture and other possessions, so he had to be extra-careful where he draped drop cloths and doubly alert about where he stepped. Worst of all, homeowners expected miracles. Clients who didn’t want to pay for prep work bitched bitterly when paint failed to cover cracks, gouges in plaster, ceiling sags or old wallpaper seams.

The woman said, “I need the whole interior painted. I’m hosting a big party this fall and I want everything spiffy.” Her lisp made the last word sound as though she was spraying saliva like a lawn sprinkler.

Toby ducked his head away from a sloping wall to sit in a rummage-sale chair. “How many rooms?”

She hadn’t been asked that question before. “Living and dining rooms, hall…”

Toby mentally counted along with her. Upstairs and down there were approximately twelve rooms or areas in all: a big, potentially lucrative job. “What about the exterior?” It didn’t hurt to ask. If he could add extra weeks of work at the same place, he wouldn’t have to scrounge for new customers.

“Most of the house is stone, very little wood and that was painted three years ago.” Her voice got pinched. “Although it’s already peeling in places.”

“I could look at the exterior when I come over to give my estimate.”

“Can’t you give an estimate over the phone?”

Duh! Could you hold the house a little closer to the receiver? “Not till I’ve seen your home,” he said. “Depends how big the rooms are—”

“They’re quite large.”

“—or what shape your walls are in. They may need prepping.”

“Prepping?”

Was he speaking Greek? “Preparation. Could be as simple as dusting away dirt and cobwebs, or more complicated, like repairing holes or stripping wallpaper.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Colangelo said. “Some rooms have wallpaper. Can you remove it before you paint?”

Crap! If there was anything he hated more than painting inside on warm summer days, it was scraping away layers of stubborn paper a square inch at a time. It sometimes took forever to finish a single wall. But if it meant the difference between winning or losing profitable work—“I can handle that, too,” Toby said. “I’ll give it a look when I come by, to see if I need to.”

“How long will it take to complete everything?”

“Impossible to tell without seeing your house.”

“When can you come over?”

They arranged to meet in two days. That would give him time to finish the Cratty place. The Colangelo job, it turned out, was located in a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood with old, established homes near Thornden Park, about halfway between the campuses of LeMoyne College and Syracuse University. Toby scribbled down directions, the address, and a phone number to call in case something came up and he couldn’t keep the appointment. They both hung up.

The third beer seemed to have evaporated. Toby opened a fresh can and sat again at the table in the nook to take up where he’d left off with the not quite empty papers.

There were more than three hundred pages. Just putting them in order took over an hour. Pages 12, 44, 78, 89, 191 and 228 had blood across the writing, from a few drops to full-blown blotches as big as a saucer. He’d tracked blood on the backs of a dozen other sheets. No telling, without a magnifying glass, how many he’d gotten paint on—the stuff dried flat white. Now they all bore his fingerprints, too.

Toby’s stomach grumbled. He glanced at the wall clock: after seven. No wonder he was hungry. He checked his larder. A few cans of beans, a couple cans of tuna beside vinegar, sauces, and spices in the cupboard. Inferior bulk raisin bran on the counter in a recycled screw-top jar to keep out bugs—it had been sitting there for months. There was a half-loaf of day-old wheat bread from the bakery outlet, now aged by a week and going green in places. Several plastic airtight containers of leftovers had been shoved to the back of the fridge. When opened, they revealed smelly things covered with fuzzy mold in three different pastel colors. He’d dine out tonight.

Toby arranged the heap of papers into a tidy block. Where to put them for safekeeping? He glanced at cabinets over the sink. He gazed down the hall toward the bedroom where his mattress rested on the floor. He looked the opposite way at the sparsely furnished living room. He considered the bathroom, not much bigger than a closet. Finally, he tugged open the oven door and laid the block of papers on a single wire rack dividing a box barely big enough to cook a chicken: as good a place as any.

Toby quickly lathered and rinsed himself in the coffin-like stall shower. He changed into shorts and T-shirt. Then he locked up and nipped over to an air-conditioned family-style cafe that served large portions of bland food for little money.

After a leisurely meal—tossed salad, homemade meatloaf, real mashed potatoes and gravy, mixed vegetables and fresh-baked apple pie—Toby returned home. He clicked on the TV and a small oscillating fan to move stuffy air around, then plunked himself into his second-hand easy chair. On a New York cable station, the Mets were playing the Padres. Toby immersed himself in the game—meaningless to the pennant race since both teams were far back in their respective division standings—blocking out of his mind the startling events of the day until drowsiness caught up with him.

He crawled off to bed. Toby slept restlessly, dreaming of a brown-skinned man covered with blood who rose from the floor to point at a pile of papers at his feet, only to be knocked down again by a faceless dark-haired man with a poker in his hand.

Chapter 7

In the morning, Toby decided to finish the Cratty job that day, no matter what. There was more work coming. He wouldn’t think about the blue house, the Puterbaughs, the cops, the dead man, that bundle of papers in the oven. He wouldn’t think of anything but just lose himself in work. After instant coffee and toast made from bread with spoiled parts torn off, Toby dressed. He locked up and went down to the garage. His was farthest left of the half-dozen cheaply constructed interconnected cubicles erected two decades before when the house had first been subdivided. Other garages, except for Bart’s at the far right, were empty, their doors ajar.

It was barely nine o’clock, yet the confined, windowless space was already warm when Toby opened the sturdy brass Yale padlock and swung the doors wide. The air inside was redolent with dust, crankcase oil, paint and a faint, sweet-sour undertone he could not identify. He wormed along a narrow path between truck and wall to the crude but sturdy shelves the landlady, Mrs. O’Dwyer, had allowed him to put up at the back to hold painting supplies. He took down fresh five-gallon containers of “Cultured Pearl” to replace those emptied the previous day. He grabbed gallon cans of battleship gray for trim, and fresh brushes of assorted sizes.

Toby lugged everything to the rear of the truck in five round trips. He selected one of his half-dozen white coveralls—identical, except for different colors and patterns of dripped paint—hanging from nails. He started to load the gear. Something funny about the ropes securing the tarp to loops on the truck bed’s sides. Toby examined the knots: grannies. He always used double slipknots so he could get at his equipment with a couple efficient yanks. Had he been so panicky leaving the Puterbaugh house that he’d changed his routine? Toby didn’t think so, but there was no other explanation. He worked counterclockwise around the truck, freeing knots, then flung back the tarp. The sickly sweetish smell intensified.

“What the hell?” Somebody had been in his truck. Everything was rearranged. Empty containers carelessly flung in the day before were neatly nested in a stack. Smaller buckets, brushes, cans of thinner and cleanup rags nestled in the topmost. It was obvious why the bed had been tidied. Someone needed space for an additional item: a long, bulky bundle swaddled in drop cloths and laid-out full-length.