She stood at the front door, all nine years and three feet of her, clutching a shiny catalog in one hand and what appeared to be some sort of sign-up sheet in the other.
I knew what this was all about and I wasn’t happy. There I was, grinding out some fresh powder on a goth metal feature I was working on all morning, and suddenly the doorbell rung out. Four times. The only people who ring your doorbell four times are people under the age of ten and people who are being chased by someone holding a machete.
Sigh… I knew what came next.
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“Hey there,” I smiled as she looked somewhat disapprovingly at my chest. The black t-shirt I wore featured a horned skull in mid-scream (or mid-moan), with blood pouring out of its empty eye sockets. Needless to say, it’s a sweet shirt, but in fairness, I get the same look from people over the age of 9 as well.
I sort of recognized her as one of the little girls who lives at the other end of the neighborhood. Little kids are like the French—they all look the same to me.
“Would you like to buy some cookie dough to help our school?” she said in a tone that suggested a fair amount of parental coaching.
“Baby, I’m a music journalist. The only thing I’m interested in is finding out how much you’re making running this two-bit scam and where I get in on the action.”
OK, I didn’t say that, but a flood of sarcastic and profane replies were caught in my mental filter before exiting my mouth. The thing is, I’m not a grouch by any means. I dig kids. At least the ones who aren’t crappy, and in my neighborhood, I’d say that the non-crappy kids outnumber the crappy ones by about four-to-one. Pretty decent numbers, I’d say. But she was coming at me during a particularly productive writing streak, when I was really in a groove, with my tunes cranking, the text flowing easily into the document and the dogs sleeping peacefully in the sun room. By the third ring of the doorbell, they were leaping at the door as if there were a cat on the other side peeing on one of their chewy toys.
Using my leg to keep the dogs back I slipped through the door to proceed with the extortion safe from canine maiming and the inherently litigious attentions such unpleasantness tends to attract.
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“Cookie dough, huh? What, do you like just cook it yourself?” I asked. I honestly was so scrambled at that point, that I found myself struggling with the concept of selling cookie dough.
“I dunno,” she said. “I guess so.”
“I guess I could eat it, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
OK, she wasn’t even trying now. Where was the hard sell? Where was the story about how if I don’t buy some of this cookie dough, the bank is going to foreclose on the school and send the kids to work in some blood diamond mine in South Africa? She was hustling me without even a token effort. This was bullshit.
I looked at the paper in her hand and could see that two of my neighbors had already bought some of her product, so I knew there was no getting out of this. She knew it too.
“There’s regular cookie dough and there’s cookie dough that’s already sliced,” she offered, opening her catalog and pointing to a page full of brightly colored tubs of dough and plates of cookies. This was her attempt at the close.
“Wait, so I can either get this roll of cookie dough,” I said, pointing to one of the pictures, “or for three bucks more I can buy this one here, with the cookies already cut up into slices?”
“Yeah,” she said, back to her dazed, bored, little kid tone.
“How much do you think they pay the slicer?”
“What?”
“Well if they charge three bucks for slicing, but they pay some guy a buck to slice the dough, then they make two bucks a roll just off of the slicing. Do you guys get any of that? The slicing profit, I mean.”
“I dunno,” she replied, officially sick of my nonsense.
“Ok, let me see that,” I sighed, scanning the catalog contents for anything that didn’t look like highway robbery. Of course, as this was a school fundraiser, by definition, each item is a bright, shining monument to highway robbery. “What about these chocolate chip ones? Are they any good?”
“Yeah, those are really good,” she said, clearly lying. What, the company came to school and insisted the kids taste everything on the menu so they could truthfully counsel potential buyers on the merits of each offering? Staring down at the tiny blonde liar standing at my front door, I pictured her future high school boyfriend asking her something like, “Are you really staying in and studying tonight?” while on the other end of the phone, she’s applying the last bit of lipstick before running out into the school quarterback’s Camaro revving outside, saying, “Yeah, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I picked a roll of some sort of multi-chip dough and couldn’t help but notice a smug grin cross her face as she handed over the sign up sheet and pen.
“You know, the Girl Scouts sell cookies that are already made,” I jabbed. “You just open the box and eat them.”
“Theirs aren’t as good as ours,” she cockily replied. Having closed the deal, she was all giggles and unicorns now.
“Well, for fifteen bucks, I’m guessing that yours are pretty fu… pretty good.” True story—I almost dropped an f-bomb. “So do I pay when the dough shows up?”
“No, you pay now,” she said, shaking a paper envelope full of my neighbor’s hard-earned money. Poor bastard never saw her coming. Just like me.
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I fantasized grabbing the envelope and slamming the door, but instead I reached into my pocket and pulled out a wrinkled twenty.
“Got any change?” I asked with bitter resignation.
“Yup,” she said, snatching my twenty with astonishing aggression. She then counted out five singles, thanked me and walked away.
Since that exchange, I have been approached by one neighbor kid selling overpriced popcorn for the Boy Scouts and two separate girls selling chocolates for the same school. Embarrassingly, I bought something from each kid. I’m now sixty bucks in the hole on overpriced junk food, none of which I’ve actually received. What can I say? I’m a softie.