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Text 11
HARRY

William Saroyan

This boy was a worldbeater. Everything he touched turned to
money, and at the age of fourteen he had over six hundred dollars in
the Valley Bank, money he had made by himself. He was born to sell
things. At eight or nine he was ringing door bells and showing
housewives beautiful coloured pictures of Jesus Christ and other holy
people — fifteen cents each, four for a half dollar. "Lady," he was
saying at that early age, "this is Jesus. Look. Isn't it a pretty picture?
And only fifteen cents. This is Paul, I think. Maybe Moses. You
know. From the Bible."
He had all the houses in the foreign district full of these
pictures, and many of the houses still have them, so you can see that
he persuaded very well, after all.
After a while he went around getting subscriptions for "True
Stories Magazine". He would stand on a front porch and open a copy
of the magazine, showing pictures. "Here is a lady", he would say,
"who married a man thirty years older than her, and then fell in love
with the man's sixteen-year-old son. Lady, what would you have done
in such a fix? Read what this lady did. All true stories, fifteen of them
every month. Romance, mystery, passion, violent lust, everything
from A to Z. Also editorials on dreams. They explain what your
dreams mean, if you are going on a voyage, if money is coming to
you, who you are going to marry, all true meanings, scientific. Also
beauty secrets, how to look young all the time."
In less than two months he had over sixty married women
reading the magazine. Maybe he wasn't responsible, but after a while
a lot of unusual things began to happen. One or two wives had secret
love affairs with other men and were found out by their husbands,
who beat them or kicked them out of their houses, and a half dozen
women began to buy eyelash beautifiers, bath salts, cold creams and
things of that sort. The whole foreign neighborhood was getting to be
slightly immoral. All the ladies began to rouge their lips and powder
their faces and wear silk stockings and tight sweaters.
When he was a little older, Harry began to buy used cars,
Fords, Maxwells, Saxons, Chevrolets and other small cars. He used to