Read an Excerpt
Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy
A Novel
Chapter One
Gil
I was born in this place named Santo Andre that is part of São Paulo, Brazil. It's not a bad area, not rich, not poor, but middle class. It's the same thing if you go in Astoria, Queens, or Newark, New Jersey. That's where a lot of Brazilians lives. You never going to see people getting robbed in the street, but then you never going to see people driving real nice cars. Santo Andre's a normal, quiet area.
In Brazil my daddy used to legalize papers. His dad came from a really poor place of Brazil. Really poor. When my grandpa came to São Paulo he didn't have anything. He probably didn't even have a pair of jeans. I don't know how he made his way up, but he became a guy who regularized houses. You know, if you want to build a house in Brazil, you got to have all this paperwork, so that's what my grandpa usually used to deal with. He taught my daddy how to do it, and then my daddy used to legalize the houses that his daddy used to send him to. It was an easy job because in Brazil everything is so corrupt. You got to know peoples. If you want your papers to work, you got to pay the peoples that deals with the papers. You already know them, so you go there, and you pay them. And then they pay somebody, and then they hurry up with the papers, because otherwise the papers would sit there for two years.
My grandpa used to deal with big stuffs, like supermarkets, but my daddy was never the greedy type. If a guy would tell him, Oh, we still building up the house, and we got to spend money on this and that, then my daddy would be like, You know what? Justgive me some money so I can go and buy some groceries, and he was not like, You got to pay me this percentage. He's like that until today.
My mom was adopted. My mom's mom used to clean the house for this family. And one day she went to the family and said she was going to give away my mom for adopt because she didn't have enough money to support her. So the lady said, Why don't you bring her here because we don't have any kids, so she brought my mom to the lady when my mom was about two and a half.
The couple used to love my mom. But my mom's mom used to come to them every month for money, so they used to get into some fights with her. And the lady was really religious, so that's why they sent my mom to Catholic school. You go to live there with the nuns. My mom said it was really, really bad. She hates church even today. She never goes to church. She hates the nuns. She never explain to me how it really was, but she said her life was miserable in that convent.
After a while, she got out and went home to live. Her adoption parents were really nice, but they were really strict. She couldn't go out, she couldn't do anything. Until today, my mom doesn't go out, she doesn't do anything. I tell her, Look, you're fifty-some now. How many years do you have left in your life? That's why I want her to go on vacation and stuffs, but she don't do it.
Then my mom met my daddy. Back then the only way for you to get out of your house was getting married. This is the way I see it: my mom just wanted to get out of that house, so she got married to my daddy. She was eighteen, but my daddy was twenty-eight. My mom was really into work. She used to work in a big Brazilian company. It went out of business a long time ago, but back in the day she was the one, after the manager, that used to hold the keys where they put the money, and she used to know the codes and everything. She used to make a lot of money doing that. My mom was a really smart woman. She still is until today, but the job that she does here, clean houses, it's not the same. Because if you don't speak the language in this country, it's hard. Really, really hard. And my daddy, he shines shoes.
If I came from a real rich family, I don't think I'd ever be able to do it. You know when you're rich, you don't want to do that, you don't want to shine shoes. Sometimes when I used to walk into that place, I was like, Damn, how they look at me, the traders? Not now. Now, I'm more comfortable. Because I don't go there to shine their shoes. I go there more to socialize. To talk, see how they doing.
I'm more like an entertainer. I like that. It makes me feel good.
The trading floor has this huge desk, and everyone will be sitting next to each other like if you go to a high-school computer class, they have the kids. There's rows of those. There's peoples that will be having three flat-screen computers in front of them. There's peoples that will be having four, five. There's numbers on the computers. I don't know what they stand for.
That's the thing: I got to get to know the difference. Sometimes they tell me what they do, but I don't keep that in mind. It's kind of hard, though, because there's a whole bunch of little things. It's not just traders that is there. It's like one thing led to the other. One sells this, another one sells just that. One got to sell to this other guy that sits two rows away. It's so confusing. I never know.
Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy
A Novel. Copyright © by Doug Stumpf. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
