The three-packs of soap his mother bought just for him so that he could take his first few grown-up showers as a child cost sixty-nine cents, and that was likely the first price of an item he’d ever noticed. He would be in his first grade clothes, pushing a shopping cart with his mother still needing to guide his arms, taking note of the prices everywhere. Loaves of bread were thirty-nine cents. A dozen eggs were forty-nine cents and a person with a large family could buy two-dozen for eighty-nine cents. His father once complained for six days that a pair of tennis shoes his mother had bought him cost fifteen dollars.
Two or three years later children at school were buying their own breakfasts from the deli across Tenth Avenue and most of those he knew received five-dollar allowances from their parents. Those children would explain to him that breakfast sandwiches were thirty-nine cents, a piece of candy was either a penny or a nickel, and the children who bought their own candy usually spent a quarter per day on five of the good ones. They would boast that lunch and dinner were free for them, so of their five dollars, they would spend sixty-four cents per day, or three dollars and twenty cents per week. If comic books were ten cents, packs of firecrackers were fifteen cents, and the prices of candy have already been given, then almost all of the children in the school seemed rich in possessions on a one-dollar and eighty cents per week surplus. Even though almost every adult in Thomas King’s neighborhood would have readily admitted their poverty, he thought that the children he knew and went to school with had all of the things they really needed.
Soon, they were all growing too big for their parents to afford their clothes, and at school, clothes came to matter more than candy. Thomas, like the other children he knew, received a fifty-dollar per week allowance from his parents in exchange for household chores that took away almost all of his free time anyway. His parents scoffed at the idea for months before giving in. His father gave thirty dollars to his mother, thinking always that the allowance was thirty dollars, and his mother would add twenty dollars from the compartment at the bottom of the flour jar that only she knew how to open.
A decent shirt at those times would always cost twelve dollars and fifty cents, and Thomas understood quite early that “decent” shirts were necessary for school, lounging with friends, and dates with girls. He learned to include twelve dollars and fifty cents per week in his budget, every school week throughout high school (usually working a summer job and spending twenty-three dollars weekly on two shirts in the eight weeks of July and August) until his wardrobe was a kaleidoscope of folded flannels and hung polyesters in his closet and bold shirt-collars that jutted stubbornly out of his bedroom drawers. He had almost as many twelve-dollar and fifty-cent shirts as the black boys at school, even though the black boys always complained that their families were the poorest.
He was wearing his first twenty-dollar shirt the first time he used a thirty-dollar fake Georgia driver’s license to get into the Roxy, paying the bouncer ten dollars because he still looked seventeen in his thirty-five dollar shoes, then ten more dollars for his entrance (his date, Kathleen Sivens, was admitted for free, on account of her seventy-five dollar Liz Claiborne dress with extra-high shoulder pads, stolen from her older sister’s closet). Between his jobs and the saving of his allowances he’d saved enough money to go to the Roxy and buy three four-dollar rum-and-coke’s and six two-dollar martini’s for Kathleen, a dollar for a pack of condoms, five dollars for a late night meal for two at the diner on his block, and six more dollars for Kathleen’s cab ride home. He spent seventy-five dollars every Friday night that way for two months, until a Black man in a red suit danced with Kathleen at the Roxy, told her that his cocaine came in bags of ten and twenty dollars, but that if she hung around him, bumps were free. After that, Thomas never saw her or went to the Roxy or spent that seventy-five dollars again.
In a year he’d saved enough to buy a car. He decided on a hunter green 1976 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a dark brown interior he’d bought from a thin black man in Newark who was tired of working on it and was upgrading to a 1986 Ford Thunderbird. The car was purchased for nine hundred dollars. It drove for sixty-eight days before died and stuck to the road like a wet dollar and a tow truck came and scraped it along to Nancy’s auto shop on the West Side. The Monte Carlo didn’t leave Nancy’s. Thomas spent five hundred and thirty dollars on repairs but the car still would not run. In that time of spending and fixing and minimal success, the mechanics at Nancy’s fell in love with the Monte Carlo, and wanted to help Thomas because he’d ended up spending two years without his car. It was given a new coat of paint that would have cost two hundred dollars, the grille was changed for a classier one that also cost two hundred dollars, and when the upholstery was redone in a tan color to highlight the fresh green paint the mechanics had to piece together the one hundred and seventy dollars it cost, and it was given four splendid gold wheels with crisp, unused tires that totaled four hundred and eighty dollars.
In the third year that the car would still not run, and Thomas was told that the car was worthless without a new engine that would cost one thousand, two hundred dollars, Nancy, the owner of the auto shop and two others like it in Wilmington and Baltimore died suddenly of carbon monoxide poisoning and in her will and testament, she left the stores to the workers, allowing them to operate them as small businesses. Thomas was first with the idea of naming the New York shop “Monte Carlo’s” because his Monte Carlo was the most beautiful remodeling job they’d ever done, and eventually, the car was sold to the auto shop for three hundred dollars and in two weeks was gutted of its parts and hoisted above the front entrance to act as the awning and logo for Monte Carlo Auto Body. When the company went public as a major Auto Body chain nine years later, Thomas King was credited with their name, and by vote of the original workers at the first New York shop, is still paid two percent royalties, or a fifty dollar check every time a Monte Carlo Auto Body advertisement appears on television.
New York University accepted him into their business program, but at ten thousand dollars per year, there was no combination of incomes that could keep him there, so he was back at home right around when it was time to finally pay his first bill. Thomas went to work as a door man in an Upper East Side neighborhood at a time when his neighborhood still rented rooms for seventy-five dollars per month. He worked nineteen hours per day for six days per week at five dollars and fifty cents per hour for two years before his parents began to ask him to help with the rent. By then he’d saved twelve thousand dollars, and was glad to pay his father one hundred dollars per month to live there. Numerous women with eighty-dollar work pumps and three hundred dollar handbags visited the apartment, always walking as if their rich husbands might pop up out of some slum alley or be disguised as a derelict. None of them ever spent the time on looking his parents in the eyes, even though each new woman excited the grin on Thomas’ father’s mouth.
The first woman to eat six-dollar steak with Thomas King’s family as his actual girlfriend was a thin Asian woman named Cynthia Cheung, who surprised Thomas’ skeptical parents by speaking clear, energetic English. It took seven weeks for him to buy Cynthia a one thousand, seven hundred dollar engagement ring, and four more weeks for the two of them decided to have their second six-dollar steak dinner, this time with all of their parents, and this time prepared by Cynthia, to announce the news. All four parents smiled with approval, but later before bed in the tenament bedroom adjacent to Thomas’, his parents lied awake all night, spewing numbers at each other.
“Larry Simmons girl’s wedding cost seven thousand dollars, and you saw, it was terrible. We don’t even know that girl’s parents. We don’t even know her situation. What percent does the groom’s family have to contribute?”
They became arguing accountants.
“No, no. no! It doesn’t matter if the base cost is five thousand per parent, we will not be splitting duties and deciding on the prices of things individually, that is for this young woman to decide.”
It became a night of Nostalgia.
“My dress cost me forty-five dollars, and it was beautiful. Where have all the years gone?”
And before Thomas’ father could groan back that all they spent those years arguing about money, they heard Thomas walking out, trying his best to not let the front door make a sound.
His first apartment, a narrow hallway of a place in lower Manhattan, cost him four hundred dollars per month, and on the night he moved in with Cynthia, and he was ready to tell her that he wanted to open a huge store that sold everything for ninety-nine cents, she told him that she was pregnant. She cried in bed for three days, spending four dollars on boxes of tissues, because he wasn’t completely happy. When she was finally calm enough to hear his idea, she helped, and with eight thousand dollars that Thomas had saved, and her credit, the original King 99 store was opened on Fordham Road in the Bronx, five days before Thomas Jonathan King was born.
They married using fourteen thousand dollars of their own money two years later, and for many years, Thomas, Cynthia, and Thomas Jonathan were seen regularly at the store, preaching to workers and customers that the “absolute beauty of the store is the consistency of the prices.”
Thomas would pace the aisles, reminding everyone that everything was ninety-nine cents.
“Razors, ninety-nine
Deodorant, ninety-nine
Cereal, ninety-nine
Towels
Toothbrushes
Toys, everything ninety-nine cents”
Cynthia would be seen behind the register with Thomas Jonathan tucked inside her elbow, screaming out to the girls.
“Count that change properly, count it twice! I hired you specifically because I expect you to be able to count change twice before the customer knows. Oh, this is going into your file.”
Every person who walked into King 99 stumbled on something they thought was worth buying for ninety-nine cents, and in the twelve years that the store was opened, they turned over every single item in their inventory. People flocked from neighborhoods all over the city to pay thirty, or ten cents less for things they could buy in their own neighborhoods. Some employees stayed for the entire twelve years, and made up to eight dollars per hour. Cynthia King grew tired of the store after Thomas Jonathan began to go to school, and she stayed at their home in Tarrytown, ordering Thomas home every day with snacks from the store, costing King 99four thousand, five hundred dollars in lost revenue every year. She gained forty pounds every year until the store closed, and Thomas began to send money to men to be invested and hidden overseas. Soon after, he bought the original Monte Carlo Auto Body, found a plastic and foam replacement for his old car, and took down the original, paid the mechanics fifty thousand dollars to specially order and replace all of the parts, and was making the drive from Tarrytown to the Fordham Road every day in a perfect hunter green 1976 Chevrolet Monte Carlo.
When Thomas brought a group of lawyers to Tarrytown to get Cynthia to sign divorce papers, her cheeks were so bloated that she couldn’t open her eyes, and she’d fallen asleep before she could call her own lawyer. The lawyers fought for four months, and the fighting cost both Cynthia and Thomas thirteen thousand dollars. Thomas Jonathan was left in the custody of his father, and the store was to be closed, and the final revenues, four hundred and thirty-thousand dollars, were split in half. Thomas King might have hugged each employee every day until the store officially closed, and the day after he returned the original set of keys to the landlord, paying him the last five thousand, seven hundred dollars in rent, he told both of his parents and Thomas Jonathan that he was moving them all to South Florida, into a three hundred and seventy thousand dollar home, in a place with no property taxes, where it costs a lot less to live.
