Hey there reader! This is my first TL here, although I've been planning on doing it for a while, so be nice! I hope you don't mind narrative.
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New York City, 1929
Angie loved his job.
Every morning he woke up before even the Sun did, he walked from the tenement he lived in with his family to the trolley station a couple blocks away, and he boarded a trolley. The trolley took him down to the tip of the great island of Manhattan on which he lived, and he got off in front of one of the massive buildings that occupied that section of the isle. He walked into the lobby, got a big stack of papers from one of the men working there, and walked the rest of the way down to out in front of the most impressive building of the whole lot.
The building wasn't impressive because of its size -- it wasn't the biggest --, and it wasn't impressive because of its structure -- it looked like many of the other buildings on this part of Manhattan --; no, no, this building was impressive because of what happened inside it. Inside this building at 11 Wall Street was, in Angie's mind, the very center of the world. Every day hundreds of men in fine suits arrived at Wall Street; some in cars, some on buses, some on trolleys; and spent the next dozen hours doing what appeared to Angie to be a kind of magic. He had been doing this job of his for a couple years now and had begun to get the vague understanding that these men were moving vast sums of money around, more than everybody in his own building had seen in their entire lives. However, instead of making him angry or jealous, this made Angie feel an entirely different sort of emotion.
This made Angie feel pride.
Every single morning for the last three years, out of these hundreds or thousands of men, a great chunk of them began their day by coming to Angie and giving him a nickel for one of his news-papers. These men, these wizards spent their time running the world, gaining and losing fortunes, and they did it with his papers in hand. Sure, Angie didn't write the New York Times, but the priest at Angie's church didn't write the Bible. Didn't mean he didn't have every right to feel good about helping people find the Lord, and Angie knew that he did the same exact kind of thing for the men who came to see him early every morning.
This day, October 28th according to the papers, wasn't really different from any of those hundreds of other days that Angie had spent on the corner of Wall and Nassau. Sure, for the last week business had been particularly good, and the men who bought all these extra newspapers had seemed particularly stressed, but this had happened before, even just earlier in the year. From what Angie had been able to gather, from the small conversations he'd overheard and from reading what he could from the front page of the newspaper, the market these men made their money on had dipped, and they'd lost a lot of it. But he'd heard the same things in May and they'd gotten over it then, hadn't they?
Of course they had, and Angie was sure that they'd do it again. In fact, just right now two tall men in business suits were walking right towards him, backs straight and smiles on their faces. That was a good sign, wasn't it?
"Paper, sirs?", he asked with the same kind of smile on his face.
"Of course, little boy, and one for my friend here, too", one of the men said, returning the favor by broadening his own smile.
"Righto, that'll be ten cents, sir!", Angie said, happy because this sale put him two papers closer to selling out for the day, which would make it seven days in a row that he'd done so. His mama would be happy with all the money he brought back! Papa had just been let off from his job at the factory back uptown and things had been tight for about a month.
Impressed with the boy's attitude, the man's smile widened yet further as he reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a whole quarter, dropping it into Angie's hand as he took the two papers the boy proffered.
"Keep the tip young man", he said with a wink.
"Thank you, thank you sir! That's very Christian of you!", Angie exclaimed, overcome by the man's generosity.
Still smiling, the man waved off Angie's gushing. He handed the other paper to his companion and pulled his own up to eye level. He scanned the top of the page until his eyes reached the right corner. Immediately the huge smile left his face, like a suicide might disappear over the edge of a tall building.
"SHIT!"
Angie felt a sting of horror at the man's curse, but was instantly interested in what was going on, as was the man's friend.
"What!?", the other man asked.
"Those damned Republicans! They're at it again! They think they can just play games with our livelihood, like all that matters in the world is their damned voters getting a subsidy. Damn every last one of them!", the man replied in a far harsher tone than he'd used with Angie a moment before.
The other man shook his head in obvious disgust as he brought his own paper up and looked at the same part his friend was now poking with his finger, as if to wipe the whole thing from existence with a hard enough jab, "Damn it all! I thought the bill was supposed to fail? That's certainly what I read yesterday."
Tucking his own paper under his arm, the first man turned to set off towards the entrance of the vast building before them all, "Well, looks like we're not going to be so lucky. Those stupid Republicans look to be screwing the pooch once again. The Democrats and the Progressives caved and now we have to pay for it. Why did I vote for Hoover again?"
The other man let out a single, angry, sardonic laugh, "What were you going to do? Vote for the Papist? Fine, let them sell me my newspapers, but a Catholic in the White House? I'd rather the Golden Boy than a Pope Worshiper".
"Yeah, well, let's hope we don't get stung for it. Remind me to offload every grain stock I own today, that asshole Smoot is going to cost me a fortune..."
Angie watched the two of them walk away, kind of stung at what he took to be a reference to him and his good Catholic family. What did these meanies know? He loved the church they went to every Sunday morning! Father Rossi was a great man! Angie decided he didn't like the two men now walking away from him in intense conversation.
Then he looked at the quarter he still had in his hand and suddenly he wasn't so sure anymore.