Jeanine found him slumped over his desk in the study. She went from elated that he might be dead to disgusted when she realized he was crying to himself.

“Darling! They’ve finally done it.” He moaned as she approached. “Those damn orthodoxy bastard, they’ve killed my business! They won’t let me sell cocaine. Not like I used to. All that income – it’s going to disappear!”

Her slap came out of nowhere, catching him mid-sob.

“Murray, you are a terrible husband, an absent father and a pathetic lover. And, so help me God, if you don’t keep me comfortable, I’ll let all your new country club friends know that you bought your way up to their level by selling drugs to the negroes.”

Pulling her new mink stole tight, she stepped back from him.

“So, if they won’t let you sell it like you used to, find a new way to sell it. The demand isn’t going to go away, prices are just going to go up. Time to be big, Murray, bigger than you’ve ever been.”

She planted a cold, hard kiss on his cheek then left him alone in the darkened study.

He’d never felt so small before.

Memphis Note
At first, Memphis’s cocaine laws were as lax as its liquor laws. But then, racism was introduced into the anti-drug equation, and attitudes began to change. The first big step toward prohibition of the drug was when the city voted to ban the sale of less than a pound of cocaine to anyone with out a prescription. A pound being much more than any normal addict could hope to afford. Sadly, all this did was push the drug underground and create even more crime around it.

Before the last frame of celluloid rolled off the reel, Jacob was yanking the curtain closed with one hand, raising the house lights with another and jerking his head for the intermission singers to get on with it.

Jacob burst out into the house like some had set a firecracker off under his rear. He only had three songs to get up to the projection booth and load the next film.

Bounding up the stairs, he found the Theatorium’s owner, Mr. Dinstuhl, sitting on the landing, shoulders slumped.

“Sir?” Jacob asked, unaccustomed to seeing his hardworking boss like this.

“Ah, Jacob, my boy” Mr. Dinstuhl looked up with a weak smile. Then, without warning, asked, “How are you at making candy?”

“I dunno? I just run the projectors.”

“You know, I opened this nickelodeon to sell candy. Chocolates, toffees, brittles. I could give two shakes about the movies, I just wanted to sell these rubes sweets. Now they all want something called ‘popped corn’. Popped corn! What the hell is that? Killing my margins, that’s what. Gonna have to sell the blasted theatre to make up for it.

“So, let me rephrase. Would you like to learn to make candy?”

Memphis Note
The Theatorium was Memphis’s first official nickelodeon. Films were the main draw, with live acts only being used between features. The theatre was opened by Charles Dinstuhl, who owned a confectionary next door. He rightly saw the theatre as a way to increase his customer base. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much interest in the movies or the business of running a theatre, and when pop corn began to over take candy sales, he pulled out of the movie business. Which was probably a for the best, since he went on to found the legendary Dinstuhl Fine Candy Company.

Near as anyone could tell, she lived on her porch. Hot or cold, stormy or dry, she was there, every day and night. On the rare occasions she did take a powder, she was back in just a moment. Just blink and she’d be back in her chair, watchin’.

It wasn’t out of some unhinged love of a fresh breeze that she spent those hours on her porch. No, she watched the only way into her house. She’d blocked off the rear exit with a bookcase long ago. This way she ensured constant vigilance of any of her lost souls that might slip away when their craving got too great.

Ask her why she’d turned her house into something akin to an asylum, and she’d always answer the same way.

“Them that’s sellin’ it, they’re sayin’ things about those that’s takin’ it. Sayin’ they’re criminals, sayin’ they’re rapists, sayin’ they’re murderers. I lost my boy to drugs for a time, and he ain’t never been none of those things.”

Then, she’d pause for a moment before continuing.

“So I figure, if God brought him back to me, least I can do is bring the rest o’ them back to God.”

Memphis Note
When cocaine exploded in Memphis around the start of the 20th century, nearly every fear of the drug was linked to racist fears. Local governmental reports said 80% of the black population was using the drug, that it had supplanted all other economic forces, that it was the cause of every rape of a white woman in the city, and that it would eventually lead to a race rebellion. None of these things were true, and all of them were built on fear of a drug that only white pharmacists were capable of supplying.

Charles and his kid brother weren’t scared of the storm. They knew it was just wind and rain and noise, like a little dog barking its head off from behind a fence.

While all the other kids at Saint Peter’s orphanage cowered in their bunks, he and his brother had free run over all the best toys in the playroom. It was the only thing that made up for being cooped up inside while it poured.

But as they rounded the corner into the play room, they were too late.

The five Insenotti sisters had already claimed the playroom for their own. The sisters said they were descended from Italian nobility, and lorded over the rest of the orphans enough that some kids believed them.

Leo, never one for subtlety, stomped forward and demanded the girls leave.

The eldest Insenott sister stood up from the floor, towering over the brothers. Charles heard Leo gulp.

“Beat it, peasant,” she growled “And maybe, I won’t crack your head like eggs for an omelette!”

Leo looked back at Charles and mouthed “A what?”, but Charles was equally baffled and just shrugged awkwardly. They had no idea what an omelette was, but it sounded painful.

Memphis Note
For over a hundred years Saint Peter’s orphanage was a bastion of safety for wayward and abandoned children in Memphis. The orphanage was part of Saint Peter’s church, whose nuns stayed to treat the sick during the Yellow Fever epidemic. The church is still open, although the orphanage has been moved to a third party.