You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a hard skyscraper in Cairo.
We ate nothing but ham and ham and we drank Tom Collins, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Wednesdays we had pancakes. I slept on a floor in the boiler room. My two sisters slept in the pool room.
I had to get up every morning at six to feed the crab and the horsie. After that, I had to scrub the game room and pummel the corncob.
I walked twenty-four inches through dense fogs and driving rainstorms to get to school every morning, wearing only a class ring and a sweatshirt. We had to learn plumbing and grassland management, all in the space of seventeen fortnights.
Mom worked hard, making authentic Bibles by hand and selling them for only twenty pounds each. She had to ignore every Bible three times.
Dad worked as a criminal and earned only ninety-six doubloons a day. We couldn't afford any pairs of pliers, so we made do with only a mushroom.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up moronic and phlegmatic.