Monday, December 9, 2013

LIFE LIST UPDATE – No. 449: Read “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” by Jean Shepherd

Christmas is just a few weeks away, and my favorite Christmas movie is 1983’s “A Christmas Story.” Most people don’t know that this movie is based on a 1966 book by Jean Shepherd called “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.” I put this book on my “life list” a couple of years ago and got around to reading it a few days ago. It was great. In fact, it may be one of the best books that I’ve ever read.

“In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” is essentially a short story collection. In the book, the narrator is a big city writer who has returned to his hometown to write about how much it has changed over the years. To kill some time, the writer goes to a bar, where one of his childhood friends is the bartender.

The narrator and the bartender, Flick, get to talking about the old days, which opens the door for all of the stories in the book. Many of the stories will be familiar to fans of the “A Christmas Story” movie, but the book also contains a number of other great stories that don’t make the movie. They’re all pretty hilarious.

The book’s so funny that I can hardly read the table of contents without cracking up. Chapters in the book include titles like “Flick Offers Me Hard Liquor,” “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award that Heralded the Birth of Pop Art,” “Flick Dredges Up a Notorious Son of a Bitch,” “Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil,” "Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back,” “I Relate the Strange Tale of the Human Hypodermic Needle,” “’Nevermore’ Quoth the Assessor, ‘Nevermore’…” and “Leopold Doppler and the Great Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot.”

In only one way did this book disappoint me. In the movie “A Christmas Story” there’s a scene in which the main character, the young boy “Ralphie,” helps his dad change a flat tire. The scene ends in unforgettably hilarious fashion, but this tale is not to be found between the cover of “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.” Maybe it’s in one of Shepherd’s other books.

One thing this book made me want to do was to read all of Shepherd’s other books. Shepherd died in 1999, but before his death, he published seven books. Those books included “I, Libertine” (1956), “The America of George Ade” (1960), “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” (1966), “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters” (1971), “The Ferrari in the Bedroom” (1972), “The Phantom of the Open Hearth” (1978) and “A Fistful of Fig Newtons” (1981). “A Christmas Story” was published after his death in 2003.

In the end, how many of you have seen “A Christmas Story”? How many of you have read “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash”? What did you think about them? Let us know in the comments section below.

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