F. Scott Fitzgerald 
The Jelly-Bean [EPUB ebook] 

A ‘Jelly-bean’ is “one who spends his life conjugating the verb “to idle.” Born into middle-class society, a man becomes a grocery delivery boy after his father’s untimely death, and soon descends into the seamier side of life: gambling and “listening to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country.”