livings by making idiots of themselves in the name of art.
After a few minutes, they sat down again. Gareth’s head was
throbbing. He was wearing the same clothes from the previous
evening, and hadn’t slept at all. Of course, the amount of cocaine still
circulating in his system would preclude any Z’s for at least a few
hours. He stared at a ridiculous exhibit in front of him. Apparently,
some teenagers had decided to put on a puppet show in the interest
of collecting a few pennies. It was the worst thing he had ever seen. A
lemonade stand would have been better. Anything would have been
better. They would have made more money selling broken chunks of
asphalt.
He mused about the businesses he himself started back in his
own grade school days. Even from that age, it was evident that he had
an ingenious talent for making money. The first truly shrewd venture
he embarked on was at age eleven: it was widely known in his school
that whenever someone was giving you a hard time, you could hire
Gareth to have them beaten up. But Gareth never handled the
beatings; he was no bully.
He was a bully agent.
Assigning one of his stable of heavies to the case, he’d skim fifty
percent off the top. It wasn’t long before all the tough kids in school
wanted to work for him and all the dweebs grew dependent on his
services to make it through the year in one piece. One of the reasons
for his great success was that for a pittance, Gareth would hire some
of his bullies to bully the dweebs. Then the dweebs would have to hire
his bullies to shoo his other bullies away.
Even at that young age, Gareth felt instinctively that weakness
was meant to be exploited. Natural selection proved it. He was
convinced that if the meek ever inherited the earth, it would only be
because the strong have bled the planet dry and left them to rot on
the barren rock.
As he took a large swig from his beer, Cain elbowed him sharply,
causing him to spill quite a bit on his Fred Segal sportshirt.
“Cain, you idiot!”
“That’s him!” Cain howled. He had thrown down his own beer
and was standing up, seething.
“Who? What are you talking—”
“Over there!” he pointed, “That’s the fucking kid who stole my
wallet!”
H O L Y S H I T !
50
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