PICKPOCKET

Never having been filthy rich, I was a fool to suppose I knew how the excessively wealthy regarded their excesses. How was I to know that beyond a certain point acquisitiveness saturates the very purpose of living, like alcohol saturates the cells of the liver, in an accumulating toxic cocktail of fear of inadequacy to both fulfill the promised expectations such wealth engenders in competitors, investors and sycophants and protect it from a public suspected of being as unscrupulously greedy as was required for such an accumulation.

I figured that since losing a fin out a wad of bills totaling around a hundred bucks was no big whoops to me, this guy would never miss a million out of his hundred billion. What I didn’t realize was that no one gave a shit about my measly fiver while his every penny had a hundred million dollars invested in a security system and a staff of bean counters, plus millions of anxious stockholders, tax collectors and relatives checking up on their share.

Little did I know how he shuddered off the ghostly chill of envy he experienced when he passed the homeless one-legged vet panhandling at the corner of his downtown Dallas branch office building this very morning. I should have known how mean great riches had made him when I saw him stumble over the man’s only foot in his attempt to ignore his existence and give him only a dirty look as its acknowledgement.

I realized at that moment how this mutated human being had built his ridiculous personal wealth by owning the mercenary corporations' looting public funds in payment for worse than inadequate support of the fodder being made of the nation’s poor in a war of yet more acquisition. The look in this man’s eyes was the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes upon discovering leeches on his body in African Queen and I knew — it wasn’t the leeches that wanted some of his financially spun cotton candy wealth he so much feared, it was the ironic leeches on his ability to achieve the happiness for which such acquisition was reputed among slobs like me to be the reward. He acknowledged with his resentment that I was happier than he.

My old gal, Mabe, slapped him back to reality with, “There he goes folks. The richest man in the world kicks a fellow human being like wasn’t one his own self, but I can see his shriveled dick right through that fine three piece, pin striped suit of emperor’s clothes.”

The crowd at the bus stop and for half a block around turned their focus on the kingpin. So discombobulated by interacting with the unvarnished truth available only outside his many sycophant filled ivory towers was he that he reached in his pocket for the bills he’d just withdrawn to pay the new girl to say she understands his torment convincingly enough to give him an erection and slammed them down in my hat.

“Dinner on me and Mabe! All month.”