At 11 A.M. I had finished the coffee and went down to the cafe and selected two diet cokes. Then the attendant suggested that they were free if I bought to Jack Daniels miniatures. I was just going to store the miniatures in the rucksack in case I had a cramp sometime, but sitting in the viewing car and enjoying the desolation rolling by as Utah gave way to Colorado, poured a Jack and poison Coke and the unmasked man to my right, a youngish fellow said, “Alcoholism is a bitch, ain’t it?”
I pretended not to hear and did not look.
As I drank and noted a small barbed wire and blockhouse compound rendered in icky postmodern form, the young, thin fellow with big square head and reddish hair under his reversed cap, who the conductors had warned dozens of times about keeping his mask up said, “Someone has a prison! Nothing screams minimum security like that place. If I lived there I’d be having lunch across the street at that place every day!”
I laughed and said, “Well, you’re young enough to get over that fence, at least.”
“How young do you think I am—nobody guesses my age right, go ahead.”
I look at him more closely, “Forty-five, a spry forty-five.”
His mouth opened and his chin dropped, “Nailed it, wow. Hey, sorry about the alcoholism crack—I’m an alcoholic, liver problems, tumor in my brain above my right eye—you’re not the me of Christmas Future I hope—what happened to the eye?”
“It’s my good eye, just very light sensitive. If I catch lateral interior lighting or a low morning or evening sun, I can go into seizures, might be puking in an hour.”
“No shit, man. The docs say I’ll end up losing the sight in this eye and they said they could cut the tumor in the brain out. But all this medical shit is experimental—like this bullshit vaϲϲine… fuck that! I’m not comfortable with letting people cut into my processing center. I make my living with my mind. If you haven’t guessed, I’m from Texas. Name’s Travis, Travis from Texas.”
“You’re a character Travis—second Texan I’ve met in my life and both in the past 24-hours.”
“You a teamster? You look like you’ve had a rough road.”
“I live out of a backpack—two teamsters took pity on me and donated these clothes. Everything I wear was given to me.”
“Well, I live out of a backpack too. There are different ways to be rich in this world and we have gone down different roads. But we will both fight if we’re backed to the wall—I have a sense for that. I was in prison in Dallas when I was 18 and the first day got into a fight with this giant Mandingo warrior who turned my face into a swollen mess. But I bloodied his lips and gained enough respect losing that fight to sustain me for the rest of my stay. I’m rich in money, hot X-wives and leverage, because I’m an asshole. To make money in this world you have to be an asshole and that I am.”
“I’m headed to Denver to put this size nine up some asses. I’m the boss, work waits for me. I’m sixth generation Texan and I wish we did business with our fists like in the old day—but we live in a bullshit world so I make my way accordingly, drag someone down a rabbit hole they’ never get out of, got a lawyer on retainer and he’s got more like him on staff.”
“I am officially a resident of Portland Oregon, live in the rich section of Goose [something]. If I live in Oregon for more than 132 days a year, I will get 25% of my very substantial income confiscated for that state’s bullshit politics. So I live out of a backpack. My first wife and my children, I couldn’t raise them in Dallas—no safe public transportation, no safe walking—a Mandingo zone. So we moved to Portland and I provide. Since I’m an asshole, I’ve had a good life and I have a brain tour and ain’t afraid to die so I tell the world to fuck off: Irish, Scotch-Irish, gun-owning Texan and come and get it. Here, here is a picture of my third X-wife, kind of quality pussy that being an asshole gets you.”
The aged hoodrat ogles the smart phone screen at a bikini clad beauty drinking rum on a sunny porch and says, “Bro, she’s beautiful in a troubling way—you put an eye patch on her and she’d look like the girl on the Sailor Jerry’s rum label.”
“Of course she does,” he grins through his pale lantern jaw that should have been attached to a thicker body, “I own Sailor Jerry’s, that’s my product. Tito’s vodka as well. I own 32% of the American lime trade and 17% of the world lime crops. I own sugar cane fields around the world in partnership with farmers—they have a good crop and we are both good. They have a bad crop and I take the loss and I cover their income to maintain my supply source and use my connections and leverage to make up the loss and a profit on top of that. Just like anyone who makes a lot of money with product production most of it ends up being tied up in the product and you become an intregal aspect of the supply chain, either wrecked by it or using it to wreck the competition. I’m vertically integrated—got ‘fuck you’ leverage. I’m a broker now—my cousin handles the production. We’re based in Eugene Oregon.”
[points to woman on smart phone]
“This beauty took a slice of my business with her—pussy sells. That’s why I have a Latina, a blonde, an Asian, a Hawaiin and even a gay black tranny selling my product. Black Lives Matter, these liberal college graduates who will have their job for two years, whose job I can take going over their head—they want to push all of the System’s race and gender politics...well where were you people five years ago when I had that all covered? You want to look down on me and not buy my product because I look like the redneck you were taught to hate? Well, I’ve got no patience for some rules follower, who will always break the rules when dealing with Coke or another multinational but wants the little guy like me to play by the PC rules—fuck that!”
[flicks mask around chin]
“Some mask police Nazi who makes thirty-two-thousand a year when I spend that in a weekend, wants to tell me how to speak and breathe—well they can just suck on the muzzle of a Texan gun. They’ll have to come and get my guns. I come from a sate that was a nation and is one of the top ten economies in the world. These women that buy for Cosco, they want all of this sustainable produced product and they want beverages without citric acid, as if they can tell me how to keep a bottled liquid from growing mold with any safer additive—but Coke can have citric acid? Fuck that. I’ll take a loss selling to your competition and build demand and then you’ll be begging for my product—or more accurately, your replacement will be calling me on this phone, and better be sending a rep that looks as good as one of my X-wives!”
Travis conducted a brokerage clinic and informed the mazed listener that he spent much of his time over the past two years trying to save the businesses of his customers, because, “I do not want their businesses. Retail is a trap, the hardest way to make money,e specially when pussy sells and the phony pandemic sends your barmaids out to sell their ass on a webcam. They owe me money and if they go out of business I take a loss. So I’ll spend money restoring their business. The System is still looking to kill the existing currency, crypto-currency included, and implement their cashless universal social-based credit system. For instance, I’m big into crypto-currency—I trade it. Not because I like the shit, but because I’ll take what payment is given and when I start dealing in a means of payment I want to own the mechanisms of that system, to be able to use what is being used to fuck me and you, to fuck them longer and harder. The world has trained its people to hate me, because I’m an asshole, just like they hated Trump because he is an asshole. I never liked him, but I admired him because he is an asshole and we are the people that get things done. I didn’t start with anything—I was a kid in trouble who didn’t graduate as an Eagle scout because I could not stand writing and you had to write a paper. I’m a math guy—I hate to write. I conduct business in person and on this damned device because it’s still the word that has power and the people that can still use the actual word, rather than argue about the written word—those are the people with power. So I’m going to Denver to put this size nine up someone’s ass and if I have to give some goon a bottle of Johnny Walker to do it for me—so be it. Right now I’m in the business of saving businesses and jobs, which makes me the enemy of the System that wants to shut all the little Ma & Pop outfits down.”
“You want a drink, sir?”
“Oh, no thanks, Travis, I need to rest my eye, talking kind of blows it up—but thanks.”
“Well sir, I wish you continued fortune. You are rich in peace and knowledge and may we both take more scalps before our days are done. I myself need to get some work done and back off the booze.”
…
Two hours later, when I returned to the viewing car, Travis was hosting two young men and a retired Mexican cowboy in a red scarf and sombrero, a man my age, speaking Spanish when advantageous, drinking and waxing intense on a variety of subjects that captivated his possible henchmen as much as he had this jaded soul.
