So you think hedge fund managers are resourceful scum?

If you like them, you will love Willy.

Last night I was sitting outside a Harm City pizzeria with Doc, who happens to be my doctor, and a good friend as well. I trust him not to crush my left testicle when I cough, and he trusts me not to write about his hellish life; to leave that to his own cathartic keyboard. We had been eating inside. When he noticed lowlifes skulking around his pickup truck—which had a full gas can in the bed—we moved out to the lush concrete-paved ground-level veranda that bordered on the asphalt lawn. We had eaten all but two slices of a large pizza with everything, and had just decided that he would take the survivors home rather than I taking them to work.

Just then Willy, a big dark-haired man who looks like Sam Elliott might have looked if he did as much dope as Keith Richards, turned the corner. He spied us at the table, scrounged for some change in his pockets, and then entered the Hindu pizzeria. Willy was not dirty, did not appear homeless. I’m fairly certain he lives in his 80 year old mother’s basement.

Willy emerged from the shop with a 50 cent [Did you know there is no longer a cents symbol on the keyboard?] bag of chips. He then came over to us and asked if he could trade us the chips for a slice of pizza. Doc said, “Take it man—we’re done.”

Willy said, “Take the chips, man, really, I don’t eat ‘um.”

Doc said, “It’s our pleasure—we’re done anyhow. Enjoy”

Willy took the chips and the pizza box, and his tenacious dignity, to the corner of the veranda and began to feast. He kept saying, ‘Thank you man!’ and Doc kept saying, ‘Your welcome dude.’

Then a clutch of hood-rats ambled by, pushing a baby carriage with a food stamp vector in it, smoking cigarettes, which gave off mini smoke columns in the night as if the carriage were a diesel rig in miniature, belching carbon into the sky. Willy began screaming at them, “Give me a fuckin’ cigarette! A fucking cigarette!!”

They continued on their way and he eventually approached us nervously; a peasant approaching two lords at their high counsel, “Would you gentlemen happen to smoke?”

We responded that we did not, that our athletic activities precluded any such reasonable use of our lung capacity. This got him thinking and he began wondering how long he had been a smoker, “Let me see, I started smoking the night I started snorting coke.”

At this hint Doc began peering up into his nostrils apparently trying to rate the erosion and arrive at an estimated date of addiction…

As Willy ransacked the crevices of his brain for its history of demise a young lady rounded the corner and asked us for a light. Doc and I declared ourselves unlit as we both admired her curvy nineteen year old figure, neatly brushed hair, and Daisy Duke attire. It was about ninety degrees on the veranda. Willy checked her out with audible grunts and said, “I’ll give ya a light if ya give me a cigarette.”

Our Scarlet O’Hara held up an inch-and-a-half long gutter-scrounged cigarette butt and said, “This is all I’ve got.”

Willy pounced, “Let’s share!”

She jutted out her hip, “Okay man.”

Willy took his time lighting the stump and managed to arrive at the same anonymous companionship calculus as we did. Namely, that if this chick was willing to swap spit with him and whoever had dropped that butt in the gutter for two puffs, then she would part with whatever was left of her dignity for a few bucks worth of booze.

Willy felt his pockets, his mental cue for the seeking of good will investment opportunities, and glanced first at my heavy work clothes and then at Doc’s summer shirt, and dollar signs lit up in his eyes. Doc would surely be able to part with a twenty to assure Willy one final go at a still fully toothed companion. As he searched for the words and reached for the glowing ember of a butt Doc looked at me and said, “That’s our cue.”

We did not have the heart to stand around and savor Willy’s desperate attempt at meaningless body fluid exchange. We just went our separate ways, no longer capable of being surprised by the rampant culture of addictive consumption that defines, this, the greatest nation to ever rule on earth.

You might look down on Willy and his gutter princess, but they are ready for the Zombie Apocalypse, and you are not!