Bennie And The Thefts

So Bennie the Thief dropped by yesterday afternoon. Apparently he had something pretty heavy on his mind so he came over to my indoor-plumbed hole-in-the-wall to not talk about it. That's probably why he picked me, I usually fail to pry.

I like it whenever I run into Bennie as I'm intrigued by his outlaw lifestyle even though I confided to him I cannot do the time so I cannot do the crime. Honored to be his safe harbor, I tried bringing up various innocuous topics for discussion but he just kept grousing, "Fuck [fill in the blank]" of whatever I brought up. Thusly, the literary 'heavy silence' one reads about descended upon us until I started to suffocate and finally had to come up for air.

"So, Bennie, just exactly when did you inform the guidance counselor your career path was Thief?"

That got his attention. Slowly he turns his scruffy black-haired ethnic face to me (He looks Middle-Eastern but I don't know what the fuck he is. Never asked.) and gives me a half-cocked look of, "You fuckin' with me?"

But I eyeball him right back with a smirky smirk that says, "Damn straight, I am!" Sometimes it pays to have a reputation for being sarcastic.

Then he actually proceeded to answer the question.

"See, it's like this..." He paused as if reconsidering the wisdom of revelation. Then, keeping his eyes peered down his beer bottle, replied: "I guess it's when I realized every good moment I'd had in life I had to steal."

Fuck me.

Now I was the one drowning in miserable silence as the truth of what Bennie said soaked into my own shit-infested existence. What is mine that is good? I'm just marking time in poverty's prison until I'm off this planet. A shared joke on a janitorial break, dreaming while driving to my soul-sapping night job while the rest of the world parties, swiping a Reeses from the office snack bar without paying; any good times for me are stolen too...

I looked up at Bennie. He didn't seem so down now and had pulled his keen, intelligent eyes out of the pit of the bottle. I sensed his spirits had lifted. Probably because he'd brought me so horribly down. The fucker.

I couldn't let it lie, of course. "Well, you know what the song says: 'There must be some way out of here said the joker to the thief.'"

"Ha! You always come up with some sort of shit to say, Harry. Just like that supervisor guy you pissed off."

Bennie looks down on my working-poor jobs as I think he's secretly recruiting me. He's referring to the time I muttered under my breath, "That brain transplant didn't stick, did it?" after one boneheaded decision too many by the brown-nose in charge. A mutual acquaintance told Bennie about it and made me out to be a hero but really I took the whole incident as one more sign my life is on the wrong track.

"That idiot redneck motherfucker. Sometimes you just got to cut loose and hope there's a better way."

Bennie stared into the unspoken abyss before him. "I'd sure like to think there's a way out of this."

"I'd like to think there's a way out too."

Neither one of us did.