Steinbeck

Of Mice and Money

by John Steinbeck

I remember when I bought my first winery. Actually, "whinery" would be a more accurate term, if you go by all the complaining I used to hear from all those ungrateful wetbacks I smuggled across the border to harvest the grapes. Hell, a nickel a day and a bowl of corn flakes was a hell of lot more than they could expect in their sorry piece of shit villages back in Juarez or whatever!

Oh yeah, I had a system. I would tell them I was "banking" their wages for them and they'd get the full balance after the crops were picked. Then after the last of the grapes were delivered to the winery proper, I turned the whole lot of them over to the immigration authorities. Capitalism, you gotta love it!

Then there were the bindle stiffs who worked my barley farm over near Salinas. Talk about brainless wonders, you could piss on their shoes and they'd think it was raining. After charging them for room and board, the bozos would barely have two bits to rub together and off they'd go to the whorehouse. That's how I got into pimping. Some freelance gals tried to set up their own shop, but for some reason the places would burn to the ground before they had a chance to turn their first trick. Hey, fires happen.

Pearls were a veritable goldmine for us enterprising types. We all got together to fix the prices, and pretty soon we had ourselves a good old American monopoly. I'd pay the poor slobs peanuts for their treasures, and good luck to them if they tried to sell it elsewhere. One time, this one bleeding heart do-gooder tried to open his own agency independent of the cartel. He told the pearl divers he'd give them a fair price for their finds. Of course this had to be stopped, for the good of the American free market, you see. So I came up with a plan.

There was this big retarded dude named Lenny who used to work on my barley farm, but we had to hustle him out of there after he'd accidentally ravaged one of the local lovelies. I suppose I could have just turned him over to the constable, but I saw his potential. The guy was like a nuclear weapon, so I just locked him away for when I felt he was needed.

But first, I made a gesture of good will toward the offending agent. I treated him to a fitting at my tailor, who fixed him up with a half-dozen silk shirts, my treat. Now if you put Lenny's brain inside a canary the thing would fly backwards, but the doofus also had an affinity for soft things. I took the agent over to my favorite watering hole, which was devoid of other customers by prior arrangement. We'd just settled in front of a couple of martinis when Lenny came in right on cue.

"Nice shirt, mister," Lenny said.

I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say I did my bit to save the retail pearl industry. As for the agent, he was never seen again. Not to give away the whole story, but if any of you ever bought any products from the cannery I owned on Fisherman's Wharf, guess what? You're accomplices!

You can't make this stuff up, but you can rearrange the facts a little, if you get my drift. Now are you gonna buy that book or not? This ain't no freakin' library, you know.

Originally published at The Apesheet

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