The Kangaroo "Get Rich Quick" Scheme
According to Bobby Hayes

My friend, the ole' muskrat has about a million "instant millionaire" ideas in the grubbiness of red-state Missourian squalor-- the land of Motormart snack cakes, rib-skinny prison bitches shuffling around like scarecrows in orange jumpsuits, and a scowl-faced septic tank man sucking shit from a hose on every corner. Out here among the simple rural folk who creak back in their easy-chairs, swiveling their heads on their red, bloated necks to watch the cars go by as they "bullshit" like hog-jowled, unenlightened Buddhas, it's always the groan over the britches-hitchin' tax man, the lurch of diabetes, or the stink of the open grave as these folk carry on like marginal country/western coyotes on the lam from the consternating gullet of 21st century technology about to throw them into a worm-squirming hole.

But it's the beauty (?) of the scheme that counts, if you can even call it beauty, and all glitters like pyrite more than gold in the old Dutchman's secret lost mine. And there Bobby would be in this fantasy, riding in on a humungous black Clydesdale horse with clopping hooves and giant saddle bags straining to the breaking point with green U.S. mint dollars, the well-fed rider in a felt beaver hat with his whiskers all bushy, as he dismounts with sacks of money in either hand and waddles into the steak house to brag about how the American dream could be yours like motherfuckin' Johnny Appleseed.

But instead of a Clydesdale horse, it's the junky old car filled with old coffee-stained receipts of the ages and in place of a felt beaver hat, it's his sweat-stained St. Louis Cardinals ball cap-- his hair streaming out greasily in back like a crazy man. And if you want to call the run-down old "Ponderosa" a steak house, there you have it-- cross-hatched griddle marks painted on the measly strip of meat they give you along with a skimpy, picked-over buffet as old folk limp along with their trays like blue spider-veined remnants of human beings. And instead of bragging at the table, it's mournful "should-have-been's" and homage to great American entrepreneurial legends.

For instance, there's the guy out in California who came up with "the pet rock" fad in the analog 1970's of faded, yellowed example in bonked-out paperback glory. His whole property of chapprel and horned mesquite was full of what appeared to be useless, porous stones until he came up with an idea under the glinting blue sky and became a wild-fire millionaire. By the power vested in his scruffy beard and faded blue jeans, he beat the system. . . . . short of growing marijuana and having the police skid onto his property with flashing roof-top lights.

Or even more uselessly (-- this I think to myself, as river-r-r-r-rat goes into another well-worn pitch that I've heard about a million times) there was the woman who came up with "Build-a-Bear", a chain-store in the malls of soulless exurban sprawl where little girls make their own teddy bears assembly-line style from scratch while unfriendly, literal-minded mothers look on eagle-like with pinched, puckered Republican assholes underneath their skirts that clench on to money like an octopus sucking on a five-fingered sand dollar for sustenance.

"It's a billion-dollar-a-year industry!" he slurs through his cheap, runny ice cream cone. I would ask him to provide documentation, but Bobby's too disheveled to pester.

I have to remark that such products don't contribute anything to our doomed society, having all the lightness of helium compared to the old "steel mill" way of doing things, that we've turned into nothing more than a "hamburger stand" economy about ready to flutter off on the breeze like a wrapper down the crumbling highway of tire rinds and road-kill. But that's a concern that flies over his bushy head as he huffs the dizzying, intoxicating fumes of the prospective fast buck that burns like ether through his frazzled mind.

There's always the mystical, magical internet-- something Hayes regards with the superstition of a simple yeoman approaching the fabled oracle at Delphi. There's something called "drop-shipping", when you buy a large quantity of something-- say, cheap shoes made in Singapore, and sell them in "piece-meal" to a bunch of unwary suckers and make 500% profit. No hassles, no bothers, a third party overseas theoretically taking care of everything. There it is as most of we grunts see it here in red-state Missouri, chinks or gooks in their mysterious, peculiar way conversing among themselves like oval-headed spacemen and working for peanuts while back in the states we can sit around with a beer ham-fistedly, waiting for the money to roll in.

I have to tell him that it may have worked once, a long time ago, for some eagle-eyed turd living out in the sun belt in a beige cowboy hat-- taking slow drags off his cigarettes with shaking fingers as he slowly dies of the gray, suck-rot of cancer, gnawin' on mule jerky-- but it wouldn't work for two plump Midwestern shitheads like us scratching our heads and figurin'.

Humoring him completely, I indulged his fantasy that we'd become millionaires, packaging these in my poor father's basement and selling them over the internet to the tasteless worldwide for $24.95/a unit. First, we went over to a branch of the St. Louis county library to research the wholesale purchase of dildos in bulk-- the hoary old librarians frowning over at our adolescent-like tittering all the way across the room on the computer. Too expensive. Next Bobby played around with the idea of buying a plastic molding works and pressing the penises himself.

He prayed on it, and decided that it was an idea sent by Satan, driving away the thought like a man warding off bats with fluttering fingers. So he shelved it. . . . . for the time being.

Don't get any ideas, kids.

(A Bowel-Busted Reveler)

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