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The Rewards Of Bad Behavior
If you listened to the well-intended instructions of all the inner voices and were therefore able to disrupt all mishaps headed your way, would you be a better person for this, or just a well-tuned obedient soldier, safe in the comfort of your knowledge, and obedience?
That's what Slim was asking himself as he sat on the steps leading into his blighted dwelling which was now minus the $200 front door he had ignorantly installed much too early in the process of the dwelling's renovation. "Shouldn't have waved my razor knife in that guy's face the other day," Slim mused out loud.
The next day when the house was violated from the side--but nothing stolen--Slim concocted wild revenge plots remembering an incident years ago where someone kept stealing the hallucinogenic mushrooms he was drying on a windowsill so that he felt forced to replace his "cooling pies" with another variety that he knew--from very reliable second hand sources--to cause violent, blood streaked vomiting. Slim wasn't by nature a vindictive person but he did occasionally lapse into unpredictable behavior.
But back then he was a child playing with children and now he was some version of an adult playing with people who could play hard, in fact had nothing better to do than terrorize some uppity land owner while searching for that next blast.
A man had come onto the property a few days previous and had annoyed Slim in such a way that Slim had lapsed into one of those aforementioned modes of unpredictablility and before he knew what was happening he was threatening to slice the other man. When the other man had finally retreated after an unconvincing pantomime of attempted murder, Slim listened to, but could not really make out the far away rants of this unsuccessful drunken solicitor, but he felt there was to the man's message the basic warning that Slim would pay for his disrepectful ways.
Now he thought about leaving the side entrance ajar and gluing razor blades to the door frame right where he knew one had to place their hands to pull up into the house, and maybe a panel of sharpened nails screwed to the floor would be a nice touch. Instead he went out and bought eleven sheets of plywood and in a frenzy similar to the hectic boarding up that occured in his area when hurricanes threatened, Slim cut to size and screwed plywood over all the windows.
And the list of suspects grew in Slim's mind. Hell, the morning before it was stolen hadn't that feeble old church going woman commented on what a nice door it was? How can she not be on the list? And when the building inspector who had come out that day to inspect the rafters had uttered that it was probably the first person who had been nice to him, Slim could not deny he had been thinking a similar thing himself. About the man across the street who occasionally helped Slim with the chores of renovation and was a self-admitted, and rather obvious, crackhead. And he seemed now two days later to be tweaked way beyond what that fifty dollars Slim had paid him would do. And yesterday he had to excuse himself in the middle of his rather suspect commiseration about the missing door to attend to the 'ho who was lingering at his door across the street. "Excuse me, cousin, let me see about gettin' me some of that pussy." The man was living large.
On the third day when the house was entered from underneath, and a section of the temporarily nailed plywood subfloor was pushed up into the house, Slim suffered a brief spell of despondency. Would he have to live in this unfinished hotbox in the middle of this urban swamp in the middle of summer to protect his possessions? He did not fancy that idea. He was getting verrry sleepy Then he went to find a phone and call the police.
A pretty, young, black, female, police officer was sent to respond to his call. She had a nice manner about her and made Slim feel better about his world. In answer to his question about how far he could go in protecting his property she implied that Slim could go ahead and do what he had to do, as long as he projected an attitude of fear about his predicament. "I am afraid," he said to her. When she left he felt more calm, but lonlier.