Better Than Sliced Bread

Have you ever stood in a back alley during a street fight? I have been there, brother, testosterone flowing through my young adult body. Brass knuckles and small-blade knives. No guns or machetes allowed. All the fists you can use. No holds allowed.

I learned my moves when I was 8, 9, 10, and 11, during school recess and after school, before organized sport took over. Fight or flight. Stand up or get knocked down. Sometimes, all of the above. The human body, pre-puberty. Had my first fight in kindergarten. Learned my lesson - if you're going to have a fight in front of the teacher, play the part of the innocent angel. If you're going to have a fight away from authority figures, be a good talker or play the part of the devil, depending on the size and flexibility/dexterity of your opponent. A person with orthodontic braces or eyeglasses is a weak opponent, or an easy target, depending on your mood.

I've grown out of my fighting form. I don't throw around weak shrimps for fun anymore. By my age, if you want to take somebody down physically, pay for the privilege. Don't order your fights over the phone or across the Internet. No paper trails. These are free lessons I've giving you here. You understand that, don't you?

While I'm keeping a low profile, staying out of the limelight and away from my international buddies, I've got this little teaching gig I think I mentioned to you. I had forgotten the stories that students used to provide teachers/professors for missing class or not turning in homework.

Any of you students reading this, let me put the record straight once and for all. Your reasons are your own. I don't want to know them. I don't care about them. You have your life to live. The only reason our lives have intersected is because I took this part-time gig to look legit to certain business associates of mine. I have no care in the world for why you skipped a class I'm instructing. You can turn in your homework the next time you show up and I promise I won't say one word why you didn't show up the previous week. If you want to tell me a sob story about your brother's wife's mother's son's son's daughter getting stuck in the mouth of a snapping turtle being swallowed by an alligator climbing out of a sewer to escape a loose bear that was hit by an ice cream truck sliding across the road after dodging a great white shark that leapt out of a boat being pulled by a drunk truck driver texting on his cell phone about the shark that landed on his boat and chomped his fishing buddy in half while he was taking a piss off the dock, go ahead.

Anything's possible. However, the only possibility that matters to me is whether I see you in class taking notes, turning in your homework and/or taking a test. Otherwise, we have nothing in common. If you want to be creative with your excuses, feel free to write them down and post them on a blog entry, facebook/myspace profile or tweet I won't see. At least that way, someone gets to see them and might have a response that'll be useful to you.

This place where you attend and I instruct is the place that cares but I ain't your momma. Some of the faculty/staff care and they'll gladly listen to your life stories, show you sympathy and all that. But guess what. Bottom line is that no matter where you take college-level classes, you still gotta show up, do the homework and study. Losing your thumb in the blender while mixing margaritas for your birthday party last night ain't gonna change the facts. Get your thumb sewed back on and show it off to your classmates.

Woke up from my wine-stained nap this afternoon and realized I'm the relic instructor/professor I used to laugh at when I was a kid. I've crossed over a generation gap. I live in a different era from my students. In my day, men were men and women were women and we understood our roles. These days, women are men and men are robots. Sure, when I was young there were women who preferred women and men who preferred men. Vanessa Williams lost her crown because she appeared in photos that seemed to imply she liked women. These days, though, it's practically a requirement that you pose nude in a risque rigged shot and post it on your Internet CV or wear clothes of the opposite sex and declare equal rights are passé.

Call me old-fashioned. I don't care. It's not that I'm a prude. No, I've dated lesbians. I've slept with bisexual women. I've been around the block. At the end of the day, when I'm sitting on the front deck drinking a beer, sipping a whiskey or chugging wine, I'd rather see a voluptuous set of curves walking down the street past me than overpriced, overexposed stick figures known as supermodels who've posed in every imaginable photo shoot posted on the Internet for undersexed viewers and are starring in an X-rated subscription-only reality show, who would turn me into an instant millionaire should they simply stop and walk up on my porch for a few minutes of paparazzi time. I don't even care if the voluptuous curves have a little extra wiggle, stretch marks or other womanly blemishes. I'm all about that kind of reality, not the scripted kind.

In my neighborhood, kids drive past with their whoosh-whoosh, thump-thump, eardrum blasters. I used to be one of them. Let 'em have their fun (say, as long as they aren't shaking babies awake in every house on the street). Our youthful pre-adulthood is a short time period. The kids'll grow up and be out of my 'hood in no time. They always have.

There's the other side of childhood you may know nothing about, the one where I stood and watched lives disappear down the drain and were soon forgotten. I almost forgot about myself there, too.

Some things in life are better than sliced bread, better than flour enriched with vitamins and iron. Better than cartoon character shaped children's chewable tablets. I won't lecture you about them because I enjoyed them. I forget many of the names of the good things in life that brought me joy and exhilaration beyond my wildest dreams. I just remember a friend of mine telling me, "you're no longer doing them for recreation," walking away and abandoning me to my new profession.

I didn't start out dealing. I was just buying a little extra for use later on, after classes or on the weekend. Then, one student or another, sometimes a college roommate, would ask to score a bit for his girlfriend or party buddies. Word spread that I was a fair dealer and soon had a network that provided me my personal supply free out of the profit I was making.

Wait! What am I saying? It sounds so simple.

Unfortunately, it is. At a certain level, anyway.

Smalltime players don't figure into the transactions between the owners of the process. It's not a democracy or a company with cross-functional team meetings where everyone gets to serve as leader for the week.

I never conducted business with...well, how shall I put this? I'm not sure who reads my words available globally. Okay, I'll just say that in my day, the owners of the process were still from Europe. Product was shipped from Mexico but the Mexican and Central American gangs of today were not in control of the turf I wandered. I don't know who owns the turf in my ol' stompin' grounds. I'm sure the distribution network is more efficient but then again maybe it's not.

It's easy to get in but not easy to get out after you reach a certain level. The issue is a simple matter of trust. "What's in it for me?" You scratch so many backs and cover so many people's asses that you lose track of the backs and asses that owe you or that you owe. At least that's what they want you to believe.

Thing is, I'm a writer. I write in code. I'm telling you all this because my code is unbreakable. I have no encryption key or cipher that you will find. I've kept a tally of everything I've done since I was in fifth grade. Yeah, it all started when I was 10 and read a science fiction story about two people kidnapped and help captive on another planet where they communicated with each other using a simple cipher. No ciphers for me. My record book is buried in the stories I write. In one story, a lover may be a dealer. In another story, a lover may be a buyer or some cop I paid off to look the other way.

I've kept track of every single one of them. To beat the system, I posted my stories for all the world to read, taking advantage of the Internet so I can stay away from the paper journals that narks like to steal and turn over to their handlers.

You want to become a millionaire? Then listen carefully. You can do it one of two ways, the slow way or my way. The slow way is the way that money dealers like. You put a little dough aside every week and invest it in some publicly traded company or fund. The traders get their share and everybody's happy. Governments like slow moneymakers, too, because they're dependable and controllable.

Then there's my way. Make it all mysterious and scary if you want and call it the "underworld." Words like that keep the suburbanites quiet, obedient, dumb and happy. I'm not going to badmouth them because they feed me. Their quiet and obedient children buy goods from my colleagues in the so-called underworld. Husbands and wives work for company owners who operate regional fiefdoms in this underworld of yours. Sometimes they're my best customers, too.

Uninformed people mention the risks involved. After all, they say, look at the crime rampant in TV shows and movies! What risks are you talking about? Ones invented by script writers to keep you glued to the TV set? You've got greater risks by walking across the street than walking the street for my way.

You know, I'm bored talking about this. I ain't gonna get no richer telling you how I built my empire. I'm just bragging to make me feel like a man 'cause I ain't got no woman with me to throw my hand around her waist right now. I'm wasting my time flapping my virtual jaws with these calloused fingertips.

What I was planning to say is that if you wanna make money in this economy, it's there to be had. Plenty of folks with money to throw at product if you've got the right product to sell. Don't need no business license to do it, neither. You wanna look legit, though, 'cause there's always some innocent citizen out there who'll stir up such a fuss that even your best customer in the law business has to make an example of you to "restore the public trust" if you don't have a valid reason for being around.

And lastly, if you're in this sort of business while taking some college-level class to look legit, do yourself a favor and get your money's worth by showing up so you can pass. Otherwise, I'll probably get bored listening to your "valid reasons" for missing class and decide you're more useful as a mule in a colleague's business, destined for an eventual spin down the drain and washed away.

Are you listening? This is simple stuff here. It's easy. If I can do it, so can you. However, do us both a favor and act like a legitimate professional, no matter what business you think you're in. I get tired of amateurs. They don't make it into my stories. Amateurs tend to have "accidents" and disappear like a puff of smoke, the only evidence of their existence being sooty stains on furniture. As always, the choice is yours, not mine.