Unacclaimed fiction from the Unacclaimed Master.

If you've read my novel you've read this excerpt. If you haven't, kick back and enjoy. Warning: Mature Content, Language, Adult Situations.

BOTTLE OF SMOKE
or
Hungry Will Gamble with Cowboys and Outlaw Bikers For Food.

I'd met Chris while working as a pizza cook a few years earlier. Back then we'd jokingly called him the 'Bank of Pankiw'. Chris was a pizza delivery driver, and he was paid in cash every day. When we'd worked together I'd routinely borrow myself into owing him my entire paycheck every two weeks. Now that we no longer worked together we saw each other less and less, but when we did Chris was usually good for a free pizza. I was of course starving, going on to day 3 without food.

Everywhere that we went Chris seemed to know everybody. He wasn't an outgoing guy by any means. If anything he was very nearly paralyzed by shyness. He wore his hair in a style ten years out of date, with a mustache to match. His wardrobe was restricted to a handful of clothes, bargain brand jeans ventilated with numerous holes, old dress shirts with collars worn thin, ratty old cowboy boots, (with the heel on the boots he stood 5'6" instead of 5'4"), and finally the ever present black leather motorcycle jacket. Whether it was thirty degrees below zero, or thirty degrees above, he would not take off his jacket. He refused to go anywhere that forced him to check in his coat. In spite of this total lack of concern over his image, or maybe because of it, Chris was greeted by friendly smiles everywhere we went.

I called him up and asked him if he wanted some company on deliveries for the night, my ulterior motive being of course that I was starving to death, and Chris was guaranteed to drop a pizza on me. He said sure, and drove over to pick me up.

Chris lived in his car. In all the years I'd known him, I'd never once seen his home. When I first met him, I’d never see him anywhere but in his old red 76 Firebird. He didn't drive the car, he wore the car. He felt most comfortable in the car. After four years of delivering pizzas the whole car smelled like a pie. Usually after riding shotgun with him all night, I'd smell like one too. When he eventually ran the Firebird into the ground he bought a newer 86 Camaro, which he treasured and refused to use for deliveries. Instead he bought an endless series of junkers; late 70s and early 80s compacts like Chevettes, Vegas, Bobcats, Datsun 510s, and Toyota Tercels. As long as the car was running and had a price tag under $200, Chris was happy with it.
Depending on Chris' financial situation, he’d sometimes let me run the pizzas to the customers' doors and keep whatever tips I earned. They weren't always great tips, in fact sometimes they were downright insulting, but cash was cash, and I usually needed it bad.

When he finally arrived to pick me up he was driving a battered Datsun 510 2 door that sounded like a lawnmower with indigestion. I opened the door to hop in and he had me wait a moment while he tossed the empty cigarette packs, fast food wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups to the back. There the garbage joined a pile of trash so high it was spilling on to the back seat.
"Smoke?" Chris offered, holding out his pack
I took one and motioned to the back seat. "It's just about time to clean it out back there, don't ya think?" I smiled.
"Why?" Chris asked, casting me a concerned, quizzical look as though I weren't making any sense. Then he burst into a high pitched giggle, rocking back and forth with his laughter and slapping the steering wheel. When he finally stopped giggling he told me he had a plan. "This is the idea," he began. "I figure every one of these little shitbox cars I keep buying lasts me about three months before it dies. So, I've decided I'm not gonna clean this one until it goes kaput. When it does I'll count all the smoke packs, and coffee cups and shit, and I'll be able to figure out what I'm spending on crap from day to day."
"You're serious?" I asked.
He nodded enthusiastically and started giggling again. "Then I'll be able to come up with a budget."
"Why don't you just write down what you spend every day?" I asked.
"Are you fuckin kidding me? Write it down! On what, a piece of paper, a book? It'd be lost the second I put it down in this mess."

We headed straight back to the pizza place as he had a couple of deliveries waiting for him. Along the way I told him I'd been thinking a lot about thirst and hunger, the parallels to uncontainable desire, and its connection to color, and the quenching and satiating of this color-lust being the essential condition of man. I told him about all of the different ways it could manifest itself.

He told me being unemployed was getting to me and that I should try to get out a little more.

I also got around to the question of food, and he said he was way ahead of me, that the girl at the shop had a pizza in the oven for us.
When we arrived at the store I noticed a bunch of Harleys parked out in front. "Aw no, it's not what I think it is, is it?" I asked, I was hoping I wouldn't hear what I knew I was going to.
Chris started giggling again. "I knew you forgot!" he laughed punching me in the shoulder.
"It's Sunday night isn't it?" I realized.
"Yup! And you're not goin’ home. You're in now, whether you like it or not."
"I don't have any money to..." I started to protest.
"Tough shit, I'll spot you some." Chris interrupted.
"I've got no way to pay you back..." I argued.
"Then you better fuckin’ win." Chris grinned.
"What if I don't?"
"Look I'll give you ten bucks, but ya gotta play." he said as we hopped out of the car and headed in. "I'll let ya run the rest of the pies tonight too, maybe you'll make some extra cash...there's still a couple hours of steady orders before it slows down. Now quit fuckin’ complainin’. Jesus, it's not like you've got anything better to do."
"Just as long as it isn't until 5 in the fuckin’ morning again." I agreed reluctantly.
"Why, ya gotta get up for work?" he said, and he nearly fell over he thought that was so funny.

Mama's Pizza wasn't like the other pizza delivery places out there. Whereas most of the more reputable establishments hired nice, clean cut high school kids to work for them, Mama's Pizza seemed to employ the worst that society had to offer. The driver job paid cash everyday and there was absolutely no paper trail to record that a particular person was or was not employed with the company. Consequently, personality types averse to having their whereabouts become federal knowledge flocked to the job. Almost all of the drivers were ex-cons, cowboy drifters and outlaw biker types. And every Sunday night, from four locations throughout the city, about twenty of these personality types and their associated riff-raff would gather in the back room of Chris's location and play cards for cash. I’d sat in on more than my share of these games while working for Mama's, enough to know that a sharp-eyed gambler I was not. I'd lost several paycheques hoping that eventually I’d catch on to the mathematical, physical and psychological subtleties necessary to win. I never did, and having at first not succeeded, then failing when I try, tried again, I quit. Or I tried to anyway...Chris wouldn't let me. Back when I too had been 'gainfully' employed by Mama's I’d counted on Chris to give me a ride home every night. Most of the time he forced me to go for coffee with him at an all night greasy spoon for a few hours before dropping me off. I wound up not getting home until 3 or 4 in the morning most nights, but Sunday nights were the worst. On Sunday nights the back room games turned Mama's into a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and unless I wanted to walk home in temperatures that have killed more than their fair share of long haired Saskatonian teens, I had to sit in.
At first I enjoyed the games. The back room was more of a small warehouse than a room, where all the dry goods like boxes, soda cups, napkins, and assorted sundry were kept for all of the stores. It was just like in the movies. It was easy to picture an Edward G. Robinson or a Marlon Brando sitting in on a game. The room was completely unfinished, gray concrete walls and floor, exposed iron beams lining the ceiling. The lighting was provided by a series of bare 120 watt bulbs hanging at intervals like convicted Texans from the iron beams. In the middle of the room, there were a bunch of 4x8 folding plywood tables shoved together to fold pizza boxes on, and that's where we played cards.
These weren't friendly card games with the guys from work by any means. Most of the players were strangers to one another, brought in initially by friends of friends of employees, growing further and further removed until any company association was too far gone to recall. There was an air of tension and danger in the room that you didn't find anywhere else. On one occasion, Lorne, a myopic, acne scarred, beanpole of a pizza cook had bet hard on a losing hand (they used to make fun of Lorne for betting on the basis of pretty colors.). It turned out that Lorne had believed implicitly that he was going to win, and didn't actually have the money to cover his bet. They were preparing to kill him.
"What the fuck were you thinking?" one of the bikers growled, rising up from his seat. "I've been to games where they hang guys for pulling that shit!"
A big cowboy with a frightfully low tooth-to-tattoo ratio stood as well. "We'll take the difference in 'body collateral'." he snarled, rolling up his sleeves.
The man Lorne had lost to stared at him with eyes of ice from across the table. "You wanna fuckin' tease me kid you are going to fucking put out. If you don't have money I want your fuckin car, if you don't have a car I want your fuckin TV and stereo, if you don't have that I want your mother's fuckin car and TV and if she don't have it I want your fuckin mother, am I making myself clear? I think most of these guys will be happy to help me collect, am I right boys?" and twenty mean motherfuckers grumbled meat-hungry agreement.
"I'll cover the moron..." Chris spoke up through an exhale of translucent blue cigarette smoke, and he slid fifty bucks across the table to the winner.
"NO FUCKIN WAY MAN!" somebody roared. "If junior there wants to fuck around junior can pay the fuckin price!" and a number of other voices shouted agreement.
Luckily for Lorne there were more voices urging "Forget it." and "Toss the kid out!" and "Play some more cards!", and that's what happened. Somebody started dealing (they skipped Lorne), and Lorne eased red faced and cautious away from the table. For the rest of the night the hardcore badasses swapped blood curdling stories of what they'd seen happen to guys that had tried to pull the same stunt. When Lorne tried to ease discreetly in on the following Sunday, it was decided by popular vote that he would have to ante up 10 dollars instead of the usual 2 for every game as punishment.
Needless to say it made me a little uncomfortable being around these people and I told Chris so.
"Just don't do anything stupid and you'll be alright." Chris advised.
I let out a loud laugh. "That's supposed to reassure me? Jesus I've never done anything smart! Doing stupid things is my primary personality trait, it's intrinsic to my nature..."
"I wouldn't say shit like intrinsic to my nature either, if I were you." Chris interrupted. "They'll think you're a fag."
"Aw c'mon man, can't you just drop me off first?" I pleaded.
"Too bad, you're in. I already told some of the guys you'd be here, and they're looking forward to seeing you again."
"I'd be looking forward to seeing someone again too- if every time I saw them they lost all of their money to me." I grumbled.
"Look, ya get free pizza, free beer, free smokes, and I'm giving you ten bucks that you could conceivably turn into a fortune if you're smart-"
"Which we've already established I'm not..." I pointed out. However the free pizza, beer and cigarettes, as well as the possibility of making some cash had a strong appeal and I agreed to sit in and play the ten bucks. "As long as it's not until 5 in the fucking morning again." I insisted.
"No problem." Chris smiled…

At roughly 4:30 a.m. the game was getting interesting. Poker and Blackjack had been putting everybody to sleep, so to change things up and keep it simple enough for myself and the other non-professionals like me to understand we started playing a game called 'In-between'. The rules are basic. Everybody antes up, two bucks a person, and they throw it into a pot in the middle of the table; so, for instance, with twenty people, the pot starts out at forty dollars. Then every player is dealt two cards, face up. The player bets any amount, from two dollars up to the value of the pot, on whether the next card he's dealt will be higher, lower, or in between the value of his first two cards. If he wins, he collects the amount of his bet from the pot. If he loses, he pays into the pot, and the pot grows. If, however, he gets dealt a card that he already has in his hand, then he has to pay double the amount of his bet into the pot, which is where the game has the potential to get really big.
Vern was the district manager for all of the Mama's Pizza stores in the city. On weekends, when the owner was out of town, it was his job to go from store to store on Sunday nights and collect all of the money that had accumulated over the weekend.
Here's how things got interesting;
We were playing In-between. The pot was getting pretty big, roughly three hundred bucks or so. Vern got dealt an ace and a king for his first two cards. He called the ace low, which gave it and any aces to follow a value of one, and with the king then having the highest possible value, he almost guaranteed that there could be no card dealt to him higher or lower than his own. With the very unlikely occurrence that he could be dealt another king or ace, he couldn't lose. The next card had to be in between. "I'll pot the fucker-between." he grinned, betting the entire value of the pot. The money was practically in his hands.
The dealer, an old pirate of a biker by the name of Swervin' Mervin pulled a card up off of the deck and gave it a little peek before flicking it over to Vern. "Sorry buddy..." he said, but he was smiling from ear to ear. The card he’d flicked over was another king. Empathetic moans and groans of sheer anguish went up around the table, and Vern's face went white, while Swervin Mervin counted the total value of the pot.
"Three hundred and sixty four dollars," he concluded, then did some quick math in his head, "which means you owe $728.00."
"Jesus there's over a grand in the pot now!" Chris whispered to me.
Across the table Vern was counting his money, and it looked like he was coming up short, very short.
"You're not coming up light are ya friend?" one of the cowboys asked, and his tone had an undercurrent of kneecap-shatter/threat to it.
"I, uh, I-" Vern was stammering and sweating. "I sorta forgot about the double the pot thing, y'know, if you hit a card you already have..."
"But you're not comin up light, are you?" the cowboy said again, and this time it was definitely not a question, but a warning.
Unlike the Lorne situation several years ago, Vern was not a moron. He knew the rules, and he knew them as well as anybody there. And unlike the Lorne situation, there was more than fifty bucks at stake, and Vern had a reputation for not paying people back. Nobody was willing to bail Vern out.
He had counted his money twice, and divided it into little piles on the table in front of him. He didn't have much more than three hundred dollars by my estimate. His face was turning from white to red, and he was shaking. Nobody was speaking.
"How are we gonna fix this without anybody getting hurt, Vern?" another biker asked and he asked it quiet and low, with what sounded like genuine concern but nonetheless implied pure bonecrush threat.
Vern looked up with terrified realization as it hit him just how deep in the shit he truly was, and his eyes, more moist and fishlike than usual, darted around the table looking for help, but there was none coming. He'd fucked himself.
On the floor between his legs was a black briefcase, and he brought it up on to the table and opened it, blocking the contents with the case lid. He didn't need to block the contents from any of us. We all knew it was the weekend money from the stores. He counted out the amount he needed, closed the case, and put it back down on the floor.
"There." he said firmly, and threw $728 into the pot.
"Watch out boys, looks like the company is backing Vern's bets now!" one of the drivers laughed. "I say we call it a night, how about you fellas?" he said with a conspiratorial wink.
"FUCK THAT!" Vern snapped, then realizing the driver was only joking, he tried to pass it off as his own attempt at a joke. "I gotta win that money back, and nobody's leaving until I do." he laughed, trying to lick the dryness off of his lips.
"Then let's play some fuckin’ cards." Mervin announced. He smacked the table and started dealing to the next player. Around the table the game went, some of us losing a little, some of us taking little chunks out of the pot for ourselves. But the real action was Vern. The game got back around to him, and Swervin Mervin dealt the cards, a three and a four.
"Higher! And I'll pot the bitch!" Vern hissed, and lit a cigarette.
Mervin had an audience and he knew it so he milked it. "Hold up there Vern, you don't have any money to bet with." Vern patted the briefcase and smiled back at Mervin. "Well does the company have enough money to be betting the whole pot? What if ya get a deuce or another three or a four?" Mervin continued.
"The company's got it covered, just deal the cards" Vern pressed. He was drumming his hands on the table like a spastic on speed.
"Awright..." Mervin shrugged, and he pulled a card off of the deck and shook his head sadly. "It's the cards buddy, it's not me." he said as he tossed the two of spades over to Vern.
"Better open up that briefcase again boy!" the cowboy laughed.
They counted out the pot, which was at 1240, and with Vern's loss it jumped to 2480.
Some appreciative whistles of amazement went up from around the table. It was getting to be a high stakes game
The tension was enervating. Everybody played a little quicker so that the hand could get back to Vern, who was sweating and shaking worse than ever. We watched with morbid fascination as he began to fall apart. The badasses were all giving him a hard time.
"Don't worry buddy, jail ain't as bad as they say." one would taunt.
"Who knows, you may even fall in love in there" another joined in.
"It would be better if you fell in love..." someone suggested, "then getting buttfucked ain’t so bad."
At the table there was one biker in particular whose size and strength were unquestionably the greatest of any present. Pete was his name, and with his bear like presence he commanded absolute respect from even the meanest of the players, primarily because he was widely accepted to be the meanest. None of us had ever had the misfortune to witness Pete's aggressive side, not that I knew of anyway. He was always exceedingly kind and jovial with me, and with everyone I knew. But the meanness was there, it was palpable, and danced like a smoldering sleeping flame waiting on a backdraft deep in the back of his pupils. Once again the hand came back to Vern. The laughter subsided and the table went quiet as his first two cards were laid down in front of him. Again it was a hand too good to be true, two aces. Vern called one of the aces high, and one low. They were using a couple of decks, and nobody knew for certain how many aces still remained to be dealt. A quiet buzz of discussion rose up as some of the players tried to remember what had been played, with Vern listening intently to all of them. Then Pete started to speak, a low but voluminous sound that we listeners could feel reverberating in the pits of our stomachs, a great ursine sound, and everybody listened.
"Gentlemen you'll take note that our esteemed brother Vern does not share in our jocular opines of his dark situation." Pete began, extracting a cigarette from his pack. Lighters flared on either side of him, and he chose the one on the left. He spoke without emotion, without sympathy, with an indifference as cold as Siberia. "In fact, if you'll take even a passing glance at Vern's deeply furrowed brow you'll observe that he's perspiring quite vociferously. One would assume, from the facts that rise first and foremost to the surface, that the underlying condition of his nervous demeanor is the financial jeopardy he now finds himself in." With this Pete paused to take a long pull off of his vodka, and to let us consider his words. "That is of course on the surface of the situation, and merely an illusion." Pete stopped again, noticing Vern's increasing fidgetiness. "Pardon me Vern, play your cards..." he urged with a waving of his giant bearpaw.
"I'm betting the pot...in between." Vern said quietly, and the words came out of the dry vacuum of his dehydrated throat covered in dust.
Swervin' Mervin lifted the card and winced as he looked at it, handing it over, this time without apologies. The Ace of Spades. Vern was stunned, and seemed for a moment to lose his balance as a wave of apparent nausea swept over him. Swervin Mervin started to count the pot again, and Vern re-opened the briefcase. He guessed that it would be in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars that he'd be paying in.
While they counted, Pete continued. "What you're seeing before you gentlemen is a man being destroyed from the inside out. Like a lobster devouring its own flesh to survive starvation, so too our friend Vern. And what's brought him to this sorriest of states, this great moral abyss that he know finds himself in? Is it an evil within that has cast him into this maelstrom?" He paused a moment to consider any opinions.
Sitting quietly, and speaking only when spoken too as he had been doing for years now was Lorne, covered from head to toe in a fine dusting of white baker's flour. "It's greed that's brought him to this." Lorne said with absolute surety.
Pete looked at Lorne, examined him for a moment. "What the fuck happened to you?" he asked.
"Whaddaya mean?" Lorne asked, squinting through the dusting of flour on his thick glasses.
"What's with the fucking flour?" Pete asked.
Lorne cleared his throat. He was blushing and turning a deep shade of red, but through the flour he looked bright pink. "I was making pizza dough for tomorrow, and I put the fuckin’ flour in the fuckin’ mixer and turned it on, only somebody left the fuckin’ mixer on the highest fuckin’ speed, and it shot fuckin’ flour everywhere." he explained. The room exploded with laughter. Half of us were on the floor. When we quieted down, Pete continued.
"Before your stand up routine just now Lorne, you suggested that perhaps it was greed that had brought our friend to this clifftop precipice with a panoramic view of his own ruin. I would disagree, and rather I put it to you like this; it was not Vern's greed, or anything else vile or base in his character, (as I believe that these qualities are absent from the hearts of men, at least as primary motivators to action anyway). No, if anything gentlemen, I would venture to say that what has driven Poor Vern to this extremely rapid deterioration of self is nothing more than his own goodness. Does that confuse you? Do I have a few minutes still Mervin?" Pete asked
Mervin nodded without looking up from his counting.
"Then I shall elucidate." Pete smiled, pouring another shot from the bottle of vodka he'd brought with him. "Vern's greed, as is the case with most of us here, arises only out of his will to do good. In the simple pursuit of some superfluous liquidity Vern took a gamble, albeit an absent-minded gamble. I'm willing to grant him the excuse that, blinded by the prospect of easy money, he forgot about the double-the-pot rule. Mistakes happen. That mistake however was the catalyst for Vern's goodness to precipitate his downfall. Vern had only two choices at that moment. Pay up out of the company money, or endure a swift and savage beating at the hands of our here-assembled rogues' gallery. You'll recall that Vern hesitated for a few minutes, apparently to ponder his quandary before concluding that it was best to borrow from Mama's. What we witnessed during that hesitation was not a burdened man weighing the pros and cons of a lose-lose situation as you'd suspect, but rather, the ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil that is being waged every moment within the hearts and minds of men. And what we saw was the triumph of good! Vern chose the most hazardous option as his route to salvation. He chose to risk his own personal freedom by stealing from his own master, who I’m sure we can all agree is if not corrupt, at the very least exploiting us all. Rather than dishonoring himself by welching on a bet to us, his communal peers, he chose instead to rob from the wicked. With the theft there was, and still is the chance of winning all the money back, of making right what he had done wrong, there is the chance of redemption. Welching on all of us here, there would be no such chance. So it was this desire to do the utmost good, a desire intrinsic to all our natures," here I kicked Chris under the table and mouthed the words 'intrinsic-to-our-natures', "a desire to do the highest right at whatever cost to himself, that has fucked Vern so heinously."
Swervin Mervin finished counting. "There's $2700 in the pot Vern, so you and Mama's owe $5400."
Vern dug another $400 out of the briefcase and tossed it into the pot with the 5k he'd already separated. "I can't stop any of you fuckers that don't work for us from betting." he said as he tossed the money into the pot. "But if any fucking employee takes any more of that fucking money, I'll see to it that they go down with me!" and he crossed his arms and stared at the pile of cash in the center of the table.
Pete stood up. "Gentlemen, it's well past five o'clock in the morning. Outside a new day has dawned, and at our current pace we'll still be here at this day's demise. I'm sure that you're all as interested as I am in how this bullshit is going to end, so I’d like to move that we all forfeit our turns, until Vern either recovers the money and saves his earthly freedom, or loses it all to see freedom again only in death. Agreed?"
Naturally everyone agreed. Vern got up from his chair and walked a lap around the room, throwing punches at the air and stretching away the tension like a boxer before a title fight. Those that needed to empty their bladders did, and a few stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. The pot heads passed a joint around. Swervin Mervin gave Vern the option of shuffling the deck, and Vern shuffled, then passed the deck back.
"Awright people, it's time!" Mervin shouted, and we all settled in. He dealt the first two cards, and a wave of nervous laughter swept the table. Two aces.
Vern let a fury of punches fly into his open palm. "One high, one low!" he shouted, jumping up out of his chair, and he started to pace frantically. "In between!" he called, and continued to pace.
Swervin Mervin waited a few minutes while Vern paced before asking "How much are you betting?"
"FUCK!!" Vern screamed, kicking a pile of boxes.
The cowboy spoke, and gently for once. "Your gettin' too worked up boy. What's on your mind? Sometimes talkin helps..."
Vern stopped pacing, and stared at the cash again. "Here's the problem guys. See, I wanna bet the fuckin’ pot, but neither me or Mama's has got that kind of cash. It's at what, like 8 fuckin’ grand right now? That means I could wind up having to put in 16 grand if I get another fuckin’ ace!"
"So you can't pot it then, bet what you can." Mervin said.
"I WANNA POT THE FUCKER!" Vern screamed, jumping at Mervin so violently that a couple of bikers stood up to grab him if need be. His face was red with frustrated rage. "Look I'm going to fuckin’ prison if I don't win that fuckin’ pot back! Let me bet my truck! It's worth $20,000. I'll put up my $20,000 fucking truck, plus there's still about 2 grand left in the briefcase here, that's $22,000 against 8 grand, and if I lose it I walk away and you guys can play the rest of the night for my fucking truck, but just let me bet my fucking truck because it's that or I go to prison over an hour in a fucking card game!!" he stood with his arms out from his sides, his feet shoulder width apart ready for a fight.
"Any objections?" Mervin asked. Nobody objected. The more bloodthirsty and heartless of the rogues rubbed their hands gleefully at the prospect of winning a truck and $12,000. "Fine then let's play this out..." he said, and Vern sat down again. "Where were we?" Mervin said to himself as he reached over to the deck. "Two aces, one high, one low, and you have called in between...." he picked the top card off of the deck, gave it a look, winced and gave a heartfelt apology as he laid it down. "I'm awful sorry Vern, but you shuffled it, so you basically dealt yourself this-" and here Mervin's tone changed to a yell of celebration,"-this 5 of hearts! You're not going to prison!"
Vern looked at the card in disbelief, then at Mervin, then at the card. A smile began to tug at the corner of his mouth, and his entire being became a quiet hissing tension relief valve. He slumped forward onto the table, and held his head in his hands. Laughter started to shake through him and the color came back to his face. A round of applause went up around the table.
"How do you feel Vern? Did I have you goin'?" Mervin asked with a grin.
"I was positive I was going to jail you fucker!" There was considerable moisture welling in Vern’s eyes. He looked like he’d run a marathon.
Mervin rocked back in his chair laughing.
"I'm never fucking gambling again." Vern said, counting the money back into the briefcase.
Chris smacked me on the back. "See if I woulda dropped you off, you woulda missed that." he said.
I smiled. It was after 6 a.m. “I just wanna go home.” I said.
“Right after breakfast.” Chris winked, collecting his own winnings from the table. “I’m buying.”