The Gospel According To Slim - entry #01

There were so many of us that were out to best the Amethyst City, The Unholy Vatican - Caine Town: The city that fratricide built. Hustlers, scallywags, brawlers, heroes and swine of all types, shapes and size. We’d bet our lives on it. All that was good or could be good had merely become more collateral for the wager, simply something to sacrifice, a bigger sack of pennies to bet with. 


But what did it mean to best Caine Town? Was ironic really. We would leave our respective nests from wherever we were from, usually one of the Old Outposts. I myself was born and bred in Bonehill. Left when I was 21 for Caine Town. Funny thing is, once we’d best Caine Town, all we’d end up doing is returning home anyway. 


But this time it would be different. This time we’d be changed. No man, woman, beast or bastard would ever tell us what to do again. 


The city was built upon boom after boom after boom. Everyone came here, over the decades, to build their fortune from gold prospectors, lead miners, oil drillers, crooks, criminals, pimps, cabaret dancers, actors along the Marquee Mile - the city had built up and ripped down all manner of dreamers. For those of us who grew up in the crumbling Old Outposts it was the beacon of a better life. 


But it wasn’t just fame or fortune that drew us to that violent, violet, neon citadel out there in those Aegean mountains. It was the thrill, the chase, the challenge - the drive of leaving the softness of our mothers hometowns into the wild fire of the beastliest sides of man, the thought that we might walk through that fire and return reforged. 


Perhaps one day. 


For now I was stuck in Boarville. Had been for just over a year living in an apartment on the outskirts of town. I had moved to be with Violet who I’d met in the city. But it didn’t work out and before they could even gather dust my spurs were brought off the hook and I was back to the grind the only way I knew how - hustling. The goal, at this point, was to get back to Caine Town in as short a space of time as possible. Pool games and poker nights were always the classic hustles but I’d always done well with my saxophone on street corners and accompanying the DJ’s in the local nightclubs. I moonlighted as a getaway driver, hired muscle from time to time and I sold poetry to the saints in the underpass, the angels in the high rises and the quick hipsters looking for their underground fix. 


But the thing that was really keeping me in Boarville was Flip Dime Damiano who’d just started a business putting on private parties for the fat cats on Gilway Lane, Caine Town’s Beverly Hills, and whatever getaway condo’s, mansions and castles they had in the mountains. I wasn’t part of the band but Damiano said he needed someone he could trust at these events to make sure everything went smoothly and, most importantly, the bastards paid. Sure enough, when he knew I was in town and looking for work he called.


Some of these cats. So many of them were born into their affluence. Many were the typical rich kids - loud, arrogant. Others were pretty down to earth. Knew their affluence and made real efforts to not let it get to their heads. But then there were those in the middle of the two extremes, the ones who knew they would never know what it was like to walk through the fire and come out the other end burnt but better for it. I watched those the most - dancing, downing their martinis, smiling and laughing those huge, guffawing laughs they all liked to use. I’d always try to catch those micro-expressions after each laugh, the ones of anguish that came from the knowledge that they didn’t really know who they were or just who they were trying to be. The quick realisations and remembrances that emerged from the attempts at drowning. 


I’d watch these the most. These, at least in my view, are the most dangerous people in the world. The ones with the chips on their shoulders. The ones who ended up in positions of power, nine times out of ten. They were the ones you needed to keep an eye on the most.

​For now, at least anyway, this work suited me. And besides it was a foot back in the Caine Town puddle. Now all that was left was to scope out the opportunities and transfer the Hustle.