If you have had to endure yet another boring session, listening on whilst a 'yahoo' tells you that if anybody wronged him, he would send 'The Boys' around, then this story is for you. With one foot in satire and one in the truth, I hope it is one you enjoy.
Who are these ‘boys’ they speak of? This plethora of mysterious heavies, sent to secure a debt, curry favour, and offer advice all on behalf of a “Mister Big?'
Dark glasses, bulging muscles and monosyllable vocabulary, they ooze danger… most of the time.
The real ones, well yes, they exist, and best do as they ask, or you will find yourself waist-deep in the big sea and only heading further in. Not the best of pension plans.
But for every reality, there is a myth, and usually in the minds of both the ‘boy’ himself and his equally shallow, equally insecure keeper.
MB (as he likes to be called) can summon these demons in a second should you dare fall foul to him to the tune of, let’s say one hundred pounds.
“I’ve fellas will shoot you for less,” MB brags to his adoring crowd at the social club on a Saturday night.
Somewhere, in the same room sits a quiet man, listening to the braggart and his foolish tales. This guy? Well, this guy simply gives his head a quick shake, a wry smile and takes a sip of his drink. Usually a whiskey.
His “boys” also sit quietly in the never-neverlands, simply doing a job, reading a book, possibly, no, probably a training session and doing what they do best. Keeping their mouths shut until it is time to not keep them shut anymore.
MB’s boys? Well, they are really clanging iron, kicking butt, chatting up the girls and smoking the smokes all in preparation for the battle that everybody knows will never really come. Because MB has shown forgiveness, mercy, and compassion. He has let the debt go, but not without adding his own wise, sage-like comments.
“It’s coming. Mark my words, it’s coming. When you are next down a dark alley (does anyone go down a dark alley except for the doggers and daredevils?) It will hit you when you least expect it,” he all but yells in a whisper.
Overhearing all this, the quiet guy in the corner offers, “But I thought you said you had forgiven the debt?” MB gives him an icy glare which the quiet man takes at face value.
“My bad,” he says and returns to his drink, but the few in the room know that MB and his ‘boys’ have just dodged a bullet.
For real.
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