Death of a small-time scam artist

A man died a couple of weeks ago. That's not unusual. Lots of men died a couple of weeks ago. You didn't know him. That's not unusual either. You don't know many people who died a couple of weeks ago. For that matter, I didn't know him. So why was a desert penguin gathered with a bunch of crusty old desert rats in the middle of a desert on a 105F degree day to celebrate the dead man's life?

Now, this guy was bright as hell, a wizard with electronics and his trailer was full of books when he died, but he was pretty ornery. When he was growing up, he simply refused to clean up his room, for example. Refused. He wasn't going to do anything that anybody told him, no matter how sensible. Then he joined the Navy. He liked the Navy, he didn't like the following orders bit. Then he moved on to the Merchant Marine. He liked sailing, he just didn't like the following orders bit. So he moved to the San Diego area and started selling insurance. He made lots of money selling insurance. But he hated it. Because insurance, mostly, is a scam. The insurance companies try their hardest to not pay off on anything. So his customers would come to him in tears because their home burned down and the insurance company wouldn't pay, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do for them.

At some point he visited the desert, and got the desert bug. He sold his insurance business, and moved into the various mining and tourism-oriented scams available there. Because what he'd figured out was that civilization, as a whole, is a scam. You can't help but be a scam artist in life no matter what you do, because whatever you're doing, you're pretending that it actually means diddly in the greater scheme of things. Unless you're some sorta great person, nothing you do means a shit. All that matters is whether you're giving folks something that they want. Which is the whole essence of the art of the scam: giving folks something they want.

Now, he wasn't a mean-spirited person. He wasn't going to take folks for their last dime or nothing. That takes evil shits like Ken Lay, and while this guy was ornery, he wasn't mean-spirited. And what he sold them generally was genuine. It was just sorta augmented, if you wish. The worthless mining claim became the next big gold strike when he'd give a guy some high grade ore and say, "I wonder if my mining claim is worth something?" and the greedy bastard would look at the ore and see dollar bills and pay the guy a few bucks for the mining claim, chortling all the way... until the greedy bastard got to the claim and discovered it was worth exactly what he paid for it. This guy viewed his job as removing money from the greedy and, well, moving it to him and his general community of desert rats. Said one of his former employees, "he never stiffed me. He'd run a scam on flatlanders, but he always paid up what he owed us."

Now, if there's anything that desert folks admire, it's a scam artist. Look at Death Vallety Scotty, for example. Have a colorful, larger-than-life scam artist who's also good-hearted? Who was a popular tourist attraction in and of himself at a privately owned ghost town until the pressure got to him and he quit and took off with $10,000 of the owner's money? And the funny thing about that is that for the past six years, years after he took off with that money, he'd been living in a trailer behind the house of one of the owners of the ghost town, for free, because, well, that's just how it works in the desert. The owners hadn't set out to make the ghost town a tourist attraction. They wanted to fix it up as homes for themselves, just couldn't get the permits for the sewer system and such that would be needed to subdivide it. They couldn't hold it against the guy for ripping them off of money which, well, wasn't really theirs in the first place. They laughed about it, and moved on, and when this small-time scam artist needed a place to stay, well, there was a place.

Two days before he died, this man pulled his last scam. This confirmed atheist who believed all religion is a scam (which is true, but in some cases a well-meaning and worthwhile scam), told his best friend in the world, the man whose house he'd lived behind for six years, that he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. His best friend, a born-again Christian, was happy. And that's all that this man ever wanted from his scams -- to make people happy. He couldn't avoid dying, but at least he could make his best friend happy for a little bit.

And that is why I was at a rememberance today. Not for the man who is dead. He's dead, and he ain't coming back, he willed his body to science and his ashes will be back in six months time to be scattered upon the desert, and his will specifically said "No funeral, my dead corpse is just dead meat, pack it off like raw hamburger when it's done." I wasn't there for a funeral. I was there for the man's best friend, a long-time desert rat who isn't going to be around for much longer. And for myself, to listen to the stories of the desert, stories that bite deep into a desert penguin's soul. So now you know why I was sitting around in the desert in 105 degree heat for most of today.

-- Badtux the Desert Penguin