Shout out for Cocomo or info regarding his Where's he now?
Cocomo had a personal nick that he laid on me. Champ.Always had a lilt of sarcasm or did I miss interpret. Gee he came from a different culture. Angle shoot was his skill. He took my weekly allowance when I first ventured into the weekly White Spot (Right Spot) 9 ball lessons.
The lessons were money well spent and after a year and a half I won A Beer! for 7/8.
For awhile I lived in the same small town as my mother, a suburb of a medium sized city. She would come over and find trails of money all over the house. A good week or two and no trip to the bank. My bank was my shirts, coats, boots, socks, anything that would hold a wad of money. Mom got worried when I hadn't worked in about six months. Life was good. The oilpatch was booming and I was taking my cut from the people that came to take money from the workers and business owners associated with the oil patch. Some from the workers too, they gambled on the pool tables with everyone else. I didn't cheat except fighting fire with fire sometimes, and I didn't play dice or cards. I never learned to play dice well and knew a little fat f**k that could knock the corners off of dice while you watched him! Not my strengths. I was a one trick pony playing pool and the occasional prop bet.
Sometimes I considered that I was taking the money from drug dealers and pimps. What were the ethics of taking all of the second hand money people worked damned hard for? There was a little store near a plant on the Mississippi River. People were getting paychecks every Tuesday, Weddnesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The little store cashed checks for people without proper ID or who just found it handy to grab a six pack or two of beer leaving the plant. Not unusual to see twenty-thirty people or more cashing checks for one to two thousand dollars at that little store. I have seen several times that many. They had a safe but it was always unlocked afternoons and evenings. I used to wonder how much money was in that little store right before the rush on Thursday or Friday, the main pay days. Some of those checks were cosigned three or four times and sometimes a foreman was cosigning for a whole crew!
A few years back when shale oil hit in Oklahoma I heard things were even crazier but I was a bit long in the tooth to work the oilfields or the honeypots up and down the nearby highways.
Is it wrong to take the money of pimps and dope dealers, sometimes plain old strongarm thieves? A lot of the workers are unattached young men cashing checks in the low thousands and being broke by the next payday. For awhile I banked half of my paycheck and partied with half. I would come home, wash my face and hands or shower depending on how dirty I was, then pull my dirty clothes back on that said chicken ready to be plucked! This chicken got plucked once in awhile, usually for going days without sleep. Mostly I was chicken hawk or above and I did the plucking though!
Huey Long wasn't a dummy and he wanted his capital city to be prosperous. He corked the river, or at least put a bottleneck just north of town, a low bridge. Ships could come up to that bridge but no further. Billions in cargo were transferred from ship to barge and the other way around at Baton Rouge every year. Huey had his own hustle and made all the other hustlers look like pikers!
Last I knew, that bridge was still there. At one time Standard Oil was the biggest petro-chem plant in the world, bigger than many cities. It and a line of plants started just below the cork in the river. A young man of eighteen or twenty got a job at Standard Oil and expected to retire from there! I used to see lines of over fifty eighteen wheelers lined up at the fuel docks, every brand you could name and a lot you couldn't! Barges were loaded on the river too. Huge barges of refined gasoline and chemicals.
There was a lot of money floating around and either through my daytime businesses and jobs or my nighttime gigs I got my share. Years later I ran into a gal that I had once been very close too both going to the vo-tech. She said who would have thought we would have both died and moved to suburbia?? My race is run but looking back I would do over 90% of it all over again if I could. Like the song says, "regrets, I have had a few but then again too few to mention."
Hu
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