Riley is Doing Well

I saw the hobbled ex-ultimate fighter at 2:00 AM on Monday night, driving the new Saturn that his new sugar mama lets him borrow. Or at least he says she lets him borrow it, he gets very defensive when pressed for details. The woman in question is apperantly a 49-year old lawyer from Schaumburg who he met at an Einstien Bros. Bagel shop downtown, a middle-aged woman who found herself single and alone before she knew it. Riley mocks her apperence and attempts to give "bootleg cab rides" to twentysomething women in her car. Truely a rat fuck excuse for a man, so naturally I got in the car when he asked me to.

He asked me if I had any money and I said know. He had completely blown the two hundred dollars the woman gave him burning gasoline accross the city and snorting cocaine off of the counsol. Now he didn't have enough gas to get back to the lovenest in the suburbs. He was completely broke until he sold the Lakeview neighborhood crackhead a baggie full of spat sunflower seeds for five dollars. He called her a stupid bitch when he found that she had given him only three dollars and change.

"That bitch is a crackhead. I mean, I do it every now and then, but there's getting high recreationally and there's being a fucking crackhead. That bitch is a fucking crackhead you know what I'm saying?"

A gay admirer of his on the Halstead strip gave him three dollars and a joint for both of us in return for the info that the police were planning to raid his favorite club. (Hydrate, if you must know, and you shouldn't bring your pharmacy with you if you're going out anyway. Watch yourselves out there fellas.) The look on Riley's face as he held up his six dollar bills before me was the most sincerely prideful countenance I had seen since my preschool graduation.

"I come up quick don't I?" It was impressive in its own way, the way he badgered the gay man into handing over that second joint, the way he held up traffic to hit on a girl walking down Halstead in the hope she would be impressed by somebody else's car, the way he used my phone to call a stolen-goods fencer at three in the morning after picking up a friend named Baeu with a Boliva watch. (The fencer tried to call me back at eight that morning as I was sleeping.) In pop culture the mythical man without a soul is usually some sort of ultra-theatric serial killer. The reality of living without a sould is much more banal than that. Terribly pathetic and yet, somehow grander than any Hannibal Lector nonsense. Godspeed you shameless asshole.