Sad thing for a man like me, going out for burgers instead of a Budweiser and a blow-job, but that's just how it played out. He blew air kisses at his reflection, and limped out the door, locking it behind him, and got into his Cherokee, gunned it up, and drove off into the dark night of Lake City. Lance T Lance sipped a twenty year old cognac and thought about indebtedness. Owing. Not something he enjoyed. When he was pro, he had a contract, but a contract, while indebtedness defined, had a start point and an end point, had a dollar figure attached to it for buy out. In this business, indebtedness or at least the appearance of it was an ongoing thing, and frankly, it bugged the shit out of him. There were the cops, of course, to keep them off his back and to look the other way -- most of that was settled with pussy and free drinks, though the older and more seasoned ones wanted their taste of the good in cash; and a certain amount of payroll and kickback from the girls went to that; there's the City inspectors, the liquor distributors, the doctors he kept on the side for the girls, the girls themselves and then, of course, his investors, whose investment often showed up in satchels full of cash from their lucrative cash rich enterprises and required, well, a turn in the laundry that was a cash-driven business like the one Lance ran, and then he had to take a certain amount of that and run it through his own laundry, all the while finding ways to get that cash into a good ol' electronic format so that it can be shuttled around and then returned, say, as a installment check from a investment firm, or a series of rents from empty houses.
