Montana Jones and the Bill Collector

Montana Jones paced the length of his tiny Brooklyn apartment with a bottle of Grey Goose in his left hand. His right arm was in a sling. 

“I told the doctor that we needed to come to an arrangement,” he said in between sips from the bottle. “I told him that I wanted him to fix my shoulder just a bit.”

“Just a bit?” I asked.  “Why in the hell would you want your shoulder operated on just a bit?”

“Well, Rick it's like this, as I told the doctor.  I want to be strong enough to lift a bottle of Grey Goose to my lips, but not strong enough to be able to go back to work full time.  See?”  He smiled and took another sip.

“I told the doctor that he'd be doing both of us a favor.”

“How's that?” I asked.

“That is precisely what the doctor asked me.  I told it to him like this.  If I can go back to work then they're going to have one pissed off, drunk Irishman piloting a tugboat in the harbor.  It's just safer and in the public interest to fix me up enough to drink and no more.”

Montana Jones is both a laugh riot and the scariest man I ever met.  He stands about five foot eleven and probably weighs four hundred pounds.  But for all that fat, it's covering muscles an ox would envy.  He's a brute of a man and deceptively spry. 

“Montana, should you be drinking so much?  Your girlfriend is coming over soon, isn't she?”

“That's exactly why I should be drinking so much,” he says. “I want to be three sheets to the wind when she gets here.  That's the only way I can stand talking to the broad.”

He walked back to the living room where I sat in a Lazy Boy recliner.  “Rick, did I ever tell you about t that dumb-ass bill collector who came calling?”

I nodded because it wouldn't matter if he'd already told me the story or not, when Montana Jones wants to tell a story he goes ahead and tells it.

“So there was this time when I was really hard up for money.”  Odd because it seemed that this was a normal state of life for Montana Jones from childhood till the present. 

“I owed money to everyone.  I owed money on my boat, on my car, on the credit cards, and even to my family.  I paid my family every week, see, because those bastards are mean and I wouldn't want to cross them.  The rest of it I kept putting off.” 

He sipped some of the Grey Goose and then put the bottle on the coffee table.  He sat down on the dingy brown sofa.  It creaked under the strain. 

“At that time I had to park around the corner.  I couldn't park in front of my house because I didn't want them to know I was home.  The bill collectors I mean.  And I didn't want the repo man to find my car.  So, I parked it around the corner and I walked back to the house.

“Well, one day when I was driving past I sees this guy standing on my front porch knocking on the door. He had on a suit jacket and he carried an attache case.  I knew he was there for some money because no one comes to that part of Gloucester in anything  fancy unless there's been a funeral or to collect from the living.  Since I was reasonably sure I hadn't died, I figured he wanted some money. 

“I parked my car around the corner and I straightened up my hair.  Then I grabbed a jacket out of my trunk.”

I snorted at that.  He stared at me for a long minute, I could see his mouth clench. “What?  I can get dressed up.  I know how.”

He continued the story, “Anyway.  I pulled out some papers and threw them on the clipboard I had in the backseat and I walked up to the door where the guy was pressing the buzzer.  I walked right up beside him and knocked on the door and hollered, 'Montana Jones, you in there?''”

He took another drink of his vodka and put the bottle back down.  With his left had he wiped his mouth and chin. 

“Then I turned to the other guy, 'So, how much is he into you for?' The other guy says, 'twenty grand.'  So I know he's from the finance company for my boat.  That's the only thing I figured I owed twenty thousand on, see.”

“'You poor bastard,' I says to him. 'That son of a bitch owes me thirteen thousand. Maybe you and I can go get some lunch and we'll exchange information about how to get hold of that fat fuck.  Then if I find him or you find him we can tell each other and maybe we'll both get some of what he owes?”

“The other guy thought that was a great idea.  So I showed him to the diner at the end of the block and we sat down for a good lunch of halibut sandwiches and beer.”

“He sat down with you and had lunch? And he didn't suspect a thing?” I asked.

“Montana Jones can be pretty persuasive when he puts his mind to it,” he said, speaking about himself in the third person.

“So we laughed and talked about me for an hour.  We both had some rather unkind words to say about me and if I was the kind of guy who got his feelings hurt easily I'd have been negatively affected by that lunch for months afterwards. Good things I'm not the that type of guy.  Like water off a duck's back, I always say.” 

“So after I finished eating, I excused myself to go hit the head.  I told him we'd settle up when I got back.  Then I takes his business card and writes on the back of it a message for that twit:”

Hey, dumbass. 

You just bought lunch for Montana Jones

How's it feel?

“I gave that to the waitress.  She was a friend of mine, meaning we'd rolled in the hay a couple times. I told her to hang onto it for five minutes and then give it to the gentleman who looked like he was eating in the wrong neighborhood. 

“With that I made my escape out the back door.   

“And that how I beat my bill collector out of a lunch tab.”

Montana sat back with his bottle of Grey Goose and got drunk enough to tolerate his girlfriend. 

And I left him to it.   

More stories of Montana Jones next week.

Comments

[a rose is a rose]

i'm shocked he drank grey goose (the SHITE of vodkas in my opinion. it tastes like mold. the expensive price tag doesn't fool me one bit). for someone in gloucester i'd guess it would be PARTY TIME VODKA (yes, there IS such a brand, or was)

what i want to know is what the heck were YOU doing in his la-z-boy?

[jane]

This is great; I look forward to more!