Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,3

the assholes on Wall Street who make you take on all these crazy loans just to get a house or go to college, loans you have to pay back twenty times over with all the interest and shit. Or the assholes in all these countries that just happen to have oil or coal or trees or whatever, making huge profits off natural resources that ought to belong to the whole world. Or the assholes in Washington, DC, always coming up with some new law that taxes the kind of people who clean the toilets at the Palace Hotel more than the kind of people who stay there.

“Be careful,” my dad used to say. “Pretty much anytime anyone opens his mouth, he’s trying to take something from you.”

So you tell me, with all these epic klepto atrocities going on behind the scenes, what difference does it make if I take a few bucks out of some high roller’s pocket (or suitcase, or unlocked car)? In fact, isn’t the kind of stealing I do about a million times better than the other kind of stealing? I’m like Robin Hood, really. I steal from the rich and give to the poor. Except in my case, the poor is me.

I glanced around the room, and when I was sure no one was looking, I reached over and undid the clasp of the silver-haired girl’s little blue handbag. I pushed through a cloud of Kleenex and deep-sea dove into the mysterious mire of femininity until my fingers found the wad. A second later I was up on my feet and out of there.

THE RETURN OF THE JEDI

I’D STOLEN PLENTY OF STUFF in my life, and I’d never felt even a little bit bad about it. But as I made my escape across the lobby of the Palace Hotel, riffling that thick stack of bills in my pocket, a huge foaming tsunami of guilt slammed into me. Maybe because it was more money than I’d ever seen at once in my entire life. Maybe because even though the girl was dressed like a rich girl, I couldn’t have said for sure that she was rich, because actual rich people usually keep their cash in banks and bonds and shit, not in a messy wad at the bottom of their purses. Or maybe it was just because I knew there were a lot of ways to make money, but only one perfectly sad silver-haired girl sitting alone in the Palace Hotel.

And so I made the mistake of looking back.

When I was little, my parents would read me one fairy tale every night before bed, always from one of the volumes my dad kept over his desk: Grimm, Andersen, those Blue and Red Fairy Books. They wouldn’t skip over the gross or scary stories, the ones with girls who chopped off their heels to fit into shoes, or vengeful demons, or tricksy Death. I couldn’t believe it when I finally heard the weak-sauce, sanitized versions of these stories we got in school; a “Cinderella” without a bunch of blood-filled shoes is no “Cinderella” at all. And did you know that, in the original “Sleeping Beauty,” there’s no handsome prince who rouses Sleeping Beauty with a gentle kiss? Nope! It’s actually a douche-bag king—one who already has a queen, by the way—and he rapes her. She wakes up pregnant, so the king’s wife tries to kill her, bake her into a pie, and feed her to the king. The happy ending? The king decides to have his wife burned to death so he can raise a family with Sleeping Beauty. Make a friendly animated film out of that shit, Disney.

Anyway, my parents also read me the Greek myths, which tend to be about gods who come down from Olympus to get it on with hot chicks. My dad’s favorite character was Orpheus, the famous musician who was allowed to bring his dead wife back from Hades, as long as he could make it to the surface without checking to see if she was actually behind him. But he peeked, and ended up losing her forever. I always thought Orpheus got kinda screwed there. I mean, would you trust the Lord of the Underworld not to mess with you? But my dad said it was the most perfect myth ever written, because it represented the most fundamental human error: we all look back.

When I did, I saw that the silver-haired girl had returned to her seat. In spite of the