Read Online Giving Up by Mike Steeves - Free Book Online Page A

‘Okay, Luke,’ I said, ‘let’s go cash this money order.’ This had the effect of taking him completely by surprise, so much that before I’d finished saying ‘let’s go cash this money order,’ he’d already started to respond defensively, as if to a question or an accusation. It was clear that he hadn’t been listening to what I was saying, only that I was saying something, and he assumed (reasonably enough) that I was going to say something about how the form was blank except for his friend’s name, the sum, his name, and his signature. Shouldn’t there be something else? More information? At some point he registered what I’d said but it was as though he kept going because he was so shocked by my abrupt acceptance. It took a moment, but when he finally did stop talking he stood in front of me and stared. He’d been prepared for failure. The moment he approached me he probably said to himself, ‘There’s no way this guy is going to listen to me, and even if I do manage to get him to stop and hear me out, there’s no way he’s going to believe a word I say.’ The reason he seemed so desperate was because he knew how ridiculous it was to expect someone to hear him out, believe his story, and then go through the trouble of depositing the money order in their account so they could withdraw four hundred and hand it over. This was why he’d been willing to approach a complete stranger and humiliate himself with an outrageous request. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose,’ he probably thought. It’s not that he didn’t hope to succeed, he wouldn’t have bothered approaching me in the first place if that was the case, it was just that he never suspected it would really happen. To put it in more simple terms, he knew he wasn’t going to succeed, but he wasn’t going to stop approaching strangers until he did. So he couldn’t believe his luck (and that’s what it was, luck) when the impossible finally happened and I agreed to cash the money order at the bank machine a couple blocks away. After standing there silently and staring at me in utter disbelief he appeared to accept the fact that I had agreed to help him out and suddenly hurried to thank me, piling on the gratitude, going on about how he ‘could tell right away that I was a good guy’ and that I was basically saving his life. He’d started walking in the direction of the bank machine and while he kept heaping on the compliments he suddenly became impatient. While he’d been telling me his story he stared at me the entire time, but now he was looking all around him as if he was expecting someone to show up right at that moment, someone that he’d forgotten about and only just remembered. I had expected him to be grateful, but his non-stop praise was so over the top (at one point he compared me to Jesus) and he was so overwhelmed and pathetic, that it struck me as suspicious. In fact, what bothered me about the way he was carrying on was that he was behaving as though I had agreed to give him four hundred dollars, instead of agreeing to cash his money order and take one hundred dollars of his money for my trouble. It was like he’d forgotten everything he’d just told me about the money order (if only for a second), like once I said ‘let’s go cash this money order’ he’d been so surprised, so completely caught off guard, that he forgot to remember that I was doing him a small favour, one that I was supposedly going to profit from, and that it was really just a minor inconvenience (if, that is, his story had been true, which, of course, it wasn’t) and so he felt the same gratitude that anyone would feel if, out of desperation, they were obliged to ask a complete stranger for four hundred dollars and on account of some fucked-up luck the stranger said ‘Sure! I’ll give you four hundred dollars.’ He