No, he didn't want the cash wired into a bank account.
'Western Union, it's faster.'
I was fucked up on diet tablets.
Gartland exploited that.
There was no mention of me being a junkie until he received the money.
Then he started comparing me to another author, Cummings.
'You aren't doing a Cummings on me,' he said after I asked him to return the cash.
He said he needed it quickly.
I sent the cash early morning.
It was waiting for him by 6 am.
My records told me he picked it up late afternoon.
So much for an emergency.
It was his con.
He was a character in his own book.
Kevin Cummings wrote the Bangkok Beat.
John Gartland is the dead beat.
I've worked five bucks off the 500 I loaned him.
What made matters worse, I had worked for a solid month without pay editing his poetry onto Youtube.
And when I asked for my cash back, he said, 'what about the editing I've already done?'
What about it?
Spell check runs automatically these days.
'But I changed duromine to gropamine 200 times.'
Until recently, I had no idea you could do it with 'find' and 'replace'.
I really felt he had earned the 500 bucks by physically changing every word from duromine to gropamine.
'Mark my word, I have,' he said, adding, 'and if you miss one replacement word, you need to go over the manuscript with a fine comb and find it, and that can take you another 20 hours.'
It wasn't until a good friend told me he could have done it for me in five seconds.
Gartland told me it took him a solid 20 hours alone playing search and destroy.
'And that's not including the syntax, grammar and editing out the nonsequiturs and making the redundant tense into a passive retrospective.'
He doubly fucked me over.
If only I was smarter.
I suspect he has been taking advantage of my retarded intellect.
'He took it hook line and sinker,' said Gartland to another ex-pat at Star of Love.
'I didn't have to pay anything off at the apartment,' admitted Gartland,' it was a big lie I knew the wanker Australian would believe. I just wanted the cash to smoke some crack and get blow jobs from crack whores.'
'No kidding,' said the other guy at the bar, 'since I've been here an hour you haven't stopped smoking the red pills and this is your fourth blowjob under the table.
Gartland had no idea he was talking to Max who relayed the truth to me.
I told him to hold out on the hit, Rosa would sort him out later.
I like to think I duped him this time.
