the maggot
- your room is ready maggot
I have this cousin you see, Monty. Skinny boy, smart at school. Good looking lad, popular with the girls, glib, good fighter, smiler.
Shifty.
– and in the course of what was to him in his mature years was normal business he managed to offend more than a couple of the governing state and federal statutes with regard to commerce – This was all before his great fall.
The magistrate who parcelled him up for the big spell at that early time was unmoved by the defence’s proposition that the cousin was largely deficient in the understanding of the laws of supply and demand, given the environment. People wanted, he got, they paid too much.
A little like Goldman and Sachs but well before their time.
Monty’s view was that of a demand supplier who was always ready to satisfy his market for little or no personal purchasing outlay, or at least an insurable contract for loss of cost price, little as it was. Usually nothing.
He was a thief, was our Monty, simply put.
Monty did beachside carparks the length of the state, metropolitan backpacker hostels, handbags in city beergardens, tip jars in the Steyne.
Monty did the Avalon and Newport markets; all those gaping handbags. He moved into RSL gaming rooms and unlucky pensioners purses, little old ladies clacking away on the wheels all day. He sometimes roamed through unguarded nursing homes, always the handsome visitor. How easy do those glittering rings slip off old fingers, just a kiss my old lovely and love from the family.
Monty would raid anything binned up on the footpath outside a retail outlet; lingerie, wetsuits, old calendars, book bins, litre bottles of Corsican chardonnay, apples and bananas.
It’s like catching fish without using bait he would brag. The maggot.
T-shirts, skateboards, anything with wheels.
The Chinese nearly caught him at Star City once with $3,000 worth of stolen chips in his pocket and three widows screeching black blood at him. He was a slippery little bastard though and would never work in a place without knowing all the ways in and out.
Monty would also thieve from his friends.
When he was a surfer.
Those days he was always the last into the water and the last back to discover the loss. Cars open and rifled, bags up-ended and spilt, watches and money gone – hidden places rendered out. It never occurred to us then that Monty never seemed to lose anything of value. He never had anything of value.
He came by the bed I was sleeping in one afternoon up in the Rivers; not quite asleep after a ten-hour night shift loading beef and here is my best mate Monty quietly slipping into the room and sliding the bedside drawer open so slowly.
Works payday it was that day, and that’s where I kept the money.
His first lock-up score was 2 years for a surf shop in Bondi.
A typical B&B.
Boosted and Burnt
Monty copped double time for that robbery and the arson that followed, guilty plea and all.
Now he’s timed in until 2015 because somebody died the last time, some stupid fat kid wobbling around on the road on a new bike and Monty flat out for distant parts, van hotly loaded.
But we don’t mind doing the monthly Goulbourn trip to see the maggot, major fucking fuckup he may be, seeing his life’s years being ticked away on a prison ledger, and doesn’t jail paint a young man grey quickly.
But he had stopped on the road you see, he had stopped to help the little bloke he’d killed. All too late though.
petebowes.com 
I’ve always thought this piece is some of your best work. There’s one in every crowd, they just can’t stop from helping themselves. It’s always supprising how long they’re tolerated within the tribe and amazing how far some make it before things smash down on them.
Thank’s Pete.
this bloke just couldn’t help thieving – he had to do it all the time