Shrink To Reduce My Power

This desperado life, and the luck that comes with it, is sometimes too much for me to bear. I have seen them die, some of my boys, and I have seen them hurt and I do think that enough is enough. So like those that came before me, I will soon be throwing in the desperado towel. But not without first trawling through my past and going over some of the things I got up to while I was a desperado, having all kinds of illegal fun.

Desperado One.
I planted lightbulbs out back and waited for the lightning to strike. But the lightning didn’t strike. A waste of money on lightbulbs and still much too dark out back.

Desperado Two.
I gained the trust of three lovely old ladies who I later took advantage of sexually (I didn’t force them, I’m not like that) and also robbed. I got jewels, false teeth, hearing aids and all kinds of treasured items that could only have been of sentimental value. Bags and bags of old crap that I eventually chucked in the river.

Desperado Three.
The Eagles were performing at some Birmingham concert place in England. Me, my wife and six of my boys attended with the intention of leaving straight after they’d played their only good song, Desperado. Weren’t we the chumps though because Desperado was actually the last song they played, right at the end of the thirteenth encore. What a terrible evening. Apart from that Desperado song, of course.

Desperado Four.
I laughed at all the spazzers that came out of the garden centre where they’d been making themselves useful by getting out into the community, earning a minimum wage and growing their confidence. I laughed, pointed and threw stones at them so that at least half of the forty spazzers were so traumatised that it took months for them to be coaxed out of the house again.

Desperado Five.
There was a knock at the door. It was a young policeman. Come in, I said, what can I do for you? He started telling me how one of my boys did this and one of my boys did that. I tied him up, gagged his lying pig mouth and tossed him down the stone cellar steps. That was eight months ago. I should see how he’s getting on down there.

Desperado Six.
I shot a dog. Six times. Right in its ugly face.

Desperado Seven.
My wife decided that she’d like to put it about a bit. A difficult one for me, this, because while I may have been a free and easy desperado living a life of abandon without commitment or care, I was also a deeply conservative, possessive, jealous monster who flew into a rage if my wife so much as glanced at another man. Tricky. But after much deliberation I decided that my wife would be free to do whatever she liked so long as she understood that this concept of freedom would be extended to my reaction to her actions by way of whatever violent and destructive response I deemed appropriate. She would, as I explained, also be dicing with the possibility of death, depending on my mood. In the end, my wife decided, to her credit and to her own desperado credentials, that she would put it about a bit but not tell me that she’d been putting it about a bit. Result: a degree of sexual and emotional happiness for us both.

Desperado Eight.
I went zombie hunting in Haiti. I ran around houses, threw dust in the air and cut open the dead bodies of witchy women. I ate terrapins, flushed frogs down the toilet and burned effigies. We didn’t find any zombies.

Desperado Nine.
Bluto, that fat get from the Popeye stories, once stole my girl. Not my wife, my girl. One of my girlfriends. Having no option but to challenge him to some kind of duel, I thought long and hard about what kind of things desperadoes were supposedly good at. Sharp shooting? Starting and maintaining campfires? Bank robberies? Singing to the moon? Longing for home? Catching and keeping girlfriends? Well, some desperadoes were good at those things. But not me. So I challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. He won – if you’ll excuse the pun – hands down.

Desperado Ten.
I drew the line at killing the following: cripples, tramps, blackies, mentals, women and old people. I made a point of killing the following: oil barons, tour guides, lorry drivers, so-called love machines, taxi drivers, farmers and white London gangsters.