So, I learned a few things about David Davies after a few stiff margaritas at the Mexican restaurant in the Marketplace shopping center. First off, I learned that getting Dave drunk is a good thing. The second thing I learned is that he doesn’t like being called Dave.
“Do I look like that stupid astronaut from 2001? It’s bad enough that I have the same name twice! Don’t burden me with another variation on the same pointless theme!”
Imagine this with a slur and the occasional odd pause between words and you’ve basically got our conversation.
David puts off this aura of being an ordinary unemployed computer tech. You know, the kind you’ll find playing World Of Warcraft 20 hours a day. The kind who’s never had a girlfriend. The kind who pisses off people like me because he actually knows and cares about the difference between RAM and ROM.
But David’s different. He’s got this backstory that’s a doozy. See, he used to work for some tech company up in silicon valley. A big place. One of those Fortune 500 outfits that don’t really come from Bakersfield. Apparently, they became a multi-billion dollar firm because they invented wireless networking or something like that. I don’t know, I was getting a little fucked up myself by this point.
Anyway, David’s job consisted of going to the offices of these executive guys and fixing their computers when they don’t work. I.e., he plugged the damned things in for those bozos. And that’s how things went for eight years. David plugged in computers all day and got home in time to watch Babylon 5, masturbate, and fall asleep.
But these kinds of good times don’t last forever, right? David had ambitions. A few days after the firing of David’s boss for some sort of S&M accident (he didn’t have details, and for that I was sad), he asks for his boss’ job. Having worked there a long time, he figures he’s more than qualified to tell someone else to go turn on computers all day.
Unfortunately for David, the position had already been filled. And it had been filled by an ex-girlfriend who also worked for the firm. And she was an ex-girlfriend who despises David. David was at the end of his rope. And you know what happens to a man when you give him enough rope…
He tried to hang himself, but he even failed at that. He was at his lowest point. And you know what happens to a man when they can’t go any lower… Okay, well I don’t really know what happens then, I’m not up on that kind of stuff.
Anyway, he told me that he borrowed an idea from the movie Office Space. Except, he didn’t take money in small quantities. He took metric shitload of money and ran like mad. He just didn’t get very far. David’s not really a criminal. He didn’t have a clue what to do with that much money and he had even less of a clue where to go. Word got around pretty quickly that the owner of the company, one Bill “Billy-Bob” Williams, knew that David took the money and was going to have him strung up by his cajones.
The reason word got around about this was that Billy-Bob declared this live on the local news. I guess word gets around fast when you threaten someone live on the air.
So David took off, hoping to get over the Mexican border with his cajones intact. And it was somewhere around Oildale that entropy set in. First his car ran out of gas, then his car just stopped running. The guys at the repair shop in Oildale told him to take a bus into town and stay for the night. He took the bus to the Valley Plaza mall in the heart of nearby Bakersfield and got a hotel room and the Garden Suites Inn. When he went back to the repair shop the next day, they pretended that they didn’t know him.
And so, the flypaper that is Bakersfield caught another fly.
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