Becoming The Muse

I grew up in a very small town, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else and if you rented an age –inappropriate video cassette from the Video Club, they would tell your parents. You knew the successful business people and their empires, like the one mogul who owned a fleet of buses or the property baron who had bought into a franchise retail store and later built an ultra-exclusive private school on one of his properties.

They were like institutions these businessman. It was as if they had been born successful. Then one day an overnight tycoon popped up, with a fleet of haulage trucks taking over the transport logistics industry by storm. He built a mansion in an emerging neighbourhood and drove flagship BMWs with personalised number plates bearing his name, lest you didn’t know it was him I suppose.

For Career Day the local High School invited him to be a keynote speaker and impart nuggets of wisdom to the young scholars on his meteoritic rise in fortunes. I was one of those young scholars in the audience and ready to learn. He told us about how he had studied hard in school and went on to enroll in university and developed his keen sense of business acumen.

His concluding words were along the lines of how education could buy you peace of mind and the good life such as he was living; punctuated by pressing a button on his car keys and his car parked outside the assembly hall beeped in response, unlocking doors. He walked out, got into his car, waved goodbye and double honked the horn as he roared away in a BMW 7 series Limited edition. The man knew how to make an exit.

You can imagine how we talked about this for days on end. I think that’s when I really fell in love with a BMW sheer driving pleasure. I was inspired to study hard in school so I too could show people that I have arrived. It was a pity that he hadn’t told us what exactly he had studied or even what universities he had gone it, upon further reflection he hadn’t even told us exactly how he had gone about the business of getting instantly rich, as he seemingly done…

Some people speculated that he may have dabbled in the occult, did some sacrificial money making rituals of the traditional witch doctor variety. I mean how else would you explain how from seemingly nowhere he had launched a successful trucking business with a fleet of countless brand new haulage trucks. Where did he get start-up Capital? Was it a bank loan, a front, luck, connections… It was just one of those things outsiders would never understand just like his business motto: The End Of Reason

The End Of Reason… there was no reasoning it, it was what it was.

Years later the story broke that he was a fugitive in South Africa. Interpol special investigators were convinced that he was a multinational citizen whom, while operating under a pseudonym, had masterminded multiple fraudulent acts involving over 7 million rand south of the Limpopo. He was arrested and extradited to South Africa.

A respected business man in one country and a career criminal in another country. Its been years since I heard any news about him and his Haulage Dynamics empire long since collapsed. Makes one wonder about how some people really make their wealth.

His accomplice and partner in crime, who had met his end after being gunned down by the South African Police SAP during a heist gone wrong was a man named Reason.

The End Reason...

~B