Greyballs
Greyballs hit me up the other day to see if I’ll be free to work some trade shows in the fall. Milwaukee, Toronto, the Big E in Springfield, MA. We get a booth at those same shows every year. It gets started in August. I just have to scrape money together for a few more months with these dog walks. Which is not going well.
I haven’t seen Greyballs since December. I was planning on seeing him in Mexico a couple weeks ago, but I bailed on the trip. I knew I was gonna be too broke to even enjoy it, especially since rent was coming up. Tony said the trip wasn’t that great anyway, it was just hot as shit down there on the island, he said, and way more expensive than it used to be.
April came fast. Four months from now I’m gonna be drinking my ass off again in the sock hat booth. I was thinking for the first half of the year I could take a break from booze. That has not happened at all. And in less than four months, me and Tony and Greyballs will be back traveling around, selling hats made out of socks.
Greyballs is a lazy old piece of shit. Looks older than he is, too. That’s why we call him Greyballs. He usually just flies into whatever town we’re in for the trade show, hits up a girl he met exactly a year ago in the same city and tries to get laid, lounges around the Airbnb for a few days, goes to the casino at night if there’s one around, and then flies back to Toronto. But he always wants to make sure there’s two boxes of white wine in the booth for him, even though he never drinks any of it because he never shows up to the fucking booth. I honestly love Greyballs. But Tony hates him, and he hates Tony. That’s what happens when two guys start a company that sells hats made out of socks and then try to run it together for 20 years.
I had to go borrow some money from Tony the other day, so I went over to his place to pick up the cash. He said a rising tide raises all ships. And then he gave me the money and I left. Now I just have to get to Aug. 1, when sock hat tour starts. I gotta do a better job of saving money this year. I can’t go back to the plasma center, man. Can’t do it. A rising tide raises all ships out of the plasma donation center.
Luckily I’ll be able to go to Toronto in September and work a fair up there, which I couldn’t do last year because I didn’t have a passport. I’ve never been to Canada. If I go this year I’ll be staying with Greyballs. He likes bragging about how cool his place is. We’ll see. No idea how often he shows up to the booths in Toronto. Probably not much. The Big E lasted 16 days last year and I don’t think he worked the booth a single hour. But also, things didn’t go as planned that time.
Greyballs came up to Springfield for a few days to hang out and gamble, they’ve got a big MGM casino downtown. I remember him frantically messaging me and my buddy Nick one night after we’d gotten back to the hotel after a full shift at the fair. Greyballs was blasted, yelling at us over group text to bring all the cash from the booth to the casino asap. It was probably around midnight at that point. Tony was back in New York for a few days, and Greyballs wanted to snag as much of the cash as he could before Tony got into town. They’re always fighting over the cash. Everybody wants the cash. But Nick and I knew Greyballs was probably just pissed off because he was losing a shit ton of money at the craps tables. So we just went to bed.
I don’t remember hearing from Greyballs the next day. He ended up leaving Springfield a few days later because he got an invite from a friend to go to Miami, see Messi play, and hang out on some guy’s yacht in Miami for a couple days. Greyballs was planning on going to Europe for a couple weeks after that. Which did not end up happening. One of those first nights in Miami he got fucked up and brought a couple girls back to his place. He’d left a few thousand in cash on top of the safe in his hotel room. It was gone in the morning. So he decided not to go to Europe and came back to Springfield to restock on cash from the booth and try to win some of it back at the casino. He actually did pretty well if I recall.
I figure the next time I see Greyballs he’ll be picking me up in a U-Haul in Milwaukee so we can head to the storage unit downtown, load up all the inventory, pick up some booze (probably three cases of Bud Light, two cases of white claw, two fifths of fireball and those two dumb boxes of white wine), then head to the fairgrounds, unload everything, have a couple beers, and watch Tony do most of the work setting up the booth. On the first day of the fair, I’ll be honest, I am always in Greyballs mode. Lazy sack of shit mode. Tony’s fine with that anyway, he doesn’t wanna be bothered during setup. Dude just wants to do his thing, building the booth by himself all addy’d up like he always does. And then that night we’ll go downtown and get blasted. Tony and I will come back to the fair the next day, and Greyballs will not. He probably won’t show the following day either. The bags of wine will stay unopened in the back of booth for the entirety of the fair. I hope Greyballs wins lots of money at the casino. And that the cash stays in the safe.