Stephen King wrote a book called The Stand, which was eventually put on film as a TV mini series. Four episodes, each an hour and a half long, faithfully recreating the story. Jack and I watched it on a whim one night, when we couldn’t decide what else to rent and the store was closing. We must have started it after eleven o’clock that night, and didn’t finish until five or six in the morning. It was quite good, and only more epic considering the struggle we went through to watch it all.
He shot me a text the other day saying that it was on TV in its entirety. I didn’t have cable, but it was streaming on Netflix and Nishi was game to watch it. There is a character in The Stand named Larry who is an aspiring pop musician who gets into trouble with loan sharks on the west coast. He borrowed a bunch of money in the anticipation of his record sales, but they didn’t cover what he owed. The thing is, shortly after he defaults on his debt, the plague hits and kills very nearly everyone. Including (I assume) the loan shark. This fantastic luck is never really mentioned in the story, on account of his mother and everyone he knows also dying. But he managed to be perfectly timed to profit on the apocalypse. He took out a big loan, spent it all, and never had to pay it back. This amuses me to no end.
I got to thinking about loan sharks in general, the break-your-legs kind, not the exorbitant rates kind. Wikipedia says they’re mostly gone now, and even when they were around they were just an appendage of the mafia. Despite that, I thought it could make for a good story where a man goes to a loan shark for some large amount of money, which he then uses to hire a hitman to kill that very loan shark. Yeah, I think there’s a fun story there.