Davey Stoker (deceased). The luckiest man alive. Short story.

 Davey Stoker was not a well-liked man.

I don’t necessarily mean he was hated, but he was the kind of guy whose funeral you could guarantee would not be that well attended.

That’s not to say he wouldn’t be missed.

There’s no doubt in my mind that folks would, after a suitable period of Davey Stoker-free time, wonder where the hell he’d gone and upon being told he was dead would say, ‘Oh…shame’.

 The thing is, they wouldn’t really care.

His was a personality that you could take or leave. And to be truthful, if you had that kind of choice, you would more than likely, leave, you know what I mean.

And just to continue with the ‘dead’ theme for a moment, if you did happen to find yourself at the cemetery to see him laid to rest then you’d be there out of curiosity and not because you were grieving a whole lot. Actually, and in all truth, you’d be there because you wanted to make sure he would stay down.

In his time Davey Stoker was called many things, stupid being one of the more frequent.

Yet despite this, in our neighbourhood he was somewhat of a living legend.

He had what is sometimes referred to as a, ‘claim to fame’.

Davey was renowned far and wide for his ability to ingest an enormous variety and number of illegal substances, and… remain upright.

One of his other er, ‘qualities’ was his extreme arrogance.

He’d take to roaming the streets of the borough with what can only be called, an air of smug self-satisfaction and an attitude that said out loud,

‘Look at me I’m invincible’.

 Now the odd thing is, and it has to be said, no matter what your personal feelings as to Davey Stoker’s right to life, you couldn’t help agreeing that this aggressive self-assessment, ‘Look at me I’m invincible’ did in fact have the ring of truth about it.

If you knew Davey like I knew Davey, then you’d know he actually did appear bombproof, bullet-proof and if I didn’t know better, immune to all diseases known to man.

Davey Stoker was in many ways, a very lucky guy. Which, considering his precarious lifestyle was beyond belief.

Take for starters, his amazing substance consumption.

Toxic substances of various descriptions and prescriptions would be introduced any way possible (or impossible) into his slight frame on a daily basis.

Davey found routes for his drugs that the average addict did not have the imagination to think of. 24/7.

Such were the levels of chemicals in his blood, that I have personally witnessed flies landing on him and keeling over almost immediately.

Herein lies an obvious question.

It would not take a mathematics/chemist (?) professor long to work out that for Davey to remain at his preferred level of toxicity, i.e. high, then he would have to be living off a fair-sized inheritance or have the borrowing capacity of a small third world country.

So how did Davey manage it?

Easy.

Davey Stoker’s World Bank was…

The Morelli Brothers.

 Vince and Quince (true) Morelli, bankrolled Davy and his unsavoury habits in return for the odd piece of dirty work.

As the Morelli brothers had their grubby little fingers in most pies, you could be sure that this ‘dirty work’ took the form of anything from the wallpapering of an old lady’s front room to the punishment of said old lady for not paying the fee for the wallpapering of said room.

The Morelli’s were like that.

They saw themselves as a cross between Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

They ruled over an area the size of a Religious Parish with an iron fist inside a brass knuckle-duster.

The Morelli’s were the Spawn of Satan minus brains.

Davey Stoker worked for the Morells as ‘Arson Man’.

Everyone knew this as fact.

There were too many occasions when Davey was seen running from the scene of a small explosion with smouldering hair and his pants on fire to think otherwise.

Hence Davey often found himself detained by the police only for one swift visit from the Morelli family lawyer allowing Davey to hold on to his unbroken record of never being charred-sorry-charged.

It was no secret Davey Stoker worked for the Morellis. And it worked well for him.

As the Morellis muscle and main man he had immunity and therefore was a force to be reckoned with. He was a man with dangerous connections.

Ergo. If you had occasion to talk with Davey Stoker, no matter how stupid you knew he was, you laughed at all his pathetic jokes.

Nobody was sure what happened to turn things around.

 But turn around they did.

Some say Davey got religion.

Personally, I find that hard to believe, as a few weeks previous Davey had given Father Delaney a severe beating as a reminder that he owed money to the Morelli’s ‘collection’.

Holiness was out of the question.

Whatever it was that had caused the change to Davey Stoker, it was a major surprise. Nay – major shock to everyone.

People pondered.

Had Davy had discovered a new drug?

A bravery drug maybe?

Whatever it was, something gave Davey the push to quit the Morelli camp.

One morning Davey Stoker woke up and just said, no.

No to anything of a dubious nature and perhaps more shockingly, NO to the Morellis.

It goes without saying that from that day forth, things took their inevitable course.

As is the Morelli’s wont, especially when they’re upset, they shot guns at Davey. They missed.

They bombed Davey. He wasn’t in but his mother was. (It was a nice funeral).

They cut the brake cables on Davey’s car. Unfortunately for them, Davey didn’t own a car (that was a nice funeral too). And so on, and so on.

No matter how hard they tried, a catalogue of bungled attempts at ending Davey’s life followed one after another.

All in all, the community lost count of the number of times the mad brothers Morelli tried sending Davey to meet Jesus. None of which were successful. (We could almost hear Jesus breathing a sigh of relief).

If it had not been so serious it would have been funny because so bad were the Morelli brothers at doing their own dirty work, that Vince Morelli lost three fingers off his right hand when a small parcel bomb he was keeping in his jacket pocket, ‘for later’, exploded prematurely.

Quince faired no better, suffering a lapse of memory and drinking a concoction (during a ravenous lunch break), he had prepared earlier to aid Davey’s demise.

Anyway, for Davey Stoker these accidents worked out to be blessings in disguise for Davey.

Vince Morelli’s disfigurement and Quince’s poisonous mishap was the end of it.

For what was probably the only instance in the Morelli’s grisly family history, they gave up on a vendetta and let Davey Stoker walk free.

They never spoke of it again, and apart from spitting on the pavement every time they passed a member of Davey’s household, it seemed like it was really, actually over.

It looked like Davey Stoker could and would live out his remaining years in his normal luck-filled fashion.

Wrong.

It was such a tiny object.

So small to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

It was amazing to think that such a small thing had probably been twice around the Universe and then back again.

That the last time it passed the planet Earth, Jesus was living it up with his mother at a party in Canaan and the time before that my ancestor was chewing at a dinosaur bone.

If only it could talk.

The sights it must have seen.

Round and round, star system to star system.

Light year to light year.

Amazing.

And here it was again, but this time, its long journey was finally over.

Snug and cosy the baby meteorite had found a home, a final resting place.

Embedded three inches into Davey Stoker’s mashed up brain.

And you know, he never felt a thing.

Lucky swine.

Lucky Davey Stoker.

end