Jimmy Adams

Jimmy Adams sells RVs—not small or medium-size RVs, but some of the biggest a normal citizen can buy. Obviously, this story takes place in America, the nation of excess and privilege for the rich and laws for the less fortunate.

He and his team take these supersized RVs, strip them bare, and add fancy interior siding, furniture, plumbing for the kitchen sink, toilet, and shower, electronics, and security systems to protect their future inhabitants. Most of the time, the future inhabitants are old lottery winners. The winners all came from unfortunate backgrounds and lived hard lives. They desperately cling to the last years of life with their newfound wealth, which they now spend on Jimmy Adams’ supersized luxury RVs located along the side of a busy highway. This was a strategic plan by Jimmy Adams—basically free advertising—since all he needed was a large front entrance sign that could easily be seen from a distance.

Yes, the tax man took much of the lottery winners’ earnings, but that’s how it was for the “upcoming” rich, not the old rich. The old rich didn’t pay taxes for decades at this point, one of the many reasons America was a wasteland of lost souls hoping to find the means for survival. One mistake here and you’re dead; someone else will take your misery and be happy with it. The common way of thinking was that you needed to suffer—if someone suffered more than another person, they had bragging rights. Again, the rich didn’t have this problem; they watched from far away with telescopes, looking over the zoo they had created.

The tax man could have been the man from the Beatles song; instead, it was some poor sap fresh out of an undergraduate program that taught obedience and nothing else.

If one were to do the math, pick one old person—who is a man because I’m a man writing this story and I have no idea what it’s like to be a woman. As a writer, one tries to understand other people the best they can. It takes patience and understanding of others’ words and opinions to get even a small grasp of what the hell is going on in their neuron mesh.

The old man, when young, wasted years of salary on scratch-offs. He spent all this money at his local gas station five blocks from his house. The man held a corporate job—mid-level, not too high, not too low—just right. The perfect water temperature when taking a bath, a common sunset you see in August right before school starts: not too happy, not too melancholy, not too easy, not too hard. Important, but able to step back when he wanted. Mundaneness in its purest form. The scratch-offs were quite colorful. The marketing meeting in which the designer presented the designs to the board used buzzwords like “pop,” “bright,” “enticing,” “catches the eye,” and so on.

The old man, now young in this part of the story, had something pulling at his pant leg. It was a child—the man’s child. The woman was not in the picture. I wonder how she was feeling while the child pulled at the man’s pant leg in the morning cold outside the gas station, standing near the pile of chopped wood that was way overpriced for fucking wood. God, I should just go chop down a tree and fuel a fire—and fuel a business model that would surely break the mold of corporate structures the man was so used to.

The brightly colored scratch-offs with big words glimmering in the sunlight really intrigued the child. It was fascinating to him. The child is hypnotized by the motion of the man’s guitar pick as it scrapes off the foil hiding the winning numbers beneath. The man grunts. The child knows his father has lost again. Not to worry—the child knows he will go back inside and spend more of the weekly budget for food and utilities.

“Stay put,” the father says.

The child stays put, tucking closer to the woodpile to escape the piercing January wind. The child’s hands are cold. All he can hear are gas pumps clicking and people shuffling their feet, trying to endure the wind while their tanks fill with dinosaur shit. Their hands are cold too. The dinosaur shit is cold. Everything is fucking cold. When the wind stops, everything is still and cold.

The father comes back out, more scratch-offs in hand. He assumes the position, leaning against the woodpile, hovering over the scratch-offs while the guitar pick plucks away the foil.

“Come on, baby needs a new pair of…”

“Come on, make my dreams a reality…”

The child doesn’t have any dreams yet. School has just started asking him what he wants to be when he’s older. He always answers, “I want to be like my dad.” The teacher asks what his dad does. He says, “I don’t know—does that matter?”

Most adults had dreams. Most adults gave up on their dreams when they realized they were impossible. The lucky few worked themselves to death giving that dream a shot. I won’t go further on these thoughts.

I take it back. It was the way of the world. People were distracted. Thinking about dreams was futile; not thinking about dreams was futile. What the hell is this paradox?

The man with the child is now old. The child is no longer a child; he has turned into a man of some sort. Men on the outside are simple creatures of habit. Maybe I write this now because I think I’m complex and cursed and everyone else is simple and normal. Wow, what humbleness. Wow, what sane, egotistical rhetoric. Wow—what the fuck do I know?

The child-turned-man can be found on Skid Row, signing up for medical experiments involving chemicals being injected into his body. He does these experiments just to get currency to buy the chemicals he really wants to inject into his veins himself. The body is quite resilient if you think about it. For how fragile it is, it really likes to give a big ol’ fuck you to the forces trying to end its system of killing cells and regrowing them from swirly blueprints hidden away. They’re hidden because you need an electron microscope to glimpse them. No one has a spare electron microscope lying around for casual use.

The old man and the child-turned-man have not seen or spoken to each other in years, and it will stay that way until the old man dies at a campground while cooking steak on his portable grill outside the fancy, souped-up RV he bought from Jimmy Adams. The RV is worth 2.3 million dollars. The old man had finally struck it big. He could have afforded a more expensive RV, but he decided to put a few million in the bank just in case.

The old man thinks about his lost son. In a moment of unselfishness, he truly wonders where his son is and if he’s okay—happy or sad. The falling out happened so long ago. Maybe the millions could go to him one day.

After the old man died, the son died three days later. The son dies never knowing his father struck it big and died while cooking steak. The son took too many chemicals while hanging out with people who didn’t care if he lived or died. They take his shoes, jacket, and leftover chemicals in a plastic bag by his left leg. The son’s body reaches rigor mortis; the son’s soul disperses into the air.

Jimmy Adams feels great today. He didn’t masturbate in the shower this morning. His wife, the night before, had done wonderful things to his extra appendage. It was special to Jimmy because his wife rarely touched him sensually anymore. The days of love were long gone. They had no kids. Both sides of the family were dying out fast. Loneliness was knocking on his front door.

It didn’t matter to him. He could focus almost entirely on his dream: managing a team that strips large RVs made by other manufacturers and turns them into something no one in a billion years would ever need.

The pride and excitement he felt selling RVs to old lottery winners was immense. You could say Jimmy Adams lived for this—and only this, a dream come true.

The old folks take the RVs and drive them around America.

America is already destroyed. Nostalgia blinds the old folks; all they remember is driving around the country in the back of a big station wagon when they were young. Back then, the land wasn’t as dead. Green prevailed. Now everything is gray and brown. Even the remaining trees are drying out and turning dull.

That being said, Jimmy leaves his home and heads to work. It’s ten minutes down a major highway, off a standard cloverleaf to his parking lot. Stepping out of his car, he breathes in fresh air tainted by exhaustion from burning dinosaur shit.

Jimmy Adams walks inside and sees the nucleus of the luxury RV business. He greets his crack team of builders and says, “Boy, I hope we make someone happy today.”

Opening time. The old folks start filing in. Jimmy Adams always keeps extra walkers and canes on standby. The old folks love to talk—especially about lottery winnings they plan to spend instead of passing down to grandchildren. Jimmy starts to believe all grandchildren are spoiled, ungrateful specimens.

Jimmy Adams shows the RV floor. The makes, models, and interior options are expansive and confusing to the old folks. It doesn’t matter—they want an RV now and are ready to pay full price.

When signing paperwork, Jimmy Adams always asks one final question before handing over the keys.

He says with a big smile,
“Are you religious? If so, pray for me. If not, make up a new religion.”

-2/7/2026