25th Hour

Charles and Spencer sat across from each other at the local hot dog stand. Spencer was very happy to be out of temporary prison, and eating a hot dog. Charles was not very happy about dropping five grand for his roommate who he knew would never be able to pay him back.
“Don’t you get it man, this is gonna be just like the 25th Hour! You know? Going to jail tomorrow, seeing my buddies for the last time, hanging out, just living it up, you know?”
“You’re not going to jail, Spencer. You’re just gonna get the shit fined out of you.”
“I don’t know man, that was a big bag of weed, I think I’m going away.”
“Well, let’s put it this way. You need to pay me back. Okay, like, I-can’t-go-spending-$5,000-every-time-my-roommate-accidentally-knocks-a-giant-bag-of-weed-out-of-his-own-bag-in-front-of-a-cop-car-type you need to pay me back. If you go to jail, I realize it’s pretty hard to pay me back. But if you don’t go to jail…I think the only fair thing is for you to be my personal assistant for a year.”
“You need a personal assistant! To do what?”
“You’ll take dictation.”
“What could you possibly dictate?”
“My history.”
“I’ll tell you man, if I went to jail, I’d have a good history to dictate.”
“If you go to jail, I’m not going to let you off the hook. You still owe me for this. Anybody else and you wouldn’t have a “25th Hour” type thing going on tonight.”
“I know, you’re the best roommate in the world.”
“So tonight, because you aren’t in a cell, and because you very well may lose the next good chunk of your good young life to a bullshit maneuver, something’s going to happen. Something’s going to happen that will eclipse everything you ever thought possible. You’re staring down into the black hole right now. You’re about to get sucked in. The thing is, right now, you don’t know. You could be my assistant for a year. But for now, let’s assume you’re going to jail. Let’s assume you’re stuck in a place that you have no hope of getting out of. Let’s assume you’re raped every morning. Let’s assume nobody wants to visit you there. Let’s assume you’d have no hope, and no prospects for your future, and let’s assume that when you got out, you’d be so depressed about your present situation in the world, being a bona fide ex-con, with all the problems like not being able to find a job and all that bullshit, that you’d go back to selling drugs to make a living. Let’s assume all that. So, life is pretty bad? You think? Well, tonight, that doesn’t matter. In the morning, you’re not going to wake up and go to your sentencing. No, you’re going to wake up in Jamaica, extradited and exonerated, having found an easy job, enough pay to live happily, all the weed you can smoke, and the beach, and the open sky and the blue water, and you’ll meet a nice Jamaican girl who has that impossibly cute accent whenever she speaks English, and you’ll eat great Caribbean food all the time, and you’ll be tan and thin and active and you don’t ever have to come back to the United States to “try and make it” because you already know how futile that is.”
There was a pause.
“Well, that sounds nice, but why the hell would I wake up in Jamaica? Are you going to secretly put me on a flight?”
“Goddammit you see right through me!” They continued eating their dinner at a leisurely pace. Unfortunately for Spencer, he would be going away tomorrow. Fortunately for Charles, he was about to have their apartment all to himself. Couldn’t he get some kind of insurance provision? Couldn’t the government pay for his roommate’s rent while he was in jail? Why should he have to waste his time finding a new roommate? He didn’t want a new roommate anyways. To Charles, just about nobody in the world agreed with him. Spencer was awful, but he was less awful than, say, Luther.