As I reclined with my cocktail, my mind couldn’t help wandering back to simpler times. Here I was, a tropical island beneath my feet, enjoying the hot sun and moisture-inducing humidity. Yet, just five years ago, I was a lowly city councillor and a small to medium township in the south. How did I get here?
It all started innocuously. Some developer wanted to do something inflammatory that would have destroyed something. I thought it was a bad idea. I said so. The developer came to me to ask if I would change my mind. I told them I wouldn’t. My mind had been made up. Nothing would change it.
That was when he produced the briefcase full of used notes.
I’m aware this is all sounding like a trope from an Al Pacino movie from the seventies, but I was intrigued. Why would this developer want to risk federal charges to get his shit done? He insisted, and I accepted. And there you have it. In quick time, work began on the seventeen story “Breens Tower” hotel and casino complex.
My role in the swindle was to trumpet the positives of this giant concrete and glass monstrosity that would cast literal and metaphorical shadows across our entire town. I said, loudly and proudly, that every early childhood centre needed a skyscraper next door to it. I argued small communities with populations under 10,000 (such as ours), always benefit from having gigantic structures rise like futuristic monoliths from massive holes in the ground.
I trumpeted and the bags of cash kept coming.
I wasn’t expecting the bankruptcy announcement, however. Mr Breens just stopped turning up to town one day when the tower was half finished. Then there was the small, unrelated earthquake, which partially levelled the incomplete structure. I now was the sole arbiter of all that was good about the colossal rubble pile. It was a position I was unwilling to take, especially with the Breens Bank being closed for business.
That’s when I decided to skip town and find my island. It can be difficult getting a mountain of crumpled notes out of the country. I hired a small aircraft, then a small boat, then a smaller boat, finally arriving on my island in the sun.
Here I was, enjoying my cocktail, safe in the knowledge there were many other prospects below me on the ladder willing to Make America Great Again, just as I had.