Freddy Steadfast was a ridiculously wealthy man. He owned a huge empty house, a huge array of cars, several airplanes, seven oil wells, a schooner, and so on. He had his work cut out for him simply talking on the phone to all of his company's employees daily that he rarely had time to enjoy his riches. At first glance, his pear-shaped body, severely balding head, and marshmallow skin gave the impression he had never worked a day in his life. But the truth was in his hands. The dark, weathered creases, scratches, and layers of exposed skin showed signs of years of hard manual labor.
You see, Freddy wasn't always rich. He had worked at the sugar beet processing plant for twenty-one years. He woke every morning at four AM, drank several stiff coffees, and would drive eighteen miles to work in his raggedy grey 1982 Saab 900. There he would spend eight hours checking loads of outgoing beets, inspecting by hand, shoveling, washing, and so on. His favorite part of the day was 11:30 when the general foreman would go on break and he would grease the zerts on the beet loading conveyor. It was then that he would take out his rusty Buck pocket knife, rubbing his fat thumb across the edge of the sharp blade as he cut away a meaty slice of the finest sugar beet he could find. At lunch time, he would stick another slice on his sandwich. It didn't matter if it was peanut butter, ham and cheese, or pickles with pot roast. He always added the sugar beet.
This was the beginning of his sugar addiction. In the years to come, Freddy would continue his daily ingestion of sugar beet, eventually capping his night off with a large slice of chocalate cake he would pick up at Stacey's Diner, three blocks away from his home. Later, he would begin each day with several cups of stiff coffee and two powdered doughnuts. At exactly 10:04 AM, he would have four sugar cookies. Sugar became his life.
It was no surprise to anyone when he walked into work on Thursday, June 23rd, twelnty-one years ago, ten minutes early for his shift and announced, "Fuck this place.", and walked out. In fact, people were surprised he didn't bring a gun. Everyone knew Freddy didn't like his job, and had become so obsessed with eating sugar that it was all he talked about. At the company picnic, he would be all alone at a picnic table because no one wanted to discuss pastry ingredients and raw sugar refinement anymore. But that didn't bother Freddy. He would just talk to himself.
Wiith no job, he would spend his entire day consuming sweets. All of them. It was merely coincidence that only three months passed by before Freddy came into money. The fat bastard won the Iowa Lottery. It was the state's biggest payout in history at the time, although the record has since been beaten. Still, $210 million after taxes is nothing to sneeze at. He went on ridiculously lavish vacations, pissing money all over the world. He bought all kinds of crazy extravagant things before he got serious with investing it. He would take huge risks on longshot companies, akin to betting at the horsetrack on the pony named Elmer.(destined to become glue if it didn't win) After some major failures he finally hit it BIG. He invested $76 million in a company called Fold-A-Vision, the makers of the world's only folding disposable cardboard binoculars. Thirty-eight months later, the stock skyrocketed. He was now ultra-rich.
Yes, Freddy was a wealthy man. But no amount of money could save him when the doctors at Johns-Hopkins diagnosed him with having a rare clot in his kidney caused from Glucosamine Ditrabianate, a common ingredient in simple sugar. He was dead two weeks later.
Take heed, my friends. Sugar kills. I don't do sweets, mama.
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