Declan's kids ought to be worried: unlike with previous Irish/American generations who diligently stored and protected any little wealth they had to pass along to their children after their demise, he's of the newer generation of current oldies who don't care for such trivial things as leaving an estate. But thankfully the house they were reared in belongs to Declan's wife, Marianne; which means Kelly can't use it as a float for his gambling ways, much to his wife's irritation. If she was stupid enough to put a share of the property into Declan Kelly's name, then you can be sure he'd fritter that away just like he's frittered the meaning of his entire existence away after I named and shamed him into revealing himself before I did.
I'm sure his kids are old enough to understand the nature of their loser Dad's lifestyle: but I can't imagine what it must be like to have to take orders from a father who busks for a living. All that cheap-assed nurgling for cash money walking the pensioners must make them feel rather poor in sociological terms. The Ma seems a wise enough simple Irish-American woman who knows the value of hard work, after all, her own father worked himself to the bone to buy that house and then develop it to make it into a reasonably comfortable family home. He died in the early 1990s and his wife plugged along for another decade before she too kicked the bucket, but not before doing the decent thing and passing the house along to her daughter - and
ONLY her daughter: Kelly's name is not on the deeds, which are available if you search the house number and street name (which I can forward to any of you who are interested via PM) in Dedham. Had she put Roundy's name on it too, then he likely would've lost it all betting on copper and brass.
The gold and silver markets are by now far out of his frugal reach, so any further spoofing about gaining great wealth from gambling on precious metals is a thing of the distant past going back over twenty-five years. So he made good once. Every failure of a gambler makes good occasionally, those are realistic odds at best. Some get lucky, they try the game once, make a few quid, then walk away with the profits. Gambling addicts don't do that: they believe the odds are better for them because they're in it for life, they think they're 'professionals', like Jimmy Dawson, AKA
AN2 - who also claims to have both won and lost millions of euros playing poker online.
Gas fucking bastards, these cunts.
Jimmy won nothing. He had nothing to begin with anyway and that's what he walked away with: nothing. Huge amounts of nothing.
Of course, in Jambo's case there might be a few differences regarding family and estate post-death. His Ma's already in the ground, so that leaves just Jimmy Jnr and his Da Jim Snr in the family home. The old man's a drunk and is out drinking from lunchtime through to close. Maybe he too enjoys a flutter while watching the horses in the bar?
See, I've worked for Louis FitZgerald since around 1992. Louis is one of Ireland's wealthiest men, and not just on paper. He has restaurants, hotels, bars, night clubs, lounges, rough-neck pubs, off-licenses, dive bars, classy cocktail joints, and everything else you can think of. His specialty since around the late nineties was to lease properties with far more space than he needed, which he would then dangle in front of smaller business owners who would sub-let a space in his latest multi-functional super-pub, giving Louis a monopoly on the local boozing scene. His typical joint would be like say this one:
Located in Walkinstown, I've worked in this joint for many years. Louis leased the entire property and put in a men's bar, casual lounge, music/event venue, restaurant, and off license. He then let one shopfront space to an Italian chip-shop run by a one-armed Italian bloke who's name escapes me but who was a diamond geezer and did proper fish and chips and took pride in his standards. To the other side of the door, Louis let another shop-front space to one of the well-known nationwide bookie shops. He also had a taxi rank out by the front gates from mid-evening into the small hours. This meant that once a regular came into the bar, they had the bookies to place their bets, cheap food at another door, and tellies in every corner of the bar for the gambling. The off license also stocked the papers (which was usually the pretense of their showing up at midday) so the lads could survey the odds for today's race meets.
They had no need to leave the bar at all, they could come in and set up at the bar, scan the racing form, lash down their money, then sit back and count their winnings. If they were hungry, a bag of chips and a battered sausage with onion rings for a fiver. A bottle of wine and a bunch of cheap flowers for herself when he got home which kept her off his back. He had them nailed in every which way and they they literally threw their money at his complex because the only other options were down on the roundabout in Walkinstown who all charged far higher prices for food and drink. In fact, the chipper had a sliding hatch on the wall and in the evening the lounge customers could order a fish supper which would then be brought to the hatch and they could eat at their table with their drinks.
Win/win/win.
Declan Kelly seems to think he has some sort of monopoly on walking the pensioners when in fact there are dozens more grifters just like him all vying for the same cash dollar money. Just type in 'walking, tours, pensioners, Boston, Southie', and see what comes up. Just like Louis has to compete with Conor McGegor's 'The Black Forge Inn' - Roundy has to compete with better informed/studied tour guides than himself, and they can drive busloads of tourists around instead of two or three at a time in his little vannette. So we know he's on the lower rungs of the business model, which he likely clocked from one of his regular drunks in the dive bar he worked for as a barman back in the 1990/2020 period.
So we can a clear picture emerging here as to how Kelly sustains himself and his cheeseburger addiction.
Being fat and short is the least of his actual worries, though he does worry a lot: especially when a man as slender, lithe, and young as I makes a point of laughing at his enormous carriage, he has to look in the mirror and wonder whether it's too early or too late to consider dying his wizened white hair, which was once mousey brown with grey flecks. Nowadays it's pure white, like Val Martin's. Aul fella's, the pair of them. Both desperate to promote an image of refinery and sophistication, when in fact neither of them could even correctly spell the words, let alone aspire to them.
Both filthy, they wear the same trousers for weeks at a time. Val with his manky jumpers and toothless grin, and Kelly with his Walmart pants, ironed into mirrors without ever being so much as rinsed out on the washing line in the rain. Culchies, the pair of them. And full of all those culchie traits we jackeens find so amusing and medieval. The Shitting Ditch. The lower barn with the rats and mice. The vans. The total obliviousness of their own overblown egos. The need to be 'known' to others. I recall once reading one of Kelly's self-inflating lines when he said:
'I would have been known to all in Ballinasloe at that time..'
Ask yourself?
What does that even mean?
Known to all??
Would have been?
These idiots think that nobody can see through them and their stupid little games.
Who are they trying to impress?
Their kids?
I'd say the kids are singularly mortified by their respective Da's antics.
Their wives?
Too late for all that now, boys.
Strangers on the street?
Yeah, especially when they have a hand in their pockets - while the other's pointing out some historic loading bay or off ramp.
One has to ask oneself why their handful of regular members continue to hang around their sites, especially Kelly with Arsefild's. Have these twats no self respect at all? They bend at the knee for these aul fellas. They kiss their arses for them too, which they're happy to do in lieu of having to pay for a site of their own. So like leeches, they attach themselves to Declan and Val's ankles and they suck for all they're worth to stay attached.
We're living through some strange days, my lovelies - very strange.