portrait of a young man named bill

Today during lunch I was checking the news on Yahoo! as I always do when I saw the mug shot of Tom Delay. He seemed jovial enough. Under his mug shot was a link to a website that shows other peoples’ mug shots. I was surprised to see the mug shot of the richest man on earth, taken in 1977, when he was just the son of a wealthy family. He too was smiling. Here it is.

http://www.mugshots.org/misc/bill-gates.html

The first thing I thought about was that he didn’t have the look of a hardened criminal. The second thing that crossed my mind was, I wonder what was the crime for which he was arrested? To the best of my recollection, looking like a nerd is still not punishable by time in the pokey.

He wore his hair very similar to the way I did in 1977, and his glasses were much like the ones I wore. Dammit! How did he end up with $50 billion and I end up driving a Toyota that will turn over 200,000 miles this week.

I can’t help wondering what he was smiling about. Maybe he was thinking as he looked at the cop snapping the photograph, “Hey, my family can buy your family ten times over, and someday I’ll be able to buy them 500,000 times over.”

Maybe he was thinking, “Damn. Here I am in jail. I’m never going to amount to anything. This morning I was thinking, where do I want to go today, and tonight I’m in the slam.”

I’d like to think that the cops rousted Ol’ Bill for getting drunked up and chasing the working girls around a cathouse somewhere. Maybe he got Old Testament with some bikers and whipped their asses.

No, more than likely he was thinking about some computer software code and he forgot to watch his speedometer and got busted for ten miles over the limit. Okay, I just went out and did the research and found out his crime was speeding—35 miles per hour over the speed limit.

Either way, I’d feel a lot better if he didn’t have that dorky smile on his face.

Hey, Billy boy, slow that Porsche down. Knuckle down and I bet you could make something of yourself. After all, you can’t be a slacker all your life.