Why I robbed your bank

 

All right.

You caught me.

Will you tell your guard to aim his gun some place else. I won’t run.

I want to tell you that I just happened to go by and saw your vault open. But it isn’t true.

This is your money, I’m holding, and I’d just dump in on your desk and call it square, but I know it doesn’t work that way.

Sure, I told your teller I had a gun when I didn’t.

I felt real sorry when she fainted.

I guess she thought I intended to shoot her anyway, even after she gave me the cash, so when I pulled my hand out of my pocket like this – well you know.

Will you tell your guard to be careful with that gun.

I know you can’t just let me go.
But life’s tough since I lost my job.

You know. You guys took my home and my car, and my wife – when she left me – took all the rest.

It’s not an excuse, I know.

People ought not to rob banks even when banks rob them.

 Nothing against you, but it’s true.

Between credit cards, mortgage charges,  bank fees on my ATM, and taxes, a man could starve even with two full time jobs.

I’d go to court or police or the politicians, but you’ve got them all on your side.

They look out for your interests more than they ever looked out for mine, making sure they respond to you when anyone like me comes along. But if someone breaks into my house and steals my stereo, I get a police report and a pat on my head from my congressman telling me they’ll do their best to get them back. No one sends the FBI for poor people like me.

Okay, I can’t blame you for my wife leaving me.

I treated her pretty bad at the end, shouting at her all the time, pleading with her to have patience while I tried to find another job.

I think I even lost it once or twice when I got drunk and hit her to stop her from bitching at me.

I never meant to hit her or the kids.

I just felt so bad all the time, lost and hopeless, wandering around from place to place, from interview to interview only to have people tell me I don’t have the right skills or that I’m too old.

When my wife left, I started drinking more and thinking, working out in my head where I went wrong, and I kept coming up with you guys.

Maybe it’s not all the fault of the banks.

Maybe there’s enough blame to go around to Wall Street, insurance companies, even those doctors who get rich off my feeling ill.

But since the banks got the money where I could lay my hands on it, I came here.

Hell, I’m so broke I couldn’t even afford the price of a gun.

I don’t know what I was thinking.

Maybe I thought if I got enough from you I could buy another house and have my family back the way it was.

Sure, I know that’s bull.

I know in the end, someone like your trigger-happy rent-a-cop guard here would come looking for me to get the money back.

Maybe I was thinking I needed to get even with you, to make a point by stealing openly when you guys won’t.

Everything you do is on the sneak, all proper and legal, even though you’ve done as much with the law on your side as I could ever have done even with a gun.

Maybe I’m not through either. Maybe I’m just tired enough of you getting away with murder that I’m going to rush your trigger-happy guard and make him do what your accountants have been doing all along.

If I’m going to die anyway, why not go out with a bang?

Can you understand that?