QotD: The wicked backspin caught you off guard. How will you play it off without losing your footing?

First of all, you need to understand what a raunch Felix Backspin was. Nothing worse than his father, or his grandfather, but the collected raunchiness had piled up. It was hard to find two square inches of land for twenty miles around town that the Backspins didn’t own. Factories, stores, service contracts with all the public services. You name it, he had more than a finger in the pie—he had his piggy little digits all over it.

The last straw was when the state decided to privatize the prisons and Backspin jumped on it with all the weight he’d gained in three generations. No kids of his own, which meant his little kingdom was going to die with him, and he resented that like hell. He’d already managed to get curfews in place, and everybody knew he got a slice of the fines slapped on every kid who made half a peep after dark. You know damn well he figured he’d get our kids off the street altogether with his very own prison rising up north of the town.

Things were dark and gritty enough in town without that. The community was roused to action. Unable to stop the greedy bastard, we figured we’d get something positive going, maybe even something that would keep his lousy mitts off the kids. Old Mrs. Shanahan, just about the only person left with any property, donated the house and land her family had been clinging to for as long as Backspins had been pitching for it. The house was a shambles and would have to come down. We had that done, and the footing poured for the new recreation center we figured would act as haven for the kids.

So along comes the sheriff with this paper. Sorry, he says, and I think he meant it. He scratches his head and looks back at his deputies, hanging back with the heels of their hands resting on their holsters. Sorry, but you’ve been served.

Cease and desist, due to some nonsense about community this and that. A big lie, of course, but he’d pulled this kind of shit before. You could fight him in court, but the deeper pockets always won. He could just keep it up longer than anybody else could afford to.

Then Jamie Dodd comes up with this little idea to just serve him back. Thing was, it didn’t take an attorney to file papers, to charge him with whatever hell nonsense a body could think up. We took his own damn paper as a pattern, and everybody in town thought up something to sue him for. After a bit, the ideas came rolling. The Williamses alone filed forty-three suits, and that was before somebody stumbled on the whole class action idea.

Backspin got the idea pretty quick. He might keep the rec center from getting built, but he’d spend every waking moment for the rest of his life wrangling with one batch of petty charges after another. We’d pretty much hit the end of the tether and he could either ease off or find the town breaking off altogether.

Can’t say things now are all sunshine and roses. Felix Backspin’s still got a nice solid grip on this old town’s throat. But he’s aging faster than a man who’s got someone who cares whether he stays or not, and if most of us are still tied to a paycheck and trying to get by, we’ve got a new generation coming who’ll have something to say about that. I’ve seen them, bouncing their balls around and hollering in that rec center we built with all the love and hope we had. Sometimes they lay off a bit and put their heads together in the corner, planning who knows what.

Who knows what, least of all me, but I’ll lay my last dollar betting it ain’t something good for Backspins.