"How to Rob an Armored Car": How Not to Succeed In Business WIthout Really Trying

How to Rob an Armored Car  by Iain Levison

Welcome to Slacker City, PA, population three – average age (and average annual salary) twenty-something. The local slackers - Kevin (ex-con turned professional dog-walker), Doug (English major turned food-service worker), and Mitch (nothing much turned auto parts manager at Accu-Mart) – certainly seem friendly enough, though their affability might well be because the three are constantly stoned. Mitch and Doug live a life of glorious underachievement, with their grody apartment and beater rides. Kevin’s life is a little more interesting, since his wife’s job helps pay for the slightly larger house the family of three needs and a slightly newer truck; but the marriage was never all that solid and it seems to be getting shakier (ask Doug why, eh?). The slacker lifestyle becomes more appropriate after first Mitch and then Doug lose their jobs in quick succession; but at least Mitch’s exit doesn’t come before he can arrange for an $1800 flat-screen to “fall off a truck” into Kevin’s pickup at the Accu-Mart loading dock. Flushed with pride at the easy success of their first foray into grand larceny – not to mention intrigued by the apparent lack of effort – the trio determine that their destiny is to become master criminals.

Jobs having gotten scarce as hen's teeth in the dying rust-belt town of Wilton, the friends end up dividing their time between plotting their next caper – a caper that never quite seems to go right – and regularly refilling the house bong with weed - job searches can go hang. Whether it’s dealing pills for a shady MD; a steal-to-order Ferrari; or the ultimate caper, robbing an armored car; the three wannabe gangsters quickly prove that they’re a twenty-first century edition of The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (except that these three don’t shoot at all). The trio prove remarkably lucky, though: their victims can’t shoot straight, either.

If you ever need to know how to knock over an armored car, talk to Howard C. A high school classmate of mine, Howard knocked over a Brinks truck just a couple of years after we graduated. Of course, Howard managed to knock it over by T-boning the truck with his semi at a busy intersection, as opposed to cold-cocking a guard and making off with bags of cash at gunpoint; but it still makes for a good story. On the other hand, Iain Levison’s literary version of his three slackers’ similar feat – How to Rob an Armored Car – turns out to be somewhat less interesting. Perhaps it’s the overstudied aimlessness of his characters that makes Levison’s plot uninteresting; perhaps it’s the by-rote stupidity of every one of their criminal plots that does the deed. Then again, it might be just how hard Levinson struggles to make his characters maximally slack. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t quite work for this reader. Lacking much of a plot, How to Rob and Armored Car still manages to be moderately entertaining, mostly because of some fairly stock gags and a couple of cute twists. It’s readable – but I wouldn’t put it on the top of the stack. (Confidential to Levison: those who speak English with Hispanic accents don’t pronounce Mitch “Meesh” – that’d be French.)

Thrice before an author (Dog Eats Dog, Since the Layoffs, and A Working Stiff’s Manifesto), Iain Levison seems determined to carve out a niche for himself writing about aimless stoners too lazy to get off the couch to repack the bowl on the bong. Someone ought to warn him that embers of his chosen demographic aren’t real big on reading novels…

An earlier, slightly different version copyright ©2009 for curled-up.com by Rex Allen