Business opportunity

Last time I was back home, I was out drinking coffee and drawing, when I suddenly felt more like a house with several bottles of milk and newspapers slowly congregating outside than usual.

I looked up to see a young man, sling-armed and unkempt, standing above me.

It's sort of nice when someone talks to me when I'm out drawing, especially when they make it so obvious where I should punch them before running off if it starts to go badly.  It turned out, he was starting a t-shirt printing business and wondered if I'd like to join in as a supplier of designs.  He looked through my drawings and asked if he could take a picture of one or two on his iPhone.  I couldn't think of a good reason not to at that moment, and I was still trying to work out whether I could get something out of this conversation beyond slightly nervy encouragement.  In the end, I had to take the pictures on the phone anyway, using my preponderance of hands to the full, so if anyone committed a crime against my work it was me.

He showed me some of his pictures.  They were fantastic.  Skulls and the like, but very cool.  "I used to be a graffiti artist," he explained, adding "if you know what I mean", which I had thought I had done before he introduced the doubt.  He asked for my contact details.  I asked for his instead, since I'd be out of the country again soon (or some such irrelevant truth), and said I'd send him an email.

"What did that guy want?" asked my man-on-the-coffee-shop-inside later.  "Seems a nice fella.  Was in last week.  Stoned out of his head."

Looking back, it would probably have been the right thing to nip any suggestions of my participation in the bud from the very beginning, rather than just never sending that email.  But I think that, as a partnership, we probably weren't really compatible, so the ultimate outcome was the right one.