Midas, In Exile, Reinvents Himself As A Self-Made Man

The King was widely regarded as a complete fucking jackass, a man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops.

The Queen left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy palace cooks and a handful of stable hands were all that remained of his old life, and these characters he depended on to do his dirty work. There was always much dirty work to be done around the muffler shops.

Who knows where the muffler idea came from? The King himself didn’t have the foggiest notion anymore. All he could remember was that he’d been drunk one night on a riverboat casino, so drunk that he’d not only seemingly lost his magic touch but had apparently abused even the privileges of a king, and he’d been forcibly removed from the boat for urinating in a public drinking fountain.

When he eventually sobered up in a Dubuque hotel room he’d had the realization that he’d lost all interest in being King. Even the gold business had become tiresome to him; when you could turn everything you touched into gold, gold entirely lost all significance and value. The whole formal world of the court bored him to tears. He hated all that ridiculous velvet and the snug knickers and, especially, the strange and foppish hats he always seemed to find himself wearing.

When he found himself penniless in Dubuque he was pleased to discover that he felt absolutely nothing in the way of desperation or regret. If anything, in fact, he experienced something that felt almost like serenity.

Who knows? Perhaps, ultimately, he had been inspired by his older brother, who’d walked out from under his kingdom to launch a hamburger empire. All he knew was that the muffler business –lark though it might initially have been– had eventually demonstrated (and demonstrated conclusively) that he hadn’t lost his old touch after all. Yes, he’d showed them all in the end, Midas had. A man could make boodles of cash in the muffler racket.