Let me tell you about a handshake.
Not a metaphor. An actual handshake, in an actual dirt lot, between two men who’d just agreed on terms that involved more cash than either one of them had any business carrying, over animals that the law of most states says they had no business owning for the purpose they owned them. No contract. No lawyer. No paper of any kind. A handshake and a look in the eye, and that was the whole of it.
And in twenty-some years around that world, I can count on no hands the number of times that handshake didn’t hold.
I’m going to be honest with you about what that world was, because honest is the only setting this place runs in. It was the gamefowl world. Cockfighting. Birds bred over generations for a purpose I’m not going to dress up or apologize for — you came here for truth over comfort and I’m not about to hand you comfort over truth on my own life. It was, by the letter of the law in most places, a crime. The men in it knew that. I knew it. We’ll set the rightness and wrongness of the thing itself to one side for a minute, because that’s a whole other post and you’re smart enough to hold two thoughts at once.
What I want to talk about is the men. Because here’s the part that’ll stick in the craw of every respectable person who’s never set foot in that lot:
They were, hands down, some of the most honest, most decent, most reliable men I have ever known in my life.
A Code You Could Bank On
You want to know what a man’s word is worth? Don’t ask him in a boardroom. Ask him in a place where there’s no contract to sue over, no HR department to report to, no paper trail, no recourse but the man’s own character if the deal goes bad. Put him somewhere the only thing standing between an agreement and a double-cross is what he’s made of on the inside.
That’s where I learned what a word was worth. Because in that world, it was worth everything, and everybody knew it. A man who broke his word didn’t get sued. He got known. And once he was known, he was done — nobody’d deal with him, nobody’d trust him, nobody’d stand next to him. The whole thing ran on a reputation economy more honest than anything I’ve seen since, because there was no system to hide behind. You were exactly as good as your last handshake and not one bit better.
These were rough men. I won’t pretty them up. Some of them had done time. Some of them should have. They cussed, they drank, they lived hard, and polite society would’ve crossed the street to avoid every last one of them. And I’d have trusted most of them with my truck keys, my wallet, and my life, in that order, ahead of a whole lot of starched and respectable people I’ve shaken hands with since.
The Trade That Tells the Truth
Here’s a contrast that’s been gnawing at me, and current events keep feeding it.
We have built a whole civilization of men in good suits whose entire job is to be credentialed. Trusted by title. Believed because of the letters after the name, the office on the door, the institution behind the business card. And we keep finding out — week after week, headline after headline, one respectable pillar at a time — that a credential is not a character. That a man can have every certification society hands out and still lie to your face before breakfast and feel nothing.
The thing about a title is that it lets you skip the part where you have to actually be trustworthy. The title does the trusting for you. You don’t have to earn it eye-to-eye, you just have to hang it on the wall. And so we have ended up with a whole class of people who are certified honest and practically crooked, and we act surprised every single time the gap shows.
Those gamefowl men had it exactly backwards from the modern way, and exactly right from the eternal one. They had no titles. No certification. No institution vouching for them. The only thing they had was the thing itself — character, naked, with nothing hung in front of it. And so they couldn’t fake it. There was nothing to fake it with. A man was honest or he wasn’t, and you found out fast, and the truth was the only currency that spent.
I’ll say the quiet part once and then leave it alone: I’ve watched the roughest, most disreputable crowd I ever ran with show more plain, reliable decency to one another than I’ve sometimes watched respectable, churchgoing, well-credentialed folks show to people they’d known for thirty years.
Said it. Moving on. You can sit with that one yourself.
What the Yards Taught That the Pews Sometimes Didn’t
I’m not here to romanticize lawbreaking. Don’t mistake me. There’s a real argument about the thing itself, and I’m not making it today, and I’m not pretending the world I’m describing was a Sunday school.
What I’m telling you is narrower and harder than that. It’s this: honor is not the same thing as respectability, and the two come apart more often than we’d like to admit. Respectability is what you look like to the room. Honor is what you do when the room can’t see you and there’s no system to make you. And I learned the difference in a dirt lot, from men the world had already written off, who turned out to keep their word better than half the people the world holds up as examples.
The man with the firmest handshake I ever took had a record. The biggest liar I ever caught had a wall full of credentials. I have spent a good portion of my life since trying to make sure I’m measuring people by the handshake and not the wall — and trying to make sure my own word is worth what those men’s words were worth, which is to say, worth everything, because it’s the only thing a man actually owns outright.
You want to know if you can trust somebody? Quit reading their wall. Watch their handshake. Watch what they do when there’s nothing making them do right but the thing they’re made of.
The most honest men I ever knew were breaking the law. And they’d have died before they broke their word. I’ve met a lot of upright citizens since who had that exactly reversed, and I know which kind I’d rather have at my back.
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