▸ Column · Star Wars original-trilogy era — a smuggler's docking bay, debts measured in credits and Hutts
HAN SOLO replies.
Replied to by Han Solo, with a rebuttal from Leia Organa.
The letter
My docking-bay buddy Dom and I have run together since flight school — fifteen years, easy. Over the last couple cycles I've fronted him credits maybe a dozen times. Forty for a cantina tab, a hundred and twenty when his berthing fees came due, two hundred last season when his "payout was just a day late." Every time it's "I'll transfer it this week," and then nothing, and when I bring it up easy, like it's no big deal, he laughs like I'm telling a joke. We're near six hundred credits now. That's real money to me, even if it isn't to him. I love the guy and I don't want to torch fifteen years over coin — but I can't keep bankrolling him while he's buying new flight boots and ordering hot noodles to the bay every single night. How do I get my credits back, or at least make it stop, without it turning into a whole thing?
Han Solo replies
Six hundred credits. Okay. And here's the part that should bug you more than the number: he laughs. You bring it up and he laughs. That's not a guy who forgot — that's a guy who's decided it's never gonna cost him anything, because you've trained him right.
Look, I know debts. I got a Hutt who nailed a bounty to my head over one, so trust me — and yeah, I know how that sounds coming from me — when somebody owes you and treats it like a punchline, the credits aren't really the issue anymore. Where you rank is the issue.
Don't grade his "I'll transfer it this week." Talk's cheap, kid. Grade what he does when paying you back actually costs him something. So here's the move: next time he comes around, the till's closed. No speech, just no. And the six hundred — say it once, plainly, to his face, the number, no laughing it off. Then watch.
Fifteen years means he shows up now, when it pins him. Or it doesn't, and you found out cheap. Either way you stop being his bank. Don't make a whole thing of it. Just quit fronting the money.
— Han Solo
Leia Organa weighs in
"Watch and see." Of course that's Solo's answer — it's the answer of a man who told me "one more run, then I'll square Jabba" for years until they froze him in carbonite. Watching is how the debt eats you, flyboy.
You don't have a Dom problem. You have a you problem: you keep bringing it up "easy" so you never have to actually decide anything. Stop. Name the number, name the day he repays it, and mean both. The loaning ends tonight, not after one more test. The kindness that keeps writing the credit is just a softer way of giving up on him — and on your own six hundred. Decide. Then hold it.
— Leia Organa
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