Luja, Decembro 1, 2008

I love my regulars. Not in some kind of romantic way, mind you. That would be far too strange to consider and I prefer to date women in any case. No, I love them for how reliable they are. I love them because I can predict just which topics are going to come up in conversation. I love them for the comfort that is provided once two people have become acquainted with one another and all that other good shit. I have had a hard two and a half weeks and it looks as though times are only going to get more difficult and so, amidst the restaurant reviews and sordid but amusing hooker stories and marriage anecdotes all provided by this one particular gentleman, there was a large portion of the human in me that found comfort in the moment. I curled up beside him and twiddled with his chest hair, in the arms of a man entering his sixties but looking like his fourties, and I was small and comfortable and secure. In fact for a moment I did not even want it to end.

So sue me.

I arrived home tonight and found out that my younger brother had travelled to Las Vegas and gone on some sort of alcoholic binge while visiting our father, during which time he vanished without a trace. It has been twenty-four hours and thus far neither the police nor the hospitals nor the morgues have seen him. I knew about the trip to Las Vegas and deep down I knew that he would be drinking even though I chose to believe the lies he tells all of us over and over again. I also know how paranoid he gets when he drinks, and how easily he is pushed toward violence when paranoid. I last saw him at the Seven two Friday nights ago, when he had come to check up on me after the hospital incident and wound up making nice with one of my clients who had shown up that night.

He did not find out what I do for a living, of course, and I know that he never will. I just hope that he lives long enough to never find out, or at least long enough for me to confess it all to him when we are old and wrinkled and it comes out sounding hilarious instead of dramatic because grand auntie just called herself a whore. Madness and corruption and mysterious disappearances. It would all be very Shakespearean or something if there were more monologues and someone to point to as the tragicomic protagonist. This is not a good time to be part of the Loveless clan.