Old Story

He staggers out of a dead end bar with a bottle of cheap booze and a black eye. Feeling as beaten as a drum, his feet slap the pavement, car horns blaring and lights flashing along to the beat. He slams into a dumpster and yesterday’s lunch seeps down into the used Chinese fortunes and empty milk cartons. In a window across the street a fat woman in a Salvation Army floral patterned dress beats her pervert of a son for watching his sister bathe.
He slides to the street and feels the bottle of booze break. He closes his glassy, bloodshot eyes and listens to a baby screaming. A no account waitress isn’t getting much sleep tonight as her baby boy wails like a burning cat.
He picks himself off the ground, his pants covered in the marinade of the city, and starts down the street. He is horribly drunk and dangerously happy. He jay walks across the street, an imaginary jazz tune clicking along to the beat of his snapping fingers. He passes a hooker on the corner of 56th and Vine and the upbeat jazz swings into a burlesque rumba. Running his fingers through his hair and clearing his foghorn of a throat, he walks up to find the hooker is a derelict telephone booth plastered in social activist stickers and poorly drawn graffiti. He laughs at his own drunkenness, and the sharp smell of his own breath burns his nose. He heads for his flat, his liver on fire from a long night.
Shortly after four in the morning, he managed to find his way home, his clothes torn and dirty and his wallet dead from starvation. He slinks down the alley like a badly beaten dog, sobriety slowly overcoming his delusional bliss. He somehow found and hoisted himself up his rusting fire escape, the first signs of a painful hangover still a nonexistent promise. Slipping on the fifth rung, he swears loudly. Under normal circumstances the stairs would have been fine to use, but the landlady had a strict no drinking policy, and in a past life she had been a bloodhound. With all the noise he was making it was a wonder she didn’t fly out into the night, bringing fire and damnation down upon his head.
When he reached his window, he jammed it open and fell inside, breaking a lamp on the way down. He crawled through the broken ceramic pieces to his mattress. He climbed in and let exhaustion overcome him. He was dreading his inevitable hangover, so his hand dropped to the floor, his fingers searching for a lonely bottle of aspirin. He found it nestled in a forest of dust bunnies and single socks. He popped three and passed out. He dreamt of nothing, and woke up feeling restless, an unknown feeling tearing at his gut.
He made it out of his apartment for the last time around eight. He was dressed in a flannel short, a beaten pair of factory made shoes, a dirty cap and a haggard coat. He carried on his back a canvas pack, filled with a blanket and a horde of books, their covers printed in names long forgotten. His pockets carried some stray bills and lint. As he walked down the streets past the drones in suits with gold in their eyes, he felt out of place, a soul born three decades two late. While people his age ran around in designer suits, their eyes glued to the shimmering glass buildings above, his lay planted on the ground, digging through burned out cigarette butts and patent leather shoes. Their young ambition was visible in their bright teeth and youthful smiles, while his dry cynicism and ancient hopelessness was far too old for his young frame. He walked slouched and dejected, a stray dog the pound ignored. His stomach growled, so he headed off searching for something to eat.
Squeezed in between a hardware store and a thrift shop there is a small diner run by an elderly couple. From the outside they seem like an ordinarily happy husband and wife, and that is probably what they were, but he found this idea rather boring and uninventive, so he made up his own back story.
They had met back when they were young and hopeful enough to have dreams. They had loved each other at one point, but after years of failure and shattered dreams, just looking at each other in the morning became a headache. After a foolish investment in the stock market, they had taken the last of their savings and put it into running a twenty four hour neon lit diner. It was an attempt to stay sane, and, for awhile at least, it had worked. They had managed to create a balance between lies and the truth. Everything had been shattered though, when the wife caught the husband with a thirteen year old prostitute. Since then her illusion of a happy life has never returned, and the only thing she has to look forward to in the morning is the thought that maybe, it will be the day she dies.
He ordered an omelet and some coffee, paid the bill and walked out.