Lit Riffs Read Free Page B

single. She hated him, and all men, at that moment, and there was nothing in the world that could have changed that at the time.
    When he was fully dressed, he stumbled across the bed, nearly breaking a leg and spilling across the floor, but no, he made it to his feet, though he still felt too wretched and ashamed to stand straight up all the way, so he kind of hunched across the room, hesitating by the door. He turned a bit, but was afraid even to look at her.
    “Get out.” It was the voice of a sidewalk as it hits a drunk in the face. Except he was no longer drunk. He felt it, every dollop of loathing, contempt, finality. Sick in the pit of his gut, moving with the spindly gait of somebody staggering away from an automobile accident, he turned the knob on the door and let himself out. She turned her face to the wall, which was oily and stained in places and where she faced it almost black with the accumulated dirt and lives of so many people, most of them down-and-outers, over so many years, and she cried hard, bitter convulsive tears that seemed to come tearing out in great chunks like the face of some cliff smashed away by … what? One too many assholes? Solitary middle age with no real prospects in sight? The sudden sensation that it just might be the sum total of her life, for this was all she had managed to piece together in over four decades, and what in god’s name did she have to look forward to? Who wants a fifty-year-old hooker who’s particular about her services (no S&M, no showers, no really kinky stuff of any sort) in the first place? Or get in on the ground floor of some new, “straight” business … yeah, sure. Even waitresses had to show some list of past employments. All she had to show, really, was a succession of men: two failed marriages, countless lovers, most of them as callous as this one had turned out to be or worse, various marginal forms of employment (go-go dancer, topless waitress, hooker, massage parlor, call girl … it all boiled down to the same thing), no family contacted in decades, no kids, not even a pet, no library or record collection amassed over the years that could now be presented to herself as some kind of evidence proving she knew not what … nothing. Alcoholism. A lifetime of self-con, pretending she was some schoolgirl on a spree when everybody else her age was married, employed, or both. She was so ill equipped for real life, she reflected, that she wouldn’t even know how to commit suicide properly. Fuck it up no doubt. She laid her face in the black place where the two walls met, while more sobs heaved up from her very guts like boulders. In the next room, somebody turned up a radio playing some awful, maudlin song; they didn’t want to have to hear her.
    He staggered on down the street, still in shock, found his way home, sat down, and tried to piece it all together. On one level it was all so simple, on another it was just too abrupt a jolt from too great a height to too miserable a sink. That plus the knowledge that he’d hurt someone, and he did have some though hardly a complete idea just how badly, and it was the person that on that day of his life he wanted most in the world to avoid hurting. Again he felt himself overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness and self-hatred. He sat like this for hours, barely moving a finger joint, almost in a trance, as the darkness fell over the city and filled the room. Finally, around 10 p.m., he got up and turned on the lamp. Then he sat down again. He knew that punishing himself this way, to such masochistic extremes, he was only reconfirming, again and again, the very conviction of immaturity which had, aside from the pain he’d inflicted, made him feel that way in the first place. But he was young and male and selfish enough to be more concerned with whipping himself and turning it into a grand melodrama than with what she must be going through. Well , he thought ruefully a couple of hours after turning out the light,