It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-12-19 17:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, cat dubrovna, jack penhaligon |
The Mean Eyed Cat: Jack + Cat
Who: Jack + Cat
When: Now-ish
Warnings: Eh. Probably language.
It was not laconic. He didn't choose stupor, one day sliding into the next like melting candle wax. After all, each night was a premiere event. A new back-catalogue and if he missed the feature, the details would slip and christ, if he had to do it, he would do it the way it was meant to be done. So after the first day, it wasn't covert: either in present location or in the bedroom of a B&B or even - the motel that had come before. It wasn't the General Store or taking the bike into the next town for the liquor store there. God no. If he was going to blunt the knife-edge deliberately, it would be precise. The shit-show in history required sobriety the next morning. So it was somewhere between the two, a step or two from the wagon to stand in the shit before climbing back on for the bloody ride tomorrow.
So he didn't weave. He wasn't drunk from the night before, because the night before was spent remembering the inglorious slide into alcoholism with crystal precision. He remembered Repose now. The shape of it, the taste of the misery. He remembered all the things he'd spent months forgetting and yet he had perhaps, a year left to catch up on. He chose the Cat because the strip-club felt seedy and as if the drinking were a side-show to the main event (which obviously, it was) and because the Cat was reliably not the kind of place one drank to excess.
So he was sober as a judge walking in. It was an odd blend of ages: the jacket classic heavy wool and the sweater underneath it bought by a man in his early thirties with money and good taste, and the scarf old, and college-colors beneath the smattering of snow-flakes. In the mirror, he saw himself at thirty five, but without the particular stamp of an alcoholic that had belonged to that particular age. He sat at the bar before he'd fully recognized the woman behind it, and new memory slotted together with old in almost-perfect alignment.
"Hello, Catalone."