trances make nice presleep mediation.

It’s my fresh fucking page. This is my work, and my life, and I`ll do with both as I may, but by God, failure is sure hard to swallow. My pen sits still for a while, and the ashtray is left to burn up.
I walk out to my kitchen. Through my bedroom, into the hallway, past the front door, and into the dark, grease pits. My sink backed up yesterday, and I can’t get past the fumes of stinky shit coming up through the pipes.
It’s a hard stench as I flick the light switch and squint at the bright luminescence on the ceiling. It hurts, but I adjust and fix the whisky. The bottle was full yesterday, fresh, new and clean, and was now a capless quarter. The night was long, but hearty, and the rum had been a good companion. It wasn’t truculent like Celine or Hemingway, just present and calmly enjoyed.
Two nights, two nights of blank pages and shitty reports to the guys who call everyday looking for something good to publish, and I have nothing for them. The calls get angrier after six or seven hours past deadline. I’m nothing special though, I’m a fucking reporter with a shitty story to report about. It’s still art. I can still bitch when my integrity is compromised.
As I slam the last of my whisky, two knocks echo through the dim apartment, over the counter and into the rear.
It’s probably Josephine, she’s high, looking for a fuck. Don’t give it to her, Shar, don’t you fucking give it to her.
I open the door, and she stumbles in. Her purse hangs off of her and swings about her body. She slurs an appeal for a place to stay, and tries her best to be charming, even seductive, but fails as she stumbles around and throws herself into the closet door and onto the ground.
“Fuck Jos, what the hell are you doing here? It’s four o’ fucking clock in the morning.”
“You don’t sleep Sharmin, you stay up all night and drink, you goddamn lush!” She slurs out the ‘goddamn’ and ‘lush’, and glares at me as if I’d just slapped her. From the ground, her slurred words and made up eyes bulge out like periscopes from her skull. Her little black dress shows panty, and I begin to reconsider my adamant denial of any fucking tonight.
She’s right, Shar, you’re just a fucking failed writer, a goddamn lush.
“Fuck you, Jos. Don’t come here looking for a quick fuck and a warm bed, and then attack me like that.” My retort is half assed, a complete failure. It becomes evident to all parties involved that she will get what she wants. It’s only a matter of time.
“What’s in the cup, Shar?” The bitch is pissed, completely correct and completely aware of it.
I let the rest slick down my throat, and walk back into the kitchen. I’m not drunk, but I am certainly a buzz case. Josephine riles herself from the floor, barges into the kitchen and promptly slams herself into a chair. Her body seems to reverberate from the force of the actual act of sitting, and she recovers with a widened eye and a shy look around.
I pour a glass of wine for each of us, the last of the shitty red, and I sit myself down; making sure to make the whole motion effortless, so as not to portray my actual inebriated state.
She just stares at me. Her eyes are bloodshot, presumably from the coke, and her hands are shaky from the events to occur.
It will probably be the normal drunk, fucked up bullshit. We tear each other’s clothes off, fuck, and she leaves in anger tomorrow. Sometimes she’ll take money, or food, or both, but she always leaves in anger. It’s like the common denominator.
“So, are you f-fucking finished your bullshit yet? Are we going to fuck?” She slurs out both ‘fucks’ and it seems to emphasize them, as if she were completely in control of my mind, and simply commanding it to do as she pleased.
You are going to fuck her, Shar. You know you’ll fuck her, you always do.
“Jesus, Jos. Do you get any blunter? You can’t come here looking for a quick lay and a bit of cash. Whores do that, Jos, fucking whores do that.” I stammer the last part out. I try to appeal to her sense of common decency, and realize quickly that through the cocaine and alcohol, she barely holds on to her clothes, lest her sense of common decency.
Trapped, you dumb bastard, that’s what you are, you’re trapped. Fuck her, get her out of here.
“I’ll be in the bedroom you fucking drunk. I figure you’ll be there soon enough.” The last part is almost a chuckling statement of superiority. She loses her drunk, stale, coked-out incivility and seems to almost possess a functional psyche. Although she insults me, the invitation excites my natural male instinct to procreate and I hold back for as long as my will holds out. Sadly, that isn’t long.
Well, at least according to the clock on the wall. The time I sat at the table seemed to be an eternity, and a lifetime of drunken, rapid thoughts seemed to course through my brain. I was proud that I had lasted for what seemed like an hour, but it was not quite so.
I calculated the pros and cons of keeping her here for one more night. I considered the sad creations I’d been doling out to the ‘paper lately. I could almost repeat every word on the page, and none of them seemed appropriate. They all seemed so fake.
The whole profession was a joke. I knew that.
But here I was, in the centre of a blossoming novelist’s dream, and I was simply another drunk. I suppose, by that standard…so was Hemingway.
It could not be forgotten that a by-now-nude slovenly slattern was waiting for me to copulate with her in the bedroom. It seemed amazing how something so terrible as alcohol could speed up one’s thoughts.
I ventured into the room. I sauntered apprehensively to the bed, and flopped beside her. I downed my wine and kissed her hard.
She started taking off her panties and moaned something about going down on her.
When I refused to tongue her, she bit my bottom lip hard enough to break skin. The taste of blood was in both our mouths, and Josephine spat onto the floor and turned back to me.
“Fucking eat me out, you lazy cocksucker.” She half moaned it, and it was almost seductive except that now, without her panties off, I could see how ugly her unshaven legs were. They were riddled in scratches and scars, and it seemed that I was not her first for the night.
I got up.
The kitchen seemed to spin as I got in there. The knives in the drawer gleamed when I opened it, and the clanging clearly bothered her, because she screamed from the bedroom that if I wasn’t going to lick her, she wanted sleep.
“Go somewhere else, you stupid slag.” She didn’t respond.
I chopped an apple, and ate it slowly as she fell asleep and forgot about me.