For the first time in awhile Bill felt like popping speed.
Since he and his wife had moved to Cleveland he had been relatively drug fee. He smoked weed, but not at work, and he drank lots of gin because that’s what his wife’s father drank. He still had a supply of black beauties, but he didn’t dip into it much. He was holding on to it, hoarding it even though he knew he could head down to Columbus any time he needed to to see Doc. Getting busted for drugs at work was simply not an option.
Down in the restaurant in Columbus drugs were rampant. Later on Bill would find that in every restaurant he worked drugs were all over. It wasn’t this way in the hotels. In hotels drugs were there but you had to find them, they didn’t find you. With his being on probation, one thing Bill did not want to do was anything that would ruin this gig he had. Consciously he had not sought out the drug connections. First place to start though would be Beverly since her sister was a maid and the maids would have a good sense of the connections.
Messing with Millie and Beverly in and of itself was enough to get Bill fired. That he was protected by Kalista and most probably by Chloe too was great, but nothing was foolproof and Bill continually told himself this. He knew on a whole other level that he should not be fooling around anyway. There were many reasons for this and knowing that according to Masters and Johnson more that 60% of men cheated on their spouses didn’t make it okay or even any better.
Cheating was wrong. Pure and simple, it was simply wrong.
And so it goes.
But then lots of things were wrong in this world.
Bill was thinking all this on his way to see Millie. He was thinking it was a day. All had started out great. He was with his wife. They laughed. They played. She let him sleep in, brought him coffee in bed. They had money in the bank, a nice apartment, a decent car. They both had jobs. Neither one of their jobs was the one they actually wanted, but they had jobs and weren’t wanting for anything in any way.
All good.
But it was a day. She left. He took a beer then a second beer. A good start went straight to wrong-think. Wrong-think went to… Beer went to vodka, went to thinking maybe he shouldn’t drive to work. But he did drive to work and here he was with three dirty uniforms in his arms and three cups of bourbon in his stomach on top of the vodka and beer he’d had at home.
Some speed would be great. Some Quaaludes would be even better. Best yet would be some Quaaludes on top of the black beauties and a drink to go with it.
How the hell…
He wondered how from just about perfect the day had gone to shit in a matter of a few hours. Really it was a matter of a few moments because the moment his wife had left out of the apartment and he had taken that first beer the skid had started. It was more of a slide than a skid, one of those slides in the arcades and carnival places. He was on top on the good spot, the sweet spot, and then he was free-falling down. Down and down and there was no bottom for the moment.
But of course there was always a bottom and while he might not be seeing one here at the moment, he’d been to a few so far.
And then there she was. Millie was just standing there at her counter like always, doing what she always did.
