a decent idea, ruined.

Thank God for Cherry.

If she didn’t bring me the leftover pizza and never picked up orders from over at Sammy’s joint, I’d starve to death.

Well, that’s probably an exaggeration. I’d get by, eating my Dollar Store feasts of almost past its prime Spaghettios and Bite Size! Caco Chocolate cookies. Tonight, I got some spinach and pepperoni pizza and an order of very cold chicken wings. I sit here enjoying the hell out of them on my porch, Shooter Jennings’ “Lonesome Blues” wails from my speakers. Life could be much, much worse, for sure.

I don’t understand, really, why she still takes care of me. I don’t know if she looks at it the same way I do. I’m guessing there’s a small part of her that hates me for what I did. For what I’ve said. For what I didn’t say. Yet she still comes around to check up on me. “Seeing how you’re doin’!” she exclaims sometimes when she catches me sitting ‘round my place in my underwear. Which, sadly, is more often than it isn’t.

She won’t bring me anything to drink. She knows I already have that taken care of. I still get royalty checks and a couple of residual ones from my “productive years.” That was when I wrote a novel, two short story collections and a screenplay. All of them were pretty decent sellers, and all got made into movies in some sort of way. The darling, a producer called me once. It didn’t stick when the booze took over. It wasn’t women. It wasn’t drugs. It was just the booze. A lot of it.

People asked me why I kept drinking. They knew my stories were all about it.

“But you don’t have to be like that anymore,” one woman exclaimed while trying to give me a blow job in the back row of a screening of “Bottles and Pigs” probably the worst of my short stories to be made into something. Hell, it had that kid from “Two and a Half Men” as the star. It had to be bad. About the only thing good about the movie was the entire soundtrack was by The Replacements. I required that from the get-go. I think Paul Westerberg hated me for it, but he got paid. I told him as much after too many Gin and tonics one night when I was in an airport and he happened to be there too.

I answered that woman with “have to? What the fuck do you know about having to do anything?” She finished the blow job. I felt bad for her. But not too bad.

However, after that night, the writing stopped. The drinking increased and soon, he was back in New Orleans, living in a small shotgun cashing checks and hanging out. I guess that’s what was always going to happen, luckily, it happened after a spate of actual productivity that allows for the lack of it now.

“Get off of your ass and do something,” she say when he was on the couch, eating Captain Crunch at 4 in the afternoon with nothing on but a blanket. “It’s such a waste.”

“Not really. It’s research.”

She’d walk out every time. But not before leaving something in the fridge or on the kitchen table.

He’d regret it one day. He knew. Death would come, the funeral wouldn’t be much, if anything at all. And then he’d be gone.

But really, isn’t that how it ends for everyone? Some just leave a better looking corpse or have people show up and cry.

His last girlfriend told him that Cherry was an enabler. Didn’t try to stop him from his destructive tendencies. “I think she wants you to die!” she’d cry when she found out Cherry and him had been hanging out at the pub.

“Nah, she just knows I have to do it myself,” he’d reply.

That relationship lasted a few months longer than he expected it to. Which, wasn’t a good or bad thing really. She did steal most of his Dean Martin Lps however. That pissed him off.

He’d had his eye on a girl at the bar for a long while after that. They’d drink together. Talk about how shitty their lives were and then go home and drink some more when things shut down or got too full of college folk. They never fell into bed together. She hinted at it a few times, but he was adamant about not doing anything.

Her friends asked why they weren’t dating, and he’d say he just wasn’t ready for it. Or he needed to get things in order first. All excuses that sounded great the first time, but the 8th time they didn’t hold much weight.

She finally left town one night. Left a four-word note : “See you in Duluth.”

“Go figure?” he exclaimed while opening up a Rolling Rock. They sucked, but it was cheap. All one had to do was guzzle down three and everything else was smooth.