The night detonated under the jaundiced glow of McSorley’s backroom your choice, as ever where the air tasted like mop water steeped in vinegar and regret. The joint was a carnival of broken promises: junior lawyers sweating in discount tweed, two-timing couples lip-locked between bites of shepherd’s pie, and a red-nosed bartender polishing glasses the way morticians polish coffins out of habit, never hope. You were already lodged in a corner booth, cardigan slipping off one shoulder, wedding ring buried beneath a strand of knockoff pearls.
One glance and I knew the script: you’d drown the night in self-pity and call it art.
I slid across the cracked vinyl and you launched your operetta family everywhere, job stress, cosmic vertigo. Each excuse fluttered from your mouth like cigarette ash in a wind tunnel, and I watched the cheap-suit attorneys circle the bar rounds, elbowing clients toward plea bargains and bourbon chasers. You kept talking; I kept drinking. We both pretended it was conversation.
When the clock died somewhere near 2 a.m., you grabbed me, nails carving tracks down my forearm, and hissed that we should “get lost before sunrise.” I followed because addicts follow dealers, because even bad narcotics promise a rush.
Outside, the city’s steam vented like ruptured arteries, taxis carving fluorescent gouges through the wet asphalt. Your perfume something lilac-adjacent, bought duty-free mixed with alley rot and stale hops; it filled my lungs and blacked out better judgment.
Back at that micro-suite you’d booked on somebody else’s credit card, the walls listened while we annihilated the bedsheets with every feral impulse you’d corked since elementary school.
I did get fucked by you, yet no real kiss just your teeth on my spine and your voice spitting apologies you didn’t believe. When it was over, you rolled to the bedside lamp like a hostage crawling to potassium cyanide and launched a soliloquy about forgiveness, as if poetry could mop up the mess.
Dawn seeped through the blinds, the color of roadkill, settling on a half-eaten take-out box and our clothes flung across the radiator like damp flags of surrender. I pulled on my jeans, brain buzzing like faulty neon, and scratched out a farewell on hotel stationery with a pen that bled more than it wrote:
“Your heartbreak routine is a busted jukebox same song, wrong key. Keep spinning it for the next idiot. I’m bankrupt on empathy.”
I left the note propped against the complimentary cognac mini bottle emptied, tilted, accusatory. The hallway smelled of bleach and last night’s infidelity
In the lobby, a janitor whistled something cheerful as he scraped vomit off the marble, and lawyers in yesterday’s suits bargained with hangovers for mercy. Outside, a delivery truck backfired, pigeons scattered like bad intentions, and the city girded itself for another round of self-inflicted wounds.
I walked east till the river stank less than your apologies, flagged a cab, and watched the skyline recede in the cracked rear-view like stitches popping on a fresh scar. Somewhere behind me you were rehearsing the next act, crying into bath-towel terrycloth because Kleenex couldn’t keep up. I felt nothing except the bruised satisfaction of finally quitting a rigged game.
Call it rude compassion if you need a label. I call it survival.
- JSPC ] Artist of Wanton [
