Giddyup for STAR

We’re in a small, dingy office. Everything is black and white. A nondescript middle aged man is sitting at a desk with an open bottle of bourbon and a glass. The bottle is half empty; the glass, half full. He’s staring into the glass with empty eyes. There may be a spark of life left in there, but it’s nearly drowned in an ocean of self pity, cynicism, and Wild Turkey. In the background,we hear a sax, softly repeating the riff from “Turn the Page,” you know the one I’m talking about. It plays over and over again as we hear a voiceover from the man at the desk.

The music business is hell. You survive vicariously by sucking the life out of idealistic and creative young kids. They flock to this town like lemmings to a cliff,and suffer the same fate. And we make money off of their hopes and dreams, and when their dreams wither and die, we discard them like yesterday’s newspaper and latch on to the next crop. Meanwhile, we drown whatever thin sliver of conscience we have left in and endless sea of cheap women, cheap booze and and pretend we’re living the rock and roll lifestyle.

Yeah, sex and drugs and Rock n roll, my ass. You could just as easily say the clap, rehab, and tinnitus in your left ear, and it’s mean the same thing.

That’s why I left the business to make an honest living as a private detective. The hours are the same, but I can look at myself in the mirror most mornings and not feel too badly about myself. I still make a living off of other people’s misery, but at least now I’m trying to help them. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes, this job is just as dirty as the last one. I break broken marriages, finishing a job started by the husband or the wife years ago.

Of course, they blame me, but what the hell, as long as they pay me, I’ll deal with it.

It’s quiet in the office today. There’s no sound but the ice melting in my drink,and the kid two floors down blowing his horn. He goes on that way for hours at a time; always when I’m feeling a little down and a lot drunk. I wonder how he knows. Then again, I spend a lot of time down and drunk,so maybe it’s just chance. All I know is one day, I’ll hear enough of it and snap, and god help the kid then.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.