Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy

Up, up, we're going drinking

The one annoying thing about being the non-drinker was being the default designated driver. There was Charles dragging Dimov off from the dinner table and towing him into his bedroom, and proclaiming, “Up, up, we’re going drinking.” Before he could scurry back to scrutinizing resumes on his laptop, Charles was flying through his drawers for the good shirt, the tight slacks, sending a zap of alarm through Dimov about the clothes askew on the floor. But Charles would not be refused.

On the way to the venue, Charles drove distractedly, engaging with dramatic turns and sudden stops, continually tapping buttons on the radio board. He slowed down before a neon façade of a bar. “And here. Pedro and his friends should be here.”

“The Argentinians from Vegas?”

“Yes! Can you believe our luck? The Universe works in mysterious ways.”

Apparently whatever happens in Vegas, doesn’t stay in Vegas. Dimov slid lower and lower in his seat, unable to shield himself against a drizzle of doom. 

The Friday night crowd spilled out in the front patio. Dimov’s nerves grew tight as He stepped into the ordure of cologne, howls for the non-shitty beer, the eyes dilated and glassy.  Instinctively his stares whirled over the fuzzy outlines of heads for the security of Charles’ skin-cut head, but the man had disappeared into the haze of bodies. Suddenly around him, the bar deepened into a lair of bestial loneliness. He wiped his forehead soothingly, and containing a jitter in his pulse, counted breaths to calm.  He could do this, he assured himself, he could play the game like he had done so atavistically when he used to live in New York.

Something crawled in the small of his back, and the woody tones of a hated cologne tickled from his left. He, smiling, leaned into it and said, “Where are these friends?”

Charles inflated rather plump with ease and grabbed his arm like a little child leading a parent.

“Pedro’s been wondering about you.”

“I haven’t.” Dimov did not doubt the wondering was of a concupiscent nature.

“Behave, would you?”

For the next half hour, Dimov thought he was well-behaved before the holy three from Argentina: Pedro, Joaquin, Miguel—glossy, ruddy-faced, twenty-five old cherubim fallen out of heaven, for reasons Dimov divined sourly, of enjoying themselves too much with the lyre and harp.

Dimov was sipping through his first seltzer, Charles had ordered his fourth vodka gimlet. Seated in between Joaquin and Miguel, Charles looked like a silvery bald mannequin under the filtered lights above their booth. Inebriation had expanded redly over his cheeks, and then he planted his pleasant peach face into Joaquin’s blunt nose.

“Can you believe it?” Charles hiccupped. “I need glasses. How the hell does that happen?”

Now that, Dimov knew nothing about, but Charles had a way of blabbering about everything else but his most worrisome concern.

Charles pushed into Joaquin, quite mournfully. “Look at my eyes, you think they are bad?”

Joaquin pecked him abruptly on the chin. “Non, Cariño. Perfecto.” Not to be outdone, Miguel commandeered Charles’ face and planted his long one on the mouth. And there commenced the kissing tag between the three of them, to which in response, Dimov scurried away his gaze only to run headlong into the rheumy stare of Pedro beside him. He could appreciate the clean, angular look of Pedro’s face but not now. And he abandoned himself to blinking blandly over the bubbles nucleating over the length of the black straw in his tumbler.

Avoiding Pedro, Dimov planted his critical attentions to the booth across from their table. Over there a woman, with earrings long and white over her satined shoulders, was wailing about the Universe and its injustices to someone as smart and pretty as she. “I’m a really good person. Believe me, really believe me, I’m not a slut. Honest…” she slobbered over her female confidante musing over the bleeding rim of her martini glass.