Going for Broke

Chapter 2

Blaine doesn't see the stranger again, not when he goes back to the bar the next night, or the next week even, night after night of drinking down his endless anxieties. It hurts to think about. Think about him, think about what he said, revealed. And soon Blaine forces himself to stop trying to find him again and focus solely on the alcohol.

Why do you even care? he asks himself. It's just some kid who committed vandalism on your hand. Why are you letting this upset you so much? Why should you care what he thinks?

But something about the stranger continues to tug at his mind, throwing images onto his retinas—those murky green eyes flashing in the light, the mess of hair, the charcoal shadows across his cheekbones. And at first he tries to tell himself that it's simply the mystique, the way the man chewed up his life and threw it back up in Blaine's face that has captured his thoughts.

But it's more than that, he knows. He knows it when he wakes up gasping, mouth struggling to form a name that he doesn't even know. But it doesn't matter, because the stranger has disappeared with all his enigmatic energy, and Blaine will never see him again. He drinks to that. He drinks hard to that. Because if there's one thing he realized that night, it's that he doesn't live anything worthwhile.

But that's a good thing, he tells himself. Because that way when he drinks, he's not really destroying anything at all. And it's so much easier to drink, now that's he's gotten into the habit. It's so much easier not to have to deal.

And why would I want him anyway? Blaine asks himself, after a few weeks of letting the alcohol steal his hours away. Why would he want him? Strolling into Blaine's life, unraveling it, picking at his choices, his job, his history, and forcing the truth onto Blaine when he never asked for it? He was happier before.

He falls back into work, tumbling through weeks, no, months of watching numbers, scanning computer screens, and watching as the market falls to pieces around him and there's nothing he can do to stop it. None of the economists predicted this, and, to most, it's not even a dip in markets compared to what they've endured in the past forty years, but for Blaine, who's only experiencing his first recession, however minor, it leads to endless headaches and many, many more nights surrounded by empty shot glasses, because it's so much easier when he can just forget. One level of his consciousness tells him he has a problem, that he has probably misplaced most of the blood in his body for beer, tells him that's it's beginning to show in the dark circles under his eyes and shadows of his face, but he drowns that part with alcohol until it shuts up as well.

November arrives, bitter with wind, and Thanksgiving is spent with a five dollar microwave meal. He can't face going home right now, no matter how much his mother pleads. Christmas passes much the same way, with Kraft macaroni and cheese, some new socks, a photo album that promises to be empty forever, and a new plummet in stocks that has Blaine back at work the next day, frantically trying to shift the numbers and avoid what's sure to come.

He almost escapes going out with Wes and David on New Year's, but in the end their promise of personally invading his apartment with ten thousand cats is threat enough. So, at nine fifteen, December 31st, 2018, Blaine locks the door of his apartment and makes his way down seventeen flights of stairs to catch a cab to Times Square. He's supposed to meet Wes and David at eleven, but he knows traffic will be murder, and then, if there's time, he's memorized the location of several nice bars around the area to drop into.

The cab drive is lengthy, to say the least. Once the taxi actually breaches the area around Times Square, the road blocks and, moreover, swarms of people actually convince Blaine that the best thing to do is get out now and walk the rest of the way. He pays the cabbie and steps out into the stream of people, battering his way into a side road and into a shady looking place. The sign above the door says 'Rocco's', which should be off-putting enough, but Blaine has found over the last few months of his life that a beer is beer, no matter how much it costs, and no matter what certain strangers might have to say about it.