Pure Slaughter Value by Robert Bingham

Author:Robert Bingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Fixers

There was once an ad man, a journalist, and a junkie, and they all lived and breathed like fleas in the coat of New York City. One day the ad man walked out of his office and onto a midtown avenue. It said, here. Here in the city of use where the flags of the hotels and clubs fluttered their sheets above his head, here he had a choice. Today he had a choice, voices to listen to, to weigh, and pausing on the street he felt an offering in the air. It was a clear electric blue day in April. His lover, she mingled in that thrilling corner of his heart that still wanted to destroy himself, to make himself an early grave. His lover and her drugs, there was that, or home to his wife. His choice. He did not hate his wife. He loved her in the way one might love and fear a teacher. One day they had married to end a fight. Now they were husband and wife. Lover or wife? How many times has the question been poised on a set of wet lips for the first time in creation? But he was a free man, wasn’t he? And in the scheme of things Charlie Way was a lucky man. He was young and working on the Gillette campaign. It was the Best a Man Can Get. Good work, lucrative work, but like a lot of people in the twilight of their twenties, Charlie felt his was the success of an impostor. The Best a Man Can Get. He saw the steely grays, the minted teal freshness and aquamarines of the new line, so painfully focused grouped for maximum brand approval. Sure, he had stolen some color combinations from the new warm weather NHL expansion teams, but so what. That old mantra, the Best a Man Can Get, he was giving it a face-lift, a new meaning that had met with such overwhelming approval it seemed only natural to celebrate. Drugs or wife? The competing pressure systems on this clear banner day of advertorial triumph muddled his mind. The street did not help. It was a medley of after-work sneakers on beefcake pantyhose and sirens. His day had been too busy for lunch, and now the beckoning cherry light of the overhead Sbarro pizza lamps shone down on the toppings like a Christmas offering. Sbarro pizza. It said, here, come in here, and though he knew it was going down, Charlie Way could not see the sun setting anywhere at all.

In his trench coat like the others, with his thinning blond hair like the others, and briefcase that held the work of the impostor, he stood on the street thinking of Eve like no other. He still wanted to alter his life, see what would happen to it if he tried to throw it away, and on the perimeter of Times Square he waited for a sign. Fuck it, he’d go home. It was Thursday.

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