New Bad News by Ryan Ridge

New Bad News by Ryan Ridge

Author:Ryan Ridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


Past Perfect

I had been drinking and was driving. My wife hadn’t shaved because she never showed her legs. We had fought all afternoon. I hadn’t been crying because I hide my feelings. The sun hadn’t risen because it was night. I had been sleeping with another woman and felt good because she had come. At the same time, I felt bad because I had cheated. She had already left. I had already showered. I had already sobered. I had been feeling hopeful because I had written.

Dogs Named Desire

We got lucky and left Kentucky. This was after our Monday-night marriage, when we lit out for the left coast and struck it rich along the way peddling new sins to Protestants, got blackout drunk at a bar around the corner from the Alamo, forgot everything (including the Alamo) for weeks, and then continued west until we reached the San Fernando Valley where we settled amongst the modest pornographers and the unending strip-mall sprawl. Our love grew small, but our backyard swimming pool loomed largely. We named it Denial and, although we never swam in the damn thing, we liked to lounge next to it and boat drink ourselves into oblivion. Sure, when we sobered there was still plenty wrong with us, but the truth is brighter than the sun sometimes. It’s only natural to look away. We did until we didn’t. Then we didn’t.

She took most of the money and then hooked up with an itinerant yoga instructor and, last I imagined, they were wandering the world inventing new sexual maneuvers.

Meanwhile, I bought some cheap speed and got to work on an uninspired screenplay about a family of disabled acrobats who, despite it all, hang on and hunker down as they learn the true meaning of the holidays, and, sure enough, the saps over at the Hallmark Channel pounced on it and advanced me enough cash to charge a new Charger and put some road under it. I should’ve gone to Montana. I should’ve gone to Idaho, but no, I got sentimental and beat it down to the Gulf of Mexico. When I reached the shores of Alabama, there were firemen everywhere. Smoke on the water and the flames into the sky. The heat scorched the sand into glass. I wanted to stick around, to stay and help those folks fight, but instead, I took the unexamined heaviness in my heart and the cash in my jean jacket pocket over to the dog track in Pensacola. I bet it all on a black dog named Desire and dammit if I didn’t lose as usual.

Then, I did what they say you shouldn’t do: I went home again, and I rented a studio apartment above a bar by Churchill Downs. Beneath me, people bonded over bourbon and beer. Me, I just listened to the lies through the frail floorboards, for weeks. Eventually, I dug myself from that dark place and went downstairs to bask in the neon. At the lip of the bar sat my ex-wife’s father.



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