Sex and Rage

“And then, once you get a job, you can get your own apartment and own car and own cute little kitten,” Jacaranda went on.

“But what’ll I do before then?” Sunrise said, worried.

“What any other girl with no money does,” Jacaranda said.

“Oh, but hooking, I don’t know . . .”

“Call your mother.”

“My mother?” Sunrise cried. “I haven’t even seen her in fifteen years.”

All her life she’d skated along making most people think that she was not really there and would never be able to remember what she saw, or put it together afterward even if she did. But now people who had read her pieces were careful not to leak any secrets that weren’t souped up. People would take her aside when she first got to parties to tell her they’d just had an abortion, were writing a screenplay about it, and to ask whom did she think they ought to get to direct.

Jacaranda liked it a lot better when people thought she was Shelby’s girlfriend or some fly-by-night art groupie. The more someone liked her writing, the fewer clothes she felt she had on.

Anyway, writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.

She discovered what most writers insist is true nowadays, which is that they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink?