* * * *

It was fucking great to get drunk, though. I held back for all the years I’d been working for Weber. There’s too much at stake for me to show up drooling and hung over. I used to have to wait to tie one on over the weekend.

The weekend. I gotta call Katharine and make arrangements to pick up the kids tonight. Jesus H. Christ that sucks. When it all went down, I had half a mind to just say fuck it and move out to New Mexico by myself, ride horses, drink tequila, plink cans with a rifle. That was a nice daydream, but I couldn’t do that to the kids, have them be the kind of children whose father left them, let them down. What it meant in practice was that I have to see Katharine three times a week to swap custody, sometimes more if one of the kids forgets a lunchbox at her house. My house. That cunt.

Shouldn’t say that about the mother of my children. Not going to do it. We had a deal, we wouldn’t bad-mouth each other or tell the kids what happened. My parents were divorced, and they constantly brainwashed and emotionally tortured me. The kids will find out when they get old enough to find out, if they are interested. I’m not going to call her names in front of them, even if she royally fucking deserves it.

I figure I have about 12 minutes to shower, shave, get dressed, and get out the door, though I could probably skip the shave since Weber doesn’t leave his office. The fact that I am stepping over pizza boxes to get to the bathroom tells me that I should probably get my shit together and clean this place up a little, though after a decade of marriage, I’m digging bachelor living. I rub my balls and smell my hand, flick boogers wherever, and I haven’t cleaned the toilet—yet. Just for fun, I took a dump in the shower last week and smushed it down the drain with my feet. I’m this close to hiring a housekeeper, which is what I think most guys do. I don’t know. I am making this up as I go along.

As I’m brushing my teeth, I spy a condom wrapper from three nights ago. I hadn’t used condoms in years, being married, but figured it was time now that I’m single again. Whenever I can, I go to bars with brokers, but women steer clear of me—it’s like I have the stank of messy divorce all over me. I’ve discovered that I have no game, to the extent that I had any to begin with. I had bought a box of forty from the CVS, like, when am I going to go through forty condoms? I came home alone, and drunk, and fished one out of the box to give it a test run. I had hoped it would be too small, but it wasn’t, and between the whiskey dick and the prophylactic I probably hammered myself for a good twenty minutes before getting my non dairy creamer going. It would have only been less enjoyable if I had done it left-handed. What a waste, I thought, as I snapped it off and threw it on the shag rug, where it would dry out and stick for a week.