I sat across a young man at a table a week or so ago. I was with d and we ran into a group of his friends outside a restaurant. We sat there and smoked a couple cigarettes. The young man was very tall and thin. He was already drunk. The blazer he wore swung back and forth from his shoulders. We walked to the bar and he walked either very far ahead or behind us. When he noticed he fell behind, he would shoot up again, though shot after shot he would miss. He didn’t seem to know how to work this long body of his yet.
He ordered one or two drinks at the bar and talked to just about anyone. People approached him and he approached others. He smiled and laughed easily and his long hair flapped in the stale bar breeze. He sat back down with us, a table made up of the boys he went to prep school with— and me.
He sat cross-legged and called himself a poet, but other than that said nothing else. Around his friends, he seemed depressed. He crumbled inside the costume, Slouched over, the blazer looked hopelessly bigger than him. He began to fall asleep on himself.
If I were to tap him with a spoon, I thought to myself, he would crack, maybe shatter. If he were older, I would wonder. But he was my age, so I pitied.
I asked him what he was drinking.
He said whiskey.
Straight? I asked.
I dated a gurl named Roxy, he said. When we broke up, I stopped taking it on the rocks...