Dregs of the Rocket Fuel Hustle (Punk Noir mag)

Privilege is the ability to carry on thinking the world is just, to be immune to its cruelty by virtue of your station. I realised that a lot later. What a wanker, eh? It was ten AM and fifteen seconds or so. The Centurion’s Elbow, Lord Street. Heavily gentrified but still vaguely hip inner suburban Thrivesville. Sometime in February. “Just don’t do it,” I said, tapping nine bucks, total, for a house sauv and Diet Coke. I put the drink, the soft one, down in front of them, and settled my perch. “Kill yourself, I mean.” Outside, the city was doing its slow defrost Monday morning shuffle.  I’d rolled off the plane sometime around 11 last night, on this work trip, and picked up three bottles of medium priced red wine at the BWS down from my Art Hotel. They were gone by three. I tell a lie – I’d woken up around quarter of five and drained the dregs from each, dry heaved, gut clenching, then tried to piece together another few hours of sleep to get over the arid pre-dawn hump. The sweats had kicked in before I woke. Bad planning, none forward, for sure, having to endure the yawning stretch between consciousness and opening time. You get to know the equations, the waves you can ride successfully. Mostly. X standards from Y to Z, push it here, top up there. The ritual, always immaculate: Rock up to work half blind, early if possible. Loudly insinuate your ethic as the rest of the pod roll in, then jack those headphones and drag your arid skull-meat to the earliest possible lunch call. Slink out and shuffle down the street past the respectables to that dank corner pub full of pensioners, get on it for an hour or so and return, triumphant and buoyant, to dazzle your in-no-way suspecting colleagues with your second wind. Then: watch your DMs for the post-work nod as your booze spike wanes. Make for the door at four, ’cause hey, you were early, so bloody early in, right?