Jack Moore opened his eyes, made a groaning sound, scratched his backside & rolled naked out of the bed.
His hairy pot belly wobbled as he bent down to pick up his underwear from the night before.
The whore that he’d spent the night with had left without waking him… but she’d left a note for him, scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror by the bedside table.
‘Call me some time, Tiger’ it read. Next to it was a phone number but the last 3 digits had been smudged and were now illegible.
As he stepped away from the table, Jack trod accidentally on a black cigarette lighter that he now remembered dropping as he’d collapsed on the bed several hours earlier.
‘Ow, Fuck’. He said.
He mumbles something about needing a piss & disappears from the room, returning a couple of minutes later to the sound of a toilet flushing.
This had become a pretty regular pattern for Jack…the way he always seemed to start the day, these days.
Jack hobbled to the kitchen and spooned some coffee into the pot, lit up a cigarette, the first of the day & stood, still naked by the kitchen window, one-foot balancing on a stool.
Looking out at the River Thames beyond he watched as a barge floated by. There was a woman on deck, carrying a black & white cat. She looked up and saw Jack, framed by the window around him.
She smiled, Jack was still naked. Jack returned her smile with one of his own, spun around 360 degrees and waved back at her. She giggled & then, still armed with the cat, went below deck.
When the coffee was ready, Jack poured some of it into an un-washed cup & walked through an archway into the living room.
He walked to the apothecary chest in the far corner, opened the bottom draw and grabbed a small cellophane wrapper containing what appeared
to be a few ounces of white powder.
Walking across to the coffee table, he sat down, tipped some of the white powder out onto the table and reached for his wallet.
Jack took out a credit card & used it to cut & prepare the cocaine into a neat & tidy line.
As he bent himself forward and prepared to start the day as he meant to go on, for a moment he caught himself wondering when it was that his life had become a scene from a bad Rock n ’Roll movie.
But that was soon forgotten, as he sat back on the sofa, closed his eyes & succumbed to the familiar blood rush that he was now experiencing.
