Fragment #16 – 22 July 2014

Laughing to himself because, although he was there to see the girls and watch them dance, and although these endless smoky nights were, for him, a pathetic attempt to assert to himself and the world that if he was not young he was virile, if not handsome then wealthy and powerful, what really tickled him pink at three in the morning when the clubs began to roil with bodies and sweat and alcohol, was that a fashion seeming to have taken off with some of the young men was to have a teardrop tattooed below one eye, or perhaps two or three, and though they boasted that these marks indicated sensitivity, or maybe grief over a departed loved one, to the older man in the corner, who had seen things and done things at that age which still threatened to catch up with him, such tattoos meant that the marked one was in fact property, that they were publicly known as being in the full and complete possession of a more dominant, invariably rough and aggressive man, and seeing these faux-toughs with their teardrop brandings he laughed and laughed, and sometimes he was approached by a young woman who was attracted to his joviality, and sometimes he just spent the evening alone, watching, drinking, and laughing.

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