Response to the one-word prompt: "Vice"
I quit smoking. I really did. It was maybe the hardest thing I have ever done, physically. Had to do it. There was this one time when I couldn't keep up with a guy, running after him in John Mullaly Park. Trying to chase him down. He was, maybe, ten years older than me. My chest was on fire. I guess it scared me. I thought about my dad. I thought about my mom. I thought about Frank. We all smoked. And I had to be different from them, didn't I? Stubborn. Always different. So, I quit. Took me three weeks.
Gave up sleeping around. I'd had a string of one-night stands when I was in my twenties. But I quit that when a buddy of mine in the Museums service died of AIDS. I saw him a week before he died. Avoiding sex on tap isn't a problem for me any more. I don't miss casual sex. But sometimes, I think, I miss intimacy. Touch. Someone doing little things for you - holding your jacket as you put it on, looking up stuff in a book for you, giving you meaningless little presents. I miss that sometimes.
People look at my face now and they nod their heads and they think: "Drinker!" But, no. Not that either. Sure, I like a beer, or a really good Scotch, or a glass of something red and Italian now and then, but I'm not a heavy drinker. I suspect that Eames drinks a lot more than I do. A lot more.
Gambling was fun for a while till I got accused of card-counting. I was beaten up, and thrown out of a place in Atlantic City. Gambling is for very young men, or for idiots. Or for old men who still wish they were very young and who are still idiots.
Drugs? Oh, please.
Sometimes I'm reminded that I'll be fifty years old soon. Soon enough. If I don't do anything else too stupid. I reckon vices are the natural product of repression, a throw-back from behaviour that civilised human beings repress. But that layer of civilisation ... oh man, it's so thin. Dangerously thin. I'm always watching people struggle to control the baser side of their natures. You and me and them, we aren't so different from the animals that climbed out of the trees and started trekking across the prairie.
New York is full of people working hard on this self-deception, and they're all piled on top of each other. And the ones on the upper levels, they crush the ones underneath. That's when vices get indulged, and that's when murder happens. People crack open under the strain and the real animal behaviour comes flooding out of them like from a broken dam.
Prison - it's the same. It's like a perfectly rendered, miniature version of society. This is what they do to you in here, I think I said, as I was crushing up my food, making it stand in line, and piling it one on top of the other. And if you can't release the pressure by indulging in some kind of corrupting, visceral behaviour, then ...
My time in Tates showed me. Out here, I work as hard as the next guy to keep myself on an even keel. It's ... it's a strain. But I let go of everything when I was in there, when I was punching the living shit out of that man's face. I felt his blood all over the knuckles of my left hand. I felt his cheek bone splinter. I felt euphoria. I felt freedom.