The Starving Years by Jordan Castillo Price Read Free Book Online Page A

hastened out of the room, clutching her torn earlobe and hobbling on her broken heel.
    Tim began the process of untangling the blinds. “Do you know where you are?” he asked Nelson.
    “Must be your place. I don’t hear my roommates complaining.”
    “You were at the Canaan Products job seminar. There was a riot.”
    “Oh, what a shock. Who’d they screw over now? Fuckin’ soulless corporate fucks.”
    Tim cut his eyes to Nelson as he untangled the last few slats and let them fall. It sounded dangerously close to leftist propaganda…or maybe it was just intoxicated babble.
    “They can shove that job up their ass. Didn’t want it anyway.”
    Tim smoothed the blinds into place. Dust coated his hands. And here he’d been so proud of his cleaning job.
    Nelson had turned onto his back. “You’re really tall.”
    “Get some sleep now,” Tim said.
    “Good idea—I didn’t mean to drink so much. After I sleep it off, we can have a little fun.”
    Nelson rolled toward the wall again, winding the sheets around his head. Tim stared at the blanket-wrapped lump in his bed. Nelson’s voice rose from the sheets. “Alcohol m’tabolizes at one ounce every hour, so…how many shots did we do?”
    Tim wasn’t usually a drinker, but a shot suddenly sounded really appealing. There was no time, though. Not now. Too much to take care of. “Get some sleep,” he repeated, stepping out of the bedroom and gently easing the door shut, but only partway, so he would hear if Nelson needed something and called out to him.
    Not that he was under any illusion Nelson even knew his name.
    The sight of his main room, when he took it all in, was startling—two other people were in it, with Marianne still in the bathroom. Tim only owned two chairs, his computer chair, and the recliner he’d found on the curb when Mr. Boswell moved into the retirement community. Randy was now sprawled in the recliner, holding a bag of frozen veg-0-mix to his face. Javier sat in the computer chair with Marianne’s broken shoe on the floor between his feet, attempting to pry the heel off the other shoe with a bottle opener.
    Tim went to the sink and got himself a drink of water. He realized he only had two mugs.
    “So I saw that box of rubbers in the medicine cabinet,” Randy said. “You dating a debutante, or what?”
    The bathroom door opened. Marianne, in stocking feet, with a wide, ladder-like run that spanned the entire length of the right leg of her panty hose, shot Randy a reproachful look. “You’re such a pig.”
    “You’ll have to tell me your secret,” Randy went on, as if he hadn’t even heard her. “I can’t see why a Fertile Myrtle would be interested in a guy like you. Unless she’s out slumming. Is that it? You feed their need to get back at their rich mummies and daddies? Act like some rebel who doesn’t give a damn?”
    “In case you didn’t notice,” Marianne said, “If it wasn’t for him, you’d be a stain on Eighth Street.”
    Randy looked to her with exaggerated patience. “Just making guy-talk.”
    “Earth to Mister Guy-Talk: there is no ‘Fertile Myrtle.’” She grabbed a flier for a Fair and Equal LGBTQ meeting off the top of a teetering stack of books and waved it in his face. “Everyone here but you is into men.”

Chapter 6

    “I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Randy did his best to backpedal, as though his natural assumption, that everyone was just like him, could hardly be construed as homophobia. “I have a friend who’s gay.”
    “What’s his middle name?” Marianne asked.
    Randy peered at her around the veg-o-mix.
    “Uh huh,” she said. “Some friend.”
    He ignored her, pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed, and got a canned message loud enough for the whole room to hear that said all the circuits were busy. “I hate this contract. Either I’m roaming or I’m breaking up or some other dumb shit. Anyone else got a phone?”
    Marianne tossed him her cell phone and turned back to Tim.