Back of my mind

How do I define my success?

It changes yearly, it's whimsical branch after branch of choice and failure and some success mixed in with help from people and a vacant mind.

I bring it without needing to think about it and each day that drives past leaves me with wonderment about how it was an how it could have been if only this or that had happened. I don't mix regrets with my daily life, but some time way back I used to mix it with chemical compensation and swim in the melancholy and euphoria all too often.

Estella eyed me from across the table.

It was a nice restaurant, new décor, new food, new chef, hotter staff than it really needed to have. Even the boys were pretty, pretty and gay, but I was not out of place and neither was she.

A full glass of scotch was already on it's way to yesterdays replay in the urinary tract, Estella's long fingers found some ice in her water. She stirred the water, she was toying with the cubes but never really concentrating on it, rather she was eyeing me because I'd just explained questionable content, intentions, reactions, and how I was given the short stick again.

"An actor has a range"

She pursed her lips and blew out some air, the blonde at the next
table was distracted.

"An actor has a range" Estella mimicked me. "Listen to you" She looked over to the blonde and rolled her eyes like they had an in joke about me.

I brought my thoughts into line, put my best defensive pattern in order. I stopped for a second and looked across at her almond eyed stare and puckered mouth and thought about how wrong I have been for every part I have ever auditioned for, how my grandfather voted for President Taft and other side branches that stick in my mind when I am not thinking about sex or money.

The conclusion I came to was that I was a crappy actor and nobody liked me when I wasn't smiling or hitting on them, and then I allowed myself to remember how often I hit on women and how often I smiled at networked people. I lifted the scotch and sealed the booze's fate in one gulp, I am a sloppy wasteful drunk, but at least I can restrain myself from blowing chunks when I need to.

It took me a swallow and a good minute to recognize that Estella's last comment was an invitation to speak, my move in this game where she was always four or five thousand thoughts ahead of me. I should have changed my tact, but she was so mesmerizing most of the time that I left most of my thinking in the laundry hamper and just never bothered to pick it up..

"Wendy asked me go, she said I was a shoe-in", and I detected desperation in my voice. I so hoped she believed what I wanted to believe. Wendy was a cool French Canadian version of me, manger-la-marde grimace just like me, as fake as me, and also as quick to swap attention to the next task at hand and not get bogged down in details once a decision was made.

Wendy was the perfect casting drone.

Cocking her head to the side Estella moistened her lips and blinked.

"And?"

I wasn't really on a roll, you see I never believed for a second that Wendy's exuberant invitation to read for the part was just her way of motivating me to audition for an obscure venture twenty five hundred miles away in place where I know nobody and where I know it gets colder than Indiana.

Because I didn't believe that I was a sure thing for the part, really, I knew Estella didn't believe it. Between you and me, she could read minds and bend time and space to suit her oliverian hide in just the way she liked it.

"I didn't get it, I had Adrian asking for me but" I was shrugging while I was explaining in a way that normal people would have taken an eight year lease on, you know that bit where I made friends with someone important during the audition process and perhaps that meant something in this cloak and dagger industry.

I paused just a little too long and Estella's hidden Jaguar genetic augmentations sprung to life and she kicked me right in the balls.

"Why do you think that Sarah didn't like you?" Of course Estella was right on the money, like the knife in Mexico City, sharp and surgical, her wit was a swab of hydrogen peroxide ready to clean the wound, or in the last century, a handful of maggots.

"You knew I was going there didn't you?"

She smiled, I smiled involuntarily, she'd come back from disdain.

"Of course I did, you're a sleazy old man" She lifted her long finger from the ice in her little sea of Peligrino and flicked the water on the tip at me. This was where she wanted me to go to, that place where I was not whining about how unsuccessful I am, but in that space where I am taking full responsibility for my actions and where nobody is sabotaging my life but my own unguided sense of right and wrong.

"Bitch"

"ooh, sleazy old man, I said it correct right? I just want you to admit that you undid all the work Wendy and Adrian did by hitting on her, if you ever really had a shot." She had heard my story, she had probed my mind with her powers, and as quick as she was she didn't need more explanation, she had me down.

"Yeah, you're right".

I leaned back and laughed.

"So you find blowing six figures and five months work funny?" She got her serious face back on and returned to her stare tactics until I'd come down from the laugh.

"Yes, it's fucking hilarious you all-knowing witch, I don't know how you know me so well, but then again, just think, if I got the part I'd be in Toronto right now and you'd be having dinner with some other old sleazebag."

"That's true, but you know I would be fucking him later tonight."