UGH. Fuck you.
No comments! No love! No fucking ponies! I just spent god knows how long typing up all the crap from my notebook and I'm just going to get yelled at for not watching Heroes yet! I still haven't got around to setting up my fucking laptop and I've had it for a week! I ought to set you bitches on fire with my amazing mind, that's what I ought to do. At the very last I ought to take more paaaaaaaaainkillers and finish what smells like TCP but is in actual fact overproof rum and elderflower and not, as I keep thinking of it, ovenproof rum. I think you could probably clean ovens with it, though. I also suspect that my tendency to indulgence in ovencleaner and codeine is probably diminishing the quality of my so-called writing and thus the LOVE THAT IS MY DUE AS AN AWESOME HUMAN BEING, yes. omigod, can you tell that I'm losing it?
I love commissioning artists, you know. I realise that makes me sound like a poncy twat with money to throw away, which simply isn't true, but I also don't give a flying fuckweasel. As I am an uninspiring sack of shit when it comes to writing characters I don't really generate the desire in people for them to draw me fanart (BOO), exceptions being when I whinge and nag and look pathetic, and then people like Heather and Marika and Ruthi, who are GOOD PEOPLE and will spared when my army of robot wenches holds its military coup and wipes the rest of you ungrateful fuckmuskets off the face of my planet, then they draw me things. Sometimes. Maybe. If I do the special dance of extreme whining. But the thing is, if I commission someone I get to go "rawr, make me artses, precious", and people do! Just because I paid them cash monies! So far I've only really paid actual money to ameinias, for tattoo designs and comic book, and wobblygoblin for tattoo design. I tried to give tweezle money for the forthcoming Tender Masochists tour poster but apparently she feels she owes me for the book on writing for animation, or something. In a perfect world I'd get to give money to Julia Lichty to design my St Sebastian tattoo and pay Kiriko Moth to draw some of my characters but since the "yeah sure, give me money and I'll do character sheets of Harriet and Julie for you" thing with kenix kind of fell through due to him becoming a comics superstar I have no idea whether I can do these things anymore. Also, the downside of having artist friends is that you hear the "fuck, I HATE THIS COMMISSION" rants and I don't want to be That Dickhead, You Know, The One With The Really Shit Commission That I Have To Draw Because I Want Rent Money. I'd rather not make people draw something they're not going to enjoy drawing. And there's always the question of etiquette - paying friends to do something for you always feels faintly skeezy, even though (as with Sarah and the necklace) the results SHOULD be satisfactory for both parties - I get ARTSES to treasure and they get money for STUFF we're able to help each other out. Somehow it ... doesn't feel like it works that way anymore. I look at people's art styles - friends - and think "Y'know, I'd really like to see [x] done in that style, but it's never, ever going to happen" and a list of reasons involving artist being busy with "real" commissions and me being too much of a gimp to actually do anything about it get in the way.
Fuck it. I want art. I want GOOD TATTOOS and I want pictures of my characters that were drawn by someone who can hold a pen and doesn't have duck hands like me, and it's never going to happen.
Here, have some SHIT FUCKING FIC to ignore instead.
Lewis Nixon frequently fell asleep at his desk. It wasn't so much that he had no work to occupy him - far from it - as that the admin office was soporifically hot in hummer, coma-inducingly cold in the winter months and contrived to be stuffy and filled with the hypnotic buzz of computer screens all year round. Possibly it didn't help any that he spent his lunch breaks in the stores closet, drinking cheap abrasive scotch from a hipflask endowed with the magical ability of making all liquids housed within taste faintly of paint.
He was roused from a comfortable sleep, face down in the drifts of paperwork, and from a happy dream about being king of the penguins and inventing a new kind of space ship, by the angry wailing of the telephone by his ear. Lewis hit the speakerphone button with his elbow, winced, and resumed his face-down position with the characteristic shudder of a hangover in full swing.
"Lewis," said an unpleasantly familiar female voice.
"Marta?" Lewis sat up far, far too fast and was forced to retch into the waste paper basket beside his desk before he could continue, his head throbbing like a hammered thumb in some early Warner Brothers cartoon. "How …what … who gave you my work number?"
"Edith, of course. Lewis - "
"I'm going to strangle her," Lewis said bleakly. "I'm going to break into the psych ward and choke her with my bare hands."
"Lewis, shut up. I need a favour." Marta's lips were pursed. He could hear them pursing down the line, all the way from Miami.
"No."
"Lewis."
"I said no."
"Unequivocally? You don't even know what it is yet."
"I don't want to make your life any easier," Lewis said as politely as he could, holding his head. "In case you'd forgotten, I hate every miserable Crisco-slathered inch of your flabby carcass and I always have. And I have no interest in sucking up to Mom and Dad, unlike some inheritance-seeking lawyer scum I could mention. So no deal."
"I'm prepared to remunerate," Marta said. She sounded bored rather than annoyed, but there was a delicate hint of desperation in her voice.
"I don't want your fucking money."
"Jesus, Lewis, there's no need for that." She seemed non-plussed, but not angry. "Look. I wouldn't be asking you if there was anyone trustworthy and willing available, but everyone else is on winter vacation - "
"Which I will shortly be joining them on," Lewis said smugly.
"Come down to Miami."
"Grow a dick and fuck yourself. Why the shit would I come to Florida? It's like a retirement home for satsumas, and it's got you and your pebble-brained husband-cow in it. NO."
"Will you shut up and let me finish?" Marta barked, her old self at last. "I'm flying out to some horrid buttfuck place in Wisconsin to spend a week arguing with lawyers and the soon-to-be-ex inlaws and the 'husband-cow' about alimony and infidelity and all the other wonderful little shit sandwiches of being divorced by the asshole who ruined my career, and I don't want to have to take Marissa out of school. Jake's fine, he's coming with me, but I need someone to - "
"No."
"Lewis."
"I said no. It's a very simple word. Even your parasitical womb-scrapings understand it, don't they?" Lewis drummed his fingers on the paper slush. "Doesn't she have any friends she can stay with? Don't you?"
"None that I want to leave in charge of my daughter for a week at this time of year," Marta admitted. "Or who can really spare the time. I said I'll pay for your flights -"
"And I've said NO. Several times. You don't trust your friends with your precious kidlet, but I'm fine? Are you deranged? Since it seems to fucking gallop in our family."
"You are family, though. Lewis, please. She's never even met you before."
Lewis huddled up to the speakerphone and said confidentially, as a master playing his ace in a very high-stakes game, "you don't want me to babysit for you, Marta. I am a dirty great faggot and I'll just subvert your dear child."
He could almost hear her rolling her eyes down the line. "That's a fantastic attempt, Lewis, but we live in Miami. If this actually turns out to be true and not another pathetic attempt to get out of this, it won't matter in the slightest. For God's sake, her best friend's parents are both women. It won't bother her and it doesn't bother me. If you want me to fly whathisname down with you - "
"Whathisname?"
"Your boyfriend. I'm assuming that, if you're telling the truth, you have one, since you never seem to have any problems getting girlfriends … fuck knows how …"
"A generous helping of the Nixon charm you're showcasing right now," Lewis drawled. "Anyhow, he doesn't like flying, and I'm not coming." He wound the phone card around his fingers and added, "And for fuck's sake, why don't you just ask Mom? I'm sure she'd be happy to go dote on her grandchild and she won't teach it new curse words and euphemisms for anal sex."
"She's already coming to Wisconsin to dote on the other one," Marta said rather primly.
"Well, I'm really busy," Lewis said cheerfully, and hit the End Call button on the telephone's base. He glanced down at the top sheet of the papers beneath his elbow, noted the due date as being sufficiently far enough in the future not to give a crap about, folded his arms over the snowdrift, and went right back to sleep.
He went home via Harry's bar, which meant he arrived there two hours after Dick, to the smell of potatoes being boiled. The smell of bubbling tubers was one that seemed to accompany most of his waking moments over the last year or two and he was seriously considering buying Dick a cookbook by now.
"Your sister called," Dick said as the apartment door shut behind him.
"Edie?"
"No, the other sister." Something rattled in the kitchen. "We chatted for a while. Seems she's got a lot on her plate at the moment."
"Why'd she call?" Lewis asked a little unsteadily; he'd been introducing Harry to the concept of Snakebite, and Harry had come up with the brilliant idea of adding a shot of Jaegermeister instead of vodka and calling it Rattlerbite, and Lewis had been obliged to race him down a few of these, and all in all he was feeling sick and dizzy. The news of this intersection between his love life and the Nixon family only heightened these sensations.
"She needs you to look after your niece for a while," Dick said, adding, 'ow' quietly under his breath. Lewis suspected he'd peeled his thumb again; the afternoon's conversation came back to him in a wave and he made a face. "I said we'd be delighted," Dick went on, over the sound of running water.
"Dick."
"You don't have to take that tone, it's only a week and you've been bitching constantly about the cold up here," Dick said rather severely, and Lewis slumped against the doorway as though he'd been bitten. "Why not take the free trip to Miami?"
"Because it's not free, it comes with a cat's cradle of family shit tied to it, that's why." Lewis flung himself onto the sofa, which cracked at him angrily. "Also, we? Are you getting on a plane for the sake of my sister when you can't even bear to do it for the sake of your own parents?" He realized he was over-stepping a quite important mark with this, but as usual when he was staggeringly drunk the words came out as easily as the liquor went in.
"Marta's booked you a ticket on the Sunday red-eye, so you have the Monday to get settled in before you get Marissa from school," Dick said as if he hadn't spoken, "and I should be getting in around lunch on Tuesday."
"You're taking the Greyhound, aren't you?" Lewis sprawled like a beached jellyfish and belched quietly. "You can’t leave me alone with the under-tens, Dick. I'll be dismembered before you arrive. Your welcoming committee will be my guts, liberally festooned over the lintel in a ulp seasonal fashion." He clutched at his stomach. "Now I really am going to puke."
"No dinner, then?"
"I didn't say that," Lewis muttered. He seemed to be growing a small potbelly, but that was no reason to abstain. Even if it was probably potatoes with a side helping of potato. He levered himself off the sofa - another futile, grumpy crack from the slats - and, sloughing off his shoes, padded slowly into the kitchen.
"I thought you had to commune with nature? Dick said. He was wearing the green sweatervest, the one that made his hair look twice as red and his eyes even bluer and Lewis's heart stop in his throat, and he'd apparently burnt his left hand.
Lewis shook his head dumbly and, after a moment of indecision, muttered, "false alarm", and made a clumsy attempt at embracing Dick without getting in the way of the cooking. He succeeded in hitting Dick in the hand and breathing sour, herbal alcohol fumes in his face, but didn't knock the pan of boiling water off the stove this time, and counted it a success.
"You're drunk," Dick sighed, prying him off.
Lewis made a 'well, here we are' gesture and said, "What - how - doesn't make that any less of a hug."
"It does, Lew, because you never do that when you're sober."
Lewis was about to take issue with this and Dick's sad voice when his brilliant herpetic cocktail idea caught up with his gag reflex and his purple anatomical description and he was forced to make a dash for the bathroom.
After some productive retching and a few flushes that proved to be preemptory - as the sound of the water set him off again - Lewis was joined by Dick, who leaned on the hand basin and asked him in a low voice if he wanted a glass of water. Lewis pressed his face against the cold porcelain of the toilet and made an entirely indistinct noise which was open to a legion of interpretations.
"Lewis?"
"Babysitting," Lewis said with a kind of bubbling horror, and dry-heaved pathetically. When he looked up, Dick was regarding him with the unreadable, unfathomable expression that tended to surface on his face whenever Lewis incapacitated himself with drink.
"You need a change of scenery," Dick said softly. Lewis wished he'd stop hanging back by the basin, looking faintly judgmental (or so said the guilt sloshing about in his belly) and instead come kneel down beside him and let him off the fucking hook with a gentle hand to the back of his neck. "I think the winter's getting to you."
Lewis had, before employment had finally claimed him two years ago, been given to more-or-less hibernating through the dark months with the aid of a bottle of whatever clamped semi-permanently between his thighs. He made no comment, just draped his arm over the rim of the toilet and groaned weakly. Jaegermeister. How those rednecks did it he'd never know.
"You have two days to back out if that's really what you want to do," Dick suggested, standing up straight again. He brushed Lewis's hair off his forehead as he passed to the door.
:Lewis didn't know whether to be grateful or for the out or furious because now he'd have to do it, just to prove some kind of obscure point to himself. He suspected Dick knew that. He suspected that Dick had damn well learnt this manipulative trick from him in the first place.
He suspected it was going to hurt tomorrow, and passed out.
TO BE CONTINUED. AREN'T YOU LUCKY. Part Two Part Three, Part Four Part Five
I love commissioning artists, you know. I realise that makes me sound like a poncy twat with money to throw away, which simply isn't true, but I also don't give a flying fuckweasel. As I am an uninspiring sack of shit when it comes to writing characters I don't really generate the desire in people for them to draw me fanart (BOO), exceptions being when I whinge and nag and look pathetic, and then people like Heather and Marika and Ruthi, who are GOOD PEOPLE and will spared when my army of robot wenches holds its military coup and wipes the rest of you ungrateful fuckmuskets off the face of my planet, then they draw me things. Sometimes. Maybe. If I do the special dance of extreme whining. But the thing is, if I commission someone I get to go "rawr, make me artses, precious", and people do! Just because I paid them cash monies! So far I've only really paid actual money to ameinias, for tattoo designs and comic book, and wobblygoblin for tattoo design. I tried to give tweezle money for the forthcoming Tender Masochists tour poster but apparently she feels she owes me for the book on writing for animation, or something. In a perfect world I'd get to give money to Julia Lichty to design my St Sebastian tattoo and pay Kiriko Moth to draw some of my characters but since the "yeah sure, give me money and I'll do character sheets of Harriet and Julie for you" thing with kenix kind of fell through due to him becoming a comics superstar I have no idea whether I can do these things anymore. Also, the downside of having artist friends is that you hear the "fuck, I HATE THIS COMMISSION" rants and I don't want to be That Dickhead, You Know, The One With The Really Shit Commission That I Have To Draw Because I Want Rent Money. I'd rather not make people draw something they're not going to enjoy drawing. And there's always the question of etiquette - paying friends to do something for you always feels faintly skeezy, even though (as with Sarah and the necklace) the results SHOULD be satisfactory for both parties - I get ARTSES to treasure and they get money for STUFF we're able to help each other out. Somehow it ... doesn't feel like it works that way anymore. I look at people's art styles - friends - and think "Y'know, I'd really like to see [x] done in that style, but it's never, ever going to happen" and a list of reasons involving artist being busy with "real" commissions and me being too much of a gimp to actually do anything about it get in the way.
Fuck it. I want art. I want GOOD TATTOOS and I want pictures of my characters that were drawn by someone who can hold a pen and doesn't have duck hands like me, and it's never going to happen.
Here, have some SHIT FUCKING FIC to ignore instead.
Lewis Nixon frequently fell asleep at his desk. It wasn't so much that he had no work to occupy him - far from it - as that the admin office was soporifically hot in hummer, coma-inducingly cold in the winter months and contrived to be stuffy and filled with the hypnotic buzz of computer screens all year round. Possibly it didn't help any that he spent his lunch breaks in the stores closet, drinking cheap abrasive scotch from a hipflask endowed with the magical ability of making all liquids housed within taste faintly of paint.
He was roused from a comfortable sleep, face down in the drifts of paperwork, and from a happy dream about being king of the penguins and inventing a new kind of space ship, by the angry wailing of the telephone by his ear. Lewis hit the speakerphone button with his elbow, winced, and resumed his face-down position with the characteristic shudder of a hangover in full swing.
"Lewis," said an unpleasantly familiar female voice.
"Marta?" Lewis sat up far, far too fast and was forced to retch into the waste paper basket beside his desk before he could continue, his head throbbing like a hammered thumb in some early Warner Brothers cartoon. "How …what … who gave you my work number?"
"Edith, of course. Lewis - "
"I'm going to strangle her," Lewis said bleakly. "I'm going to break into the psych ward and choke her with my bare hands."
"Lewis, shut up. I need a favour." Marta's lips were pursed. He could hear them pursing down the line, all the way from Miami.
"No."
"Lewis."
"I said no."
"Unequivocally? You don't even know what it is yet."
"I don't want to make your life any easier," Lewis said as politely as he could, holding his head. "In case you'd forgotten, I hate every miserable Crisco-slathered inch of your flabby carcass and I always have. And I have no interest in sucking up to Mom and Dad, unlike some inheritance-seeking lawyer scum I could mention. So no deal."
"I'm prepared to remunerate," Marta said. She sounded bored rather than annoyed, but there was a delicate hint of desperation in her voice.
"I don't want your fucking money."
"Jesus, Lewis, there's no need for that." She seemed non-plussed, but not angry. "Look. I wouldn't be asking you if there was anyone trustworthy and willing available, but everyone else is on winter vacation - "
"Which I will shortly be joining them on," Lewis said smugly.
"Come down to Miami."
"Grow a dick and fuck yourself. Why the shit would I come to Florida? It's like a retirement home for satsumas, and it's got you and your pebble-brained husband-cow in it. NO."
"Will you shut up and let me finish?" Marta barked, her old self at last. "I'm flying out to some horrid buttfuck place in Wisconsin to spend a week arguing with lawyers and the soon-to-be-ex inlaws and the 'husband-cow' about alimony and infidelity and all the other wonderful little shit sandwiches of being divorced by the asshole who ruined my career, and I don't want to have to take Marissa out of school. Jake's fine, he's coming with me, but I need someone to - "
"No."
"Lewis."
"I said no. It's a very simple word. Even your parasitical womb-scrapings understand it, don't they?" Lewis drummed his fingers on the paper slush. "Doesn't she have any friends she can stay with? Don't you?"
"None that I want to leave in charge of my daughter for a week at this time of year," Marta admitted. "Or who can really spare the time. I said I'll pay for your flights -"
"And I've said NO. Several times. You don't trust your friends with your precious kidlet, but I'm fine? Are you deranged? Since it seems to fucking gallop in our family."
"You are family, though. Lewis, please. She's never even met you before."
Lewis huddled up to the speakerphone and said confidentially, as a master playing his ace in a very high-stakes game, "you don't want me to babysit for you, Marta. I am a dirty great faggot and I'll just subvert your dear child."
He could almost hear her rolling her eyes down the line. "That's a fantastic attempt, Lewis, but we live in Miami. If this actually turns out to be true and not another pathetic attempt to get out of this, it won't matter in the slightest. For God's sake, her best friend's parents are both women. It won't bother her and it doesn't bother me. If you want me to fly whathisname down with you - "
"Whathisname?"
"Your boyfriend. I'm assuming that, if you're telling the truth, you have one, since you never seem to have any problems getting girlfriends … fuck knows how …"
"A generous helping of the Nixon charm you're showcasing right now," Lewis drawled. "Anyhow, he doesn't like flying, and I'm not coming." He wound the phone card around his fingers and added, "And for fuck's sake, why don't you just ask Mom? I'm sure she'd be happy to go dote on her grandchild and she won't teach it new curse words and euphemisms for anal sex."
"She's already coming to Wisconsin to dote on the other one," Marta said rather primly.
"Well, I'm really busy," Lewis said cheerfully, and hit the End Call button on the telephone's base. He glanced down at the top sheet of the papers beneath his elbow, noted the due date as being sufficiently far enough in the future not to give a crap about, folded his arms over the snowdrift, and went right back to sleep.
He went home via Harry's bar, which meant he arrived there two hours after Dick, to the smell of potatoes being boiled. The smell of bubbling tubers was one that seemed to accompany most of his waking moments over the last year or two and he was seriously considering buying Dick a cookbook by now.
"Your sister called," Dick said as the apartment door shut behind him.
"Edie?"
"No, the other sister." Something rattled in the kitchen. "We chatted for a while. Seems she's got a lot on her plate at the moment."
"Why'd she call?" Lewis asked a little unsteadily; he'd been introducing Harry to the concept of Snakebite, and Harry had come up with the brilliant idea of adding a shot of Jaegermeister instead of vodka and calling it Rattlerbite, and Lewis had been obliged to race him down a few of these, and all in all he was feeling sick and dizzy. The news of this intersection between his love life and the Nixon family only heightened these sensations.
"She needs you to look after your niece for a while," Dick said, adding, 'ow' quietly under his breath. Lewis suspected he'd peeled his thumb again; the afternoon's conversation came back to him in a wave and he made a face. "I said we'd be delighted," Dick went on, over the sound of running water.
"Dick."
"You don't have to take that tone, it's only a week and you've been bitching constantly about the cold up here," Dick said rather severely, and Lewis slumped against the doorway as though he'd been bitten. "Why not take the free trip to Miami?"
"Because it's not free, it comes with a cat's cradle of family shit tied to it, that's why." Lewis flung himself onto the sofa, which cracked at him angrily. "Also, we? Are you getting on a plane for the sake of my sister when you can't even bear to do it for the sake of your own parents?" He realized he was over-stepping a quite important mark with this, but as usual when he was staggeringly drunk the words came out as easily as the liquor went in.
"Marta's booked you a ticket on the Sunday red-eye, so you have the Monday to get settled in before you get Marissa from school," Dick said as if he hadn't spoken, "and I should be getting in around lunch on Tuesday."
"You're taking the Greyhound, aren't you?" Lewis sprawled like a beached jellyfish and belched quietly. "You can’t leave me alone with the under-tens, Dick. I'll be dismembered before you arrive. Your welcoming committee will be my guts, liberally festooned over the lintel in a ulp seasonal fashion." He clutched at his stomach. "Now I really am going to puke."
"No dinner, then?"
"I didn't say that," Lewis muttered. He seemed to be growing a small potbelly, but that was no reason to abstain. Even if it was probably potatoes with a side helping of potato. He levered himself off the sofa - another futile, grumpy crack from the slats - and, sloughing off his shoes, padded slowly into the kitchen.
"I thought you had to commune with nature? Dick said. He was wearing the green sweatervest, the one that made his hair look twice as red and his eyes even bluer and Lewis's heart stop in his throat, and he'd apparently burnt his left hand.
Lewis shook his head dumbly and, after a moment of indecision, muttered, "false alarm", and made a clumsy attempt at embracing Dick without getting in the way of the cooking. He succeeded in hitting Dick in the hand and breathing sour, herbal alcohol fumes in his face, but didn't knock the pan of boiling water off the stove this time, and counted it a success.
"You're drunk," Dick sighed, prying him off.
Lewis made a 'well, here we are' gesture and said, "What - how - doesn't make that any less of a hug."
"It does, Lew, because you never do that when you're sober."
Lewis was about to take issue with this and Dick's sad voice when his brilliant herpetic cocktail idea caught up with his gag reflex and his purple anatomical description and he was forced to make a dash for the bathroom.
After some productive retching and a few flushes that proved to be preemptory - as the sound of the water set him off again - Lewis was joined by Dick, who leaned on the hand basin and asked him in a low voice if he wanted a glass of water. Lewis pressed his face against the cold porcelain of the toilet and made an entirely indistinct noise which was open to a legion of interpretations.
"Lewis?"
"Babysitting," Lewis said with a kind of bubbling horror, and dry-heaved pathetically. When he looked up, Dick was regarding him with the unreadable, unfathomable expression that tended to surface on his face whenever Lewis incapacitated himself with drink.
"You need a change of scenery," Dick said softly. Lewis wished he'd stop hanging back by the basin, looking faintly judgmental (or so said the guilt sloshing about in his belly) and instead come kneel down beside him and let him off the fucking hook with a gentle hand to the back of his neck. "I think the winter's getting to you."
Lewis had, before employment had finally claimed him two years ago, been given to more-or-less hibernating through the dark months with the aid of a bottle of whatever clamped semi-permanently between his thighs. He made no comment, just draped his arm over the rim of the toilet and groaned weakly. Jaegermeister. How those rednecks did it he'd never know.
"You have two days to back out if that's really what you want to do," Dick suggested, standing up straight again. He brushed Lewis's hair off his forehead as he passed to the door.
:Lewis didn't know whether to be grateful or for the out or furious because now he'd have to do it, just to prove some kind of obscure point to himself. He suspected Dick knew that. He suspected that Dick had damn well learnt this manipulative trick from him in the first place.
He suspected it was going to hurt tomorrow, and passed out.
TO BE CONTINUED. AREN'T YOU LUCKY. Part Two Part Three, Part Four Part Five