Otherwise Known As …

by Eugene H. Davis

About the Author: Eugene H. Davis first fell in love with writing while an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, studying with John Yount and Thomas Williams, of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Eugene earned his M.A. in Creative Writing from San Diego State University, and then worked as a screenwriter, film reviewer, and editor in L.A. and Europe, where he doubled as creative consultant to Allianz Global Risk Headquarters, producing infomercials and online cartoon series.

Excerpt

He had picked her up at the lower Manhattan café, Beau’s, where he was accustomed to having a nightcap with his cronies at the end of day.  Both were victims of the city’s power to crush the best and brightest drawn to its promise; both had been defeated by its colossal indifference.  For him, an aspiring artist, cocaine had been his undoing—scrambling delicate circuits of intellectual nuance and aesthetic sensitivity, his birthright, into a monotonous quest for the elixir of excitation, leveler of pain. 

For her, a Harvard graduate and published scholar of feminist literature, and a willowy mid-western beauty, the coping mechanism of alcohol, to numb her acuteness, and blur her monstrous insecurity and self-loathing, had predictably become an end in itself.  It was destroying her just as surely as cocaine was incrementally destroying him, line by line.

A few lines snorted in the privacy of the café restroom, during which certain liberties were taken by both parties, followed by a few more gin and tonics at the bar and the Harvard girl and the Fulbright artist soon found themselves in the back of a taxi to Sunnyside, where the lady kept an apartment.

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