The businessman looks like Howie Mandel. He’d spent the whole night at the bar, complaining about his wife and daughter. His daughter was a brat, a little fucking bitch, he said. He stinks of rum and Diet Pepsi and rants about China.
“What is that?” he asked. He nodded at me.
“What’s what?”
“That.” he gestures at his nose.
“Yes, I have one.” A small blue stud. I went back to my spreadsheet, reviewed rate variances with booking codes.
“If my daughter ever came home with a hole in her face like that, I’d fucking rip it out.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Eleven.”
“I was twenty seven when I had my ears done. Nearly thirty when I had my nose done. I am not eleven. I work two jobs, pay my own bills, put myself through school, and I vote.”
“Well she spends all my money.” He staggers a little. “Music. The iTunes. What can you do?” He shrugs, frustrated by his daughter, Bitch Profound.
“Maybe you should consider not letting a child have access to a line of credit?”
I decided to ignore the physics of ‘removing a hole’. I realized drunk or sober, to this man I would always have the same agency as his daughter, an eleven year old girl. Of course, I had a distinct advantage in that I wasn’t actively spending his money and my orifices were legal to fuck. Only in this way do I have value.
I spend the rest of the evening thinking about my sister’s douchebag father, the one who sat my mother down and explained he was going to pick what law school she attended, assuming he let her go at all. The one who could not contain his rage when my sister was given a black baby doll for her birthday. My mother tries to cover for this offensive gift: “She can pretend she is a doctor working in Somalia.”
“No. She. Can’t.”
I don’t know. Sometimes I remember things.