The Old Fag
Book Nine
Robin & Simon
Chapter One
Watching the accumulation of hairs falling from his scalp to the shower drain, Robin wondered if with the passing of his hair, he was metaphorically witnessing the passing of his career or his lifestyle and launching into a full-blown stage of midlife. Not a crisis, certainly, but dangerously close to wanting to stop the Aston-Martin on the side of some highway and cry publicly.
Diego, on the other hand, was enjoying the meteoric rise in his own career: not a rock star but the local equivalent, poet, lyricist, drug addict, stripper, pimp, and male escort. Robin wondered again, starting to shiver in the shower, how he could possibly keep up with his boyfriend. At 29, Diego was rocketing upwards; at 47, Robin was glumly staring at issues of tenure, research, publishing, and mentoring under-skilled and overly-plump suburban graduate students.
"I shall deal with this another day", he muttered, attempting a Scarlett O'Hara impersonation. His mind remained fairly blank as he wandered through the morning, attempting the routines in his university office, gulping vast quantities of coffee and three aspirin to shave the edge off the hangover. Phone ringing, not expecting any polite or humorous conversation this early, he stared at it for a moment before picking up.
It was Professor Thurneau from Geneva, wanting to suggest a complete re-write of their joint presentation for the conference next spring in Istanbul. Robin did not want to deal with Professor Thurneau at the moment, but it was necessary. Since Robin was the writing guru for their project, and Thurneau the theoretician, it was incumbent on him to be as gracious as possible. Being gracious, in this case, meant muttering appropriate positive-sounding acknowledgements when there was a break in the conversation, and as sincerely as possible agreeing to the nonsense coming from his older colleague.
The upper Midwest has a culture and a rhythm of its own; in some ways, seemingly suspended in time, not having any sense of the degree to which it had rusted away from the tail-end of the twentieth century into near-oblivion, the community where he was raised gave Robin no preparation for this phase of his life, for this ennui he was feeling. Get through the morning routines in the office, teach a couple of graduate seminars in the afternoon, grade a few papers, think about healthy food for the evening and then settle for something slightly more digestible than the student union cafeteria, and shuffle home to await the drama of Diego's evening preparations. He could not allow himself to think about the potential toxicity of it all. Drowning in scotch seemed a reasonable pathway out of the current harsh reality.