I shut my eyes and sank back into the deep sofa under a blanket, feeling the fizz of the wine on my tongue before letting it slide down and fuel the growing buzz in my head. Both my sister and John’s son, and their families, had dispersed in the days since Christmas, so it was just me left to celebrate alone in the big sleepy house. Mom and John had gone to sleep a little after ten. Holidays with the family weren’t so bad, and snowy Michigan was beautiful, but it would have been nice to start the new year with a raucous kiss instead of a quiet evening. I had the big show on the TV, but even if I wouldn’t be caught dead in Times Square, it just made me wish I were back home in New York as planned before my canceled flight. I popped the bottle early, and sat sipping from a glass of half-decent champagne on the couch as my stepdad’s grandfather clock ticked away the last minutes of the year. I forgot to post this here, but I wrote a New Year’s Eve story based on this micro story and photo I posted on Twitter. Hey, it was steady work and he paid well. Or I would suck him off, period, with no reciprocity. He was always on top, puffing on his cigar. He was steady and consistent but not creative. It was our mutual signal I was open for business. I would go up to him and offer him a light. If I saw him approaching the corner sucking an unlit cigar I knew it was time to spring into action. He needed to feel like a real man and I was ready to help him. He was one of my first and steady customer. Was he such a bad guy? Now his wife called him a chauvenist pig and wanted to be liberated, his daughter was shacking up with a black man and his son had longer hair than his sister and actually looked more ,like a girl than she did! Well, damn them all! He could still walk the streets proudly smoking his cigar and too bad for the person who was offended! All he was trying to do is eek out a iving to give his family some nice things the same way his father did. It was 1974 and Russ couldn’t believe how much the world had changed.