Read Lost Girls for Free Online Page A

fast when I want to. Lift myself up to the heroic heights at which my working life takes place. This state of being goes by a name which carries the resonance of a philosophical concept or historical epoch: Billable Time.
    But this transition requires a little help. Most opt for the coffee and doughnut approach, but as coffee holds some antagonisms toward my bladder and doughnuts leave a suspicious film over tonsil and gums, I prefer a line or two of reasonably priced but honorably cut cocaine. This involves some embarrassment to admit even to myself, as more than a few years have passed since this particular narcotic was the hippest in town. Call me old-fashioned, but coke just suits my go-get-’em, 80s temperament. And in the end, the entire matter of which drug is coolest is ultimately beyond rational criticism or debate. Who can argue with tried and true physiological addictions?
    With me, I never have to wait for a birthday or anniversary—it’s breakfast in bed every morning. Two lines taken off the bedside table and the day opens up before me, burns through every vessel in my head and washes cool bleach down the back of my throat. Everything at once electric and numb, a sense of purpose pulsing through tissue and tickling over skin. And along with all this a yearning tosing. Don’t even hum in the shower (and fake it every time I have to stand for the national anthem) but there it is, a balloon of song rising up from a fist of hot muscle in my chest. Sometimes, if I happen to pass a mirror at times like these, I can see myself as one of those grinning lunatics from a Technicolor musical who’s always on the verge of abandoning speech in favor of expressing themselves through rollicking chorus numbers instead. Not joy but a feeling that’s somehow suggestive of the word: the fish hook “j,” startled “o,” the raised hands of a blissful “y.” Even now I know it’s nothing more than the word itself though. For surely if it was the real thing you’d be too busy being joyful to imagine how it might look printed on heavy bond paper under the office letterhead.
    I’m up. Pull back the bedsheet, peer down the neglected but so far—praise God!—still flat expanse of stomach and slouch over to the nectarines for another line. Then another. And then (only after a moment’s balanced consideration) one more for the road.
    I pack, pick a few things up at the office (dictaphone, tapes, laptop, color markers, yellow pads—lawyers’ friends all) and swing down to the car rental place near Union Station to set myself up with some wheels. Normally, it is advisable practice to confirm the price of such items with one’s client, because in the end he’s the one who faces the numbers under the column headed “Disbursements” on the fee statement. But seeing as Mr. Tripp is unavailable at the moment, I don’t see the need to be nitpicky with the professional procedure on this particular morning.
    “Compact, Mid or Full?” the guy at the counter asks once he’s got my essentials tapped in.
    “Anything bigger than Full?”
    “You want a limo?”
    “No, although I suppose I should be thinking about booking ahead for the prom…”
    No smile from the guy. Then I remember: for the rest of the world, the coffee and doughnut is already wearing off.
    “Whatever you have in the Full will be fine.”
    “We got a Lincoln Continental that’s clean.”
    “A clean Lincoln. Splendid.”
    The sign at the side of Highway 400 appears for 69 North and I steer the big car onto the off-ramp, jelly around the curve that sets it on a new course. The way of the weekend pioneers heading up to their vacation properties, rich but preferring to go by the name of middle-class, over-leveraged, under stress, a family. And today an entire generation of children moving into adulthood sharing little but the memory of blazing Friday afternoons, carsick-ness, the view from the flip-up backseats of station wagons. Peeling off at the exits