One button monkey

I met him during a heavy summer when the city air smelled like hot trash , the crazies spilled onto the streets and the women, out of their shorts.

There was no preamble. He just sat down next to me, fixed me with a steady stare and said:

"Son, no matter what you think about your situation, it's wrong."

His handlebar moustache, fashioned carelessly from the stained remnants of a million battered phrenologsists, was a discredited relic from the Victorian era now packed into all of the toyhouse warehouses and lorry cabs permitted in an era that values eggs called 'Kinder' rather than actually practising the virtue. Wherever it was from, it interested me more than his stranger's slurred diagnosis of a situation I knew nothing about.

"Have we met?" My only response to unsolicited analysis in basements selling moonshine.

He was undeterred.

"I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of. Decisions made, you know...they were the wrong ones. But this I do know, and you should know it too. For my - many - regrets, the best times I've ever had were making them."

Something about that last sentence rang true and I wanted suddenly to ask him to listen...nod his whiskers and watch his potted middle jiggle in acquiesence to my adolescent woes. But he'd finished, stooped down and started trying to eat the shards of glass embedded in the manuka-glazed, beermat-varnished floortiles. After that, I was kinda too scared to talk to him.