The Quality of the Piece is Irrelevant

Lancer returns from the cozy abyss of the semi-successful Hollywood actor-writer to visit with his old workmates.  This returning to the bar is an important event for him, though you cannot understand why, as he was around for only a few months, and yet when he bounds through the front door he acts as if he is falling in with beloved college chums at a ten-year reunion.  He has a collection of people with him who look as though they were manufactured by aliens. He introduces them to you and they claim to have heard all about you, and they smile and beam at you and you do not know exactly why but after a time it becomes clear that Lancer has told them stories relating to your ability to render yourself useless.  His dirty-blond hair has been bleached and he is deeply tanned; he is playing the part of a wisecracking swimming pool cleaner in a television pilot, he says.  You ask him if he is enjoying himself and he replies by pointing to the breasts of one of his new friends.  You ask him if this part he is playing is good or bad and he says that the quality of the piece is irrelevant--he is a working actor in Hollywood and the odds against this happening are so great the he would take the part of a singing shitpile if it kept him out of bars like this one. "But you seem to think it's the greatest thing in the world to be back," you say.

"Only because I don't have to be back," he says. "I mean with you I'm sure it's different--you work, you have your wife, you'll probably have kids, right? You're all squared away, but I have dreams, you know? Big dreams. And none of them were going to come true in a place like this."

--Patrick deWitt, Ablutions (2009)