Witticism fades on dribble soaked lips caught halfway between quip and piss poor joke, snagged in realization that the statement is not desired. Flagrant display following an ineffectual attempt to display the degree of empathy passed across, mirror the affection and nurturing that is so foreign. Scrub out those Golems whispering in thunderous tones where they sit perched atop your clay built heart you’ve deluded yourself into believing beats so strongly. Open yourself to a differing of feelings, a roughshod pillaging of your isolated innocence protecting you as thistles would from the harm beyond.
There is a gaping pressure to perform and become something more inline with the standard expectation that we all face daily. To become a contributing and upstanding shill to the mockery lifestyle of the norm. Where an unabridged story of what life has really been like would cause discordant gasps and choking on $7 coffees. A land of spreadsheets and data with endless phonecalls and emails to confirm that we are all part of this droll and seemingly futile empire of dreams. Each moment will be etched as gray as the moment prior and only punctuated by the sycophantic bleating that denotes contrived success. But there can be joy milked from every endeavor, every adventure and journey of any kind. For all I lament the necessity of this change I recognize that this, as so much else in life, is temporary in passing. A gateway to attain a degree of comfort for myself and those that I care deepest about. Walking through the door framed in expectations is a moment of sacrifice and service to the good nature of love where we are willing to endure, seek to excel, survive and adapt all for the promise of a more easy smile. Once the game begins, I enjoy the race rat or otherwise. I’m programmed to enjoy the chase, the thrillingly mundane, the average existence. In some ways I know the unsuspected truth of experience, let it guide into appreciation for opportunities and a day not on the street or going hungry. For the leakless roof overhead the potential for participating in the world. I hate the side of me that is drooling at having funds available and the luxuries that they provide. Its almost as though my inner monsters haven’t been sated, are waiting for the next opportunity to scorch away the meat and tender outline of my flesh gone to pasture in the haze where hard living is the only pleasure to be found.
An ex-girlfriend stole my shoes once. By breaking in through the floor level hotel room window I was in while I was preoccupied with injecting another fifty units of liquefied crack and vinegar. I even came out when I heard the noise. All I was capable of doing however, was to stare blankly while trembling under the pressures of the locomotive that was my heart careening off the rails inside my head. Didn’t even say anything, just stared.
It was a bizarre occurrence to be sure. I could only fuzzily sketch out how I had l had hefted her bodily not 30 minutes previously–out into the hallway following what was a reasonable argument taking on unreasonable levels. Now she was snaking out the window to my room dragging behind a pair of black and white Nikes that happened to be my only pair of shoes I had brought.
Earlier that day I had seen my children for the first time in more than a year. At a supervision center I had ridden the buses and trains for eight hours to get to. Just one hour that I paid for out of pocket. They looked beautiful, he was handsome, she was angelic.
Far more than I could take
My ex-wife had structured things so as to ensure I would have to return to my old stomping grounds of New Bedford, MA and this dingy facility if I wanted any access to the kids at all. It was the same city I had desperately sought to get away from during my attempts to get sober. Aside from my children, there was nothing there but the grime and filth and needle strewn streets and shit memories and traumas and fuckups and locations and people I didn’t want or need anything to do with.
I had won $10,000 on a scratch it a few weeks before, something that I never thought would happen though I had kept gambling on them periodically for most of my adult life. I had started a new job a few months previously as well. I was living in a halfway house and had been there for nearly 6-months, longer than I had stayed anywhere in several years now. Things were upbeat with many reasons for optimism and putting nose to grindstone while enjoying some happiness for once.
After seeing the kids I broke down. I knew how much of their absence in my life was my fault, both before and the recent inability to clean up my act.
I checked into a hotel and managed to track down my ex-girlfriend.
She was doing amazing, clean, signed up for school to become a certified drug and alcohol counselor—she was really putting the pieces of her life back together again.
I don’t know if I showed up with the drugs to the hotel and met her, or ordered them after we got there. I do remember using the inside of a hardened blue glasses case as my mixing surface for the rocks. It was good stuff, probably should have just been smoking it, but once you progress to the needle it’s something of an end all be all.
You mix crack with vinegar or another highly acidic agent to break it back down to water soluble form. I used Braggs Apple Cider with “The Mother” because it was rich in amino acids and somehow in my addled puddle of a brain that meant it was better to use for these particular purposes. That and it reminded me of making salad dressing at the home I had once owned.
Shot after shot after shot, ringer after ringer after ringer. All she wanted to do was cuddle up and maybe read some of the book she was studying from with me.
Rock, vinegar, mix, pull-up, vein, red flash, push plunger, go lightheaded, gasp, nearly orgasm, fall slowly when short gulping air, wind up sitting on the edge of the bathtub shaking head to clear the spots from vision and WHUMWHUM from my ears, rubbing quickly inflating arms to try and minimize the swelling.
Lost in and to a ritual, there was no mind being paid to anything else but the same rinse and repeat exercise as had just played.
I realized things had escalated rather dramatically when the chocolate cake was flew past my head, She came at me with those sharpened nails of hers, tried to grab the drugs and throw them in the toilet. Failing that, my ears and face were a good enough post to thud into.. Holding her up against the wall so she would stop ripping at my face, getting spit in my eye before throwing her out into the hallway. I was callous and cruel and willfully ignoring the pointed reality of what I had been doing and how it must have felt to watch me self-destruct so viciously.
Then she stole my shoes.
I had smashed my cellphone earlier that evening in some bizarre fit of rage over something seemingly trivial. Thrown it so hard against the wall the mental housing of the iPhone had crumpled as the screen shattered.
I used the hotel’s lobby phone to call a taxi who took me to get a pair of flip flops at a pharmacy and take me to the hospital for the cuts on my face. The idea of just grabbing some first aid for myself at the pharmacy never even crossed my mind. For quite some time I had become accustomed to just going to the hospital when things had gotten to be too much and I was dehydrated, or crazy from lack of sleep, or desperate for another rehab. It was second nature.
They thought I was there for chest pains after taking my pulse rate. The EKG came back okay and they let it slide though.
Eventually I made it back to the hotel.
The wall in the bathroom was covered in chocolate cake, towels were laying all over the floor. I knew “it” was going to fall apart again with a twisting certainty in my gut born of seeing the same thing happen over and over. Different implosions, different actions at least—but the same result no matter what. Isolated, lonely, confused, ashamed and embarrassed, it never seemed to change.
When I kept shooting coke for the next two days and had to resign my position I was barely even surprised.
Dystopian cartwheels in the caterwauling life we lead staring constantly at the satisfaction all around. Bitching occasionally to satisfy unmet desires that we struggle to attain even at unreasonable cost. The hunt for happiness overwhelms the basics and sometimes its worth it whatever the price. Disciples of a daily rut where we stay stuck and mired deeply in the mud of a situation not planned for. In the moments of joy where our desire for completion coincides with our faithful love and devotion, we find a peace despite the discord that is without compare. In the moments where we falter under the weight surviving as only survivors can and are willing to do, we have to remember the strength we share to stumble on. Nothing becomes the norm and requests for aid cut as a degrading act that dehumanizes us further. Outlasting the shame of each failure and the disgust it brings resolutely waking each morning to the grim gray of sameness. As upper class homeless we are on the outskirts, enjoying luxuries like cold running water and a toilet, that the rest of goddamn society imagines are god given. Fear that the envy of our possessions will lead to thievery leads us to close the door and have knives on hand. Eating another can of soup in mid-summer heat because the soup kitchens provide cans and bread regularly and its too goddamn expensive to purchase a real meal. Endlessly pretending that things will just fix themselves because the reality of work necessary to get out of this situation is beyond daunting, it’s easier to capitulate and get high. Holding tight to special items because they are memories encapsulated in the fur of a stuffed animal or favorite shirt. When you’ve lost it all so many times before the littlest things can have such an enormous significance you might even indulge in a treasure box for safe keeping. Solid week long stretches without bathing because the $7 per person to shower at the truck stop can’t be found. People look at you with mixed contempt and confusion because if you dress nicely and present well it defies logic that you should be in such a predicament. Putting on makeup diligently just to feel pretty for a moment scrape the grunge of sweat stained skin stickily from your body. Oh yes, there is freedom to be found if you chose to indulge and let the wash of illicit and irregular activities become your home. A beer and some vodka to wash down the weather and heat along with the anxious discord of stress over the unknown of tomorrow. A shot or a bowl of glass to provide focused determination the confidence to strive for success into the oncoming crush or an opportunity to zone out and lose days at a time without emotion. Some black tar to sleep peacefully and stay dazed no thought and no fear, no nothing at all because you’ve gone dead inside. Its a slide down into a pit of needles and loss where the bottom can always fall out and take you lower, lower than you ever imagined possible in such insidious ways. Bravo to those that soldier their way out of the muck find themselves a spot of sanity and personal identity allow themselves the grace of overcoming through grit. Fucking monsters of life having been torn through the gutter when they stand proud and defiant despite their obstacles applaud those hard mother fuckers that didn’t give in, defied all the odds and managed to rejoin the world on their own terms.
Wiggling brain worms of love cross each other on withering paths, laying out siege plans and more, demanding the mind bow and be labeled a whore. Tussling tatters of titrated remains, their infection spreads softly but fierce is the pain. When all is lost to the annals of memory (that malleable stuff made of thoughts stuck in entropy), we’ll know not the beginning, seek to suss out the end. But by that point the parasites will be dug in, they’ve rewired the hardware, unfucked the program and rewritten the codes. Their beautifully at odds with all we call real, if God were a worm I might be filled with more zeal. A zest for the unknown where dreams can take flight, even a place to call home in the bitterest of nights. But, here I sit. Obliterated identity left off as a stain to be cleaned by the new host who’d prefer I be insane.
Thrilled to officially be part of the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective – if you haven’t seen their work before please check them out. A fantastic and wonderfully deviant group of artists that I feel truly privileged to be brought in on.
To Ink - a blog from Melting Neurons 