Third and Last

There was a dollar and change in the bank and I was finishing the third and last beer in my fridge. I kept wondering how I could make five bucks in the time it takes to get to the store. Paypal had fucked me. Locked my account. I had been writing porn again and living off of it, barely, for the last few months, and having suddenly begun to shift a lot of funds through my paypal account, it was locked for suspicious activity and I was out of beer. I didn't even like beer, but it's harder to scrounge a twenty for wine than a five, so it had been beer. 

I kept wishing I was a girl so I could jerk off on a webcam and pull in a hundred bucks or whatever the fuck they make and be done with it. Shame was for the weak and I had little anyway.

The pawn shops around town had all closed. The record stores had all closed. There was never a comic store here. There was no where my dwindling gas tank could drag me to sell shit. 

"You could always get a job," someone had said the day before when I had brought it up.

"They going to pay me today?"

"Well, no, but..." 

"But nothing. Eventually it'll be sorted and I can go back to my system and everything will be fine."

"Your system isn't working."

It was fine. It worked mostly. I made enough to keep breathing. Keep eating. Keep going. If I worked harder, maybe if something picked up traction, I could do better. I was doing as well as I had on a payroll, and I took that as a win. Yeah, I had a hiccup and sometimes I've had hiccups working and maybe my paycheck had been lost, or it wasn't processed, or the state took most of it, or any number of things. So I had to suffer for a bit. That's fine. 

I thought, almost jokingly, that I could probably rob a bank. I had no moral issue with it. No one would get hurt and banks were insured to the fucking moon and back. Victimless. The worst outcome is that I'd pay my rent on time.

Well, I suppose that isn't true. The worst outcome is getting caught, but even then I'd get free room and board.

I wondered what the market for fat white guys jerking off on a webcam was. 

There wasn't much for food in the house. I hadn't planned on the locked account, so now I was scraping through what was left. Mostly just bologna sandwiches and for breakfast if I was really hungry I would make cheese omellettes. I would have preferred wine in any situation. There were two cans of spaghetti-o's in my cupboard that were expired by a year or so that I had just found and I thought I'd probably still eat them. I'd give it a few more days and we'd see.

Paypal said it would take seven to ten days, and if they meant calendar days it was up by a couple and if they meant work week days then I still had a day or two. I could go a day or two, so long as nothing came up.

My beer was gone and I had to piss and I thought about taking a walk but I didn't have three and a quarter for a pitcher at Bar / Food, so I decided I'd just sleep. Time travel closer to tomorrow and hopefully tomorrow would be the day. I could pay my car insurance and my phone bill and buy a box of wine and a pizza maybe. 

I saw little value in anything and I didn't think that was good or bad and I just wanted a fucking drink and to disappear and I thought there should be a program or grant for people like me. The New York State Drunk Nihilist Fund. Or I could just rob a fucking bank.

  

A Moment at Sea

I had a stomach full of chinese and it wasn't happy. Elle and I had watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while we ate and now she was rolling a joint while we polished off a few glasses of wine and deciding what to do next. Maybe paint. Maybe write songs. Maybe wander town.

I had been in a strange place all day. Hopeful and lost also. A few confrontations in the mirror and a rock in my guts. Keep drinking, I had thought.

Elle's living room was lit by strings of christmas lights lining the molding and doorways. Two strands of blueish white and two strands of yellowish white. Both sold as "white". It wasn't unfamiliar and I found it comfortable. I thought about how much I preferred my bed without a frame and how much I hated living up to where people thought I should be and what people thought I should be.

My stomach was stretched and overfull and ached and I would have asked for a stomach rub but I thought it strange and somehow sacred. I am an idiot.

Elle went to the kitchen and put on an old mix CD she had found and smoked the joint. Pot made my anxiety skyrocket and over the last ten years or so had a way of crushing me under panic attacks and depression. More so, anyway. Elle knew and smoked in the other room. She didn't have to but I thought it was beautiful that she did. The mix CD was good and french pop music played and then Portishead after. I watched Elle mouth along to it and I thought that was beautiful too.

When she had rolled the joint she apologized for dropping pot into my wine and when I stopped to take a drink I didn't see any at first. I sipped and saw it stuck to the side of the glass. A small nub soaked now in wine and I took it out and set it on an end table.

I looked at Elle in the other room smoking and drawing with oil pastels and I could see it all. All.

I could also, and clear, see nothing. Soon and forever.

I know you thought you were a good person.

You weren't.

For Me

Wandering again. It was the end of September and night and an anchor sat on my chest. My nose had been running all day and my throat hurt and I thought my house smelled like rotted leaves but I didn't know if it did or if I was smelling infection. I was walking down a long street near my house and looking into peoples windows from the sidewalk as I passed. I had a fascination with watching people live lives when they thought no one was looking. They were calmer, sloppier, kinder (mostly). They took their coats and shoes off at the door and sat on their couches and with their husbands or wives or children and returned to their ritual. The one they'll look back on when one of them dies. 

Remember when we all used to watch television at night and Dad would fall asleep before the first commercial?

Remember when Charlie used to draw all of those trains and show us every one?

Remember the way Mom used to hum while she cooked?

Remember the good? Remember?

Remember?

The ritual. It wasn't for me, but I thought it was beautiful. I understood it and it isn't to say I didn't want it. It just wasn't for me. 

The air cut through my jacket and into my bones as I walked the uneven and broken sidewalk. I had walked it a thousand times, but I always tripped over the same lifted panel in front of the white house where I once was drunk and fell and knocked a garbage can over, spilling all manner of shit into the road. I assumed every subsequent misstep there was the sidewalk taking revenge. Maybe it was.

I wondered if I should have worn another coat, but it was too late to think too much about it. I was out here, a little colder than I would have liked to have been and a little further from home than I would have liked to have been. I walked in the dark. I didn't understand the word home now. Home was a place you could always return, wasn't it? Isn't that what childhood implied? And television? and family? You could always "go home"? I had lived in the same place for eight years, and less than fifteen people had ever been inside of it and it was my sanctuary. It was the only place I felt comfortable, but I was about to lose it. Maybe voluntarily, maybe not. It depended on how you saw the situation. I walked away from it and thought that maybe I wasn't supposed to have that. Prior to moving out of my mother's house when I was fifteen, I had lived in close to thirty "homes". Shelter from weather. A place to rest for a few months and I thought we were nomads. Settling for a moment, finding work, taking in the sights, moving on. And I thought maybe that bone never left me. I was still nomadic and I was forcing domestication upon myself. It just wasn't for me.

I could pay rent but I didn't want to. I felt disrespected entirely by my landlord, and my house was falling apart to the point that I was embarrassed to have people inside of it. Even people that had been there a thousand times. I would hold the rent until it was all fixed but I knew that meant I was holding the rent until I found somewhere better. I could fight it. Bring it to court. Win. That didn't make sense to me. I hated this house and its ghosts. I didn't want to win this pile of haunted rubble. So I thought I'd abandon it and move on. The house was adorable and fine and with a little work, perfect, but it just wasn't for me. I walked.

I didn't know where I was going.

It was better that way. The dark. The void. The uncertainty.

I don't ever want to know what's for me.

It's better that way.

Something in Nothing

I spent a week laying around Elle's apartment painting and drinking and watching her undress and reading a book of short stories I couldn't seem to finish. It was a small apartment in the top of a large house, tucked into the corner. There was an unnecessary drop ceiling and whomever had been maintaining it before Elle hadn't. I puttered around and would occasionally fix small things. Tack down coaxial. Glue the thermostat back together. Get the bathroom door back on it's track (although I had broken it off in the first place). Elle would say thank you and look up at me almost as though I had given a kidney to her father and I was sad to understand what that meant. I went about my business and we bought another case of cheap beer and another two bottles of wine. 

It was a movie I hadn't watched in almost a decade and it wasn't as good as I had remembered, but we were watching it and her head was on my chest and my fingers ran slow through her hair, over, over, over. She squirmed a bit during the bloodier sections and made small sounds of surprise or repulsion every once in awhile and we joked to each other about some of the poor writing, or facial expressions, or whatever came to mind. It was easy and it was fun and it was nice.

The bedroom was dark and cool and the bed was sanctuary where we pulled close and in the dark and over the sound of the small fan at the foot of the bed, whispered to each other things normally better left unsaid but there, under blankets and pressed close, better said. Hand on her skin, above her hip, below her ribs and gripping and I kissed her. Pulled slow away and in the dim light from the living room could see her eyes, dark and wide, wrapping her sight around me, reaching and digging for something. Truth, or hope, or light, I couldn't tell. Something more and I hoped it was there.

Morning and I dug through her sparse cabinets looking for a pan to cook omelettes in. There was one in the sink and I cleaned it and turned on the gas stove, dropped a chunk of butter in and prepped the eggs. As the eggs cooked and Elle slept in the other room I finished the rest of the dishes, poured a glass of wine and listened to the radio. Songs I didn't care for, but didn't hate so I let it play and poured another glass and dropped the two omelettes onto plates and brought them into the bedroom. Elle, still sleeping and without blankets was laying mostly straight in a tank top and I followed the contours and set the plates down on the nightstand and from her ankles to her calves, to her thighs, to her back, and neck kissed upward and on her neck she moaned and rolled a bit with eyes open and looked into me. "Good morning," I said. "I made eggs." She wrapped an arm around me, heavy with night, and kissed me. "Wonderful," she said. "You." Pulled her into me and laid down and closed my eyes, and she did too and the eggs went cold and I couldn't have felt better about it.

Sometimes the eggs go cold, and sometimes you say more than you should, and sometimes you have to fix the little things. But it can be easy, and fun, and nice.