Everyday Madness
Matthew Malone
Malone Small Press
Atlanta
Second International Edition, July 2010
Copyright 2008 © by Matthew Malone
ISBN: 978-0-615-26892-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American copyright conventions. Published in the United States by Malone Small Press, a division of Malone Books, Atlanta.
Malone Books Web Address: http://matthewmalone.co.cc
Printed in the United States of America
Author's Note:
This is an electronic edition of my first novel. Although the novel itself is copyrighted and has been assigned an ISBN, I've decided to offer the electronic versions for free. You may send this to your friends, print it, pass it around, upload it to torrents, share it at will. All that I ask is that you don't remove my name from it or edit the contents. There's no practical way I can enforce that request, so I'm simply asking in good faith.
Why am I offering my novel for free? Well, I'm at a point in my life that I find myself not needing much money. No, I am not rich, nor wealthy. By Western standards I am exceedingly poor. But I have a place to live and food to eat. I could charge for this novel, make a profit, then spend the money on things I don't really need, but I'd rather just give it away. I am suggesting that, if you enjoy this novel and have a little extra money, you consider donating an amount of your choosing to one of the charitable organizations I support. The organizations are listed on my website, http://matthewmalone.co.cc.
So enjoy the book ( I think it's pretty funny ) and consider donating.
Matthew Malone
July 3, 2010
A
Mostly True
Story
There's a fat blister on my cock - down there by the base - that I've taken to calling Mildred. Mildred is a resilient old bitch, even if she often bleeds milky puss. She's been with me awhile, survived all the creams and pills and fingernail picking I could throw her way.
Ladies don't like Mildred. Often, as their faces draw near and their pretty mouths open to take me in, the sight of Mildred will send them reeling back as if my penis were an angry raccoon. I don't mind. Life is endless war. Mildred is my battle scar.
It's a Friday night in June, maybe August, and I'm at a hotel in Atlanta. I can't remember the name of the place, but it seems nice - bright new carpet, towering ceilings, marble columns that rise imposingly from the floor. Plus there's an open bar and the female waitstaff all have big tits and tight asses.
I haven't slept in a week.
My parents are having a retro party - some sort of disco theme - so I'm dressed in a yellow and green plaid leisure suit. The pants are flat in the front and flare out at the ankles around black leather platform shoes. My shirt is just a regular white Oxford, but I leave it unbuttoned until an inch or two above my belly button. Unsure what socks would be tacky enough, I'm wearing none. Earlier, sipping my fourth scotch, I caught a glance of myself in a mirror and laughed wildly.
I've been sneaking away to the bathroom throughout the night, snorting long lines of cocaine off a travel brochure that I picked up in the lobby. The last time, as I stepped out of the stall, my father was washing his hands. He glared at me in the mirror while I pushed up the high skin over my cheekbone and snorted. He asked if I was sick then, drunk, wandered off without waiting for my answer.
I haven't eaten today and, now on my sixth drink, I'm slipping down into that mean drunk place.
Trying to hide near the bar, I watch one of my mother's friends. I think she designs lingerie for Playboy. Can she get me a date with one of her models? Probably not. Stephen Summers is near the door, flirting with my cousin. I hope they don't end up fucking.
The air in this room is sour and smells like the mist from a fresh sneeze. There's a low, painful ringing noise reverberating from the walls. I wince, wonder if anyone else hears it, doubt that they do. One of the ballroom's walls is made of thick glass windows that look out to the city. I stand in front of it and watch the falling darkness. Outside, above the silhouettes of tall buildings, the sky is gunmetal-gray. The clouds are hanging low.
"Reilly! Reilly!"
I turn. An old is woman walking towards me, pulling behind her a thin man with brown hair. The man is short and has a dark shadow of beard.
"Reilly," the old woman - whom I don't recognize - says. "I'm glad I found you." She's wearing a faded, royal-blue pant suit. Her hair is curled and permed. "I was just talking to Remmie here, and it turns out he's the mayor down there in..." She snaps her fingers. "What's the name of the town you're at now? Where you're going to school? Your grandma told me but I just can't recall."
The way she snaps her fingers annoys me. I contemplate kicking her in the cunt but instead just murmur, "I don't remember either."
She gives me a strange look then turns to the man. A smile hints at the corners of his mouth. He shrugs at her and offers no answer.
"Oh well," she continues. "He's the mayor. I thought I should introduce you two. It really is a small world, isn't it?"
"Remmy?" I ask him. "With a 'Y?'"
He has on a flowered, polyester shirt, faded yellow bell bottoms and camo hunting boots.
"IE," he tells me.
"Ah," I shake his hand, say, "Nice to meet you. I'm the anti- man."
He raises his brow. The old woman gives a fake little titter. Her plaster smile cracks and tries to break. Remmie laughs. He's swaying slightly.
Later, I'm standing with my ear against the wall, hunting for the source of that goddam ringing noise, when, out of the corner of my eye, what looks like a pterodactyl - maybe just a mutant flying lizard - flaps past the windows.
I drain my drink and chew up the ice. The loud popping and cracking between my teeth almost overwhelms the ringing. I open my fist and let the short, ornately-carved crystal glass drop to the floor. It bounces once against the carpet before settling on its side.
I'm heading to the bathroom to sniff more cocaine when there's a commotion at the door. My father is waving his bottle of beer and screaming at a mountainous security guard. The big guard's dressed in a uniform of navy slacks and a white, collared shirt. A gold shield is stitched to his sleeve. None of the man's clothes fit him right - too tight and too short. A white plastic nametag pinned to his chest reads, "BOWERS" in strong black letters.
"Quiet down? Quiet down?" My father is yelling. "What's your problem, asshole? We rented this whole goddam floor! We'll be as loud as we want! The concierge told me we wouldn't be disturbed, so get your fat ass out of here and go bitch to him!"
I arrive just as my father drops his beer and shoves the guard. Stepping between them, I raise my arms, one hand on each man's chest. This brings my brightly-colored jacket sleeves into clear view and the interlacing, striped fabric makes me nauseous - a feeling of rabid squirrels trying to claw through my stomach lining.
I begin spewing clichés like, "Okay, guy, we don't want any trouble," and, "I know you're just doing your job, man. We can work this out," but the guard is beyond reason. Blotchy redness is climbing up his neck.
"Return to your rooms now, sirs," he orders. "This gathering is being officially ordered to disband."
From my father: "Disband? Are you fucking serious, you stupid prick?" He looks at me, his face pure confusion, then angry as he turns back to Bowers. "Get the fuck out of here, you asshole. Leave us the hell alone!"
I palm a folded-up hundred-dollar bill from my pocket and offer it to the guard. Franklin's one visible eye stares up at me before the guard shakes my hand and accepts the bill.
"Thank you," he says. "But I'm still going to need you and your party to leave this area."
Everyone's watching now. The cocaine makes my blood angry and hot.
I shake my head. "You fucking cunt," I hiss. "You really want to be like this? You're gonna take the money and still be a dick?" I grab the nametag pinned to his chest and rip it off, calmly drop it to the floor and say, "Turn around, and get - the fuck - away from us."
"You little shit!" the guard yells. His arm comes up with a clenched fist, loaded to swing.
Before I can set myself in a defensive Shaolin Kung Fu stance - left palm forward, right fist clenched - I see Remmie running up behind the guard. His arms are raised over his head, holding up a big ceramic serving platter that's dripping brightly-colored red and yellow sauces down into his hair.
In a swift arch, he brings the thick plate down onto the guard's head. I wince at the sound of the man's skull cracking under the thin, muffling flesh. Bowers falls in a big mound. Blood, already pumping from the torn skin, turns his hair dark and wet. It saturates the thin hotel carpet and swells out into a macabre, rust-brown halo around his head. I kick him twice, quickly - once in the gut, then again on the side of his thick throat.
"Well alright," my father announces to the room. "Back to the party!"
The police arrive with an ambulance. Bowers leaves on a stretcher. The guests mill around the cops, giving explanations while offering money and future favors. The officers leave – richer, and apologizing for the inconvenience.
The party goes on.
I'm in line at the bar when Remmie sidles up next to me. His smile is big and drunk.
"How 'bout that, Reilly?" he asks.
"Good fun, Mr. Mayor. Highlight of the party."
I order myself a scotch, him a bourbon. We take our drinks and wander toward the windows.
"So what do you do, Reilly?" he asks. "Besides college, I mean."
"I've been working on a nervous breakdown for the last couple months."
"Oh yeah? How's that going?"
I shrug and throw out my bottom lip, "Alright, I suppose."
"You like to hunt?" I find that helps with stress."
"Not since I was a kid."
"I go out everyday. Gotta kill something, right? Otherwise, I'm just not myself."
"Really." I draw the word out. "I guess that's one way to handle things. I'm pretty sure I'm insane, though, so I probably shouldn't start wandering around with a rifle, murdering things. Could lead down a bad road, you know?"
"Killing," he corrects. "Not murder. Fine-line difference."
"Sorry," I tell him, ask, "You ever kill a polar bear, Mr. Mayor?"
"No. But my friend shot a bald eagle once."
"Isn't that illegal?"
"He's in federal prison now." Remmie looks over my shoulder and takes a drink.
"Too bad. Sounds like a hell of a guy. You hear that fucking ringing?"
He ignores me, says, "Sasquatches have been bad this year."
"What's that?"
"Sasquatches. Smelly fuckers have been everywhere."
"Oh yeah? Well, that's interesting."
"I shot one a couple years ago. A little one. A pup." He sips his drink. "Just winged it, though."
"You sure it wasn't a raccoon? Or a really hairy person?"
"Nah. It was Bigfoot. I usually coat my ammo in poison dart frog mucus, but that day I forgot." He empties his glass. "Just think, if I wouldn't have been so goddam sloppy with my preparations, the poison probably would have dropped that sumbitch after a hundred yards. I'd be famous now."
"Tough break."
He picks at his teeth with a fingernail. "I've got a hard on. You like pussy, Reilly?"
"I surely do, Mr. Mayor. Very much, actually."
"You like strippers?"
"Not as much as whores. Strippers leave you with a hard on, and that empowers the terrorists. We can't let those bastards win."
"I fucking love whores," Remmie says. "Let's go buy us some. You grab a couple bottles from that bartender and meet me in the lobby."
"Alright."
He starts off, then spins back and points a finger in my face. "You ain't a Jew, are you?"
"No."
"Good. Alright. Just checking. Let's go."
We spend the next hours of the night weaving along Alpharetta roads, drinking bourbon and occasionally firing Remmie's .45 out the window of his truck. Strip clubs dot the area and we visit them all, blatantly smuggling in liquor, the bottles lumpy bulges under our coats.
When our erections become painful, we drive to a Korean massage parlor, Miss Kim's AAA Spa. It's a discreet storefront nestled in a strip mall. Next door is a limousine service, and long black cars fill the parking lot.
I pay my money and the madam leads me to a dark little room.
Lying on the stiff massage table, my tacky Goodwill suit is a rumpled pile on the floor and the liquor is pounding full-bore towards blackness. An almond-eyed Asian fondles my flaccid cock in her tiny hands. As she bends down and begins to lick me with quick, darting movements of her triangular tongue, my mind begins to wander and my body begs for opiates, yearns for a shot from the sharp, shiny needle.
Intravenous drug users are a special kind of people. When you become willing to inject dirty street drugs directly into your blood stream, you've reached a point in your life that's hard for most people to imagine, even fewer to actually reach. It sets you apart from the average user, the posers who snort two or three small lines of cocaine on Saturday nights while sipping cheap domestic beer and flirting with drunk women.
I've heard that once the big veins in the arms and legs become maxed out, some addicts start shooting into their dicks. I'm not there yet, but the option isn't totally outside the realm of possibility. For now I can still get off between my toes.
I need heroin.
No, stop - don't think about that. Don't think. Focus, concentrate on the chink. She's sucking on my balls now. Did I pay extra for that? I can't remember.
I struggle to raise my head, perverse satisfaction rising up in anticipation of the whore's reaction to Mildred. When my vision finally focuses, something's obviously wrong. The girl's still going. The blister's gone. Completely vanished. Not even a mark.
Was it ever there? Was Mildred real? Would I hallucinate a herpes blister? I try to remember the first time I noticed Mildred down there, try to pinpoint the morning I woke up to her staring back at me, but the hazy memories don't form up right. Something's fucking with my head. Everything's fucking with my head.
Squinting down at my crotch, I mutter, "Well that's odd," and I'm going to ask the whore if she thinks my dick is big, and whether or not she sees a blister on it, but then the ceiling spins and tears open into a frightening black-blue sky.
I decide to close my eyes.
• • •
On a Wednesday I walk into the psychiatrist's office.
The usual smell - sweet wood shavings and old feces, reminds me of a pet store - is thick in the lobby like an invisible cloud.
The receptionist with the dumpy ass and the ring of fat around her belt stares at me from behind the desk. She slides open the glass partition with an arched brow. There's a candle burning next to her. When I lean forward to talk, the slight heat radiates onto my arms.
"Reilly Reynolds," I tell her. "Two-thirty appointment."
She makes a check on her clipboard and tells me to take a seat.
It's a tiny waiting area, dim and hard to breathe in. I need a gas mask to protect me from the fumes that rise from the excrements of hate and fear left to linger by the people here before me. The chair I find is padded and covered with rough, woven wool. There's a wooden board under the fabric that hurts my ass, right up into my tail bone. Cheap, generic artwork - sail boats and golf courses - hangs on the walls.
I watch the other people in the room and wonder if they're as crazy as I know I am.
A fly lands on my leg. I try to skewer it with a pencil but it moves at the last second, and I end up stabbing the lead through my khakis and into the fatty flesh of my thigh. Swearing quietly, I put the blood-tipped pencil back into my pocket.
The Devil is real, and he knows my name.
"Reilly?" Dr. Clance calls with a smile.
I look up at her, try and fail to force a smile.
"How are you today?" she asks as we walk to her office. She's a short black woman, older than me, wearing navy slacks and a checkered blouse. Her slick hair is pulled back in a tight bun.
"I'm okay," I tell her.
Her office is crowded with books. The walls are decorated with posters reading things like, "It will be okay," and, "Tomorrow is a new day." We sit facing one another - me on a love seat, her in a black, executive-style desk chair.
"What happened to your leg?" she asks.
"Nothing."
"It's bleeding."
"No it's not."
"Okay." She scans her notes.
"How's everything going? Still feeling the depression?"
"Yes."
"The meds don't seem to be helping?"
"Maybe a little."
"Have you had any more incidents?"
"Manic episodes?" I ask. "You mean manic episodes, right? Isn't that what you call them?"
"Yes."
"Not lately."
"Good. No more attacking random people?"
"No." I scratch at my beard. "Not since that kid."
"How's he doing?"
"Good, good. He got out of the hospital last week."
"Excellent. That means the anti-psychotics are doing their job." She gets up and walks to her desk, picks up a booklet then returns to her chair. Sunlight coming through the window behind her hurts my eyes. "Have you thought anymore of harming yourself?"
"No," I answer automatically. Tell them 'yes' and they send you to the bad hospital with the nice name and the hallways filled with screams.
"Well, how would you say you feel overall? If you had to sum it up."
"I'm so unhappy I can barely make it through the day. Everything I see and everything I do are just pointless actions of denial. I feel like I am all the depravity and all the unhappiness in the world condensed into a single human form. I feel like I'm the shit stain on the bathroom wall of the world that everyone sees but tries to ignore. You know, in the hope that someone else will come along and clean it up."
Her eyebrows make two little arches. "That's a pretty grim outlook. Bit dramatic. I'm not ignoring you, am I?"
Shrug. "I pay you."
"Fair enough. I bet you feel very confused, don't you?"
"No. The opposite. I feel like I understand everything perfectly and that's what makes me so incredibly unhappy."
"Why do you think you feel that way?"
"Chemical imbalances? I don't know. Maybe life is just wearing me down, killing whatever it is that lives inside and controls me."
"You mean your soul," she says.
"Okay."
"Can you give me an example?"
"Example of what?"
"Something that wears you down."
"College," I answer immediately. "College is a fucking waste. I've been there for years and I'm not really learning anything. I don't even know why I'm there anymore."
"Then why are you?"
"So I don't have to deal with the real world, I guess. Or something like that...fear, maybe. And because without that piece of paper, that goddam diploma, I'm not worth shit in other people's eyes. It's like I'm just buying a piece of paper so I'll be accepted by everyone else and keep up this illusion of normalcy."
She remains silent, jotting down notes between encouraging glances.
"I guess I'm disillusioned," I continue. "Nothing is ever what I hope it will be. Everyone told me that college is this utopia of freethinking and acceptance, but it's not. That's a fucking lie. The people there are just as close-minded and bigoted as the rest of the world. If anything, it's worse, because the college people try to pretend they're not."
"I think college is very accepting."
"Jesus. How can you say that? Do you really believe that?"
I go on to tell her about the class I had in rhetoric a couple semesters ago, the class with the hyper-liberal lesbo professor who was always criticizing the government. I tell Dr. Clance how our class started getting death threats, how students or teachers or some crazy assholes actually wanted to kill us over meaningless bullshit sessions in a classroom. How there were only eight of us in that course. Eight students and a teacher, and how that frightened someone enough to threaten our lives. I tell her how we had to have campus police escort us from the class to our cars for weeks, and how insane it all was.
"What does that say about my school?" I finish. "What does that say about this country? What does that say about humanity?" I stop for breath and cross my legs, pick at a scuff on the toe of my Topsiders.
"That's hard to believe," she says.
"Only because you've convinced yourself to believe that this illusion of freedom – free speech, free actions, whatever - is real." I look her in the eye for the first time. "It's not."
"Now you sound like a conspiracy theorist."
"Why? What I'm talking about are simple observations gathered and combined to form a logical conclusion - the conclusion that life sucks and there's no point trying to change anything. At least I'm capable of understanding that's just my personal opinion and I don't try to force it down other people's throats."
She squints at me, as if she's looking at something deep inside. "Have you been having more of the delusions you were telling about, Reilly?"
Feign surprise. "Of course not," I lie.
"Because someone as creative as you - when someone like you suffers from the conditions you've been diagnosed with, they can start to build up fantasies in their minds. Complex delusions. Intricate, convincing tricks of the brain. You've had nothing like that?"
I laugh and play with the pleats of my pants. My leg throbs. I wait a moment before answering. "No. Nothing like that."
"Are you still hearing things other people don't hear? Seeing things other people don't see?"
"I don't know." I give her a shrug. "How could I know? If I see it, it's there. I don't go around asking people to double check me all the time."
"Alright. Well, I want you to watch out for anything like that, anything you see that you find out isn't real. Write it down and call and tell me."
"Okay."
"For now, I think we should bump up your medications a little. Have you been having any bad effects from them? Any reason to change them?"
Inside, I smile. "No. I don't think so."
She rips pages out of her prescription pad and hands me the stack. "Let's try this and see if you feel any better."
"Great," I mutter. "Thanks alot."
I stop at the receptionist on my way out and hand her the check for two-hundred dollars, then head for the pharmacy.
Staring at the row of assorted plastic bottles, I sort the colorful pills with my finger. Rave-blue, eel-green, bone-white, and my favorite - a big strawberry tab speckled with little tan spots. I swallow them, one by one, with sugary opium tea.
Zoloft (80mg). Xanax (.5mg). Strattera (80mg). Adderall (40mg). Lithium (150mg). Abilify (20mg).
The pills fill my stomach. I can feel them tumbling in the acid as they slowly dissolve and fuel my blood.
Whatever soul may once have lived inside me has molted from this body and moved on. I function through the days like an old wristwatch ticking through well-rehearsed motions, winding myself up each morning with this regimented onslaught of prescription drugs.
Often now, I find myself questioning whether I'm asleep or awake. I live disconnected from morals or worries - even pleasure is hard to find. I know and accept that I'm the worst kind of person.
The acceptance brings no relief.
• • •
When I open the door, Melanie is standing there. Her hair has been dyed pink. She smiles up at me. I'm not sure what to say.
"Your goddam hair's pink."
"Do you like it?" she asks as steps inside.
"No, not really."
"Fuck you then."
She hugs me, her head barely reaching my shoulders. Hot breath blows on my chest as the smell of strawberry shampoo gets in my nose. I can feel her stiff nipples through the thin cashmere sweater she's wearing.
"Actually," I lie to her. "It's kind of sexy."
"Thanks." She smiles and shows straight, bright teeth. She seems pleased. "Where ya been?"
"Running. It's good for me. Flushes the toxins and releases endorphins."
"Have you eaten yet?"
"No."
I cook us thick, bloody hamburgers and we take shots of whiskey, enjoying the smell of the meat frying in the pan. When we eat, she puts too much ketchup on her burger and the thick red slush mixes with grease and drips down her chin. I laugh and give her a napkin.
Finished with the food, we each take a Xanax then retire to the living room. I sit back in my chair. She lies on the carpet, points her arm straight up, and uses her fingers to trace phantom images on the ceiling.
I close my eyes and try to imagine what happiness feels like, then fantasize about being a bear. There's a dead spot on my back, almost at the base of my spine. It's numb most of the time, but every once in awhile there's a tingle followed by the sensation of hundreds of pounds of pressure pushing down on that one little spot. It's tingling now.
Melanie gets up and walks over. She grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet.
"Let's go upstairs," she says.
"Okay."
Afterward, we lie next to each other without speaking. A giraffe is humming the tune of "Dixie" from somewhere unseen. I turn on a John Prine album. The music relaxes me, distracts me.
"My life is a waste," Melanie says.
"Was it really that bad?"
"You know what I mean."
I do, say, "That's what drugs are for."
"That's pathetic."
"That's life. My life. Makes yours look good in comparison, I guess."
"There has to be some point to it, some greater purpose."
"You could always try to justify your existence with a belief in some imaginary higher-power," I tell her. "I hear illusion works wonders."
"That's crap."
"Yeah, probably."
I light a joint and we pass it back and forth. The red ember glows in the darkness.
"You just have to accept that we are mean, selfish creatures living insignificant lives," I say. "The best we can hope for is some kind of control over our destinies."
"I just...I just need to know that it's all for something."
"You're born, you suffer, you die. If something nice happens in between, consider yourself lucky."
"You don't think that's what life is? The nice stuff in between?"
"If you can make yourself believe that, then it is."
Even in the darkness, her body looks tan. Her legs are short, muscular, and defined. My gut looks pregnant, my skin as white as the moonlight trickling through the window. There's a scar next to my belly button, an old memento from a knife fight with a homeless man on the Marta train.
"Then it's all just a waste," she says. "There's no point."
"All that matters is what you do while you're alive. When you die, it's over. If you live for death, your life is wasted. You can do anything you want. Right now. You're free. Think of how incredible that is. There's no right or wrong. Live. Never let yourself fall into those bland, religious traps. I think I'd rather be ripped apart by wild lions than die old and safe with delusions of heaven. You have to accept your own worthlessness in order to live."
"But how can you live like that?" she asks.
"Because it's true. Once you know the truth, there's no other honest way."
"Well, if nothing matters, why not kill anyone who disagrees with you? Why not just rape any woman you want?" She rolls onto her elbow and props up her head to face me. "You're talking like a nihilist."
"Why? Why would I want to? Everyone's entitled to their own shot at happiness. I have no desire to interfere with that. I have no right to interfere with that. I treat others like I want them to treat me. Don't you remember that rule from kindergarten?"
"That doesn't work in the real world."
"Works for me."
"But you're the most unhappy person I know."
"That doesn't mean what I'm saying is any less true. It just means I'm an unhappy person. I know what I should do and I choose not to. I choose self-destruction. I choose to waste my existence."
"Why?"
"I don't know. It just seems right. I don't believe in destiny, but somehow I feel that this is the right thing for me to do. To give up on happiness and embrace the misery and the depravity."
"Still - how can you live like that?"
"Drugs help, even if just for little bits of time. They bring happiness, euphoria. I've heard people say that it's not real happiness, but what is? Only feelings are real." Melanie sighs. I go on. "I think drugs are the real God," I tell her. "If that's true it means I can capture God in a bottle, a line, or a needle. I like that thought."
"You might as well kill yourself."
I stub what's left of the joint into the clay ashtray between us.
"I think about that every day."
"What about love? Love's something to hope for."
"Love is the worst kind of bullshit."
"Have you ever loved anyone?" she asks.
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"She left."
"Why?"
"I guess she didn't love me anymore."
"Do you love me?"
There's a nickel-sized bruise on her ass. I poke it with my finger. "I don't know. No. I don't think I ever want to be in love again."
"That's ridiculous. You're only twenty-six."
"What does that matter?"
"You're too young to say something that definitive. You probably don't even know what love is."
"I think I do. That's enough for me."
"But what if what you felt before wasn't real love?" she asks. "What if you just thought it was because you didn't know any better?"
"It was real. It was love."
"What did she do to you?" Melanie asks quietly.
It's my turn to sigh. "She just... stopped loving me. That was enough. I never want to hurt like that again."
"You can't just give up because one relationship didn't work out. You'll be missing out on life. It's pathetic."
"It's enough for me."
"That's so stupid, Reilly. You're so stupid. You're an idiot."
I light another joint.
Last night, aiming at suicide, I swallowed an excessive amount of drugs; a combination of Methadone tablets, Percocets, and Xanax. Instead of sleeping myself to death, I spent the night sweating and eating thick-crust pizza while wearing nothing except my Winnie the Pooh slippers and a Red Army officer's cap. I tried to masturbate, but my cock had no feeling and played dead. I smashed my hand with a hammer just to feel something.
Coffee is black and best served hot. The devil lives in Tasmania. Sometimes, when people ask me simple questions I pretend not to know the answers. The sky is red and my teeth are bleeding, but tomorrow will be worse.
I am the anti-man. My name is Reilly Reynolds and I want to die.
• • •
I go to a party at one of the big, white houses on Greek Row. There's a band playing and I wander among the crowd with a bottle of gin, smoking a joint and screaming, "Do you have cocaine?" but no one does.
A girl in a pink shirt approaches and flirts with me while touching my arm. I'm nervous and turned off by her eagerness so I tell her to leave me alone.
I climb the stairs and walk down the halls. Kicking open bedroom doors, I find drinking, smoking, and fucking – but no coke. In one room, a huge, drunken beast charges me, enraged that I've barged into his room and woken him from near-inebriated slumber. I smoke a joint with him to avoid personal bodily harm.
Frustrated, I finally call Rich. He brings me an ounce of powder and some digital scales.
I make base in the big beast's room. He's high now, and appeased. He says his name is Matt. When I tell him my plans, he laughs and invites me to move the drugs from his room.
I begin selling grams of the cocaine for sixty-dollars, with no price reduction for quantity. Once everyone at the party's had a taste of the product, I raise the price to seventy-five. They keep coming back, faster than before. A greasy man with black fingernails trades me for some heroin. I quickly put it up my nose and the night gets better.
A girl sucks my dick but I'm too strung out for anything to work down there. She finally gets bored and passes out next to me on the couch. Just before six in the morning, a man, older than me - shaking, near death, with bloodshot eyes and the stink of liquor - enters the room with a handful of coins and dumps a clatter of quarters onto the glass coffee table.
He begs, "I've got five dollars, man. Hook me up with a line. Please."
I laugh and tell him to bring me money, paper money. He starts to cry and lies on the floor near my feet. Matt comes back – he left earlier, saying something about a girl - and tells me that he's going to bed and that I need to leave.
I drive home, bang my head against the seat of a wooden chair thirty-seven times, then sleep for twenty hours.
I am grim black evil masquerading in the skin of a man.
• • •
Cold, fluorescent light is burning my eyes. They water as my leg twitches with nervous energy. I finish reading and look up at the class grouped in a half-circle around the room.
"That was really funny," says a middle-aged woman - dumpy, with a bad bleach job. "You should write for Saturday Night Live."
You're an ignorant cunt, I think, pleased, and say, "Thanks."
"Was it really Jesus?" This from a brunette with huge tits and quarter-sized nipples that poke against the fabric of her shirt.
"I dunno."
"Of course it wasn't Jesus." The dumpy woman, Wanda, is speaking again. "That man was using drugs. Jesus would never take drugs."
Her voice bounces against the speckled tile floor, echoes off the white-painted cinder walls. She's sitting in a plastic, blue chair. I fantasize that one of its thin metal legs will snap, sending her fat ass slamming to the ground.
I blink.
They're all staring at me. "It's ambiguous," I say.
"I think it's great," says a tiny young woman still dressed in cotton pajamas.
I wonder what her vagina looks like beneath the pajamas. Shaved completely? Maybe just trimmed into some exotic shape, like a heart.
Outside the window, two panda bears are fornicating violently on the sidewalk. I try to remember the last time I ate LSD.
The professor - short, bald, with a tuft of brown hair under his lip that reminds me of a shit stain - begins criticizing what I've just read. I only half listen. Why should I care about what this man thinks? He once told me, while we smoked marijuana from my tall glass bong, that he has been working on a novel for twelve years, yet still doesn't have a title.
"... you're telling too much," the professor is saying. "I want you to show."
"But I'm telling a story."
"Show, Reilly, show. Like a movie."
"It's not a movie," I reply, anger working up through my glass-eyed Lortab haze. "It's literature. It's supposed to be superior to movies and all that Hollywood bullshit."
"Well, then at least try to be poetic. Your writing is too vague, too raw."
"But life is vague. And raw. It's just a series of random nightmares. And I don't have time for poetry."
He answers something, but now I'm really not listening. I know what this pathetic, babbling PhD scored on his SATs - 730 - and I assume he must have misspelled his name.
I want to scream curses and strip naked, explain to everyone in this shitty classroom that we should all give up because none of us will ever make any difference after we're dead. Instead, my stomach revolts and my throat begins to siphon. The room shrinks. I spew blood-laced vomit all over the long table. The smell is strong with acid.
"I quit," I tell them, wiping my mouth, then leave the room.
No one objects or even speaks, but I slam the thick wood door behind me anyway and throw my portfolio - which holds everything I've written these past seven years - into the first trash can I see while picking chunks of vomit from my beard and whispering, "I am the anti-man."
Outside, the July sun is hot and high, the air so humid that breathing comes hard and thick and wet. I squint while fumbling for my mirrored aviators.
There are only a few dozen summer school students wandering around the campus. Some stare at me, raise their eyebrows at the vomit decorating my shirt. I belch loudly, little traces of bile coming up into the back of my throat.
My stomach feels better already.
I head back to the apartment in my forest-green Audi, crack the window after lighting a joint. My parents bought me a house outside of town, but I use my own money to rent an apartment near campus.
The last stanzas of the Band's "King Harvest" fill the car. Pulling into the apartment complex, I flick the roach out the window onto the hot, red pavement. The bizarre red pavement of the parking lot is what drew me to this place, despite its old, worn townhouses that stink of burnt cigarettes and stale, sour paint. The lot looks like a tennis court. For some reason, I find this comforting.
Rich's little, blue Honda is parked in front of my building.
As I climb the steep metal stairs to my door, I can hear voices above. Lee, my neighbor, is sitting with Rich on the smelly couch we pulled onto the balcony months before. Lee's body is thin and bent. His leg twitches constantly. His face is pale and drained - dirty with acne, boils, and sweat. His irises are bright blue, but his half-lidded, heroin-dead eyes seem to see nothing.
"Can't find anything?" I ask him.
Lee scratches at his arm. "Whole town's dry. I'm staring to hurt. Bad." He wipes snot from him nose with the back of a hand. He's wearing dark, baggy pants and a t-shirt with 'Metallica' ironed on the front in dripping red letters. His copper hair is cropped short, almost to the scalp.
Rich is air-drumming. Blurred hyper-movement of arms. He doesn't pay attention to our conversation.
Lee's father has already bought him three cars this year. The BMW was stolen by a friend for the insurance money - used to buy a large quantity of heroine, supposedly imported from France. The Volvo was totaled when Lee passed out driving down the interstate and crashed into a metal barrier. The Land Cruiser, the survivor, is in the lot below, parked beside the truck my father bought me for my sixteenth birthday and the Audi, which my grandfather gave me as a high school graduation present.
"Come on, I've got some bud we can smoke," I tell him. "It'll help even you out. Maybe."
We go inside. I sit on the leather couch and begin packing my bong. Rich goes into the kitchen and draws a glass of water from the tap, careful not to wet the black leather driving gloves he's wearing.
"Goddamit, use the filter!" I yell.
He empties the glass and refills it using the capsule-shaped Brita.
"It's there for a reason," I tell him. "Who knows what kind of shit is in that goddam city water."
"You're a freak," Rich tells me.
Rich is average when he doesn't speak. Average height, average weight, average face, average hair. His one eccentricity is a dresser drawer filled with gloves - wool gloves, leather gloves, cheap gloves, expensive gloves. I've never seen him not wearing a pair. Once, when I asked him why, he told me: "Because mittens are for faggots."
Rich has a speech impediment that causes him to sound British, so "Hello" comes out "'Ello." Other than that, and his habit of constantly sniffing cocaine, Richard is the most normal person I know.
The lighter clicks once, twice. The flame hits the cannabis and the bong gurgles. I pass it to Lee while exhaling a great white cloud of smoke. Rich sits next to me and pours chunky, white powder onto the glass coffee table. He breaks it up with a driver's license, then makes it disappear up his nose through a tightly-rolled bill. He prepares another line for Lee.
"Reilly," Rich begins. Finishing breaking out the line, he gets up and starts pacing, rubbing his gloved-hands together with intense, nervous energy.
"What?"
"I got to talk to you about something."
"What?"
"I met this bitch with cerebral palsy a couple weeks ago."
"No you didn't."
"Yes I did. Fucker. Listen to the damn story. This chick has cerebral palsy and her arm is all curled up and --"
"Which arm?" Lee interrupts.
"Shut up. The right one. And she has this real bad stutter so that she can hardly talk."
"That sucks," I confirm.
"Yeah, but look, if she smokes like one good bowl, the stutter gets better and she can use her arm a little."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It's crazy to watch. Puff, puff - all better. The stutter's still there a little but it's pretty much gone afterwards." Rich glances at Lee, then to the line of cocaine still untouched on the table. He leans down and snorts it before continuing. "But she has to drive to Atlanta to get the green and even that's not a regular thing. It's a big risk, too, you know." He sniffles.
"Okay." I clear my throat with a mighty hack and hit the bong again.
"So I told her I knew somebody who could hook her up with some real good shit. Like medicinal shit."
"You told her that?"
"Yeah."
"In reference to...?"
"You."
"Ah. Sounds like you kind of committed me without asking. You know that I don't like to sell in small quantities. It's dangerous. And too much work."
"She's sick, you asshole."
"And I appreciate that, but what if she gets arrested and the cops show up at my house and find a hundred fucking marijuana plants growing in my basement?"
"She won't even know who you are. It'll all go through me."
"I don't know."
"Come on, be a buddy."
I sigh. The THC makes me charitable. "Alright. I'll just give it to her, though. I'm not gonna charge a gimp. Tell her like an ounce a month."
"Thanks, buddy. That's great. This is a good thing for you to do. God's smiling right now." Rich is bouncing on his toes.
"Yeah, that means so much to me."
"Are you trying to fuck her?" Lee asks.
"What? No...I mean, so what?"
"Wow. You're trying to fuck a girl with cerebral palsy, you yakked-out mother fucker."
"So what? She's hot. You bigot."
"Is it like a fetish thing for you?" I ask him.
"No! Fuck you, asshole. That's goddam offensive. She's attractive, and smart, and --"
"And you want to stick your dick in her while she b-b-begs you for it." Lee tries to smile at his own joke.
"Exactly."
"You could have just said that you needed drugs to fuck a girl," I tell him. "There's no shame in that."
"It really does help her, though."
"Alright. Whatever."
"You know medical marijuana is biblical," Lee says absently, rubbing the withered muscles in his arm.
"In the Bible?" I ask.
"Not in the bible, but it's been around since biblical times."
"I think the definition of biblical is 'in the Bible.'"
"No, it's something that pertains to the Bible and Bible times. But the point is, Jesus used cannabis to heal people. I read about it."
"Bullshit," Rich says. "Junkies don't read."
"No, really. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the balms Jesus used to heal the sick were olive oil mixed with an ancient form of cannabis. That's why it made them feel better."
Rich and I look at one another then back to Lee.
"You're like the Herodotus of heroin addcits," Rich says.
"That's pretty goddam interesting," I admit.
"That's why I find it so hypocritical that our government, which is based on Christian values, has decided to outlaw and vilify a plant that Christ himself approved of and used."
"Thanks for sharing that," I mumble.
Lee leans forward in the chair, pauses, then dry heaves thin strands of vomit onto the carpet.
"Shit! Go outside to do that!"
"Sorry," he gasps. "I'm hurting. I'm sick. I think I'm gonna die."
Rich stops pacing and sits down next to me. "Fucking junkie," he says and snorts another line of cocaine.
"I'm dying," Lee mutters again and again.
"Goddammit. I've got some methadone I was going to take tonight," I tell him. "I guess you can have it."
Lee's head snaps up, his hungry heroin-eyes locked on me. "Please. Please let me have it." He starts rifling through his pockets, pulling out wrinkled bills.
I open one of the coffee table drawers, take out the pills, and hand three to Lee. He snatches them. I swallow the other two.
"You're a fucking God," he says and stumbles out the door.
Sounds of banging and crashing come through the thin wall that separates our apartments. Lee returns, sniffling. "I can't find a needle. Fuck, fuck, fuck." He gets a steak knife from the kitchen and begins to chop up the pills.
"Just chew them up."
"I'm gonna snort them. Send 'em straight to my brain."
"Just chew them! It's the same as snorting them."
"Nah, this sends them straight to my brain." He takes the rolled-up bill from Rich and vacuums the pile of powdered opiates.
"Have you ever looked at an anatomy diagram, you moron?" I ask. "Your nasal cavity doesn't connect to your brain. The powder just drips down your throat into your stomach."
"Actually, it's absorbed by the membranes in your nose," Rich says. "So it does hit you a little faster."
Rich and I watch Lee. He's leaning back in the chair, eyes closed, waiting for the drug to work.
"Let's get drunk," I say.
Lee brings over Coronas from next door. The bottles are warm, the beer skunky in my mouth.
"Warm beer?" I ask. "Only sociopaths drink warm beer."
"Shut up." Lee has a little smile on his face now.
I ditch the beer and search desperately for whiskey. Finding a half-empty bottle, I take a slug before speaking again. "I quit school today. I walked out and I'm never going back."
"Dumbass," Rich says.
"I couldn't take it anymore. It's too pointless."
"How will you get a job?" Lee asks, softly, as he studies the wrinkles in the front of his shirt.
"Who cares?"
"You should, asshole," Rich tells me. "That's like eight years of your life wasted."
"I don't care about things like that anymore." I hold the whiskey to my lips and let the fire fill my mouth. "I don't think I care about anything anymore."
"That sounds healthy."
"Oh well. I don't care about healthiness either."
"Then why go to that shrink?"
"For the drugs."
They both nod, understanding. We pass the bottle back and forth in silence while Rich does a few more lines. Leaning back and sniffling, he tells me, "I saw Lisa yesterday."
I nod, hold up the bottle and drain it.
"I hate my life," I tell them. "I quit."
• • •
"You sure about this?" I ask Lee again as I put the car into park.
"I told you - it's fine. I deal with this guy all the time." His leg is shaking hard enough to rock the car. His fists are clenched white and bloodless.
The fake brick siding that plasters the front of the apartment is sun-bleached to the shade of old salmon. The metal door is painted a peeling, dirt brown. It's August, but the rows of shrubs are just a tangle of leafless, dead twigs. When Lee knocks, the sound bounces through the empty parking lot as if we're inside a deep canyon.
"Come in!"
Through the doorway, there's a sharp smell of burnt chemicals and rotten melon. It's dark. I can't see any furniture, but can just make out a small mound of mattress and blankets in the corner.
A voice calls out, "Who's your friend?"
"This is Reilly."
There's a man on the mattress, hidden among the blankets. He's withered and curled. His face comes to a sharp point at the chin and his hollow cheeks are scarred with acne. All he's wearing is a lumpy diaper that's leaking thin, liquid shit. The mattress is stained around him in big, yellow blotches.
"What happened to you?" I ask.
"I'm a quadriplegic, asshole."
I nod and look around the room. "How come you don't have any furniture?"
"Why do you think?"
"Oh yeah."
"You get the pills?" Lee cuts in. He's twitchy, impatient.
"Yeah," the man says. "The nurse brought them today. But how 'bout you help me out first and give me a hit."
Lee kneels down and takes a small glass pipe from beside the mattress. He drops in a white rock from the baggie next to it and lights it while holding the pipe to the man's mouth. The cripple's
eyes widen as he inhales, his head spasms while he holds in the smoke.
"Were you born like this?" I ask as they burn another rock.
He holds in the smoke for a moment, then answers as it curls from his mouth. "Nah, I was a Marine in Iraq. We got into a firefight outside Fallujah and some stray shrapnel caught me in the spine."
"Shit."
"Here's the money," Lee tells him, counting the bills near the man's face.
"Alright. Pills are in the bathroom."
Lee, still busy with the gimp and the crack, nods to me. I walk into the immaculate bathroom - I guess it doesn't get much use - and find the prescription bottle on the counter by the sink. A Purple Heart lies near it, on top of a pile of medical cards, military forms, and a beige bar of soap.
"Goddam," I call over my shoulder, picking up the medal. "This is cool. I've never seen one of these in real life."
Back in the living room, the pills safe in my pocket, I ask, "So you glad you went over there?"
The man's face crunches with ridicule. "Are you serious? I'm paralyzed from the neck down. Forever."
"You got a Purple Heart, though. That's pretty cool. People respect that."
"It's a few inches of ribbon and a hunk of shitty metal. And your respect don't mean dick to me. I'll sell that thing to you for a hundred bucks."
"Really?"
"Yeah, hundred bucks. Come on, I need the cash."
I think about it, say, "No thanks."
"Come on, guy. Help me out!" His head reaches up from his dead body - reminds me of a turtle.
"I don't think so."
"Alright..." He seems disappointed.
"I bet you're a man who could really use a good whore," I say.
"No point. Can't feel anything down there. Wouldn't even know if I came."
"That's the most depressing thing I've ever heard," I tell him as Lee heads for the door.
The man shrugs. "Life's a lonely game that you play by yourself." He turns his head away from me and stares at the wall. His frozen little body looks pitiful down there on the mattress.
Back in the car, I start the engine and let out a breath. Little Feat blares through the speakers.
"You brought me to a quadriplegic crack head's house."
Lee laughs, jingling the bottle of pills. "Yeah."
"Jesus. That was really fucked up."
"He sells me the Oxycontin cheap, though. He's so desperate for someone to come give him a couple hits of crack."
I throw two of the painkillers into my mouth and chew them up, put the Audi in reverse and say, "Let's get the fuck out of here. This place depresses the hell out of me."
• • •
My house, the house my parents bought me years ago when I still showed promise, sits alone on fifteen acres of flat, pine-green land. The driveway is long and cuts through the trees as it passes a tiny lake - maybe just a big pond - before it runs into the two-story, wood-sided home with the wrap-around balcony and elevated deck. The trees are cleared away on every side, and we keep the grass mowed down in the summer with a rusty old Snapper. I've named the house Herbie Bellows in the British tradition.
The sky is melting sea-green as I barrel down the gravel driveway. From the edges of my vision, I can see brown-clad Russian spies darting among the trees. They must want something from me, probably my brain, maybe just my hair - it's long and blond, just the sort of thing the KGB would covet. I haven't slept in five, no, six days.
The dogs hear the gravel crunch and groan under the big tires of my truck. They break from the tree line in long, leaping strides.
"There they are," I coo, opening the truck door and taking their heads between my hands and rubbing their ears. The dogs use their shoulders to bump each other and work for the position closest to me. Their hair sheds from the heat and clings to my hands. "There's my good dogs. Y'all been good?" I take a handful of treats from the truck and toss them out in rotation.
Paul comes out onto the porch and throws up an arm. "What say, boss man?"
When Paul asked if he could move in with me, I quickly agreed. I've found that, being an asshole, it's wise to keep large friends around for protection. Paul's tall - near six and a half feet - with a neck that disappears into his shoulders. The lid under his left eye hangs low and pink, crying constantly so that he has to carry a linen kerchief to dab the tears. He's a bi-sexual sadomasochist and his dates usually leave the house with dark bruises and rope burns. One early morning, while I lied on the couch, near-comatose from too much heroin, a man came down the stairs weeping. His hands were deep in his pockets and little, pink cigarette burns laced his arms. He saw me watching him and avoided my eyes, then silently left the house.
It depressed me.
Paul and I go into the house, followed closely by the dogs. The metallic jangle of their tags sounds like loose change. Inside, the floors are all hardwood, upstairs and down. The house is decorated in the sparse, sporadic way of men. There's a big wrap-around couch I bought from Goodwill, and a few chairs, most of them from garage sales and second hand stores. The walls are covered with my art - abstract paintings and colorful sketches that are the products of long nights on speed. There's dog hair everywhere, on everything, as neither Paul nor I like to clean. The day he moved in, Paul nailed up a wooden crucifix with a weeping Jesus hanging from it. I left it up. It's nice to be reminded that even the best of us suffer.
I fall onto the couch. Paul sits in the recliner. Fred jumps up next to me and Lucy pokes me with her nose, leaving a cold wet spot on my arm that I wipe off on my jeans.
"You alright?" Paul asks.
"Same as always. How're things here?"
"Blue's been throwing up."
"Godammit." I call her over. She stares up at me with her brown-eyed gaze and pants stinky breath into my face through her plaque-toothed smile. "You alright, baby girl?" I ask her. "You sick?" To Paul: "I'll take her to the vet this week."
"Alright." Then, "Damn mold's been hittin' all the plants I used that Super Bud Booster on. They're just too fucking dense."
I take a joint from a box on the coffee table. "I heard that can happen. It's alright. Next time I'll add some silicon to balance it out. We might be able to save those moldy plants for honey oil, though, so keep them isolated from the others."
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