My Road to Redemption is Littered with Empties.

We’re not stopping until Seligman

There was hot death blowing through the windows.  Before us a black ribbon of asphalt unrolled to a horizon dancing hula in the heat waves.  Every party has to come to an end, and ours just came to a screeching halt through a cinderblock wall, up a ramp, over a troop of Girl Scouts, and into a vat of hot tar.  Panic attacks, shakes, retching, eyes watering, the hammer of guilt banging on the anvil of shame, just behind the temples.  It was going to be a long ride home.

Marko and I were on our way back from a visit to California, after an eleven day bender we would never forget–if we could remember any of it.   I do remember emceeing a punk rock show in Ventura while in a black-out, if that counts as remembering.  After 1,200 beers or so, we finally ran out of steam and decided to call it a day.  We could sense a mob collecting torches and pitchforks, so it was time to go.  Besides, I had library books due, and Marko couldn’t remember if he left the curling iron on.

Now, poison oozed from us in a viscous, bubonic sweat.  It coated us in a glaze that the desert kiln baked into our clay, our skin pulled tight against our desiccated skulls, lips pulled back and stuck above teeth dry enough to light a match on.  Grimacing like game show hosts on their third face-lift, our decaying organs gassed a fetid funk from our sewer holes.  It smelled like rotting something.  Rotting us.

We were drinking plenty of water, except it happened to come with beer.  It was hot beer, too.  Not Oh-gee-look-what-I-found-under-the-bed warm, but Cup O’ Soup chicken noodle hot.  Bottled beer broth.  Drinking beer that hot, really signals the end is near.  It’s purely maintenance drinking by that point.  Party time is over.  Drinking just enough to keep away the Jumping Jiminees, and maybe something worse, like a moment of clarity.

No time for that shit.  Now was not the time to fall apart, penitent, blubbering for redemption.  We had to make it home, and that was beyond the Indus, beyond the Hindu-Kush.

The car seemed thirsty enough for water.  It was boiling it away by the gallon.  I stared at the temperature gauge intently.  My blurred vision saw three of them, all different.

“We may be fucked, or not,”  I said, pointing to the dash, “It totally depends on which one of these is a lying son of a bitch.”

Marko didn’t say anything.  Lips tight.  Eyes on the road.  Hands at ten and two o’clock.   He was going stoic on me.

Marko and I were a combustible combination on any given school night, but even more so when on a mission to “blow off a little steam.”  We had wanted to take it to the next level and were thinking about going back to California for a while.  We figured that when you get used to drinking beer at a 7,000 foot altitude and you return to sea level, you would become a blood-doped Olympic-caliber drinker ready shatter records, and anything else lying around.  It was only a theory back then, but today a proven scientific fact.

A situation took place which presented the two of us with a perfect opportunity to research our thesis.  This incident, while a most unfortunate mishap, had created a stellar excuse for us to leave Santa Fe.  While waiting for things to cool down, we could visit family and friends, and reassure them we were doing well and feeling fit.  I know we reassured them alright.  Reeling and reeking, walking through a closed screen door, knocking over the Ficus, one of us wearing two different sneakers, the other with bloodied toilet paper stuck up a nostril, dragging a toy wagon filled with beer,  “Hi everybody, we’re really drunk, AND we brought guns!”

I don’t know if I can say it turned out to be a good visit.  Eventful yes.  Perhaps monumental.  But not all that good.  I still have some amends to make for that outing, including one to a chubby little teenage woman with bleached hair.  It’s tricky because I don’t know her name or what she looks like beyond the description I just gave.  Does anybody know her?  I think she was from Ventura.  She was at the punk show I can’t remember emceeing.  I have a letter for her.

It was time to get out of the town we got out of town to.  The air conditioner murdered our gas mileage, so we kept the windows down and let the Mohave come blasting in.  All one hundred and eleven degrees of it.  It felt like sitting in a toaster oven while wearing blow driers for goggles.

“Dude, I need you to pull over so I can piss!”  I yelled.  No response.  Did he hear?

“Dude, I need you to pull–”

“Needles in seventeen miles.  Hold it.”

“No man, this is a serious levee breaker.  Pull the fuck over.”

“We can’t stop out here.  We’ll never move again, and die.”

I kind of knew what he meant.  Sometimes you think you’re just going to take a knee to catch your breath, but fall over, permanently.  Can’t risk that.  I squeezed myself between my finger and thumb.  Time to soldier up.

When Needles, CA  looks like an oasis, you know things are sucking hard.  We pulled into a gas station.  We filled up with gas and topped off the radiator.  I went inside to use their restroom.  Afterwards, I looked around the store, and grabbed a Gatorade from the cooler.

“What good is that going to do?” Marko asked.  I thought about it, and put it back.  Don’t waste money on foolish things.  Was it time for the one hamburger I had budgeted for this 900 mile journey?  No, wait for Flagstaff.  Candy?  Bad for you.  Too hot for cigarettes.  Hmm…cold beer seems to be the only thing left.  We bought a six pack.  That’s right, for between the two of us.  Really not feeling well.

Back into the Oldsmobile and onto I-40.  Sipping on a cold beer will help.  All we needed was our 89th wind.

Marko suggested we smoke some weed.  It might make us feel better.

That is the lie, the big lie about weed, that somehow it will help, instead of making everything 47,ooo times worse.  Not thirty seconds after coughing your lungs out, you realize that you just took the first step towards turning some minor mental turmoil into a nightmare of Byronic proportions.  You brought this on yourself, with full knowledge and prior experience.  You did this voluntarily and not under the duress of some punishing deity or burdensome social obligation.  You are the Satan you once feared.

“Yeah, might as well.”  We rolled up the windows.

The weed didn’t make us feel better.  Just different.  Different as in worse.

“I think I’m going to die,” I announced as calmly as possible, “I can’t feel my heart.”

Marko looked over.  “How do we know we haven’t died already?  How do we know we weren’t killed in an accident a few miles back, and are just imagining this?”

We drove along in silence for a while.

“Okay, that better not be true!”  I started clapping my hands and blinking my eyes.  Still here.  Still here.  Fucking weed.

I tried to stay positive.  “You know, it’s not like dying right now would be the worst thing that could happen to us, right?”

“Yeah, not dying right now seems to be a lot worse.”

I thought about that.  That’s never a good place to go, especially when you’re rubbed raw and severely stoned.  Here we go with the heavy reflections…

“I’ve tried to live a good life.  You know, not hurt a lot of people.”  Marko just laughed.  “I’m serious, dude.  It’s not like I went out of my way.”  More laughter.  “I don’t think my karma will be too bad  if I have to come back as anything.”  Silence.  I waved my hands around.  “Maybe all this is just karmic payback for something.”

Highway Patrol passing us slowly.  Do not look over.  Push the bag over to Marko’s side.  Pretend you’re talking.

“Do you think molecules miss people when they die?”

“I bet people sure miss the molecules,” Marko said, cracking open a new beer, way before the 75 mile limit we set.

I had scared myself enough to join him.  Smoke more weed, too.  Might help.

By Flagstaff the wheels were really coming off.  After pulling off to fill up and finally get my hamburger, we got lost getting back on the Interstate.   It was night and our nerves were dangling out the window.  We were driving around looking for the on-ramp, barking and bitching at each other.  I was beginning to freak.

I seized on the fact that Arizona was a zero-tolerance state, which meant getting caught with any marijuana was enough to get a life sentence.  They don’t fuck around here.  They still think Hitler was misunderstood, and that daylight savings time is some sort of commie conspiracy.

We needed to throw the weed out the window, right now!

“Are you fucking crazy?”

“I don’t want to be raped!”

He grabbed the bag out of my hand.  “We are NOT going to be throwing our weed out the window!  You need to get a grip!”  he commanded.  I could tell he meant it, and settled down.  I did need to get a grip, but how does one do that?  I don’t know what to do in order to get this grip everyone so desperately wants me to obtain.  It seemed elusive.

My best guess in life was to drink as much beer as humanly possible.  That didn’t seem to be working.   Still needed some tinkering.   So now what?  I felt like I was about to have a nervous breakdown, which is very opposite of getting a grip.  Then I thought, “Boy, I could sure use some help getting a grip.”  That was it.  It wasn’t a prayer.  More like a statement.

I nervously fiddled around with the radio and found a station playing Gregorian chants.  Honest to God.  Probably some public station trying to fill time, but it was just what we needed, something calming.  Soothing soul balm.  “Dominus ex patria, plurumbus unim exaltum, santu benedictum ortho novum …”  .  Monks chanting their prayers in cool caverns with damp moss-covered walls.  Some with eyes that can turn into blue flame and heal the sick with a touch a touch of their staff.

It had a sanctifying effect.  Marko and I started to relax.  While not entirely redeemed, we did feel temporarily absolved, and managed to chill out.  The air was getting cooler, too.  We stopped snapping at each other, and were soon back to cracking each other up.  He found the on-ramp and we resumed our journey.

There was plenty of horror left for us to enjoy during that death march home, but for now, with magically powered monks serenading us, we had stumbled upon a real oasis.  A place to rest, and get a grip.

To this day, we both agree that moment with the monks was the best one of the entire trip.  Looking back, I wonder if the little statement/request had anything to do with tuning in to the monk chants and subsequent chill-out.  Who knows?  Could it really be that easy?   Boy, that would piss off a lot of people.  I don’t know why, but it seems like it would.  These days.

Frankly, I had to resort to some similar hocus pocus mumbo jumbo to get sober.  I couldn’t stop drinking, no matter how bad it got, until I got so desperate that I just asked, something, anything, out there to help me.  I remember doing it in a bathroom in Redondo Beach.  I had been trying to detox myself, and was violently gagging as I tried to hold down the beer I needed to get in me to keep away the DT’s.  I looked up and saw myself in the mirror.

For the first time in my life I felt compassion for that poor fucker looking back at me.  “God, if you’re out there, and whatever you are, you need to help that guy. Nobody deserves to live like this.”  That was it.  I don’t know if that counts as a prayer, or a surrender, or whatever.  I hated myself so much that I couldn’t even ask for the help for me.  It had to be for that guy over there in the mirror.

After that, events started unfolding, and like finding chanting monks on the radio when there’s no hope left, things got better.  I got better.  All I had to do was ask.  Oh, and endure a bunch of soul-scorching fire, but you can’t be a total pussy when asking for help.  You need to show you’re willing to work.  That part kind of sucks, but not one tenth of what life was like before.  At least this journey has a happy destination, and plenty of rest stops along the way.  Good food.  Clean bathrooms.  Ice cold drinks.  And good directions.

Happy Motoring, fellow travelers!

The Not-So-Great Outdoors

Greetings lost travelers, our camp is just beyond the burning tires.

When I discovered the outdoors, I felt like the pioneers must have.  All new land to run amok in.  The law being slower to catch up with your hijinks means you can let it all hang a little looser.  Start in a land where the law is already a step slow, like in old New Mex, and then really disappear.  You should see what you can get away with.  It’s pretty good.  Bring along some like-minded individuals and decide to only adhere to laws that are convenient, and now you’re talking Utopia to this anarchist.

Camping for me was never about frying up trout in a pan while the coffee brews, a few fake ducks scattered around.  It was about returning to the Great Primal Id.  Pagan barbarians huddling around a fire outside the gates of Rome, gnawing on undercooked turkey legs, waiting for the city to fall.  Invoke the night!  Unleash the wild dogs!  Let them hunt the beasts!  Howl with their joy!  Wave your warhammers and axes in the victory of freedom!  Trample the oppressors in the madness of your fire dance!

Humping in thirty cans of Guinness along with your regular gear kind of sucked though.

If it was any trip with my friend, T-Bone, it was guaranteed to be a serious hump.  I met T-Bone, a French-Canadian/Lithuanian hybrid, when I was washing dishes at The Natural Cafe.  He was the lunch cook.  The first thing I noticed about him was that he had to wear two t-shirts over each other.  Both shirts had so many holes that he had to layer so the various holes would cover.  Only problem was some of the holes intersected, and the sub set, if you will, revealed pale New England skin.  That’s totally punk, I thought, true punk, and an especially gnarly way to show up for work.  I decided right then that I liked him.

We’d hang out at his place, since the 1950’s trailer my sister and I lived in was too small for even one person.  He’d turn me on to good comics, or graphic novels, as well as the latest toe-tappers the crazy kids were listening to those days.  We’d be reading Love and Rockets, or Hate, or my personal favorite, Steven, while listening to The Butthole Surfers.  Drinking beer and yucking it up, we patiently waited for the 80’s to finally die.  It was a good time, and he was a pretty normal cool dude…until you got him outdoors.

T-Bone graduated with a degree in archeology, and after The Natural Cafe gig, got a real job in the profession.  During the day, he’d contentedly catalogue pottery shards, or someone’s bones, with the same meticulous care he catalogued his comics and CD’s.  It was a good fit.  However, this mild-mannered slacker, once freed from the shackles of pedantry, and out in the wide open outdoors, became possessed.  He would get all Indiana Jones on you, and insist on leading forced marches through wilderness hell.  The Chindits fighting through the jungles of Burma comes to mind.

I’m convinced he was some kind of wild-eyed, obsessed explorer in his past life.  Some college professor gone mad from sampling the native plants, on a quest to find the hidden City of The Rainbow Serpent.  He would drag my ass to the farthest point on the topo map, grid Z 98, then back up a squiggly line to A 3.  That way we could see the petroglyphs.

“Seriously dude,” I would tell him, “Just out of sight of the families at the picnic tables would be cool with me.”  Oh no.

“We need to see this ancient Indian pueblo site.  It’s on the top that mesa.”  I follow his finger and see the distant shape of a mountain with its head chopped off, its jagged form illuminated by the surrounding summer lightning.

I’m no Daniel Boone, but I’ve watched enough lightning safety pieces during the local news to know that you need to go the other direction than up high, on flat.  That was like laying yourself on a sacrificial altar of the Lightning Gods and daring their asses to do something about it.

This sort of unproven superstitious rubbish didn’t concern the fevered Colonel leading our expedition.  Despite my most spirited entreaties for caution, the dash was on.   The stubborn goat, appropriately native from a place called Marblehead, kept climbing and I followed, but only partially because of  his intrepid Yankee leadership.

We also had women with us.  Well-scrubbed, hardy ones, mostly of New England and Maine stock.  Thick in thigh, avid outdoors chicks, they all seemed fearless.  And therein was the rub.  I was scared shitless.  I wanted to turn back and head down, but couldn’t bring myself to do it in front of all the hot nature girls.  Instead, I willed my feet forward and turned my thoughts to God.

Lightning, at one point, was flashing under us as we climbed.  “”Is under good?”  I kept asking myself.  We passed by trees that were split and burned from past strikes.  I wondered if straddling the burned crotch of one of those would decrease my odds of getting hit.  It was raining and I could feel the water coat me with extra conductivity juice, just in case all the liquid-filled metal cylinders I had strapped to me weren’t enticing enough bait for a bolt.

I already knew at that point in my life that I was due some kind of avenging blast, from either Nature or God.  Now was a great time for them to tag team me.   Yes, it only made perfect sense that I should go out like this.  I started making small promises.

It got to striking around us pretty good, and not FLASH tick tick tick BOOM, but FLASHBOOM.   The static charge made your ass hole involuntarily contract, although it felt pretty voluntary.  You could taste electricity on your tongue.  Arm hair stiff as brush.  Sweet Jesus, spare me.  Bigger promises.

“Dude, I just don’t know how good an idea this is.”

“We’re almost there.”

Fucking psycho lunatic.  Onward he went, with several pairs of tanned and muscular legs following.  I reached into my pack and cracked another beer, way ahead of my rationing time-table.  Now, I faced another nightmare–running out of beer in the middle of nowhere.  I started muttering mutiny among myself.  Could it be possible that I’m the only sane person in this doomed party?  Wouldn’t that be a fucking cosmic irony?  He’s clearly mad, but what about the women?  I guess it doesn’t matter if they’re crazy or not.  I’m going to be wherever they are anyway.

If it’s on top of Dr. Frankenstein’s satellite dish while he’s working on bringing Jr. to life, so be it.  I resigned myself.  Chicks trump everything, every time.

We finally made the summit.  The rain let up.  There was more time between the flashes and the booms.  Shafts of light started to poke through the clouds.  The vista kicked into Grand Mode.  We jumped into the ruins and began exploring.

“Hey T, I hope I find a tomahawk or a peace pipe or something!”

He looked up at me.  “Yeah.”

I lowered myself into a kiva.  “Or a sack of ceremonial peyote.”  Which I would of course turn over to the cultural authorities, after totally pinching the stash.

You didn’t need psychotropic agents inside those kivas to get a buzz on.  Those places were absolutely soaked with spiritual whammy.  A weird sort of heady reverence seemed to reverberate around the place.  Very different from the one in an average American bowling alley.  I don’t know if it was ghosts or residue atmospheric charge, but my molecules were lit up.  Sacred stuff rocks balls, I thought.

We don’t have enough sacred stuff.  There’s too much Wal-mart stuff, and Chuck E. Cheeze, miniature golf, tractor pull stuff.  It’s sacred alright, but have you seen to who?  Maybe I should start having my own sacred stuff?  I didn’t know what it would look like, or if I could even afford it.  I figured whatever I came up with would be illegal or addictive.  Maybe I could shoplift one of those magic bongos they had at The Amethyst Chalice, New Age bookstore.

The sky closed up again, and the lighting started.  Okay, fuck this, I’m not sticking around for another battering of shock therapy.  The Colonel and the girls can take their chances.   Some of them will come down alive, I’m sure.  I announced my immediate departure and left with little fanfare.  This is only partially pussing out, I told myself, I made it to the top.  Now I’m going back down, where I belong.  They could finish their education.  I am so gone.

More lighting, but now with me skedaddling down the road like a hobo with a stolen chicken.  The knees were steaming from trying to brake my descent, but the flashes and fear bayoneted me forward and faster.  Cowardice?  It seemed like common sense.  Regardless, I let it rip.

“Oh Mammy Mammy!  Oh holy holy!  Holy Mammy of God!”  I slid and scrambled down the trail.  Once my nerve broke, I was a one man rout.  I grabbed at branches  to slow down.  “Lee’s Army is coming!”

I started taking back promises as the trees around me got taller.   I finally made it to the bottom and laid down by a stream next to a culvert.  I later found out it’s one of the most dangerous places to be during a lightning storm, and one I was never warned about during local news shows.  What else was the media holding out on?   For now my ignorance meant bliss, and I pulled out a beer to celebrate it.  Only eighteen left, but what the hell.

The Colonel finally arrived with our store of women.  He was partially satisfied.  There was one more thing he wanted to see.  This would take us to a place so bone dry we wound up having to steal water from someone’s car, but that’s another tale.  That was T-Bone.  He’s had me teetering from dizzying death-drop precipices, freezing to stone Eastern Front-style in snowy wastelands, wading knee-high in streams while lighting struck upriver, or baking on hot coals in a sea of smelting sand, just so we could see something.

I wouldn’t trade any of it.

I got to see things I would never have, not if it had been up to my lazy ass.  I really owe him for that.  I also learned that being in Nature could make you feel better.  It didn’t matter what kind of madness tormented and drove me when I went in, I always drove out a better model.  And, I got to see a lot of sacred stuff.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring too much of it back in my pockets.  But eventually I learned what made things that way.  It’s all in the way you look at them, or more accurately, look for it in them.  Today, I start by looking at my coffee like it’s sacred, and then expand what I include, slowly, as the morning opens up.  If I keep paying attention, pretty soon I’m surrounded by sacred stuff, and God becomes something more than a guy to make promises to while being chased by lightning.  The Great Outdoors becomes an inside job.

Cue the banjo music

A Tale of Two Rehabs

My first rehab was in Laguna Beach.  My second one was in North Hollywood.  I could see the ocean from my window at the first one.  My view from the second featured a neon clown in front of a liquor store.  The first time was in July.  The second was in January.  I got a tan at the first one, and a flu at the other.  I could make out with chicks in my room at the first rehab.  I was written up for making “sustained eye-contact with the opposite sex” at the other.  You get it. Very different.  Different results, too.

At the second rehab, my roommate was a Russian gang-banger from Montebello, who had gotten accepted into a hispanic gang.  I’ll let you figure out how.  He was a young guy with a shaved head, baggy pants, and lots of homegrown ink.  His family moved from Russia when he was five, and he quickly adapted to his new environment.  Boris from The Black Sea was a bad-ass little fucker, and as far as I was concerned, an immigrant success story.

Back then, the second place was full of people being diverted from prison into rehab instead.  Most just did what they would’ve done if they were locked-up.  I looked out at the yard while I was still in detox.  There were guys in beanies and denim coats playing dominoes or walking the track, dropping now and then to do burpees or push-ups.  They wore work pants and flannel, either house shoes or white sox and shower sandals, all de rigueur for the perennially institutionalized.  I wasn’t in Laguna Beach anymore.

Boris and I became friends.  He was a funny dude, and we connected.  The laughs worked like Bondo on the more gaping fractures in my soul.  One night while he was sharpening a toothbrush handle into a shank, I told him about the first rehab.

The irony was that while at the second place, I was surrounded by some seriously sketchy characters, it was at the fun-filled, beach condo rehab in Orange County, where I really worried for my safety.  And, the danger came in the strangest guise.

It started with Granny.  They brought her in on my sixth day there.  She was a crazy, white-haired, 80-year-old woman, who the staff told us, stabbed her husband while she was drunk.  “She didn’t kill him, so…”  So what?  So now she get’s to come in here and live with us for a while?  Oh fuck that.  An 80-year-old man wouldn’t get that kind of slack.  His dentures would be soaking on a bunk in Corcoran.  What gives?

“Dude, that’s fucked up,” Boris said.  He took out his lighter and heated up the toothbrush.  After warming up the plastic, he began pulling and flattening it, then went back to sharpening.

“Why don’t you just go downstairs and get a knife from the cafeteria?”

“I don’t know, it’s just something to do. Go on.”

She wasn’t the cute and cuddly kind of old woman either.  She had mean eyes and sneered a lot.  A Madame Defarge.  She was cantankerous and crotchety, but she could put on her grandma mask when it served her.   I saw her smile at one of the counselors and “Yes dearie” him, but as soon as he turned away, her face soured into glaring hatred.  She was working the system, biding her time until…she could strike again.

I watched her carefully during meals.  Why does she need a steak knife for cutlet?  Give her a butter knife, or better yet, a wooden spoon.  If this old bitty decides to go wide-o with a blade, it’s going to be hard to take her down.  You can’t just run up and belt the old broad.  Clobber her with a fire extinguisher, and you’re going to do time, whether she came at you with a knife or not.  No, there’ll be a lot of dancing around, avoiding her swipes and pokes, while trying to grab for the shiv.  I hate to depend on finesse.  Things tend to get clumsy when the shit erupts.  I had decided I would use my food tray as a shield, protect the vital organ, and just play defence until SWAT got there.

“I’d just tip the table on her and bolt,” Boris said.  Crude, but effective.  I had to admit his idea was better.  That was a breakthrough for me, accepting the fact that somebody else might have a better idea.  Of course, this nugget of realization was nestled in some insane thinking, but any realization at that point was a victory.

It turned out Granny was the least of my worries.  I told Boris about Jimmy The Geek.  One day, one of the counselors brought up to my room a google-eyed, belt-above-the-naval, dorkenhoffer with a Vicodin problem.  I’ll call him “Jimmy.”  He was going to replace the snoring pharmacist that checked out that morning.  Good, I thought, maybe now I can get some sleep.  Strange thing was, that although this guy was a Class A, textbook version of nerdhood, my body reacted to him in primal fear.  I swear to you, the hair stood up on the back of my neck when I shook his hand.  I had no idea why.  It just did.

The first thing he did, after shaking my hand and introducing himself, was hand me a piece of paper.  It was a Xeroxed copy of an old Newsweek article.  “You need to read this,” he says.  “Yeah, sure,” I say. “No really, you NEED to read it!”  “Okay,” I tell him.  I didn’t feel like reading Newsweek right then.  It’s old news when it comes out fresh, so a Xerox from the 80’s was really going to be stale.  I glance down at the article.  It was something about a little kid who stabbed his parents while they were sleeping.  He didn’t kill them.  So what?  Who cares?  I folded it up and put it in my pocket.

There was something odd about this bug-eyed dweeb, something beyond his looks, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Something menacing about him.  Ah, I was tripping.

“Dude, that’s the guy!  He’s the one in the paper, as a little kid.  He’s the sleep stabber!”  Boris was excited.  He was now listening wide-eyed.  He had his knees up to his chin.

“Yeah okay, you’re fucking up my story, dude.” I told him, “I didn’t snap to this yet, alright?”

“Dense, bro.”

I continued to tell him about how during some of the meetings that day, Jimmy “shared” about some of the bad things he did.  I’d rather not say here what, but they were disturbing.  Even Boris was a little shocked.  Enough said.  The meetings took on a heavy vibe of disgust as Jimmy let us get to know him better.  So, this was my new roommate.  Jolly good.

During one of the breaks, I remembered the article and pulled it out.  It was about some parents suing the psychiatrist that prescribed their son’s psych meds.  The kid stabbed them while they slept, and they had to blame someone.  In the article, the shrink claimed that the kid didn’t show any danger signs before this incident.  In the margin, written in pencil, someone wrote “Oh yes HE DID!!!!!!!!”  Hmm.  There were other annotations, all made by someone with an apparent personal involvement with the events reported.

Okay, this was a little kid…but… the article was almost ten years old.  I wasn’t delighted in the way things were adding up.  I looked at the name of the kid.  It was “Jimmy.”  Interesting.  Same name as the sick psycho fuck who handed me this Xerox telling me I NEED to read it.  Could there be a connection?  Boris started howling.

“I fucking knew it!” he laughed, “No sleep tonight for you!  Your bunky might get stab-happy. Did you stick him first?”

“Dude. I’m in rehab, not Pelican Bay.  I can’t shank the dude because he creeps me out.  I was tempted to puss out and complain to staff, but how would that look?”  He nodded.  “So I tried to become his best buddy, that is, after I secured a huge cake knife under my mattress.”

Unfortunately, as Jimmy and I became buddies, he opened up more.  He shared more, and I got scared more.  Personally, I thought drugs were the least of his problems, although I’m sure they didn’t help.  At lights out, Jimmy informed me that he also had a condition that made him unable to sleep for days at a time, which he warned might make him crankier when he started to kick.  He said he would probably just spend the night sitting up, “trying to maintain.”  Great.

“I’ll be here for you, brother,” I said, my fingers tucked under my mattress.

Neither of us slept a wink that night.  Jimmy was sitting up cross-legged, talking to himself while listening to something over his headphones.  Recorded instructions from Satan, I imagined.  His Coke bottle glasses made him look like a mumbling locust.  Meanwhile, I kept one eye open the whole night.  I remember trying to get God to forgive me- for a lot of stuff.  I was really pleading my case.

“I even prayed,” I confessed, “Oh God, I’m so scared, please help me!”

“A classic.”

“Yeah, standard stuff, but fucking heartfelt. The next morning I was a wreck.  I was still detoxing and raw, and now hadn’t gotten any sleep.  I didn’t know how I was going to go another night with this ghoul sitting up next to me.  ‘Ok God,’ I finally said, ‘I can’t deal with this shit.  If you’re out there, and you’re not too busy, I’d love for you to take care of this thing.’  What the hell, right?  What do I have to lose?  I’m out of ideas at this point.  I give up.  I put back the cake knife, and go to my morning group session.  During that session, Jimmy gets pulled out of group, and I never see him again.  His insurance didn’t go through so they bounced his ass out.”

“Where did he go?”

“He got into a taxi and drove to Montebello.”

Boris laughed.  “Ah man, I would cap his geek ass.”

“How could you?  He only comes when you’re asleep.”

“Do you think it was the prayer? I mean, do you think that helped get rid of him?”

I couldn’t say for sure.  It seemed like a coincidence, but who says those don’t count?  I just know I felt better thinking that it was.  We were getting sleepy and decided to turn out the light.  Boris put away his crafts project.  We laid there in the dark for a while.

“Hey Boris, maybe there is something out there that we can tune into that will help us.”

“I fucking hope so, dude.  Buenas noches, carnal.”

“A ti.”

I turned over and went to sleep.  I slept well that night, the glow from a neon clown bathing us both in its protective light.

Happy, Joyous, and Free