Everyday Madness - Chapter Six

“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 and his fists are clenched white and bloodless.
         The fake brick siding that’s plastered on the front of the apartment before us 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 are inside a deep canyon.
         “Come in!”
         Through the doorway, there’s a sharp smell of burnt chemicals and rotten melon.  It’s dark, and I can’t see any furniture, but can make out a small mound of mattress and blankets in the corner.  A voice calls out, “Who’s your friend?”
         “This is Reilly,” Lee says.
         The man on the mattress is withered and curled.  His face comes to a point at the chin and his 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 him.
         “I’m a quadriplegic, asshole.”
         “You get the pills?” Lee’s twitchy.
         “Yeah,” he says. “The nurse brought them today.  How ‘bout you help me out first and give me a hit.”
         Lee takes a small glass pipe from behind the mattress, drops in a white rock from the baggie next to it, and lights it while holding the pipe to the man’s mouth.  His eyes widen and his head spasms a couple times.
         “Were you born like this?” I ask as they burn another rock.
         “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.”
         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.
         “Goddam,” I call, picking up the medal. “This is cool.  I’ve never seen one of these in real life.”  Back in the living room, I ask: “So you glad you went over there?”
         His face crunches with ridicule.  “Are you fucking serious?  I’m paralyzed from the head down.  Forever.”
         “You got a Purple Heart, though. That’s pretty fucking cool.  You’ve got my respect.”
         “It’s a few inches of ribbon and a hunk of shitty metal.  And your respect doesn’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!”
         “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.  I 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.”
         
Back in the car I start the engine and let out a breath as Little Feat blares through the speakers.
         “You brought me to a fucking quadriplegic crack head’s house?”
         Lee laughs.  “Yeah.”
         “Jesus.  That was really fucked up.”
         I throw two of the pills into my mouth and chew them up, put the car in reverse and say, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.  I never want to see that guy again.”
*
It’s Tuesday, and my phones tells me I have twenty-seven missed calls.  I’ve just finished vomiting blood, and now I’m in the shower rubbing my skin clean and raw with a bar of green tea soap.  After the soap comes a deep cleaning Vitamin C body scrub that contains blue exfoliating beads.  I use the tips of my fingers to grind the cream into the valleys around the base of my nose where grease and dirt collects in horrifying black pores.  The orange aroma hits my nose and the back of my throat fills with the bitter taste of artificial fruit. 
My shampoo, also labeled Deep Cleaning, is worked into my hair and allowed to set for the count of sixty in the hope that the extended time will maximize the leeching of grime from the blonde follicles.  I’m having a bad day, so I slather my face with a glycerin-heavy sea kelp mask that burns so strongly my nose begins to run.  The five minute wait until I can rinse it off is maddening.  I distract myself by scrubbing all over with a small plastic brush that has stiff white nylon bristles and draws blood that trickles down and foams on the porcelain floor as it mixes with the jets of hot water shooting from the stainless steel shower head.
         Thick steam condenses on my back as I dry off with a fluffy towel.  I slip on blue, yellow, and red striped pajama bottoms that have a rip in the waist band where I’ve torn the tag off.  I use my palm to wipe clean a hazy strip of mirror and, to my blurred reflection, whisper, “I am the anti-man and I hate myself,” while thinking of Amanda, who is Stephen Summers fiancée, and how last night, high on speed, she begged me to fuck her up the ass but cried and screamed for me to stop before my dick was even a quarter of the way inside her.
         Midnight comes and fists of madness are pounding on the door.
*
         “Are you happy?” Stephen Summers asks.  He arrived an hour ago with a black ball of sticky opium to smoke in the long, slender pipe I bought a couple years ago from an old Chinaman in Shanghai.  Now we’re sitting on the floor inhaling the floral smoke while watching a documentary on Hitler’s SS.
         “You mean about the opium?” I question.  “Or overall?”
         “Overall.  Like, day to day.”
         I think for a moment, decide to lie.  “Occasionally.  I am right now.”
         “Well right now you’re high.  What about when you’re sober?”
         “I try to avoid sobriety as much as possible.”
         “Don’t dodge the question.”
         “Okay then, no.  I’m not happy when I’m sober.  I’m amazingly miserable.  I usually am when I’m high too.”
         “Why?”
         “I don’t know, man.”
         “Don’t you ever think about it?”  Why you’re unhappy?  I do all the time.”
         “Who cares.”
         “Well, I do.”
         “Fine.  I do too.  I think about it all the time.  I have almost everything I want, but I’m unhappy.  I was in love and engaged to a great girl, but I was wasn’t happy.  My family surrounded me with love and support but I wasn’t happy.  I have friends, but I’m not happy.  So fuck it.”
         “Why?”
         “Why aren’t I happy?  How the hell should I know.  Maybe it’s a chemical imbalance.  Maybe I just see life for the brief, pointless shit storm it really is and choose to accept it instead of trying to fool myself into believing it’s something more.”
         “Maybe the point is to just enjoy it as much as you can, while you can,” Stephen says.
         “That may work for us.  We have cars and houses and a little bit of money.  We can use drugs and women when we feel bad and need to pass the time.  But what about the others, the people who suffer constantly with no chance of relief?  Homeless, starving people who fear a new level of pain every time they have to wake up.
         “I can accept that life is meaningless, just a fluke of evolution that endowed us with heightened understanding.  I try to make best of my consciousness.  But what about the people who can’t?  They may worship God or find love or that kind of shit to squeeze out some happiness, but ultimately it’s a terrible hard life.  For everybody.  It’s a goddam lottery of existence, but the prize is either mostly bad, or cata-fucking-strophic.
         “Is it worth the pain and depression for a few glimpses of joy?  I guess most people seem to think so, or suicide would be legal and much more popular.  They’d probably have a machine that kills people in the pharmacy at Wal-Mart.”
         “What about you?  What do you think?”
         “How should I know?  I’m just trying to ride it out with the least amount of suffering.  Then I’ll die.”  I take a drag from the pipe.  “This isn’t even an original conversation, so it’s worthless.  Everyone tries to figure out why they’re not happy.  Most the time they can’t.”
         “We could always figure out some mind blowing new truth and change the world forever while sitting right here.  Couldn’t we?”
         “Impossible.”
         “Huh?  Sure we could.”
         “That’s impossible because there’s nothing original left to think,” I explain.  “Every conceivable thought has already been thought before.”
         “That’s bullshit.  You’re always saying weird bullshit like that.”
         “It’s true, cocksucker.  Try it.  Try to think of something original.”
         His face twists up.  “Alright…I’d like to beat off on Daley Square, on the exact spot the final bullet hit JFK.  I think there’s an X that marks it.”
         I nod approval.  “That’s pretty good, but I’m sure some psycho’s already done it.”
         “Okay then, I want to sedate a wooly mammoth, gouge out one of its eyes, and skull fuck the shit out of the socket while the thing’s still breathing.”  He passes me the pipe.
         “I bet a caveman did that.  That’s too easy.  And what’s up with all the beating off and skull fucking?  Get your mind out of the goddam gutter, man.”
         “You say a lot of stupid shit, but this is definitely the worst.  It doesn’t make sense.  What about new technologies and inventions?  We can’t even begin to imagine the shit to come.”
         “Hmm…that’s a good point.  But there could be someone who thinks it up decades or centuries before the actual technology arrives.  Like, just the concept of it.  I hold strong to my original argument.”
         “The scary thing about you is that you’re almost right most the time, yet still so very, very wrong.  You understand all the problems, but you don’t care enough to do anything about it.  You’re actually quite close to being smart.”
         “I can accept that.”
         “You act like you know everything, though.  It get pretty goddam annoying.”
         He cuts off another piece of opium and puts it into the pipe, begins smoking it.  Chants of “Ziegheil!  Ziegheil!  Zeigheil!” come from the television.
         “Do you know that there’s bacteria way up in your nose that will kill you if it gets in your eyes?” I ask him.
         “So what?”
         “Maybe I can get some out and rub it all over my eyeballs.”
         “You’re such a fucking idiot.”
         “That’s what they tell me.”
*
         Self awareness comes easily when you hate yourself and want nothing from life except, hopefully, emotional escape and a quick, easy death.  If you know what you don’t want, the rest just works itself out.  I know I don’t want a job or a God or the sense of satisfaction that arises from a job well done.  I’m the layer of yellow scum that gathers around the inside of the toilet bowl where the water meets the rim.  I’m the kind of man that must be exterminated if society is to stand a chance at success.
           Today, Dr. Swann told me there is an inoperable tumor on the frontal lobe of my brain, and that I will be dead within a year.  He showed me the CAT scan, but the tumor was just an innocent white blob the size of a quarter.
         The sky is blue and high.  I don’t see a single cloud.  It’s warm, but not hot, and the deck chair I’m sitting in has hard wooden slats that are digging against my back.  The smell of decaying wood is all around me, and I can hear the trees growing.  The wind is blowing into my face and I can see the individual pine needles, green with life, shaking on the branches.  One breaks off and twirls to the ground in slow tight somersaults.
         It seems a terribly normal way to die.  I always fantasized a piano falling on my head, or a gang of angry, murderous midgets stabbing me to death – but I’m doomed to this.  Slow.  Boring.  Maybe I’ll lose all my hair, at least.
         I strip naked and tie a blue and burgundy bowtie around my neck, then go outside and lie facedown in the grass.  An ant crawls up my nose so I blow it out with a deep gust from my lungs.  Another bites my balls, but I leave it alone because I don’t feel like killing anything today.  The dogs wander over and Blue lies with her head resting on the back of my leg.  Fred sniffs my ass then runs into the woods.  Later, when I hear his deep throaty bay, I know that he’s pinned something down a hole or trapped something up a tree.
         John Wayne died the day I was born, just hours before my mother pushed me from her womb.  Is there significance in this?  Is there significance in anything?  Probably not.  Knowledge may be power, but it’s undeniably miserable.  What should I be feeling right now?  What am I supposed to be feeling?
         I fall asleep and wake up covered with bugs and itchy bites.  I go inside and use a box cutter to slice all the skin from my forearms, then put on a Casper mask and run around the back yard.  The freshly exposed bones and muscles itch worse than the bug bites and rusty blood streams down into the thick green grass.
         A moment later, while pirouetting near a sprinkler, I realize that I don’t know any Dr. Swann, and that I can’t really picture his office or what the man looks like.  Then I remember that I’ve actually been chewing Jimson Weed all afternoon, and that this is probably just some intense hallucination.
         I open my eyes and I’m in a jail cell, think, “Shit, not again,” as steel bands of fear squeeze my chest.  I blink, open my eyes again, and I’m on my bedroom floor.  I pinch myself all over, but don’t trust the pain so I find Paul and he assures me again and again that this reality is truth and that everything is fine.  I sob like a bitch then smoke several joints and watch him play X-Box for the rest of the night.  Life goes on.