By A Story By Johnny Fontaine
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Part I
The apartment walls seem
too white, rainbows
shooting off the stained
glass front bay transom window across my ceiling, spelling her first initial out. She’s another reason to change, though perhaps, like everyone else, is just clueless. What I thought I could be is not what I want to be after all.
I am not responsible, financially stable, nor independent or possess a work ethic. I am not in love or exhibit any signs of true friendship. I fear confrontation, have no social bonds and lack trust or variety in life. I know no career goal, show no artistic freedom or have any financial rewards. I have no faith or community ties, show no service to God or utilize any outlet of personal growth. I lack any intellectual development, cultural diversity or self-improvement. I suffer exponentially in fitness, diet, any exercise or discipline.
With the exception of a few problems, everything is going well; but that’s way too much for an epitaph in case my heart stopped beating, another casualty of the 12-Step Antichrist.
The air beyond my heavy wool covers is a lonely kind of cold, the old stones of the apartment building living on their memories. Out of bed but dressed sans shower, I decide a return to some sort of archetypal truth doesn’t assume I can accept its identity. Each morning I’m losing more blonde hair to the brush. I put on sunglasses instead of opening a new bottle of Visine.
All this change doesn’t have to be in pain. The crack can only numb me so much, as if they rocked up my soul and cut it up into $20 pieces to sell to all my enemies. For too long I’ve been denying myself any real opportunity to let old dreams fly. I smoke them away, one hit at a time. Tomorrow could be my last day for quite some time, considering the brink I’ve pushed myself to. Maybe I’m not afraid of heights after all. Too many days in a row I’ve been pretending I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up lost without a map. The push of the clothes against my body signaled work, like cheap reparations.
I used to fear nothing. It’s almost like I reached out to embrace it (nothing) and call it my own. I am much stronger than this need to self-destruct. My dreams tell me so. I am not insane, only tired of failure and stupidity. I truly am my own best effort. Wisps of smoke fill my nostrils just moments before I leave, a parting shot.
Part II
It feels like I have to be born
again at 31. I’ve been put on a
one-week suspension from work, so must use the time from today until next Saturday in order to come to grips with everything. Rocky was just a movie, right? All this pain, fear, self-destruction, dishonesty, crime and loss of discipline must be defeated.
So what do I do? Walk three miles in the rain to back up some black hash mailed to me from my buddy in the Bronx with some white rock culled from a near rip-off in the Louisville housing projects. A voice inside told me the raindrops were uninvited tears from God. I’m to convince you I’m nowhere near a loss to explain my pathetic weakness in case asked, as if penance were something on the horizon. There are no intellectually stimulating conversations with crack dealers, just the beaten look in their eyes as they silently pray I will return later to help them feed their own damning ritual. Life takes funny bounces for everyone, so I don’t feel so bad.
Sometimes you just wake up and it’s one week later.
My father used to tell me “You can’t smoke the ashes of a cigarette you didn’t choose to enjoy.” That made sense to me, especially on the night before returning to work after the suspension. I don’t even think it’s the drugs, to be honest. Today is just as good as any to call my last. Tomorrow I wake early, have breakfast, shower and shave, then go to work, later in the day to bring a cache of stolen merch to my drug dealers. Then I’ll accept withdrawal. I swear that I fell off to sleep believing that the last thought was true; tomorrow can be my new beginning.
Part III
No call, no show at work,
another bank withdrawal,
two trips to the projects, pawning the stereo system; at least I got my laundry done. If God loves me I’ll still have a job tomorrow with the Christmas budget untouched by my stupidity.
This is truly the bottom, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Raped by fear. Tomorrow, my destiny will be on its knees. I’ve had 20 jobs in as many years, but that doesn’t make me an addict, does it? I’m more addicted to the fear right now of going back to work tomorrow. If I don’t go in I’ll just have to find another job; it’ll probably be like this one or worse.
Life does favors. I got a call late this afternoon, my employment terminated. They saved me the trip downtown. Church and classifieds this Sunday – sound familiar? I felt like one of those M.C. Escher prints that unravels your mind and leaves you searching for a perspective that doesn’t exist, like trying to make love to an escort. I lost a job at a video store. Tracy, my girlfriend of three years, left me because I smoked one joint for every song at a Yes concert we attended. True, they played long ass songs but they played a lot of them in over 3 hours. She felt violated, like my 35-day treatment center vacation hadn’t paid off the way it should have. The job I had before the video store was making $42K a year as a rookie phenom with The Prudential. I can’t even remember if I was high or not when I took my securities license examinations.
Part IV
Well, it’s a strange place that
I’ve been living in.
I’ve argued with my dealer over debt consolidation for the last time. I am tired of running; it doesn’t make sense that I slept through the 11th in a hotel room downtown. At least I had the Labor Day holiday to remember. I remember a time when I was in a better hotel room in Atlanta, standing naked in front of the mirror and swearing Princess Diana was the wrong one to die that night.
None of this makes sense, regardless. Church tomorrow, for sure. Maybe I never gave up because I never had a reason to. A fire in the belly sort of epiphany, where my head dances away and I’m left with nothing more than a low-dim fright to be alive.
There are things I can do, people I can call. John Lennon composed “Help” and not many people listened, but a lot of people bought the album. I’m listening to it as we speak. What this feels like is a moment from childhood, sick with fever and pushing back hallucinations after waking up in the middle of the night. The room was washed in freakish shadows from a small nightlight. In pulverizing fear, I found myself a miniscule being among giant fears, all of them dressed in black, inhuman in their silence. As they moved towards me, I remember thinking I would never survive. All I could do was begin to scream in panic and hear nothing come out.
Part V
I once sat naked in my down
town apartment (the one with
the skyline view) watching my chained apartment door open slowly. I mean it was imperceptibly moving, albeit the angle from which I viewed this was skewed. I was prone on the living room couch feeling my heart fiercely pounce against my chest, but I wasn’t sure I was going to live through that night. I did remember the crack of light I imagined seeing became some sort of goal. It made sense.
One more hit calms me down, gives me an opportunity to realize that I’m cold. It’s nearly Christmas and I haven’t done a day’s worth of shopping. I live alone. It’s better than the shelter. My sex life is in cyberspace. Times swing. NA meetings are better than church. I sit around and try to figure out who else is showing up high. The coffee is better over in AA. I’m going to return to normal tomorrow. I painted the apartment walls a Williamsburg blue. Tracy would’ve liked it.
Johnny Fontaine is a columnists for The Louisville Cardinal, and is currently writing a frenzy of different fictions.
