Making My Own Mess

In my life, I have lived in rooms made out of tarps, rooms full of cat shit, lived in places that got regularly raided by cops, where Mexican drug dealers slept on pillows of cocaine in order to keep it safe. I am definitely not bragging about how tough I am or where I’ve been, I am merely trying to gauge my current situation in all of this. I have always had some kind of partner through all of this. But I think the thing that helped me get through the chaos was all the drugs and alcohol I was ingesting.

I only did sleepy drugs (alcohol, heroin, benzos, etc.). No coke or crack or anything like that. I would do anything to be asleep through that misery. I can never understand people that live in total shitholes with other disgusting pieces of shit that are addicted to meth or something and don’t sleep for weeks at a time. Why would you want to be awake through that? I mean if you’re famous and you have a lot of money, and a pool and stuff, I guess I can understand prolonging things. I still stick to this decree--doing only downers--only now all the downers I do are legal, at least for me, and only for me.

Time was I used to have sheets on my bed. Now I notice that I do have one sheet, which has been bunched up into the corner of my bed for the past week. I wish I could gain the energy to put my sheet on, because I eat in my bed so much there is food debris in it and also coins that get stuck to my back. When I get up in the morning it sounds like someone dumping out a change purse because of all of the change falling onto the floor.

My father is really old and has emphysema and broken discs in his back and all kinds of ailments. I looked in his room last week, and his bed was perfectly made. It was so nice, it looked untouched. I asked him if he ever sleeps in his room, because he’s always in this recliner next to which he has set up shelving for all his drugs, breathing supplies--even a coffee warmer with his coffee cup on it--but he replies that he slept in his room last night and the night before, he just makes the bed every day. It struck me at that point that people do make their beds. I always found that so pointless because you’re just going to get into it and mess it up anyways. But I guess it looks nice.

When I do wake up, which is at some ungodly late hour usually, the first thing I wake up to is the big empty can of cashews sitting next to me. And then I see the various empty bottles of Gatorade and Orange Crush next to me. At many times in my life there was a person there. I often didn’t like that person, but now it is empty bottles of shit.

Wasn’t I supposed to grow out of this phase in college or something?

Well I wasn’t exactly the typical college student. While my classmates were binge drinking and dancing on tables, I was poking needles in my arm and falling over tables. But, shit, I still got through collage with a solid B-average. It’s not like people don’t know that there’s something wrong with you, but when you’re in art school that makes you “eccentric” and therefore acceptable. Or that’s what happened to me, at least.

I keep thinking I’m going to give up soon. Not give up and kill myself, but lose all motivation for anything whatsoever. Still, I keep subtly pushing myself. I use drugs that sedate me, but they’re all prescribed. Not that that makes them any better for me, I just find it funny that I’m able to support a big drug habit and have it all be legal. And I look like Bill Gates compared to my goddamned roommates.

I have roommates that steal from me and others to support their own habits. I have roommates who get drunk and rant about saving the children in the neighborhood, while dismissing all of their parents as spics and niggers. Since I was seventeen I’ve lived in about eleven places, with about fifty different people. They are all funny for their own reasons. But they make me fucking sick when I’m living with them; only upon separation do I start to appreciate them. Not all, but some.

But I just sit and look at my room and realize that I have given up on this room and I wonder what other areas of my life I have given up on. But it’s hard to have a place with a perfectly clean room when the room is so small, and you have so much stuff, and the rest of the house is a shithole. I guess I could start by making my bed. But it’s so inane.

People ask me if they can come over a lot. I cannot ever let them do it. They say things like, “Oh my house is messy, it doesn’t bother me.” And the few times I have believed that line, when they enter where I live they are obviously disturbed, and rarely come back. If they really like me, they continue to contact me by telephone and never come back again. The only one that comes back is this guy I used to live with who stays with this man who is three times his age “for free” but he actually has to do all these sex favors for him, so he comes over for refuge.

The neighborhood I live in is littered with drug dealers, and it reminds me of when I used to come down here everyday to get my drugs. It would be so convenient for me to go back to using the heroin, but this substitute is a beautiful thing. For me at least. I know I’m just sucking the same milk from a different tit, but for some reason, I don’t care. I have come home many times to friends lying unconscious in my house from overdoses, so I shoot them with Naloxone, and it wakes them right up. It happens so often that it’s an almost immediate reaction for me. But luckily, it’s the only reason I don’t have stacks of dead-friends trading cards.

I’m still getting used to not being in school. I was in there for so fucking long. I thought something major would happen after. I was going to move. But I did not because I got a job offer here. I should have just bolted like I wanted to. Maybe. Who knows. Everything started out and it seemed so easy. But now it has been about ten years of self abuse and I’m still stuck in it one way or the other, but like I said I feel like I’m supposed to be concerned, but I’m not. I’m more concerned about the state of my room.

School was always so safe because I was doing something everyone approved of. Now I have a bunch of jobs, all that are satisfying, but none of them are office jobs or more importantly jobs with benefits. I recently had to have my teeth overhauled, because I had about twenty cavities (thanks to the drugs), and my mother paid for my teeth to get fixed. It was the very first thing she has paid for in years, and it was nice of her to fix them, but the guilt will not stop. That is my mother though. She offers to pay for something only to pour on the guilt. I realize this is all over the place, like a diary entry. I just want to stop waking up with change stuck to me and stop looking over and seeing bottles all over my bed.

Sister Dearest

My father made sure that I had about five different last names when I was growing up. There was our actual family moniker, but then sometimes he insisted we be called the “Hacks” or the “Smutneys” or the “Mansons” (these aren’t the real bogus names we used; I’m just giving examples).

This led me to believe that I and my parents were some kind of super-cool spy family that had to hide from the government. It turns out that we did have to hide from a Higher Authority, but not for anything as cool as international intrigue.

But one of the main reasons we had such fluid surnames, I was told, was due to an “evil woman” known as Vera.

When I was about ten, I found out that Vera was an ex-lover of my father’s. Their union, in fact, produced a child. Now my father is not really Deadbeat Dad material. This Vera is the real villain of the piece. She whelped forth nine children, one of whom drowned when he was a baby; another graduated from Harvard. And she held my family in a grip of terror.

I wasn’t allowed to answer the door or pick up the phone. I couldn’t give my personal information out to anyone. The only addresses we ever had were P.O. boxes, and they were always three towns over. My mother lived this way, too.

The great terror was that if Vera ever found us, she would kidnap me and hold me for ransom. This was not an unreasonable fear. I heard all kinds of horror stories about Vera having sex with her kids; and then there was the one who died. So I was really, really scared. I grew up under the specter of this killer psycho-mom who could leap out from anywhere at any moment, and I’d have no idea who she was because she’d be wearing a disguise.

Plus there was my sister. The one who lived with this evil woman.

When I was about ten, Vera caught up with us. She sent my father a letter making clear threats that he should pay her back child support, or that she’d come snatch me away. It also contained a picture of my sister, who was about fifteen. Word was that she’d become a wild runaway. I was desperate to talk to her, but forbidden to do so.

Fast-forward five years. My parents were newly divorced. My father was extremely strict, so, with him out of the house, I enjoyed all kinds of new freedoms. So did my mom. Occasionally she’d even spend the night at her new boyfriend’s place. This meant the end of all curfews and constraints.

I embarked on a series of lesbian romances immediately (I was never with a boy until college). I went to church on acid. In short, I had all the fun a fifteen-year-old should. The only disruptions occurred when I’d meet my dad for pizza.

Especially this one night.

Upon entering our usual pizza joint, I saw my dad sitting with a girl who looked to be about twenty. He said her name was Robin and that she was his new girlfriend. She did appear strange enough to date a fifty-five-year-old but, at the same time, she sort of looked a little bit like me. This struck me as some rather odd pseudo-incest. But I went with it.

After some start-and-stop conversation, my father came clean. Robin was my sister.

There she was - the girl who caused my family to be the “Whites” and the “Joneses” and all those other fake names for so long. But I had no resentment. I was very interested. She was so bubbly and upbeat. I was at my most shy and retiring, but Robin spoke with insane energy and I immediately looked up to her.

She revealed that she’d just arrived from Florida, where she’d gotten arrested and kicked out the window of a cop car. After that, they took Robin to jail and my dad posted her bond, so she’d be staying with him for the time being. I had no idea how my father was going to handle this.

See, I have some other half-siblings, too, besides Robin. My father helped his oldest son deal PCP. And now he was helping his criminal daughter hide from the police. And this was after years of not letting me stay out past 11PM.

None of this bothered me at the moment, though. I just wanted to live Robin’s life. The more she babbled, the more I wanted to imitate every aspect of her.

After the pizza meeting, Robin spent five whole days in my dad’s apartment. He finally shipped her off because she’d wake up routinely throughout the night, screaming uncontrollably. My father values, above all things, his privacy - to the point that he tapes up the peephole in his front door so that no one can look in. Since Robin’s wailing was disrupting his silent kingdom, she had to go.

Robin also broke into my dad’s private pharmacy, which didn’t help her cause much. My dad keeps more narcotics on hand - many of which have not been manufactured in years - than a dozen nurse stations at a dozen different hospitals. Robin managed to dip into his Valiums, and then she crashed through a glass coffee table.

That was, indeed, the final straw - but only for this particular appearance of Robin.

She’d be back.

Five years later, to be exact, Robin returned. With child. And more on fire than ever.

Robin’s son, this poor little creature named Abel who is now in the custody of the state, was severely developmentally disabled. He was once found wandering on the side of a highway at age three wearing just a (full) diaper. Abel could not even form words or carry out any of the tasks that one should be able to at his age - except that he was smart enough to get away from his mom.

My sister continued to both fascinate and frighten me. As Abel tore around my brother’s house shitting all over the floor (because Robin refused to buy diapers), she’d tell me how close we were in the cosmos, because she and I were both Virgos. She was utterly oblivious to the piles of feces her son was pumping out around the house.

Some time later, Robin attended a big family party with my father and me. Now my family is comprised of some of the toughest people you’ll ever meet - criminals in and out of jail, drug addicts, murderers...any horrible transgression you can think of, they’ve done it. And yet they were all terrified of Robin.

She made it so that you would just have to deal with her, though.

In the midst of a conversation with my father, Robin shot up from her chair and yelled, “REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU TOUCHED ME, YOU FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE, AND YOU CALLED ME A WHORE!?!”

And then she quietly sat down.

My father, who usually cannot control his anger, remained very calm. People milled about serving fried chicken as though nothing had happened. My dad even managed to choke down a piece, and maybe some mashed potatoes as well. Shortly thereafter, we politely left.

That was the last time Robin has spoken to my dad.

Robin continued to live in an Illinois suburb alongside my other half-brother and half-sister. She shacked up with a motel owner and had another kid. I picture the next most likely thing to happen to her is that she’ll be “saved” by fundamentalist Christians.

My most recent contact with Robin occurred when she called to ask for $6,000. She needed a brain tumor removed, she said. Six months later, Robin called back to state that she no longer needed the cash, because TV evangelist Benny Hinn has cured her ailment. Thank God for him.

This is my blood. It’s the same as everything else in my life.

And, Robin, should you be reading this, please get in touch with me. I’d like to know you better and learn more about your life.

Good Day. Mate.

Yesterday was a good day. Just like the Ice Cube song.

Maybe “good” isn’t quite the word. “Long” and “bizarre” may be more technically accurate. But I liked how everything went. It all made me happy.

The night before, I offered my Jetta to a homeless man to use as a motel. Since the starter is shot, I figured the car would be okay. Waking up and seeing that he’d come and gone and that my vehicle was in one piece felt like a blessing.

I’m weird with the homeless. For all the searing hatred I feel for humanity in general, I get all Mother Theresa when it comes to hobos. Sometimes I get burned, sometimes I don’t.

So as I was pondering this good fortune, I wandered past a table full of fat women at an outdoor cafe, stuffing their porky faces. I bummed a Marlboro Light (of course) from one of them, and as I was walking away, I heard her plump pal hiss in my direction (when she thought I was out of earshot): “Eat something!”

I wanted to turn around and tell them that the cigarette was my only meal for the day and then start crying. I wish I had.

It made me think about how fat people should not be allowed to eat, period, but they definitely should be banned from hogging it up in plain view of the public. Who wants to walk down a street and witness a parade of obese, middle-aged cunts gorging themselves? It’s like a car crash you don’t even want to watch.

Parading down Damen Avenue in the summer is like going to the zoo and watching the elephants eat each others shit.

After that, I realized I was broke. I called my friend Zed, who always provides me with a quick source of income. I burn him with cigarettes and he pays me.

Zed grew up in a bar in Yugoslavia, where drunk women routinely singed him with their smokes. Now he enjoys nothing so much as a lit ciggie to the foot while being degraded. In fact, he shells out $80 for a half-hour of this treatment.

This works out for me because it’s a great way to channel my aggressions and, even more so, I just plain enjoy it. The only problem is that it requires me to ingest about ten cigs in thirty minutes, and I tend to be a bit sick afterward. Still, eighty bucks is eighty bucks.

I’d almost perform this service for free, but I really needed the dough. It makes me laugh to see Zed wince in pain. He loves this reaction. I think that’s why he always asks me back. That, plus he has deemed me “pleasing to the eye.”

So even though this was my seventh session with Zed, this was the first time I made him cry. I think maybe he finally felt comfortable enough with me to really let loose. It was definitely some sort of breakthrough.

Still, the tears made things a bit awkward afterward. I felt like I was slogging through a sea of uncomfortable feelings on the way out. But seeing Zed sob made me realize that this was a profound experience for him. His pain was attached to real memories--and true horrors, at that. I was glad that he was dealing with this in such an inventive and mutually beneficial fashion. That made me happy.

With a few bucks now to tide me over till my next paycheck (if I could keep it away from my sticky-fingered roommate, who’s developed a repulsive taste for crack), I decided to catch a band. I found a club and came across a guy I regularly fornicate with named Beefo.

Beefo’s a bit crazy. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly is wrong with him, but he claims to be nuts enough to make a living from Social Security payments. At first I was skeptical, but then I started experiencing his...obsessions.

The latest fixation for Beefo is online airline tickets. He looks for good deals on flights all the time. I mean, constantly. Since he has nothing to do all day, this is all he does.

And he almost never travels. Anywhere.

Beefo claims he has a roommate who is constantly in Costa Rica fucking hookers. I’ve never seen anyone else in Beefo’s apartment. We had to wait until exactly three A.M. because that’s when this roommate was next departing for Costa Rica.

So we waited until three, went to Beefo’s and had sex. Immediately upon popping off, Beefo shot out of the bed and glued his face to a nearby computer. I thought He can’t possibly be looking for airline tickets. Alas, I thought wrong.

“Look at this!” Beefo squealed. “Check this out! Three hundred dollars round trip to Prague! You should totally take advantage of this!”

It dawned on me that plane tickets brought infinitely more joy to Beefo than sex ever could. This, too, made me happy.

The sun was rising as I drove home. As I parked on my corner, I saw a white guy waving a piece of lumber and screaming. It was my roommate, Blockhead.

He was drunk out of his mind, greeting the denizens of my mostly minority neighborhood with wails about “spics” and “niggers”. He was on a self-righteous tear, yelling about the poor children who have no choice but to grow up to be drug dealers themselves.

It’s hard to argue with his point of view on this sad state of affairs, but one sloshed, skinny white asshole twirling a two-by-four and spewing racial slurs is not going to correct the many woes of the inner city and/or rescue its youth.

The funny thing is that Blockhead never seemed to be troubled by any of this strife before. That, and I swear he exhibits pedophilic tendencies.

I tried to shut Blockhead up, but he told me he’d been out doing this for the previous three nights. I told him to at least knock off the racial slurs, because the locals were highly likely to be offended by that kind of language, and many of them have guns, which his piece of wood probably wouldn’t be much good at fending off.

Desperate for quiet, I summoned my other roommate, Medici, to help. He was useless. Plus, his presence prompted Blockhead to threaten me with the two-by-four. I wished I had a taser. I would have used it and solved the problem.

Not wanting to call the police, I simply made it up to my room, turned on the air-conditioning, and waited for a gunshot.

The next day I arose to see Blockhead sitting in the living room, sans bullet holes. He must have gotten tired of fighting the one-man-fight he was fighting, or he sobered up, or both. He was fine. I was relieved. I just hope he stops. But he won’t. Or he’ll do something worse.

See, the insanity - it never stops. From the homeless freeloaders to the fat-asses to the fetishists, my world is a nonstop carousel of mania. And I think it’s great. It all makes me happy. I don’t know what I’d do without these people and their...peculiarities.

These nuts keep me going.

So even though I don’t live in South Central and I’m not Ice Cube, I was moved to declare: “Today was a good day.”

Shrinky Dink

Last week I was wandering around the streets late at night (as I often do), and I found myself lingering outside a club, wondering whether or not I wanted to go in. I knew what I’d be in for if I entered the place, and I had to decide if I wanted that or to just enjoy a quiet night.

As I pondered this, a rather down-and-out homeless man talked to me. He asked me to come back to the Christian mission where he was living. I declined.

He was almost fifty (a factor that usually doesn’t stop me), and he did have three teeth that were missing in the most charming way, but he was even too incoherent for me.

I was waiting for my friend Dax to negotiate something with a rail-thin girl who was strung out on meth and who was flying at about light speed compared to my usual standard state of lethargy. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it's people on meth or crack. Heroin can be annoying, but usually the people just pass out and don’t bother you, unless they OD. That can be a true irritant, but I’m getting off the subject.

At one point Dax threw in the towel and we headed for the train. That’s when he propositioned me, offering money if I’d have sex with him. This is not without precedent, as I once let him lick my vagina for $100 while I watched 3rd Rock from the Sun and tried to block it out. Dax is a male escort himself, but he cannot seem to get anything from any ladies, so he pays for his poon.

Again I declined, prompting Dax to whine that I’d broken his heart and a bunch of other bullshit. Poor him.

Two days later five big guys wailed on Dax and put him in critical condition. Now his jaw is broken and he has to have a metal plate in his face, which will make it very hard for him to get through airport security.

I feel bad for him.

So after I turned down Dax’s cash-for-cooch offer, I wandered back to the club. Some guy named Yonkel was hanging around outside. He was from Israel and told me that he recognized me from some shitty art show we were both at and proceeded to ask me all the boring getting-to-know-you questions.

Yonkel also told me that he was a doctor. A psychiatrist, to boot.

Immediately I was impressed. I thought about what kind of drugs he could prescribe me and how I always wanted to date an MD.

We were deciding whether or not to go into the club and he told me to relax and take a deep breath. That was gay, but after I did it, I decided I would not go into that place.

Yonkel asked if he could walk me to the train. If I knew what was going to take place in that thirty-minute hike, I probably would have declined, but he was a fucking twenty-seven-year-old MD, a man of my dreams, so I couldn’t resist.

And then it started...this onslaught of questions. I thought that shrinks wouldn't try to analyze people outside of their job, but here we were.

After mentioning that his family was wacky, Yonkel asked me about my upbringing, about abuse in my family, all of these really heavy questions. I’d expect to answer these queries if I were in his office, but on the street it was a bit awkward. And he seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that he was crossing major boundaries by hammering away at this stuff. Still, Yonkel was undaunted.

I started to get offended and I wanted to get away from him. But then he started to draw these conclusions about me, which sound terrible when I write them, and it’s almost embarrassing, but it does explain a lot. The answers were so simple that I am almost mad I did not come to these conclusions myself.

All these people, all these articles that I’ve written, the constant parade of shitheads coming into and out of my life for a day or two is just my way of trying to find intimacy. It was a good answer, I thought.

So all of these mornings, brushing my teeth and watching those little white cum strings that form along the bottoms of my teeth and the pits in my gums and the inside of my cheeks that are impossible to spit out and all those times I had to reach into my herpes-scarred mouth to separate and lift the knots and yarn that collect and breed inside my flushed, ugly, pounded face, and all the stains that I come across later, and all the accusations of me having VDs and sleeping with weirdos--all that is me trying to find intimacy and failing.

It’s an interesting prospect.

I knew Yonkel worked at a local university as a psychiatrist, but I didn’t exactly remember his full name. I tried to look him up on the Internet, but I could not find him. I wanted him to be my psychiatrist.

Surprisingly, I ran into Yonkel the next day. I informed him of my search and I think I scared him a little bit. Unfortunately I don’t have the insurance to even afford a shrink.

One thing that I know and that always comforts me is the fact that I know that my mother is sleeping with a man who has genital herpes and she does not seem to care. Sometimes these simple realizations make all the difference.