[Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series that began Aug. 31. To read the first part click here.]
The Snake and Eggs
The brain is a dog dish. There’s water sure, but it’s brackish, chaotic and gross; the useful stuff, the shit we need to safely navigate ourselves from day to day, in order to keep shelter overhead and two cups in our guts, is all mixed up with poisonous half-dead eight-legged memories sloshing around strands of various breeds of unwanted slobber as waterlogged slug-like traumas slowly decompose on the bottom of the bowl, adding a nice, awful film to the whole cranium cocktail, making proper operation slow going. Coping with the fact that my first sexual experience was a planned attack upon my person by a known, yet seemingly-protected predator made my abilities to mechanically function as a new adult hell. I didn’t know which way was up, but I was all too happy to keep going down.
The Two Coreys and Murky Dismal at The Demolition Derby
The younger of my two roommates and I had always been pretty close, but, once we vacated for good from the apartment on Broadway, a harmful, symbiotic relationship was born, and we quickly exiled ourselves from the scene, from sex and, most importantly, from sound logic. Ours was a disgruntled bond made up entirely of hard drink, hard drugs and hard intolerance enjoyed in dank basements, sweltering garages and weed-infested parking lots. We hated just about everyone and everything and actively showed it. We became too hard for all y’all motherfuckers! And it was, at its core, just plain sad. Positive friendships were thrown out the window to never be mended, and family was dismissed outright. Enter, a villain.
It didn’t take long before we cozied-up with one Murky Dismal, a 40-something, concrete-bachelor and pronounced king of substance abuse, a real ornery ex-con who lived in a one-room South Central shack cluttered with broken instruments, unfinished finger-paintings and a multicolored mountain of porno on VHS that all seemed to feature some Danish rouge named “Rocco.” Our world became a dumpster on fire, rolling down a hill, headed for an 80-year-old lady leaving church, with Murky stoking the flames. A series of car chases, car crashes, fist-fights and overdoses followed; outrunning cashiers, barkeeps, bouncers, the police and enraged bus drivers became standard. Misery loves company, and we were the three most miserable bastards going.
Fall Over Not Out
Today, I hold an acute disdain for the romanticization of drug and alcohol abuse. I’m not straight-edge by any account, but there’s nothing tender, or picturesque, about three grown men getting into a living-room brawl over the artistic merits of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” while wasted. It’s a collision-course every day, and every day a collision-course accompanied by a repeating tempo that gets faster and faster until — you up and explode.
Sunday Morning Coming Down
Arrested on Derby weekend — the clink was so packed with fellow lawbreakers, I never saw a cell. Instead, they just handcuffed me to a chair next to an old man who was shirtless but wearing a blazer, his hair slathered in shampoo and all askew. It was funny to me at the time, like: “Damn, old man what sorta detestable, lowdown dirty shit does one have to commit to get your bad self hemmed up by the police, while trying to take a shower?!”
Fast forward to roughly a year later, and I’m sitting on a curb, hemmed-up without a coat on the side of Dixie Highway, as a pair of Louisville’s finest search my car, a cold November rain soaking me to my soul. This time, I was finding nothing funny about my exploits, or the heap of trouble I was now in. Watching the flashlights beam and gleam inside my car, I knew I had to change, that I had to give myself another chance at doing anything other than living in this perpetual state of self-inflicting damage.
Pain of Mind
When you’re living life all boarded up, the air you breath is malodorous, your vision is fucked and your capacity to move, limited. Yet you convince yourself that you can see the futility in everything and, in everyone, their malicious code. The ability to remove the boards so you can get a proper look at what’s what is a slow, strenuous task, but once you’ve got some light shining in, you keep going, without forgiving or forgetting or seeking retribution. You just move on, because what else are you going do, lay down and die? Fuck that. ‘Nuff Said. •
