Don't Wake Up

The first thing on my mind every morning I wake up is usually a curse word.  Shit. Fuck. Motherfucker. Fucking Cunt… I’ve uttered it all from the underside of the pillow I wrap around my face as an instinctual reaction to having risen from the solace of sleep. My impulse is to flinch from the onslaught of depravity that inevitably follows a new calendar page as it falls to the floor. A sack of feathers is no protection against the types of things I am forced to expect from a newly budding day: Things like scarlet spotted shirtsleeves and telltale puddles of blood on the bathroom floor, and the gravity that pulls my mother’s face into a heartbreaking mask of disappointment when my pupils are tiny pinpoints in the mud of my eyes. Things like creeping in my car for hours on the same streets that surround the dopehouse, and the nervous sweat that soaks my back as I wait for the Man’s white Corsica to appear in the driveway. Things like payphones that receive call-backs, pager numbers written on thin slips of paper with no name, and the look the gas station attendant gives me as I count out ninety-six-cents worth of change that I saved for gas out of the two hundred I just spent on heroin - then telling the attendant, “I want to use thirty five cents of this for one of those single cigarettes… and, uh, put the rest in the tank, I guess…”

I recoil behind my pillow from the knowledge that I’ll claw for every inch, scam for every quarter and shrug off every lie I’ll tell while bottomfeeding here among the ghosts of industry and the abandoned dreams of those who never tried, in my decimated hometown of Youngstown, Ohio… as if goose down could cushion me from such a blow.

Youngstown’s battered shell of rust and loss and hopelessness leaves a city with no drain to go down; just 34 square miles of prime real estate right at the very bottom, where signs of life come to die or be forgotten. So bottomfeeing here is to stick a straw in the mud and inhale until you’re chewing on shit. Luckily, I’ve reached a stasis with the rotten, stagnant environment I’m immersed in. The haunting vacancy of this abandoned city precisely matches the abandonment inside of me all the time. There is no hope for those who abandoned it long ago. And we stand like these buildings stand around me, dilapidated, and boarded up with scars; barely kept alive by the memories of better days. I was born in this miserable lashing of streets and suburbs; and if I continue on this way I’ll undoubtedly die here without ever leaving or really trying to do much but romance a crutch that makes me weaker with each use.

Years ago, before my ability to cope became reliant on the amount of dope money I could come up with before ten a.m., I used to dream at night about getting laid and finding cash, and sitting in classrooms that were somehow in both my school and my grandmother’s living room when I was 12. Now I see bent and tainted needles lying in piles behind my desk. I see myself arguing with the pawn shop owner over a fair price on my last gram of self-respect. I dream about having dope but not a rig, or having the money but nowhere to buy, or having it all with nowhere to hit. I dream about track marks I can’t hide, details of lies I can’t remember and the friends I haven’t seen since they all stopped talking to me years ago. I dream about all of that and then wake up to be faced with more of the same, only this time it’s worse because it’s real.

I come out of those dreams in fetal positions, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, already dreading the immense weight that descends daily onto my chest with a suffocating gravity that pressures me into doing things I’d never do if my habits weren’t so complicated. My knuckles are white before my mornings even begin; strained from pulling the pillow so hard over my eyes that one sweet moment of denial is attainable before it’s useless to argue any longer that I haven’t woken up. Although in reality, because of the subconscious chemical blanket I’m under, I haven’t truly woken up in years.

Slowly, I loosen my grip on the pillow and let it drop from my head, allowing my surroundings, my memories, and my bolstering to-do list bully their way in. The bedsprings wail from my swizzle stick spine twisting as I flip onto my back and open my eyes. They drag over the faded and dated carpet which matches the drapes slung shut across the front window of this twenty-two-dollar-a-night motel room I rented for two weeks, ten days ago. There's a static light screaming from the television set bolted to the wall and it causes my eyes to squint. The sticky mattress shifts under my weight and knocks against the nightstand, rattling everything on top as I flop onto my stomach and stare at the floor. I am as the light bulb in the lamp on the wall, burnt out. The water glass on the nightstand is half empty, as all of my glasses are, if there’s anything even in them at all. After a life of knowing all the answers, this is where I've ended up, renting an address in a cum-stained motel where all my neighbors fuck the pustual suck-bags they meet in the bar next door for just enough money to sustain themselves another day under the same yoke we all tie our backs to when we first give in to giving up. 

With the drapes slung shut to block out the existence of light I live by television static. A flophouse vampire, paying by the night, I catch my sleep in hour long nods, waking up to smoke cigarettes and burn holes in my fingers. I’ve wasted whole twilights folded over pillows or slumped in chairs, sedated in infomercial lullabies.

In the savage intensity of television static, the unwashed jeans of a corpse and its wrinkled tee shirts scatter their outlines across a nauseating ocean of turquoise carpet. Floating on this bed I am often sea sick in times when I’m caught without the narcotic bait that hooks me, or when early morning hours separate me from a sharp harpoon. Tortured dress socks lie in pairs as blood strewn melena-black clumps of shit floating on a pond colored shag rug. They remain where I peeled them off to walk barefoot on water in a daze of chemical mysticism. My father wore black socks every day of his structured and perpetually irritated life. Dress socks pulled to his knees, with expensive polished Oxfords on his feet. I wore sockless shoes or laid back in sandals or white Adidas Eggshels. Our preference in socks was a major difference between my father and I… one that prevented us from walking in each other’s shoes.  

And then it all floods back: the job I hate, the friends I despise, the habits I support and the dreams I’ve let die… all results of the loose grip I have on the reins of my raw subconscious wanting. My intention was to kick in this shithole, but all I’ve done is maintain. I can’t even say I’ve gotten high, just shooting for a feel of normal… and I flinch from the reality on the other side of my clenched and sweaty pillow every morning.

My thousand-dollar-a-week habit costs me seventy bucks just to get out of bed, let alone find a clean pair of pants, shave, or tie my shoes. For months I've balanced myself on a hundred dollars a day. But once I decided to quit my habit grew to almost twice that. Waking up is a seventy dollar ordeal, flushing it down a vein like a swirling toilet. Often it’s more. Sadly it's sometimes less. Then there's the cocaine collapsing the veins in my wrists and turning my ears to tin cans. Somewhere there must be an end where I can rest and take a breath and regain solid footing. My most potent delusion I suffer is that I’m in control of the thing I have no control over. In failed determination, with rabid junk reasoning warping the realities of a week willed attempt to flee, I’ve sequestered myself in this grimy crack pipe motel to come out clean on the other side.

That was weeks ago. There were justifiable reasons to allow myself enough denial to stave off a flesh-crawling disease with impatient tightening muscles and cramping legs strangling my perception of time back into a horrifyingly linear filmstrip. Instant and total relief from the sickness is the only thing I have to shield myself from the ton-lugging minute hand marching on.

Every morning I return to this life where the things that should matter don’t…. and the things that shouldn’t matter, matter more than anything else. Things like unclogged needles, back alley handshakes, and just enough gas in the tank to make it to the dopehouse… these are my only priorities. Not whether or not I’ll be stranded in the projects with an empty tank afterwards or the fact that I’m stuffing the cost of a used car into my veins every month.

That amount may as well be quantum astronomy, or the mechanics of temporal physics or hyperbolic geometry or some other complicated mess of ideas that I’ll never understand. It doesn’t register any more than the health risks of being my own incompetent and untrained phlebotomist, or shooting up with rain water or melted snow, or mainlining spoons of vinegar to break those miserable chucks of rocked up crack back down into injectable cocaine. As I leave those innocent nocturnal dreams in the foggy night that dies by the dawn I open my eyes to abscessed arms, malnourished ribs and empty wallets. I roll out of bed every day to the backbreaking chore of achieving enough to clear out my head in the bathroom stall at the end of the hall. Around lunchtime I’ll eat a sandwich from the Deli down the street with the premium bathroom - the one with a deadbolt and a private sink and no chance of being interrupted. I’ll peel open used baggies, boil old cottons and scrape the residue from the spoons before going back to the office and hashing out the rest of the workday. Then there’s the cocaine, ringing my ears in the mirror of the second floor bathroom by the elevator until the executives down the hall pound on the door with whitened knuckles on furious fists. Without another seventy for an evening dose I’ll be up all night, desperately seeking the comfortable parts of my dirty mattress.

Today, the threat of another oncoming day is cushioned by the contents of the cigar box on the nightstand by my head, in which lies the cure. It was unfortunate when the faceless Puerto Rican I bought weight off of ended up fogging up the back windows of a city police cruiser as it headed for county. That left me buying twenty-bags and spending more for less. These three thumb-sized waxed-paper envelopes, each stamped with the word Slowicide, will carry me toward that late lunch in the bathroom stall down the hall. Slowicide … I'm not sure if it's a warning or an invitation. Either way a golden crowbar couldn’t pry me from the sheets as easily as the all-consuming lure of a chemical rush and the instantaneous washing off of withdrawal symptoms.

I rarely have enough to sink me back into the couch anymore. Whatever I come up with each morning only barely resets my zeroes back in a line. I can’t tell if I’m addicted to the sensation of that horrible sickness evaporating in seconds, or if it’s about a twenty second narcotic flood that vanishes much too soon, or if it’s just a romanticized version of what I may have felt at one time. But what was once a blissful pillow of wings to carry me gently through the day has been worn away over the years; strangled into a grueling cycle of need and relief, a repetitive spin of copping and shooting and copping again, and hitting in front seats in fits of impatience with a telephone wire cinching my arm, having not even made it two blocks down the street from the dopehouse.

The five to seven minutes it takes to prepare and ingest my morning medicine will be my one fleeting moment of tranquility in another otherwise wretched revolution around the sun. I savor these minutes, as they are the only minutes of the day I will enjoy. Many mornings I will have nothing, and my watery eyes and runny nose, fever chills and crawling skin will remain until I strangle sixty dollars from the fists of opportunity, usually in the blind spot of some store’s security camera. So in comparison, things don’t look as grey as they usually do as the morning’s premier minutes tick themselves to death.

I stare vacantly into the unlit closet, where my suit jacket is a lurking predator in the gallows of empty coat hangers. That black double-breasted uniform of the professional cattle is indicative of the responsibilities that continue to stalk me whether or not I’ve killed my chills and sweats for the morning. I turn my head, but the suit jacket still lingers in my peripherals, taking on the shape of a madman about to kill. Now my cheek is on the pillow, and I’ve come face to face with the cigar box on the nightstand, where the gravity of those three bags sucks every thought in the room into one singular vacuous point of condensed ruin. My seven a.m. wake up shot is far more effective than calling the front desk and asking for a curtsey call. I’m surrounded. Everywhere I look is more evidence that another day is on the rise, even though I’ve slung those ugly drapes over the windows to keep it out. With a lifelong arm twisted behind my back I give into the first word on my mind, another curse word that makes it all the way to my lips.

“Goddammit,” I groan.

Eh, I’ve woken up to worse.