ONE

No Soft Places

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ONE

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04.05.12 (Thursday)

     My spot in Room 5 is small and orderly, and my butterscotch-colored, wooden locker is tall and teeming with hardback books and designer coats.  My bed, also butterscotch wood, has two drawers at the bottom filled with four pairs of brand new, black and brown, church shoes; four pairs of brand new, black and white, Nike and New Balance sneakers; two laptop computers fresh out of the packaging; and over seven-hundred dollars in cash -- ones, fives, and tens –- that I keep in a grease-stained, brown, paper bag to throw off would-be thieves.  In my nightstand, I have eighteen packs of cigarettes in every major brand and flavor that I care to smoke or sell; a hundred or so pills of every color and nefarious purpose; eight ounces of the stickiest, hydroponic marijuana you've ever seen; fourteen hits of LSD; two grams of cocaine; a pint of Jack Daniel's whiskey; and, of course, toiletries.  I do not pay for rent or electricity or water or anything.  My food, also free, is prepared for me three times daily.  I have an indoor basketball court and weight room.  I have a large, flat-screen TV with cable in the common room.  I have a shower with a massaging shower-head.  I have a driver in case I need to make a doctor's appointment or have my teeth cleaned.  I don't cut the grass and I never do dishes.  I am a homeless man in a drug and alcohol program in Greenville, South Carolina, and I am doing just fine.

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04.06.12 (Good Friday)

     It was good to get away from the homeless section of the city today; I was beginning to forget that there was anything else out there.  The weather was lousy when I left, so I wore my heavy, burgundy coat with the green- and blue-checkered lining, and my favorite hat with the ear flaps.  I walked directly to the library, the wind howling and cutting through me the whole time.  I spent an hour there reading random books from the fiction shelves -- both adult and juvenile -- and answering emails.  I sat next to a pretty, blond woman with what looked to be great tits straining against her red bra and thin, white blouse.  I've seen her many times before at the women's shelter next to mine.  She is probably hiding from an abusive boyfriend or husband; she has that look and demeanor and timid smile.  Nevertheless, I can tell that she's interested in me.  She always has some simple question for me, something anyone else could easily answer, and conjures ways to brush against me in the cafeteria no matter how empty the place is.  Jonah says, “Man, why come you ain't tear that pussy up yet?”  I know; if I wanted to I could fuck her.  But I don't want to.  I don't even feel comfortable with the word, “fuck,” anymore.  Something is changing inside me.

     I left the library after an hour to find that the temperature outside had risen by about a hundred degrees.  My coat had become a hindrance, so I gave it to another homeless guy I'd seen on a few occasions at the shelter below the program's dormitory.  I asked him for ten cigarettes to make it look right: Who knows who might be watching me?

     I walked east toward Main Street and turned right.  The trees downtown had been bare when I last saw them in early February, before I was taken off restriction; now they are nearly full and add a whole new dimension to the cityscape.  Gone was the gray and gloom of an hour before, leaving a tranquil, turquoise, infinite ceiling in its place.  The sidewalks were humming with activity: runners; dog walkers; diners enjoying a cold, midday beer; picture takers; men and women in business attire with briefcases and fancy phones; girls eager to bring out their cleavage from a long winter's hibernation; clean-shaven boys with fresh haircuts, eager to receive the girls' gifts.  Farther south, past the main strip of restaurants and bars, Falls Park opened up like a French Impressionist's wet dream: soft, picnic blankets spread beneath umbrous trees; and children stretching and climbing and teasing the fat kid; and fair-skinned ladies beneath large parasols, sunbathing beside the playful river; and older men in groups of two, leaning against lampposts or resting on the uneven, rock wall, smoking and watching the whole scene and saying to one another, “This is why we do it.  This is why we put up with it all.”

     At about two-thirty, I decided I'd better head back to the program.  I wanted to get back before the supervisors made their shift change.  That way, I could leave again later without anyone realizing I had made a habit of doubling-up on my once-a-day, three-hour, outside pass.  I stopped by the bus station on the way for old times' sake.  I saw the familiar faces of the homeless men I'd known for two weeks before I entered the program, still taking a bit of refuge from the elements beneath the green, metal roof.  Still searching the sidewalks for half-smoked cigarettes.  Still checking the garbage cans for the forgotten shot at the bottom of a vodka bottle -- half alcohol, half backwash.  One of them had passed-out on the floor beneath the world's most disgusting, drinking fountain.  I nudged him gently with my foot a few times, trying to wake him before the police might come by and take him in.  He stirred a little, rolled over in his own throw-up, drifted back to a heavy sleep.  I shrugged it off and continued on, reaching the shelter just in time for a shower before dinner.  I tried to masturbate in the shower, thinking about the girl from the library with the red bra and ruddy cheeks, but, again, I was uncomfortable with those thoughts.

     Something inside me is definitely changing.

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04.07.12 (Saturday)

     I smoked a joint today and listened to some somber music that a friend loaned to me.  It was a British band -- one of those that defy genre placement.  I love British bands.  How is it that they're always just a few steps ahead of their American counterparts?

     I listened to one particular song on a loop twenty times or more.  It opened with a full, atmospheric sound.  A black and blue melody: violin and cello with a driving beat and a high, repetitive guitar-riff that made me want to both cry and stab myself again and again, afraid that I might never die.  Then it shifted, almost becoming a new song altogether.  The singer sang in a falsetto whine -- lyrics I could not always make out and didn't really need to.  He was lost in the woods.  A slow piano emerged, laying down only a few melancholy notes in a rhythm that dragged half-a-beat behind the drums for three bars, catching up on the fourth, and losing itself again.  Suddenly, everything faded almost to nothing until a growling bass line came creeping low from the black forest, and a crisp high-hat called out like an ugly, buggish, clicking creature, unafraid of being located in the thick brush.  Something crashed, splashed, fell apart.  A titanic spaceship hovered, spotlighting portions of the scene but never revealing the whole.  The sounds built slowly, slowly, slowly into a crescendo, and the voice came again, screaming and pleading.  Finally, quickly, accepting its fate, the voice softened, calmed down, receded, it was over.

     I drank a cup of black coffee to regain my balance, but the music continued in my head.  I took a walk through the rough neighborhoods behind the shelter to clear it.  From a distance, I saw a young girl, obviously strung-out on something, losing her mind on a yellow curb beneath a well-nourished maple of about the same age; the contrast was horrifyingly sad.  A man in his early thirties hovered over her, pacing a few steps every couple of seconds, returning to his hover-position, checking his watch.  He would say a few words to her occasionally, and she would lift her pretty face from her hands and attempt a smile.  But she could not hold on to whatever tiny bit of false light he'd given her for very long, and her head would topple over violently back into her hands.  When I passed and the man asked me if I wanted to party, gesturing to the girl, I nearly crammed my right foot down his throat.  I cannot remember the last time, if ever, I hated a person like I hated that man at that moment.  I am not a tough guy, and I generally adhere quite naturally to the generic philosophy of pacifism, but it took every morsel of energy I could muster to refrain from killing that man.  In fact, I have to wonder if –- had I not still felt the slight sense of paranoia that usually accompanies reefer -– I might have acted upon my impulse.  I also have to wonder whether that might have been the appropriate response, whether that might have been one of the rare occasions when physical violence is not to be treated as even reluctantly necessary, but actually to be aroused and encouraged.  I looked again at the girl.  She was someone's daughter.  (It is unfair, maybe, but I cannot summon the same sympathy for young men.  I don't know why.)  I wanted to avenge that girl, no older than eighteen or nineteen, who had likely contributed a large chunk of depravity to the situation she found herself in.  Still -- whatever it is, wherever it comes from, call it archaic and macho and disconnected with modern attitudes if you like -- I both blamed and wanted to punish the man, the original man -- it's always a man -- who broke her spirit and started her down that pathetic path.  I wanted that original man as well as the man who now stood before me, who had apparently taken over the evil reigns, to feel indescribable pain.  I wanted them to beg me for a moment's relief from that pain, knowing fully well that I could provide it, so that I could cackle and crank the dial up until it broke off in my hand.

     The anger-- no; the primitive, very masculine fury and rage inside, betrayed by the marijuana's hazy high and epileptic wheel of indecisiveness, created within me an impotent wrath, and I felt a literal sickness welling up from my stomach.  The back of my throat responded involuntarily, and the idea of being nauseated began to recite its own self-fulfilling prophecy: the more I worried about getting sick, the sicker I became.

     I was, at that point, a mere five feet beyond the man, and I instinctively began to make more distance between us in anticipation of what was about to explode out of my mouth, when something from deep within my animal-brain -- possibly the same neuro-connection responsible for monkeys throwing their own shit at passersby -- took over, and I turned and lunged at the man and vomited all over him: down the front of his red and white jersey, down his black pair of Wu-Wear jeans, and covering his red and white Nikes.  He jumped back and threw his hands up and to the side as his eyes looked down at himself in horror and disgust.  I recovered and wiped my mouth and looked up at him.  I began to laugh and spit to the side and cradle my stomach.  I backed away slowly, completely unconcerned with the possibility of retaliation, wishing I had brought a camera and could take a few photos, have them developed, and send copies to all of his friends and his other girls and those girls' families.  I wanted him, this fucking waste of sperm, this absolute piece of absolute shit, to look at me again -- as he repeatedly looked up at me, then back down at his clothing -- and find that, while his gaze was on his shoes, an entire coliseum had emerged from thin air all around him, packed with thousands of hysterical onlookers and containing fifty of those jumbo-screens with his terrified, helpless face a hundred-feet-tall reacting in slow-motion replay in a continuous loop, with morning-radio sound-effects and a laugh-track.  Had I been able, I would have puked on him again and again until he either fled in fear, or responded and attacked me.

     The young lady looked drearily up at me with a puzzled expression, as if I had been explaining advanced calculus to her, and she was just on the verge of breaking through to understanding if only I could coax that last bit of illumination from between the folds of her brain.  I could see the rusty gears turning in her mind.  She was assuming that the sedated sense of shock she was experiencing was the product of her own out-of-mindedness, and not a completely rational sensation brought about by having witnessed a uniquely disturbing event.  She was trying to call into focus a false reality of which she was really a part, though at the moment removed from, wherein what had just transpired might be normal.  She was, in fact, inventing another universe and attempting to locate her particular position in it via junkie GPS.  She was failing.

     Conversely, my own fog of intoxication was threatening to evaporate, or possibly it was that the shifting planes of pot-influenced, experiential perception had simply shifted yet again.  Whatever the case, the hysteria in which I'd momentarily been lost subsided, and I found myself smack in the middle of an offbeat movie wherein my character might be played by either an unknown actor, hired only to be quickly disposed of, or a top-bill superstar who, in such a scene, would be promptly provided with a great one-liner and a weapon.  Time alone would tell.

     Oddly, though, time told it differently than one might have expected.  The man, the pimp, more concerned, apparently, with his clothing than even his reputation, simply muttered a few curses at me and, for reasons I've yet to decipher, at the young girl on the yellow curb before stalking and sulking lumberingly away.  It was anticlimactic.  I was, in a weird way, disappointed.

     The girl and I stared at one another for a few moments before she, too, stood and walked away without saying a word.  She stepped in a small puddle a block down the intersecting alleyway, stumbled, nearly fell, recovered, conceded to gravity's cajoling, sat down on yet another yellow curb.  A dog yelped in the distance.  A storm door crashed shut.  The dog barked again.  A glob of bird droppings fell from the overcast sky and landed on my right shoulder with a soft, “splat.”

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04.11.12 (Wednesday)

     Anyway:

     I've decided to stay away from the weed for a while.  When I was younger, I could smoke all day long; now, it just leads me to confusing, dark places.  The past few days I've kept my antennae straight so that I might avoid any more darkness.  After all, I can't just go around vomiting on every single asshole I come across, can I?

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04.13.12 (Friday)

     Today is my day off.  In order to make this program financially solvent, each of the men are assigned a job.  We go to work five days a week, eight hours a day -- just like people in the real world.  We are paid low wages, barely enough to buy cigarettes and snacks, really -- also just like people in the real world -- and are not considered to be actual employees.  This is fine with us; it eliminates the pressure to perform at anywhere near a higher level.  I work at a warehouse, accepting donations of clothing, appliances, electronics, and household items.  It really could be a wonderful system for the well-off to help the not-so-well-off were it not filtered through individuals such as myself.  I have sticky hands, you see -- like most everybody in the program -- and the quality donations generally never make it past my backpack.  And this is how a person who was homeless and penniless only a few weeks ago can now walk around with the most expensive shoes on his feet, wear them four or five times, and never sport them again.  This is how a person who supposedly has no significant income can have a veritable pharmacy in the top drawer of his butterscotch-colored nightstand.  This, however, is not the explanation for why I possess such things.  My particular situation is unique.  I will try to explain.