Frank's black out.

THE DARK MANTRA

Chapter1.

Frank's blacks out.

Saturday - late 90’s

Frank was slumped on a cheap white plastic chair, in a dirty low life café, in West London. He was looking out of the window, and through glazed eyes, and the archaic grime, he couldn’t see much very much.
“Your coffee,” the waitress said, as she bent low over the table.
“Hmmm there was a time I would have eaten her alive for doin that, the cheeky bitch!”
Muttering under his breath, Frank, who was not feeling too great, to say the least, shrugged and clenched his teeth.
“Old age, I can’t be bothered with it now. Fuck it”.
In his warped opinion, she had just forced him to look at her breasts, while serving him his second black coffee.
To her, he knew, he was just another, miserable, middle-aged desperado; the place was full of them.
But Frank, was actually only 31 years old and he’d had a very hard life.

He took a sneaky jaundiced look around the room at the sad misfits sharing this space with him. Eyes roaming, he looked up at the old yellow stained polystyrene ceiling tiles, tiles that must have been there for at least 30 years. Sighing deeply, he stubbed out another cigarette. The espresso machine hissed in the background, and steamy nicotine moisture ran down the window. He wiped the condensation from the window and saw to his bitter sense of joy that it was starting to rain.

Rain suited Frank, he knew it made people feel miserable, and he needed the company right now. He also knew he had £4.50 in his pocket which would buy him 3 cans of strong lager. Frank, had a pretty serious drinking problem, and money, or the lack of it, was high on his anxiety, fuelled, agenda.

After leaving the café, he went to a local stay open 24hour, sell everything store, and got his fix, the much anticipated three cans of strong lager. But because it was still only 8.15am, what little remained of his pride, would not allow him to be seen drinking in the open, and he slipped quietly into a darkened doorway.

As far as he was concerned, out of sight was out of mind, and he needed to get right out of his mind, the quicker the better. He coughed, a habit he’d adopted to conceal the noise of the ring pull being opened, and supped his first taste of the day, a strong sickly sweet lager that was hard to drink at the best of times, but first thing in the morning it really took some will power.

“I hate this fucking stuff.”
Raising the can to his lips, taking a swallow of the disgusting sweet liquid.
“Why do they have to make this shit so cold, what is this obsession with cold beer? It’s better than warm beer I suppose”
Heaving, gagging and coughing, with watery bloodshot eyes, he waited to recover before he made another attempt to drink more of his cure. Now a little braver, as the booze reached his bloodstream, a bit greedier, and looking for a certain cure from the way he felt. He slugged back another large gulp.
“I hate this fucking stuff. It could only be someone with a booze problem that would drink it in the first place.”
He almost managed a bitter laugh. But two more deep thirsty swallows finished the first can, and now empty, he crushed it and threw it to the ground.

The next few minutes were hard, as the alcohol hit his nervous system. Intense concentration and years of experience, meant that he didn’t throw up these days. Throwing up meant he would loose the alcoholic value and have to start all over again - he had become a master at not throwing up.
“Ha! That would look great on my gravestone, ‘a master at not throwing up.’”

Suddenly he felt very dizzy, and with the world spinning around him, everything went black.

Some time later, he woke up, with a sour faced old lady slapping him around the face.
“What happened?” he said, scratching his head.
“I don’t know love, and I don’t care either to be honest.”
She wheezed and hissed her bad breath into his face.
“I just want to get into my shop, so can you get out of my way please. It’s a bloody disgrace; you should be ashamed of yourself - disgusting! Now go on get out of it!”

Frank pulled himself up, to a wobbly standing position, and shuffled out of the shadowy safety of the shop doorway, straight into the full blazing glare of the early morning sun. He felt like a vampire rising from the darkness.

The rain had now stopped and a light hazy mist filled the air.

“Oh no!"

As the sun warmed him, he noticed steam rising from his damp trousers, carrying with it the smell of shame. He had known for some time that he was in big trouble, and that he was on a slippery slope in a downward direction. As dread clenched his chest and paranoia gripped his mind, at this point the only thing he knew for sure was that he needed more alcohol, much more.

He’d woken from many drunken blackouts in the past, and it wasn’t unusual for him to wake up in a shop doorway. But he knew he hadn’t drunk much today, in fact, he had only just finished the first can when the world went black.

In the hazy glare of the morning sun, he squinted at his watch and saw that it was still only 9.15, realizing then, that only an hour had passed since his time in the café.

Time for Frank was a bitter enemy, especially when it was this early and he was this broke.

In his coat pocket he could feel the comforting weight of the other two cans of lager lying against his leg. He took one out, opened it with a cough, and with just a little more confidence, he took a deep breath and drank it down till the last drops were gone.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” he sighed, and smacked his lips.
With his thirst half quenched he was starting to feel slightly better.

The, ‘three cans of strong lager’ usually made Frank capable of stringing a sentence together, and at least pretend to be normal, but it was always hard work.
Now that the booze levels were topped up, if he squinted his eyes a little, it was quite easy for him, in the bright sunshine, to imagine he was in Spain, or Portugal, not that he’d ever been to Spain or Portugal. But alas, as his watery eyes became focused he knew only too well that he was not in Spain, or anywhere else for that matter, but right here, in West London, on the Harrow Road, bitter and twisted, with piss soaked trousers, and a shame soaked soul.

He shuffled along talking to himself.
“Fuckin Hell, what am I gonna do, I’m well fucked? God if you’re out there somewhere can you give me a break please?”

The desperation he had managed to avoid for so long was getting hard to ignore, and more difficult to hide. All of the creative techniques he’d indulged in throughout the years to avoid these feelings, were no longer working.

The booze’s strength, and quantity, had now increased to such a degree that it acted as an anesthetic, merely knocking him unconscious; any pleasure involved was a very long distant memory.

“What am I gonna do, I’m so fuckin useless, I’m so fuckin useless?”

The, ‘I’m so fuckin useless,’ drone, was Frank’s favorite mantra. This was just another way of making himself feel really bad, as if he wasn’t feeling bad enough.

He had learned this mantra many years ago, from his relationship to his homicidal and abusive father, and later, from an equally homicidal, and abusive math’s teacher. These two men, in Frank’s current warped opinion, were the main source of his very low self-esteem, and it felt deeply unfair to him, that an inability to grasp math, and being born to a bastard of a father, should condemn a man to a lifetime of uselessness and misery. But who was he but a mere drunk? He couldn’t even begin to think about tackling these internalized tyrants from Hell.

What he must have known at some level, and what medical science knew, but perhaps did not care to share with him. Is the scientific fact, that within the cranium, is a billion celled organ known as the brain. And this brain, with its large mass of neurons, has multiple billions of electrical impulses flashing through its internal network, throughout every second, and every minute, of every single relentless day.
With each of these electrical impulses, triggering a chemical reaction on a receptor site, somewhere within the body, metaphorically, as far away as a distant galaxy, or as near as a next-door neighbor, all of these processes taking place within fractions of nano seconds.

The point was, is, and always shall be. ‘What signals are you receiving from, and what signals are you sending to your precious body, from the brain? In Frank’s case, with his ultra negative brain programming and thinking, the signals were pure death messages. Poison was flowing merrily through his poor disheveled body and mind

A small sane part of him, that still remained somewhere, deep within his shattered psyche, knew that he either had to make some major changes, or die trying. He had always known that he would have to change at some point, but not just yet, he thought, because there was still a third can of lager to drink.