The Energy Heist

The Energy Heist

(1 of 2)

A man looks his worst on the day he checks into rehab… after the streets have beat his teeth in, and his ribs are showing from malnourished, black bottomed spoon diets. Without a wake-up shot, the skin blisters in feverish bumps and crawls with impatience. Hairs stand on end, and sweat soaks the clothes. The edges around the body somehow appear jaggedly in and out of focus at the same time, as if the addict in withdrawal is in the interim between two realities, filtering himself through the vilest areas of time and space.

Lars was that way as he disappeared inside to begin the intake process which would need to be completed before any withdrawal medication could be administered. The dirty brown hair hanging from his forehead, twisted into stringy, sweat clogged strands, gave off the same pungent stank that his filthy two bedroom apartment did.

Those pants, ripped off from a thrift shop,and worn for weeks at a time without being washed, bore a history of bleach stains and needle blood. Their 36-inch waist, now four sizes too big, was cinched tight to his hips by a worn leather belt with teeth marks in it. The cuffs of each of leg were shredded from walking on his heels. Lars was barely kept alive on a strict repetitive diet of daily bullets and reasons why not. He staggered in for help, only after all other options had been exhausted.

One week later, with detox behind him, he emerged. An ugly woolly-worm has crawled from its crystals now a pompous and egotistical winged creature. Soon every day turned into every-hour-for-twelve-hours-straight with Lars breathing the same air as me. The relaxed ease of my daily group sessions with the circles of liars and disturbed dope fiends, the plagues of psychotics, and slaves to the bottle, changed once my anonymity was squashed with Lars’s arrival.

Eventually I grew tired of his annoying tendency to embrace himself with such an undeserved excess of flattery. His sentences were inherently constructed with two ideals in mind: his obvious superiority to the rest of us, and our understandable envy of that fact.

As the weeks drug on, we all endured the recounts of his mediocre life, by which his tone was suggested that a less-than-subtle braggery was deserved. Once he cleaned up, ate a few decent meals and slept a few full nights, Lars began to take on the traits of whoever he was before heroin destroyed his personality. Now his thick mop of hair, having been buzzed off with a pair of electric clippers on his third day sick, was clogging the sink of the detox unit, just as his beard clogged his sink at home.

Lars was slowly shedding his skin, painfully becoming the man we saw before us, whose polished teeth lined themselves in a professionally straightened smile of charm and charisma. An animal magnetism surrounded him and Lars Dawson soon became a name passed around on the lips of those female addicts in the women’s center who met us several times weekly at outside meetings.

Consumed in ego, Lars embodies all of those chumps who struggle for superior standings on life’s upper ladder rungs. Blinded by arrogance and reduced to the common denominator, those disciples of popular opinion wear the identity obtained by those ladder rungs as lifelong raincoats from the true silence of their souls; as if a man can be judged by the car he drives, or the name of jeans he buys, or what type of house he can afford. In a move to prove his own dominance to himself, Lars decided I would be his competitive liaison, thus always one-upping, outdoing, and overshadowing my comments in those six-hour-long one-hour group sessions.

One afternoon, intoxicated by his own competitive belligerence, he muscled his way into a conversation I was having with the chattery young blonde who was chairing the meeting that we were at. The girl I need only describe as the best eel in a sack of slugs, none of whom were all that attractive. But some, by comparison, became more attractive than others. So safe to say it was slim-pickins at the Six o’clock Hungry-for-Recovery meeting in the watery basement of a wholesome suburban church. This girl I was talking to was an overripe strawberry in a bunch of moldy peaches and very, very serious about her sobriety.

“… I don’t know, man. I known you a long time… I don’t think you’re actually ready to quit,” Lars wedged his way in-between us, only after he’d scanned the entire room for female faces, and categorized them all based on things like vicious rumors, social status, and how high they clocked in on the 13th step rating.

It created quite an uncomfortable silence, and the girl turned away bashfully, her cheeks blushing with embarrassment.

“What… are you kidding me? You don’t know me,” I objected on the basis that he was using the claim to shoehorn his way into our conversation.

“Yes I do, I’ve known you for a while now,”

“You’ve known me for exactly one hour a day, for six months.” I straightened up, having to rubberneck around Lars to be able see the girl I was talking to. “So six months… that’s… 183 days… one hour a day, that’s 183 hours… so that’s… about… seven and a half days… You’ve known me for a week.”

“Still though… I’m just saying… I bet you go back out before I do.” He raised his chin, hinting that I didn’t have the sack to match his ambition.

“That’s ridiculous.” A huff of breath left my lungs as a shallow laugh. “It’s not a competit— ”

“For real, bro. Money where your mouth is…. I bet you I can stay clean longer than you can.”

This all came out of the fact that when Lars had been walking by us, he heard me mention I had one month clean. And if I had one month, that meant Lars only had three weeks clean, which meant I was beating him by a week. She and I both stared at him. The air was now painfully uncomfortable, and I was sure he was making an ass out of himself by turning a healing process into some crass competition. His plan was unfolding like a napkin of eggshells dropping on a tabletop.

“I don’t know,” he continued, pretending to look within to reflect on some well of deep wisdom.

Casually, without knowing anything more effective, Lars the meat stick flexed his arm at the girl in-between us. “Some people…” he glanced at me from the side of a smirk. “They’re just not ready yet, and they have to go back out, and come back when they’re actually serious.”

As he said it, I saw his chest puff out, as if he’d maliciously reached into my field of serene and calm energy with his dimwitted fingers, and pulled out a deep breath of the good vibes I had amassed from flirting with this wilting pear that Lars’s was so desperately trying to muscle away from me. His bristly scorpion-tail chin was waving at the ankle of the next to die. Smooth, efficient and romantically lethal, he grinned at the girl I was talking to.

It was plainly obvious that he expected his presence to act as some sort of charismatic whirlwind, transforming the whole room from black & white into color, purely with his entrance. The church basement, now a stage on which Lars was always at the center, was the perfect place to jut out his powerful chin, and strut around like a spit shined authority on everything.

Now this girl was a class act… well read, quick witted; and she looked kind of smart in her thin wire frames. I was sure she was above being tricked by humanity’s most basic and transparent maneuvers. But then, she was a bit frumpy, with lumps where her bumps should be, and a face that was only hot if you squinted really hard.

She’d heard of Lars through the grapevines of gossip. So when he talked to her for this fleeting and disruptive moment, she felt as if she had real value, some sort of worth. The fact Lars Dawson was vying so obviously for her attention was more than she could withstand. And her face lit up like a kitten’s tail in a brush fire when he looked at her.

“Are you actually serious?” I wrinkled my expression, both at Lars and the situation.

“Absolutely, I’m serious,” he raised one eyebrow with subtle control, gambling it all at the Casino Royale. “I’m all about my recovery. I’m doing my steps. I’ve got my steps down. I’m on… like… I’m on like step five… already… feels good.”

“That’s wonderful,” she blushed. “Who’s your sponsor?”

“Travis… Travis Martin,” he said without pausing. It was a lie; the name came from the thin air around us. Spirals in his eye spoke what she needed to hear, letting on that Lars might have, in his phone under the name Travis, some silly extension like ‘Call B4-Not A4ter.’

“Alright then,” I said, pulling back on the sludgy grounds from the ass end of the meeting’s coffee pot. Then, slamming my Styrofoam cup down like a shot on a bar top, I declared, “Fine, twenty bucks. That’s a bag. So whoever ends up winning, owes that person a bag.”

“Right,” Lars agreed without thinking about it.

“So if you relapse, you know you’ll have your bag plus this one from the bet, right?” I figured it was an accurate way to look at the situation, from an addict’s point of view.

“That’s terrible.” The girl’s posture changed from a telephone, to ‘Oh no you don’t.’

“Yeah,” Lars shielded her shoulders, protecting her from my hedonism. “We’re here to heal, man. God, slow down… it’s not a competition,” he said.

“That’s sick thinking,” the girl objected, with the words of all her books behind her. “That’s
just the kind of thing I was talking about.”

“Ugh,” I thought. “It was, too. She talked about it for fucking ever.”

She’d made ‘sick thinking’ the topic of the meeting, and we discussed it for an hour. Then she continued to talk about it the whole time I was standing in front of her, all the way up until Lars busted in with his muscular neck to dazzle the competition.

As I stood there watching this cock-blocking debacle, things became very clear to me. I saw that Lars’s internal conflict was an unwinnable one - an endless struggle to remain on top in an ongoing contest in his head which provided him the idea of who he was. The contest was one of energy, the need to come out ahead, and to best the one sitting next to him.

Consumed with the hunt - for more, for better, and for better-than, he would never see the struggle’s end, as his entire identity was derived from these types of situations, where he was able to prove his dominance, and thus his worth, to himself and anyone else watching. It was as if he were building his character, brick by brick, instance by instance, into the grand idea of Lars Dawson, and anything that challenged that idea was challenged.

As Lars is this way, so is humanity: locked in a constant struggle for energy. By design, humanity is blinded by its own duality, and cut off from its source, so that it doesn't even realize that source exists. We are left, throwing arms into the dark, trying to find our way, scrambling on the bottom, fighting over the scraps of light that we believe are the only ones left.

Completely unaware of its endless availability, Lars reaches in and steals it from me, empowers himself with it, and gives that energy straight to this insecure girl, who obviously, judging by her batting lashes, has used it to pump herself up. So much so that she forgot all about that snaggletooth she’s been trying to hide, and she smiles wide, falling right into Lars’s eyes.

She knew his approach had been a shallow and callous one. But the power of her recovery, her convictions, and even her soap box was no match for that basic need to feel like she was worth something. Because of that, when Lars smiled back at her, she forgot I had ever been standing there at all.

Sadly, as the energy she got from Lars wanes, she will again be left with those same feelings of worthlessness she’s had all of her life, as will Lars. With no one from which to steal his pride, Lars will feel secretly ashamed of a weakness inside that he tries to hide by pulling maneuvers such as this - where he proves, if only for a trumped-up moment, that he is not weak. All of us, slaves to a constant taking of an inner inventory which argues between that which we are, and that are told by ourselves that we should be.

Is this all that makes up a man like Lars Dawson, a series of wins and defeats? Are we all just put together by popular opinion, molded by other people’s perception? And what about me? As I gather self-satisfaction from believing I’m somehow better than the majority of scum sucking degenerates who think and act this way, does it mean I’m also to blame?

Sick thinking indeed.