Time goes.

I have been sitting on this bench without moving for seven hours straight. I try to think how I started today, but my mind is in a think fog and I don't have the abilities nowadays to do anything, much less think. Everything has been burned out...I falter. Five days have passed since I have started...It took a Herculean effort just to go downtown to the library and type this shit. So, I remember five days ago...

I awoke with a start of fear, gasping for air, about an hour before the lights went on in the dorm. I lay there thinking of the nightmare I had until the lights blink on at 5:30. A grating voice booms out over the hacking and farting of the waking men.

Good morning, Rescue Mission. For the guests and clients who slept in the dayroom and the chapel, please strip your mats and place them in the bin provided in the dorm. breakfast will be at 6:00 a.m....

And so on and on it goes. My lithe torso feels as if I had been beaten with a rubber club and my eyes are crusty and tingling with pain. I reach by my bunk and grab my old plastic water bottle and guzzle the liquid greedily. It hurts going down. Grabbing my pajama pants from the end of the bed, I tend to sleep in my boxers and t-shirt, I place my feet into plastic shower shoes and clop through the wooden maze to the men's bathroom. It is already crowded. Stale clothes, dirty backpacks, white tiled floor smeared with water, mud, and shit. The odor is enough to make an ambulance attendant puke. The filthy mirrors over the sink are positioned so you are forced to watch some old dirty bum squatting on the toilet behind you. Loud sound of grunting and farting produces toxic steaming shit. Ker-plop.

I shuffle down the hall to the main office, not hearing the various Good Mornings chirped at me from the natives. Today I start my medications as prescribed by Dr. Guzman. One Welbutrin XL in the morning taken with six Seroquel, beautiful little darlings. I plop them into my mouth and wash them down at the chrome water fountain losing the battle against algae and grime.

Then the call for breakfast. Burnt grey oatmeal. Try to eat it but the drugs began to take hold. My speech is slurred, my body seems to be made of a hardening plastic. I can't concentrate...like being drunk, but not being drunk. A couple of friends and Juan sit at my table. Juan looks worried, "What's wrong?" I tell him I started my medication today. After chewing on some horrid stale toast, I return to my bunk. Head spinning, legs twitching, terrible cotton mouth.

I fall into a deep, deep sleep.

Woke up with the fear of suffocation. I swing my legs out and sit at my bunk. Staring slack jawed at the dusty brown tile on the floor. It takes me twenty minutes to get up the energy to stand up. What fucking time is it, I thought, swirling my dry tongue around me sticky and gooey mouth. 3:53 p.m. Okay. Need to take a shower. I enter the white tiled shower, tiles covered in orange and green and black fungus. It smells like bleach and shit. Letting the hot water flow over my torso, I stand there swaying. Time goes.

Dressing, I walk as if in a dream through the dayroom, always a chess game and television blaring a football game, and to out doors. The sun burns my eyes and I don my huge Willy Wonkaish sunglasses that I had purchased downtown for three dollars. The Bench is quite full. Old and worn smooth from the rub of a million hobo asses; warped from the elements, it now seats the heroes of the underworld and forgotten. I sit among these fools, smoking my last Lucky Strike, playing chess, staring. The sky is a big bright Texas blue and gives everything a blue hue. A swarm of flies, the quantity of biblical proportions, dance and fuck on us. I sit as immobile as an iguana in the sun, staring at nothing, thinking about nothing. The sun swings across the cloudless sky and time goes.

Trucks arrive with donations. "Attention men in the shelter! We need a few volunteers to help unload these donations. If we don't get any help, the television in the day room will be shut off!" The Voice blares from a loudspeaker. The mission gets all kinds of great donations, but we never see it. Good food is donated, yet we eat crap...where does it all go? Two or three brown nosers rush to help, I sit and let my cigarette smoldering down to my fingers. Time goes.

"Well, you look thoroughly medicated." Quips someone at me beyond my grey screen.

Three four hours pass and I get up to take my afternoon meds. One more seroquel. Plunk a pill into my mouth and down it with water from that foul fountain. Even the water tastes foul. The hallway begins to spin and I return to the bench and listen down into myself. It is time for dinner and not really hungry, I poke through the Victory stew and just eat a bruised apple.

Outside the sun is going down and the sky is so clean you can count the stars. The loudspeaker, that Voice of Big Brother bulldozes through the tranquility. "Attention in the mission! It is time for Chapel services. Everyone is encouraged to attend! The television will be shut off all night if we do not get a big turnout!" The television is apparently shut off. Various men stomp out of the dayroom into fresh air and grumble,"Damn! There's a football game on!" "We can't watch it 'cause they haven church."

I look up, "Yeah, God don't like football."

Time goes. The dog rolls around in the dry grass. The flies swarm and cluster. Up the hill, the I-10 is breathing. Across the Rio Grande, the yellow lights begin flickering in the white shanty houses. Juan comes back from a day at Labor Ready, that temp work joint. He holds my head in his hands and peers into the Nothing.

"Man, they got you fucked up." He mumbles at me. I want to hold him but it is to much an effort to move. "Help me to my bunk", I ask. Like an invalid, I cling to his muscles as I am escorted inside.

"Better to see you on junk, than this shit, babe." Juan whispers as he lays me onto my cot. "I hate seeing you like this. There is nothing in there." He puts gentle hands over my eyes.

Within seconds, I am asleep.