blackout

He woke up in the bathroom stall. Baptized by the murky toilet water. He forgot how much time had passed. As the music stopped playing at the dive bar. He didn’t know if he had died or was just temporarily broken. No worries, no mind. There was no time. Didn’t make a difference. Since he had never accurately felt a scientific measurement. Or maybe he just was never good at math. The condom machine had been broken. But he knew he couldn’t fix it. Finally realized that maintenance would never come by. It was someone else’s mess. As the hangover began to set in. He left the toilet without flushing.

Space Opera Blues.

Been scraping through countless nights of insomnia attempting to pen this new novel. It's not about rentboys or drugs or homeless or life's petty shit. It is completely different for me. A rollicking science fiction piece set in the 33rd century, kind of a hash of Buck Rogers and chinese chop-sockey movies called Colt Corrigan and his Adventures Across the Galactic Lens. It is a secret passion of mine. I've always fancied the rollicking daring do of the old Flash Gordon serials and John Carter of Mars books. I hope it comes out okay. It definitely will be a lavishly detailed work. Normally, my plot for a novel runs a page and a half, if that. This one is eight pages of twist and turns, cliff hangers, and political intrigue.

The most difficult part is coming up with interesting names and stuff. I have been reading on the Mayan Empire and Vietnam conflict for ideas of back history for the galactic culture and boning up on Japanese and Victorian cultures for the three planet settings....I hope it doesn't suck.

Swirling Mocha

I didn’t sleep well last night. As I lay in bed, I kept replaying the events of the previous evening. This guy I had met at the cafe had seemed very innocent. I figured he came from a conservative family with a religious background. His dogged insistence that all men were incapable of controlling themselves spoke of more than religious conservatism. It made me wonder if he had been abused. Raped? I saw how the older men of the cafe looked at him. Was that it, that he’d been sexually traumatized?

But then there was a blowjob.

No. That isn’t quite right. It wasn’t a blowjob. It was an attack of my cock. He went at it with such ferocity, it honestly scared me at first. But as I lay in bed thinking about it, I couldn’t help myself from getting hard.

Mental Masturbation

It was morning, like any other, in that I was strewn across my floor, sleeping off my hangover. There came a point in these benders where anything other than the fetal position on a wood floor felt like the spinning teacups on speed. I stared across my room at my digital alarm clock. The numbers were always hard to decipher from this angle. It was either 11, 1 or 7, and even though only two of those answers were acceptable, all of them were entirely possible.

It was in this deja vu, of waking up in a panic for the millionth time, that it really hit me. Before the sore back, and shooting pain behind my left eye would sink in, I would think; this is the last time. This time is different.

I planned to drink a liter of water, hit the gym and forget this ever happened. But that always never happened. That was just a sweet reverie I would sing before settling onto the couch, taking a fistful of Motrin and queuing up Netflix. The only place I would go on this day was the corner store, for my daily dose of Gatorade. It had become the only thing I could ever guarantee a weekly occurrence of.

It wasn’t ever different. It had never been before and I slowly began to realize that it was never going to be. It was always the same.

Different was the only idea that excited me anymore because it was still an idea. It was far away. Like a dream nestled in a cloud, different was anything I wanted it to be without the suffering of sacrifice, and the sober bleakness of reality. Everything yet to be experienced was so easy to sum up with my small minded fantasies and fears. Everything was something special before I was bored of it. I thought long and hard about how long something special could really last for a guy like me. The whole reason I would find my special something is because I was out searching for it, unhappy with my boring nothings.

And so it was made simple in that moment.

Do the right thing, feel smug and be bored or douse myself in gasoline, light the town on fire and shame myself for weeks after the dust had settled.

Wanderlust

"Way to go", was the last thing I heard from him.

It was over, like the proverbial blink of the eye. No closure, nothing. The pain, it was excruciating for a bit, but you know what, it was bound to happen anyway. And I’ve always wanted to travel.

I was an Aries and he was some other shit. I forget which it was, maybe the crab or the bull, or whatever, but I know now, we weren’t compatible.
How come I didn’t know that at first, like right of the bat. what a shame, a real life shame? He was real pretty though. That part hurts the most, because, well, his personality wasn’t as pretty.

Words.

I found myself with my eyes still and calm, for the first time in years as the original jotting of notes sprang to life out of my mind, giving the innuendo I carried in my heart for so long a name, a sound, a breath.

I wanted to cry, and I tried by staring at myself in the bathroom mirror and looking for that self-loathing I’ve had for so long but I was too disgusted with myself to keep the lights on and soon I felt nothing but darkness and longed for my sheets. I discredit sleep far too much and wish I had more time to write in it because my thoughts seem the most honest and painful right before and right after I do.

The sunset came over the biscuit colored Tucson mountains and the radiant yellow gained a reddish hue and the sun so big and burning in the sky, but not bright, found its way home on the coattails of the back porch and the spire cactus in the backyard, the humidity finally weighing down to rest.

I caught myself before I fell to sleep and typed out a few words I don’t think I’ll ever let anyone else read. Maybe I’ll burn them on the edge of that sky in that big sun’s flames settling down to be tucked in by the night.

SCREAMING

The bottom line is that when I’m discontent with my life and I automatically jump to the worst thing possible; why bother anymore? I’m miserable, and I want to use. But I know where using takes me. Using takes me to dope sick mornings, mornings I wish I just wouldn’t have woken up for at all I’m so sick. Using makes me into a complete and total monster, no one will want to be around me, I go fucking insane. I use anyone and everything around me to get that “last one more”. If your an addict, you know what that means. It’s that one that’ll finally satisfy all of your needs and cravings. And if your an addict, you’ll also know that it doesn’t fucking exist. Using makes me lose all of my friends. Who wants to be seen with the guy who can’t stop shoving needles in his arm? The guy who’s covered in bruises and track marks and the occasional dried blood. The guy so disgustingly thin and completely empty looking - the life has literally been sucked out of my eyes.

I don’t want to use. I know that, so when I feel like this, you wanna know what my disease tells me? It tells me I’d be better off dead. Because that’s what this thing ultimately wants. It wants me to be another fucking statistic. Another one of the junkies that just couldn’t stop. It wants all of my money, it wants me miserable, and then it wants me to fucking die so it can move on to the next person and take their life too. Addiction doesn’t care. It doesn’t care who you are, what you look like, if you have a family, friends, a good job. None of that. All it cares about is making you miserable and killing you. It literally sucks the life right out of you.

I am a slave to to it. Once I have that first one, its game over. It consumes my thoughts. And even the days I seriously don’t want to use, I have to. There’s this little voice in the back of my head SCREAMING at me to get high. And there’s no ignoring that voice, no matter how hard I fucking try. And it never goes away.

And you want to know what the craziest part about all of this is? I could literally wake up tomorrow and not feel this way at all anymore.

strangers in hotels

He kissed fiercely, with his teeth. Engulfed my entire mouth. Chewed my tongue. Rough fingering. Decent fucking though. I was getting ready to leave and he pushed me facedown onto the bed and I protested a little and definitely could have said no, but I spread my legs and allowed him to continue. And now I’m at home, wearing red truck’s shirt, eating pizza in bed, watching It’s Always Sunny, and pretending that I don’t care that this is what I’m turning back into.

We Can Be Heroes Just for One Day

"Why? Why did you do it?!"

"Do what, quit?"

"How could you!?!"

"How? How do you think? I sat down instead of standing up, that’s how. That’s the definition, kid."

"But…"

"But what? You needed me? For what reason? The crisis was averted. The world’s still spinning. Your problem is that I wasn’t the one who kept it on its axis this time."

"But you’re…"

"Lemme guess, I’m your hero. I’ve been a lot of people’s hero kid."

"Then how could you…?"

"Because I’m human! Because it’s not my job to be your hero. It’s not anybody’s job. There are a lot of things we don’t get in this world, kid. And one of them is a person who’s perfect to look up to. I’m not most kids’ first hero. They start with folks like Smoke and Blaze, the edgy ones. Then the first footage they see of those idiots beating up people who have long since been knocked out shatters that. So they move on to Prism, or Paradox, or any of a hundred others. Then they’re let down again, and eventually almost all of them make it to me. So far, that’s worked out well for everyone. But clearly, your luck’s not quite so grand. But as your hero, the least I can do is save you from yourself. If you keep going this way, you’re gonna be one of those people. The ones who cycle through heroes, constantly finding new people to look up to. That’s a bullshit way to go through life. And the end result of that is you sitting somewhere, unhappy with your crap life, looking up to someone for inspiration that you’ll never act upon anyway. Let me tell you something  Let’s say you save the world five times. Then on the sixth time, you don’t do anything. If no one steps up to take your place, then you’ve failed. My goal is to try and be more than human. And that challenge is unwinnable. But there is a victory in inspiring someone else to give it a try. I’m old now. I’m tired. And my world’s not quite so big anymore. The faceless masses have been replaced by the faces and voices of the people I love. I’m done kid. It’s your turn to save the world.”

Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground

Tuesday.

We made love lazily, spread out over the vastness of the bed. It took up space and time, a lot of space and time between the two of us. Later, I applied mango body butter to my stomach and thighs and he realized he disliked the natural smell of my skin. It did not matter.

We tasted the Japanese green tea I had bought on a whimsy, and tiny flecks of tea leaves swam inside the porcelain cup long after I had taken the final sip.

I said, “You always think something better will come along, and that you should keep going and hold out for it. For somebody new and improved. But that is not true.”

He said, “Nothing better comes along, if anything things get worse.” I licked my lips and nodded. He claimed the thicker pillow for himself and the sheets smelled like mango.

We both knew it did not matter at all.

Gained and Lost

It looks like an ordinary parking lot. The asphalt’s been bleached a lifeless gray color by the unkind sun; scraggly yellow weeds poke through ugly, winding scars in the tarmac; carts lie, abandoned and askew, throughout the abyss. It’s hard to discern one parking space from another, the paint jobs neglected for years. Cars long come and gone decorated the lot with iridescent pools and bottomless black stains; discarded grocery bags flutter by like suburban tumbleweeds. It is, most people think, an ordinary parking lot.

Except it’s not. It’s not an ordinary parking lot. It was there, under the cloak of night, that you held me close and said you loved me; it was there that you told me I made you happy, happier than one else ever had or would; it was there that you decided we should forget all our friends and their judgment run away together. It was there that I fell truly, madly, irrevocably in love with you, and you kissed me with such passion it was if the world were ending around us—and it was there that you left me, just as the hazy sun appeared, blowing kisses to me and driving home to your wife, who you conveniently decided—hours later—that you still loved more, despite the blandness, the distance, the misunderstandings.

No, it’s not an ordinary parking lot. This is a parking lot of loves gained and lost, of stories that ended before they could begin—and now, whenever I walk past that extraordinary parking lot, I think of you, of the short, sweet time we shared together there, and—with an insincere heart and a head permanently full of what-ifs—wish for you a happy life.

the Mug

The mug seemed to shatter before it ever made contact with his head. By the time it got there it was in shards, and those shards embedded themselves in his skull.

The satisfaction was what took me by surprise. I'd imagined shattering the mug over his head dozens of times, but the intense satisfaction I felt as each piece drove itself further into him was something I hadn’t been expecting.

He lost consciousness instantly. When I realized this, I was disappointed. I'd wanted more time to savor the fear on his face, the same fear he had taken the time to enjoy on mine.

But even amidst my disappointment, I was mesmerized by the blood coming from the wounds on his head. I was always surprised by how viscous blood was. It moved slower than the watery substance I'd envisioned. There was a trail leading from each of the shards, and as they made their way down his face they joined, then separated again. By the time all the strands had made their way to his chin, an elaborate pattern had formed.

I watched it come together and was fascinated. This wonderful mosaic was more worthwhile than anything he had ever done in life. I stood back, admiring my masterpiece, proud of what I’d done. I then lit a cigarette, walked into the other room and sat pondering out the window. Tucson is becoming a bore.

Insects Bug Me.

They loved dust.

In my mind’s eye, they would creep out every night to roll in it delightedly, legs skittering on the floor with glee.

A man could never understand the problem of a cockroach—a live cockroach—in a bedroom. A man doesn’t understand the hidden violence in a moving thing.

I’d read in a magazine that roaches love dust, so I swept every day, up and down the brand-new apartment. I hadn’t seen one yet. A Tucson miracle!

When I met him, he was wearing terrible jean cutoff shorts, white strings hanging all a kilter. It was easy to be light and loose on our date. The first kiss was nothing to write home about. We had different styles. I liked to kiss at 45 degrees. He liked to kiss straight up and down.

The second date, though, he anticipated—met me at 70 degrees. Perfect. We were on a dirty thoroughfare, sticky from Vietnamese food, his hands in my hair, mine grabbing at his t-shirt outlining just how many muscles were in that back, and how soon could I get my hands on all of them?

The sex followed quickly, and it was good. Damn good. By date seven—a blissed-out day hike—I thought we were on terra firma. Home in the city, he ran to his apartment to get clean clothes, promising to come by afterwards.

I was alone, dripping from my shower, humming to myself, ready to get laid. And there it was. Moving like an insane thing. Gleaming. Crazed.

I leapt to my bed, shouted, “Get the fuck out of my house!”

By the time he got to my apartment ten minutes later, the PTSD had bloomed magnificently: Saucers for eyes. Ragged breath. I handed him ammo: Windex; a bookbag, a boot, an umbrella. Told him to kill it. That we were sleeping at his place that night. I saw the alarm in his eyes.

He couldn’t understand. The creature on the body that shouldn’t be, with all its moving parts.
He never called again. I bought traps.