In Real Life

Something like a year ago, you were actually going to give this up—were going to give yourself a fresh start. A year before, Scott’s body was found putrefying in his bed. That’s what was on your mind while you’d gathered your things. 

After you’d checked yourself out of the treatment center, you called Dave to tell him you’re back in Lincoln. You tried to imagine whether he’d be amused or troubled that you couldn’t handle more than sixteen days. While you had the phone pressed to your ear, a technician who certainly was not your greatest advocate looked askance. Dave didn’t pick up. 

This is when the author in your life takes over. He’s a natural born storyteller, this one, and so you kick back in your bunk and listen while Moreno beneath you snores, and Brent, oblivious, listens to Coast to Coast through earbuds, tuned in to the batshit right-wing conspiracy theory program on one of the cheap handheld radios that are like gold in jail. It’s snowing when you leave, the author tells you. Not dissimilar from the white, billowy static in your head. The slow walk to downtown reminds you of a disaster movie you saw when you were a kid. Volcanic ash floats to the ground. You’d seen the same movie in high school because the science teacher had got tired of trying to teach geology while her marriage itself lay petrified in the path of a ravening nuée ardente. On the street you pass the old tenement, gutted for gentrification, where Scott’s body was found. A harried, fair to middling Pierce Brosnan looks on. Something akin to despair is painted on the poor guy’s face. Then the snow stops. You pause and look around, to get a sense of the direction this whole thing might be going. Overhead, some geese fly in the formation of a scrawled “y” across the watercolor grays.

You decide to try Dave every half-hour, since nobody else you know in this shithole has a working number. A red, cold-stiffened finger glides across the screen. You stab out a sequence you know now by instinct: Phone; Recents; Voicemail; End. Yet this is only another beginning of sorts, however fucked that may be. You stub out your cigarette, pick up your overstuffed duffle bag from the snow-covered walkway, and step inside the downtown library, where all the fresh (and not-so-fresh) members of the city’s homeless congregate. And they’re all here, as far as you can see from the sad little corner table you take near a wall of car repair manuals. 

It’s too cold not to have a plan, the author admonishes. Or not to have a place where you can at least loiter, until the exigencies of a waning day and the library’s business hours foist some desperate measure upon you. Like this one guy you once knew. Stole a car because he’d burned all his bridges and needed a place to stay during the winter months. With the Grand Marquis he took from the parking lot of a retirement community (a set of keys propitiously left in the glove box), he had a mobile home for several days, and then, after the cops finally caught up with him, a bunk, a shower, and three squares for the remainder of the season. When you check the weather, you see that it’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit. With the wind, it feels something more like -12. The technical term for this is “Cold as Balls.” Still, you haven’t quite got so desperate as your erstwhile friend.

Fuck this. You decide to walk to Dave’s, since he’s not answering.  Fuckety fuckfuck. You really wish that your friend Scott, the one guy you could count on this town, hadn’t died on you last January.

Ten frigid blocks, give or take. When you get there, Dave still doesn’t answer. The son of a bitch is sleeping. He’s always sleeping. You hide your duffle bag behind a juniper on the front lawn where the skiffs of snow have not yet penetrated, and walk to the city mission medical center. It takes a little bit of arguing with the nurse behind the glass, but you get a script of clonazepam from your student days; fill it at the pharmacy inside a nearby grocery store. Then it’s back to Dave’s. The son of a bitch won’t answer, but doubling the prescribed dose of clonazepam dulls the cold. 

You look at the grapevines entwining the arbor in Dave’s backyard; at the ivy which clothes the leaning privacy fence like a moldy, woolen vest. He and his dad want to rip all of this out for landscaping, you remember. Such a pity. Every now and then you drift off while sitting on an orange bucket. 

When the son of a bitch finally wakes up, he answers the angry dinging of the doorbell—not his phone. Posthaste he delves into his latest scheme: turning the house into a tenement consisting of seven single-bedroom quarters for his consistently down-on-their-luck friends. Closet space converts easily to bedrooms. What happened to you, anyway? you feel like asking. Long hair, hipster flat cap, goatee, fascination with Robert Anton Wilson and the mythos surrounding Lucifer—you’re awake now, craving a dialogue on the prudence of Ayn Rand’s thought and the basic tenets of neoliberalism . . . and when you manage to delve into the topic of your brief stint in rehab, Dave tells you he doesn’t believe in addiction or mental illness. Quite a racket they have. He hands you a Stella Artois, and you can’t tell whether the accompanying smile indicates indulgence or irony. “How’s it feel being back in real life, now?”

The room is sliding sideways. You’re not sure if that’s what Dave meant. You tell him you’re done with this town. Like Jim Morrison said, “The west is the best.”—Or was that an old Arby’s slogan?—He takes a moment to look it up. Thank God for Google. “It’s better out here,” he corrects, and for some reason you remember the geese you saw earlier, moving across a brick-framed corner of the sky. Dave’s excited, working out the basics of a contract that he wants you to sign. “I just need a place to crash until I can buy a bus ticket,” you say. And of course, he won’t have any of it.