If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right

(I will be self-publishing some work in the first half of 2010, as I'm becoming exceedingly disillusioned with the publishing world at large. I hope to learn how to utilize the scraping cogs of an ancient printing press, as well as a state-of-the-art book-binding machine in the next few months.
In the meantime, this is a two-part excerpt from a story that spans currently around 29 pages, double-spaced, describing the beginning weeks of a self-prescribed tail-spin stemming from two months of alcohol abuse, a city-wide power outage, a storm of apocalyptic bravado, a haunted theater, a suicidal dream, and a broken heart. It’s based in California, but I only used that locale because I was most familiar with it. It could have been based anywhere. This sort of thing happens everywhere if you know where to look.)

Eric

The sun plumb forgot to rise. I got a call from an associate of mine; he too, like everyone in town, was trapped in the midnight sash of the blackout. The bars had power, he told me. Everyone would be drifting to the nexus of the taverns to exchange stories of where they’d been when the flicker of the bulbs ushered in the flickering candles. And, of course, to drink. I grabbed a jacket – a corduroy patchwork number, blazer-heavy, silt-brown – to brave the winds and whipping garbage caroming into the sidewalks and abandoned cars along Main, and made my way.
The place glistened from a block away, a buzz of activity siphoning the silence of the powerless grid, like a string of Christmas lights with only one active filament. A steady drove of hysterical things gravitated toward its beacon like alcoholic moths to a wobbly flame, ants corralling toward the Twinkie, marching to a beat of Celtic promise, like Irish brigadiers must have marched, fueled by the lasting paste of potatoes on their tongues, or Scottish bagpipes whirling their whistle for freedom toward the crown of England. It could just as easily have been the methadone line in a Harlem alleyway, everyone itching and feverish to get a piece of power, a piece of comfort, something to soften the shivers.
Eric was already seated with a couple of hangers-on – old girlfriends who orbited him like moons. Pushing past the throng, we huddled round the teakwood table. Every “excuse me” and “pardon” created a Panacea shift in the brood, human tsunamis manifested toward the shore of the bar, swishing whiskey sours out of their glasses, imploring innocent patrons to expel meaningless apologies for the clumsiness of wayward elbows.
There was an annoyingly loud buzz of noise, divided between the nasal-twang of the Hank Williams tune on the jukebox, the hiss of the wind when the door would allow more lost, seething minds into the bar, and the general fizz of drunken discourse.
“Man, I didn’t have time to eat all fuckin’ day, then when I finally remembered that I had some tots in the freezer, I popped them in my oven. Fuckin’ power went off two minutes into it. Fuck it, I’ll just drink instead. It’s…”
“…sooo cold at my house! Ohmigod you guys! The heater doesn’t work either, and the cat pissed on all my blankets, so I was washing them when…”
“Goddamn it. This is the only bar that has power? I fucking hate this place. This shit would have never happened in SoCal. The way their power grid’s set up, each section of town is delegated equal…”
“Nothing like a depressing Hank Williams song to start off your night,” I hear myself say to no one in particular.
Eric looks at me like a caveman might have looked at fire for the first time ever, a dumbfounded film across his blue eyes, his jaw dragging into his bourbon. It always takes him a while to get that something has been said that may have some comedic value or even some kind of relevance to his life at all. Sometimes he executes these stares with no climax to speak of, just a quick Neanderthal bedazzlement followed by a swift synapse wave break toward whatever his last thought was, or an ocular return to whomever’s breasts he happened to be ogling before the interruption.
Luckily this time, a Hollywood grin infests his face, and he howls. He’s taken a keen interest into my spiraling dementia, the frozen-rope melodramas of my depression. He’s taken to calling my abrupt weight loss the “Big Dive,” and I secretly think that his ceaseless ambling of well-worn paths toward ex love interests is an attempt to cultivate a sadness for the purposes of deflating the girth of his own belly. Either way, he’s become a partner in tell-all drunken confessionals at the Tower, and made clear that his own limitations to function within the realms of society were to be as reflexive as they were self-prescribed.
Self-prescription being a brand new hobby of mine, I decided to take arms with the lug and bull-charge through the darkness, and the cold, and the sadness sipping my froth, which is precisely why I chose to meet him out in this mucky fucking weather at the snap of his pudgy fingers.
I sip the froth off my Guinness, and grab a stack of cardboard coasters.

Toby


Toby and I made small talk and he told me a story about the residents across the street, now stirring in their yard, staying up all hours of the night on their porch, drinking and being rowdy and trying to shoot the moon with a slingshot full of bottlecaps. He gazed at the men with their dogs, propped in tattered porch chairs, cans littering the yard and puffs of gray smoke billowing from their open mouths like spirits escaping for better ways to be.
Toby was on a temporary hiatus from boozing and had ordered a mystifying row of drinks to sate his thirst. Tomato juice, orange juice, coffee and water sat in a proud row waiting for him upon our return. He looked sad and pale and unhealthy, and seemed to know that no matter how hard he tried, he was the victim of a larger demon — a wild drifting phantom who may have gone too far in search of this truth and even to an extent caught wondering whether it was truth at all or just self-destruction. And if his truth was self-destruction, his skin and bones and droopy eyes did little to shield that fact from the rest of the world. And he wanted it hidden. Everyone knew it.
His serving gig at one of the more posh eateries in the city demanded he clean himself up a bit, at least for his five-six hour shifts, within each of which he'd pocket around 400 dollars in tips alone per night. On the job, he appeared a model of learnedness; astute in the culinary extravagances inherent in the world of raw fish, while maintaining a polite, if not irrevocable five-star visage and genuine respect for an affluent array of pushy diners.
At night, he fumbled slowly, sluggish into seedy corners, into the alleyways of the dankest dives in town. Sometimes we'd find him mumbling to himself, or to strangers, mimicking the high-pitched sopranos of heavy metal singers, with nothing in his eyes; nothing, it seemed, in his heart anymore. He stuttered out syllables that obeyed cadence, but neglected to string the proper letters together to create useful words - ergo tangible sentences - and often added interestingly hilarious character qualifiers to their conclusions, morphing inquiries as normally coherent as, "Where have you guys been?" to "Zuhfuck yerguys bin, trash?" What happened to Toby to create this monster is anyone's guess.
I snubbed my cigarette out early from the caving of pity and concern for him and his plight, and dared not ever tell him what kind of epiphany it had been for me, just then, to see his pain, to see him wearing his fears on his face in the afternoon air. I only know him well enough to indulge his stream-of-consciousness banter, not enough to confide in him or burst with my secret analyses. I snubbed it out and said, “Okay Toby, let’s go inside.”
The moment had passed.