I'm Set Free

I feel it in my throat. Or, uh, my stomach.
At the backs of my eyes—burning—sickness—knives twisting in.
She smiles.
She looks at me.
Her eyes get this light—a glow—shinning.
I know she loves me, I fucking do. There’s been times in the past where I’ve misinterpreted people—misjudged them—projected distorted images onto their covering of skin. I’m an unreliable narrator. There’s no reason anyone should believe me.
But she loves me.
I’m sure of it.
Her eyes turn to planets when she looks at me. She wakes up in the middle of the night to send me messages. She stays with me longer than she plans—always. She kisses me and it all fits together—the universe—sunlight—crucifixion—terror.
But then she pulls away—runs away.
I’m holding her and then she’s gone.
Some thick, solid, well-constructed barrier comes up and she laughs and says something random.
She asks herself whether it’s better to love—to feel all the pain and fear and ecstasy and unknowing—or if it’s better to exist light and uncommitted—lying out on a raft above the water’s surface—absorbing the sun’s warmth—never too hot, never too cold.
She asks me the same thing.
I tell her I don’t have a choice.
She tells me I always do.
I think she’s wrong.
Maybe I should be able to just exist on the surface—not get involved—remain detached and whatever. Maybe that’d be easier. But that’s not me. I’ve tried, man, I’ve fucking tried. But I just feel everything so intensely. I plunge down to the bottom of the ocean and the pressure crushes me till I can hardly breathe. The pain rips me wide open. The pleasure lifts me up to where the air thins out.
Is it worth it?
Hell, like I say, it’s the way I am. I’m not interested in anything else. I want to tear off my lover’s skin and taste the veins and tendons and muscle tissue underneath. I want to love every scar and marking. I want to breathe together, back and forth between our stained lungs. I want to give her my eyes to see herself with. I want to know her completely—completely.
But there’s a lot of pain that comes with that—a lot of fucking pain. A lot of fear, a lot of doubt, a lot of vulnerability. To open yourself up to the possibility of getting hurt, that’s like the hardest fucking thing ever.
And, of course, I’ve gotten high over it in the past. That’s the danger for me. When the pain gets too acute, the fear too overwhelming, I usually end up running back to the fucking needle.
So this whole falling in love thing is fucking terrifying.
Terrifying and totally dangerous.
But it’s also life—I mean, living. It is depth and reality. I get absolutely no satisfaction out of some meaningless affair. I’m only interested in souls touching—however much pain that can involve.
Of course, for me, I gotta negotiate this shit fucking carefully. I gotta have a lot of support around me.
I also gotta remember that whatever pain there is will pass.
If she runs away tomorrow, never to see me again, the worst that can happen is a couple days of sickness and whatever—sadness—depression.
I swear to fucking God, the fear of the depression is always so much worse then the reality. I think most of us spend our whole lives running from those negative feelings. But they’re really not so bad. They’re really not. It’s the fear that fucks you up.
Still, I realize that not everyone is willing to take that risk of getting vulnerable.
The girl, well, she goes back and forth.
I mean, “living is easy with eyes closed.”
So maybe it is better to keep them closed.
Well, if you’re able to.
And I don’t blame her for not wanting to feel.
I spent a good part of my life running from that shit.
But that depression—that darkness—it’s there. Running from it doesn’t take it away. Actually, more and more, I feel like the only way to deal with that shit is to really embrace it—take it on.
Feel it.
To avoid anything in life that brings those feelings to the surface, that’s not living. That’s caving to the fear. That’s doing what I’ve always done in the past.
Get drunk not to feel it.
Get high.
Sleep with people I don’t really care about.
Move constantly so I never for a second have to sit with my insides.
That’s what I do.
Hell, that’s what a lot of us do.
It’s sad, really.
Sad and such a goddamn waste of time.
But I can’t see that shit until I, uh, can—you know? Nothing anyone said ever helped. I just had to come to understand that my feelings weren’t gonna fucking kill me. They can be totally painful, but they can also be so fucking beautiful.
So I guess I just have to wait—wait to see what she does with the fear. Wait to see if she’ll face herself.
And if she won’t, well, fuck, I love her, but I need someone who can stay vulnerable with me—and with the world.
So I guess I might just have to wait to find that, too.
I’ll tell you what, the difference for me today is that I’ve started to have some patience—and I think I see the truth just a little more clearly.
What’s that Velvet Underground song?
I’m beginning to see the light.
Exactly.
Change can be so slow—but it’s fucking happening.
And I don’t need to run from myself today.
Or place all my value in her hands.
I am whole within myself.
. And I’m starting to have conviction in the things I value.
It still goes up and down, of course—but even that’s some kinda progress.
I try and fail, try and fail, try and fail—until it starts to change.
That’s the most I can hope for.
But that’s okay.
It’s okay.

Some Kinda Love

Man, lack of sleep fucks me up.
I get so goddamn emotional.
Actually, it makes me fucking delusional.
So I can’t tell exactly what’s real right now and what isn’t.
Besides, I’m probably too close to all of this to write about it.
I have no perspective.
I don’t know what any of it means.
But here it is anyway.
Yesterday I felt like I wasn’t ready for any of this. I don’t know how to change, or I felt like I couldn’t change.
But it’s a choice.
Everything’s a choice.
The choice might be so fucking hard that it’s nearly impossible, but, ultimately, it is possible—I can change.
I can.
That’s what she keeps telling me.
It’s all about choice.
I argued with her about it, but then I gave up after awhile.
I mean, she’s right.
She convinced me.
The thing is, I was actually super committed to not getting involved with anyone—especially not falling in love.
I knew I wasn’t ready.
I mean, I know I’m not ready.
When I’m with someone I start to forget everything else in my life and just become completely absorbed in them. I feel so fucking good when I’m with them that I start to fear any second that we’ll have to be apart. I convince myself that I can’t live without them. My entire existence becomes dependant on the goddamn relationship.
It always happens.
It’s this default setting inside me.
I’m like a police dog incapable of disobeying a command.
But I guess that’s just the lie I tell myself—that I can’t do things differently.
I find myself reverting back to the exact same behaviors I’ve always engaged in—it tears me apart—but I’m not willing to do what it takes to change.
That is a choice.
Staying the same is so much easier—even if it breaks me wide open and destroys every relationship I’ve ever been in. That pain is still easier. It is the path of least resistance—and, as she keeps pointing out to me, if I keep repeating the same destructive pattern, I obviously must be getting something out of it. I mean, I must enjoy it in some masochistic sort of way.
Goddamn do I not want to admit that. The fact that there’s a piece of me that actually enjoys and seeks out the pain and drama is so totally shameful. It means I’m not as much of a victim as I like to think I am. It means I actually have to take some responsibility for the choices I make.
She’s taught me all these things.
And I fucking believe them.
I mean, they are the truth.
Anyway, so, yeah, I was trying not to get in a relationship again ‘cause I knew I wasn’t strong enough to not repeat those same fucked up patterns of mine. And, that’s reality, you know? I’m not.
So I just figured I’d stay away from girls and get strong on my own and then eventually be able to find some perfect, meaningful, non-codependent relationship.
That’s even what I was told to do by counselors and people at meetings.
But life doesn’t work like that.
There’s not some mathematical equation humans can be plugged into in order to solve whatever problem they might be having. I’m not the letter X or Y. I’m not some variable. Life plays itself out and, as similar as we all are, we are also so very different. And besides, it seems like no matter how much preparation I have, when I’m put back in an old situation, I forget everything I’ve learned and just react like I always have.
I’m dumb.
And life happens.
We have no control over that at all.
But what we do with it is our choice.
So this is my choice today.
Yesterday I got so scared I almost called it off.
But today I’m choosing to keep trying—not run away—maybe fucking grow up for once.
The girl, right? The girl met me at a coffee shop—the product of some random seating arrangement and, uh, just starting to talk.
Fuck, man, that was last Thursday.
We’ve probably talked a thousand hours since then.
And I was trying to stay detached and whatever—not get involved. But, more and more, with everyday, I began to see this person as uniquely beautiful and brilliant—so different from me in so many ways, but still so similar.
I made the choice to go further.
We talked and hung out and learned more and more.
But, before I even was aware of it, we’d basically been together almost every second of everyday since that first day we first met.
That feeling started coming on me, right? That feeling like the only happiness I’d ever known was with her and that I couldn’t stand being away from her. It was weird, too, ‘cause the more I was clinging to her, the more afraid I was of letting go.
But it wasn’t just that, my whole perception shifted. It was like I was actually starting to believe that I couldn’t exist without her.
The reality, of course, is that I actually really like my life today, regardless of whether she’s in it or not. I like my time alone—my time with my other friends.
The feelings I had weren’t real. They were a distorted delusion. And It’s my choice whether to keep indulging in the illusion, or actually make the totally terrifying effort to try something new.
But yesterday it seemed hopeless—like I couldn’t make that choice and I was gonna have to run to save myself from burning out.
I hadn’t mentioned this to her at all, though, when she told me very plainly that she was worried about becoming too codependent with me and that she thought we should spend a day apart—try to only communicate once or twice through text messages.
Alright, so, uh, that seems like a pretty easy thing to accomplish, right? I mean, spend one day apart from someone you met a week ago.
But, fuck, it was like having nails driven into my lungs when she first said it. I felt like curling up to nothing.
I knew she was right, but I felt powerless to pull away from her—even for a day.
It felt impossible.
Still, though, I began to look back at my life and I could see how every time I’d been faced with a situation like this, I’d always folded—I’d always chosen to just do the same thing over and over. I kinda had this realization that if I didn’t fucking try to face this shit—to learn, while allowing myself to make mistakes, nothing would ever change. I had to pull the goddamn bandage off my skin.
So, fuck, here we go.
Day one of trying to maybe engage in a healthy relationship—whatever that means.
Right this second it feels like I’m going to fail.
Maybe if I sleep some that’ll change.
I’m fucking tired.
Tired of all this shit really.
So, uh, yeah, we’ll see.

Guitar Wolf

It was last summer when I found her.
I was going to get a coffee at this place on Bull Street right next to a dog park. The heat had come already, but it wasn’t yet the wet, suffocating, thick, thick burning of late July and August.
I’d only experienced one summer in the South and I’d quickly learned that it was something you survived—a test of endurance and stamina. Just walking from my apartment to the car I’d be drenched and sticky with sweat. The sun beat down mercilessly. The air constricted your lungs.
I moved to Savannah after getting outta my last rehab. I fell in love with a girl who went to school down there, so I scrounged up the money for a Greyhound ticket and rode the bus for four days across the desolate, ugly, flat, flat highways of the central United States. I was broke, starving, exhausted. Actually, all I had to eat the whole time was a package of peanut M&Ms. I was skinny, skinny and dirty and wild. I’d been sober only three months. My last detox, off meth, heroin, cocaine, Xanax, and an opiate blocker called Suboxone, was absolutely the most wrenching, terrible, painful thing I’d ever experienced. My body was pulsing with tiny seizures as an electrical storm ragged through my brain. My stomach was a lake of burning oil fires and I didn’t sleep for nearly two weeks. I mean, no sleep at all.
The process of getting clean was long and raw and emotional. I was a mess and the habits I’d picked up on the streets were nearly as hard to kick as the drugs—stealing, lying, scanning the curb as I walked for fallen change, or cigarettes, or maybe a purse, or something.
There was a time when some family friends had tried to help me get sober, taking me from being homeless in San Francisco to their spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
I’d already become too feral and crazy.
I stole from them.
So coming to the South, I was determined to do things differently. I moved in with my girlfriend and got a job at her school. I started working on my book again, a memoir about my addiction and my struggles growing up. I’d been sober nearly a year.
And that’s when I found her, or, uh, you know, she found me.
I was walking into get a coffee. It was summer, like I said, but not yet so hot that I couldn’t stand it.
A woman called out to me.
It took me a minute to figure it out, but, yeah, she was calling to me.
Her voice was all raspy like she’d smoked too many cigarettes, or, after looking at her, too much pot.
She was probably in her late fifties, with tangled grey hair and a sack dress covering her heavy, sagging body. She had beaded necklaces hanging down and round Janis Joplin sunglasses. She was bent low, her arms wrapped around a shivering dog.
“Hey,” she yelled. “Hey, kid, can you come help me?”
I walked over.
The dog was super skinny—it’s ribs sticking out—it’s nipples swollen and hanging down. It trembled, trembled, trembled as I came closer.
It looked maybe like a beagle, but with long legs and big, bugged, wide open terrified eyes.
“I just found her,” the woman said. “She was running out to Victory. I don’t know what to do with her. She doesn’t have any tags or anything.”
“Okay,” I said, crouching down low to the dog and rubbing it’s ears encouragingly. She felt almost wet with grease and I could see fleas the size of sunflower seeds scattering down around her head. “Maybe we should take her to a shelter.”
“Yeah,” the woman answered back. “Do you have a car?”
“Uh, huh.”
“You don’t mind taking her?”
“Well, uh, I guess not. No, of course.”
I grabbed the dog by her neck and tried to led her forward to my car. That was no good. She wouldn’t move. Eventually, I just picked her up and carried her shivering against me. As soon as she got inside, she climbed behind the passenger seat and curled up in a ball on the floor. I drove off, my heart beating fast—wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
At the shelter they agreed to check her out and put her up for adoption if I was willing to foster the dog until they could find her a permanent family. I had two cats at home, not to mention my girlfriend, but I figured they’d all be okay with it. They said she was a hound dog mix, maybe Walker and Fox Hound. They thought she might be pregnant.
When they led the dog by a rope leash into the back, well, that was when the problems really started. A vet tech with a needle went to give her a shot. The dog’s eyes went glossy, staring unblinkingly at her. And then the dog lunged, lip curled back, teeth out, barking, snarling, growling—ready to tear the vet apart in order to defend herself. I grabbed the rope and pulled the dog back and told her, “No!” and for some reason she didn’t bite me, but instead took shelter behind my legs.
And so the people at the shelter told me to have her killed. They wouldn’t work with her and said that my only option was to drop her off at Animal Control.
I walked her outside. She was uncomfortable on the leash and kept stopping and tucking her tail between her legs. As I led her back to my car, scared she might turn on me at any second, I suddenly noticed she’d been scouring the ground and had picked up a Snicker’s wrapper. She was chewing on it frantically.
I took a breath.
I put my hand up next to her mouth and grabbed the wrapper. She didn’t growl at me. She just looked up with those sad, sad blood shot eyes.
She was feral—wild—homeless, like I’d been. She wanted help, she just didn’t know how to accept it.
I bent down next to her and she hesitantly licked my cheek.
Fuck, I thought.
I got her back in the car. I wasn’t going to Animal Control. I drove her home.
She spent the first few days outside in our little back yard, huddled beneath a covering of bushes. We managed to get her a bath and out to another vet, though she had to be muzzled so she wouldn’t go after anyone there.
I wanted to name her Guitar Wolf, of course, but my girlfriend wouldn’t go for that, so she picked out Ramona and we put Guitar Wolf in the middle and then Jackson at the end, ‘cause that’s the best last name ever.
And so Ramona Guitar Wolf Jackson became our dog.
She was bad. I mean, so totally bad. She chewed up our house, ran away, jumped on people, lunged at all large men and anyone whoever tried to bum a cigarette off me.
She woke me up early and in the middle of the night and I had to walk her all the time.
Actually, it was really our walking together that made me fall in love with Ramona. Teaching her to trust, to understand that the world didn’t need to feel so threatening any more.
I cared for her, like all those people had cared for me—taught me how to live and really participate in life again.
So we’ve just walked and walked around Savannah.
Ramona and me…or, I.
Eventually, she’s learned to play off leash, with other dogs, in the stretching out parks.
I gave her another chance, you know, and now she follows me everywhere.
This is my penance and one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever known.
So when Ramona gets scared and comes cowering up next to me, I rub her ears and tell her to hold on.
‘Cause that’s the same thing I tell myself.
Just to hold on.
Hold on.
It’s gonna be alright.
I know it will.
And that’s the truth.

Missing Savannah

Russell’s a big guy—strong, man, I wouldn’t fuck with him. I mean, I wouldn’t fuck with anyone, but still.
I’d been living in Savannah about a month, I guess, when I met him.
It was a cook out and there was a large grill with red orange flames rising up to black soot and smoke in the light fading out.
Not to totally stereotype, or whatever, but people seem to dress different in the South. I guess you’d call it more conservative, or maybe just simpler. The guys are all in khaki shorts and Polo shirts and Rainbow flip-flops and sunglasses hanging down from Croakies around their necks. The girls are in sundresses or just jeans and tank tops. For me, coming from San Francisco, the whole culture was foreign and impenetrable. And, alright, let’s get honest, there’s a prejudice that exists against the South. My mom came to California from Blytheville, Arkansas when she was around twenty years old and she’s since worked to train away her accent completely.
“You just aren’t taken seriously,” she explains.
I’d actually never even been to the South before. My image of it was all pick up trucks, fried chicken, racists, and white ladies sipping tea on the veranda. “Deliverance” meets “Gone With the Wind,” something like that.
It’s ironic, though, because coming from San Francisco, I thought of myself as totally liberal and open-minded and blah, blah, blah. The fact that I was so judgmental about Southerners and Southern culture is pretty goddamn hypocritical.
So, anyway, going over to the cookout I basically kept to myself. Actually, I was sitting in a folding chair smoking a cigarette when Russell came up and put a hand on my shoulder. He was drinking a Budweiser out of a bottle and smoking a Camel. He had thin framed glasses and thickness everywhere else—short cropped hair and soft eyes that were already a little glazed over.
“You’re Nic, right?” his voice deep and Southern. “I’m Russell.”
I shook his hand.
“You’re a writer, is that right?”
I kinda lifted my shoulders up.
“I dunno, I’m tryin’. This is a great spot, though. How long have you guys been here?”
He told me just about two years. They’d moved down from Charleston when his girlfriend was offered the management position at this clothing store in Savannah. Russell worked construction, but, back in Charleston, he’d led carriage tours around the city.
“I’ll tell you, man, you wanna hear some interesting stories, just talk to a carriage driver. Those guys I worked with were like history geniuses. Did you know the pirate Black Beard held the city of Charleston for ransom? I mean, that motherfucker stuck up the whole goddamn place. He used to light fuses in his beard when he was charging into battle so there’d be all this smoke comin’ off him—scare the shit outta everybody. Black Beard was a heavy dude. All those pirates were.”
“Pirates, huh?”
He went on to tell me about how most all the pirate captains were ex Navy—trained soldiers who had been either disenchanted, or disengaged with the service. He talked to me about their ships and military strategies.
“Down here,” he said, “we all come from a culture of fighters. Sure there was the Civil War and all, but it’s more’n that. The way I was brought up, back in Mobile, my daddy instilled in me that it was my duty to serve my country. Joinin’ the service wasn’t a question, it was something I had to do.”
I lit another cigarette. Russell drank his beer down. I’ll tell you what, where I came from, I didn’t know one person that even considered joining the military. It wasn’t even in the realm of things that were possible. But talking to Russell, I realized how any criticisms I might have about the armed forces, or abstract ideas of peace and anti-war whatever, had no connection with the actual experience of being a soldier—or being raised in an environment where serving was considered a responsibility. I felt like I couldn’t say anything, you know? I just had to listen.
And I did.
Russell told me about going to the Citadel in Charleston. He was there in the nineties when they were forced by the Supreme Court to admit their first female student. He was part of the regiment assigned specifically to protect her. It was a classmate of his who was accused of sexually assaulting her. After graduating he joined the Rangers and was deployed to different unstable Latin American countries.
“Basically,” he said. “Our orders were just to march through the jungle until we met resistance. When we met resistance, well, it was either they killed you or you killed them. I had no idea what the hell I was doing there. All I knew was that these people were trying to kill me. So, yeah, I come back to the States and start doin’ a little reading and educating myself—a little growing up—then I find out what we were really doin’ in those countries, hell, it makes me sick.”
Saying, “Jesus Christ,” was the best thing I could come up.
“Well, whatever, I was so goddamn young—a little fuckin’ kid. I don’t regret it. I mean, how could I? It’s made me who I am. I had to go through it. And I got this awesome life now—good friends, good food, good drink, all good things, right?”
I scratched sort of absently at the back of my neck.
“Yeah, man, I know what you mean. I went through some hell, too, you know—bein’ strung out for so long. But I don’t regret it. It takes what it takes for each of us to learn and, yeah, like you said, grow up.”
“Yup, I’ve lived life just about as hard as I could. I wouldn’t take it back. Hell, maybe I’ll write a book about it, too. That’s always been a dream of mine.”
“Hell yeah,” I told him. “You should.”
We went on talkin’ like that for who knows how long. He just kept totally surprising me. We talked about the books he loved. His favorite writer was Bret-Easton Ellis. He pretty much knew every goddamn thing there was to know about politics, history, religion, whatever. I coulda just kept asking him questions all night. As it was, he got pretty nice’n loaded and I smoked about a pack a cigarettes and he invited me to go crabbing the next day.
I agreed.
Though, uh, I wasn’t really sure what crabbing was.
As it turned out, the next day was like the fucking hottest of the whole year. By the time Russell called me, around noon, it was easily over a hundred degrees and so thick and wet I could barely breathe. He picked me up in a truck he’d borrowed from a friend. There was a very shy, skiddish black dog in the back.
“That’s Luna,” he told me. “She’s Carolyn’s dog.”
I didn’t know who Carolyn was.
Driving out Victory toward the beach the live oaks with roots breaking through the pavement gave way to marshland—flat, flat—canals cutting through like line drawings. We drove over bridges, past falling apart gas stations advertising boiled peanuts, cold beer, fish and grits. For all the opulence and old money wealth of downtown Savannah, the surrounding areas are desperately poor. Trailer parks, boarded up houses, Piggly Wiggly’s, Wal-Marts, that’s all there is. The heat made the road just shimmer, shimmer, shimmer.
“You’ll like it down here,” Russell told me. “It’ll do you good to slow down a little.”
I thought about that one.
I’d lived the past basically four years in LA—first on the West side, then in Hollywood. My world there was, what? All about image, man, that’s all I can say. I could be strung out on benzos and locked in a psych ward, but as long as I had my I-Phone and my goddamn new car and my celebrity friends, well, I was alright. Life was all about moving constantly, from one thing to the next.
I was, am, just frantic.
Russell pulled into a McDonald’s and we went into the drive-thru.
“You want anything?”
“Nah,” I told him.
Russell ordered a double quarter pounder with cheese and a large coke, then we went ‘round to the pick-up window.
The woman behind the glass was heavy with extensions curled up tight and deliberate. She leaned out towards us.
“You don’t want no fries with that, honey?”
Russell smiled so big, showing his small, block teeth.
“No ma’m. They tend to make me gassy.”
She laughed and laughed and I laughed, too.
Russell thanked her and we got the food and went on and, uh, got.
The next stop we made was at a gas station. That’s where Russell got a six pack of Budweiser and a net basket for crabbing, plus a pack of chicken necks for ninety-nine cents. I couldn’t really help buy anything ‘cause I still didn’t have any money. Russell told me not to worry about it.
“I worked on Wall Street, you know?” he told me. “Worked with a big firm playin’ stocks and whatever. I lived in New York for two years and made a bundle of money. Hell, I ain’t ever been more miserable in my whole life. There ain’t nothin’ worth workin’ like that for—all shut up inside all day—so much stress you can’t barely breathe—trapped by concrete on every side. I’d rather be a little hard up and able to cook out, go walking on the beach, go crabbing with a fine gentleman like yerself.”
“Ha,” I said.
Russell took a side road and suddenly we were driving with tall marsh grass on either side of us.
We parked at the end of a splintering, gray dock stretching out into the murky channel of water reflecting sunlight.
Russell grabbed a cooler and the beer and the net. I got the chicken and tried to keep Luna from running off into the mud and oyster shells.
We walked out together onto the dock.
To tell you the truth, crabbing wasn’t really what I imagined. I mean, it wasn’t a lot of drama and high seas adventure. What you do is, you take a chicken neck and kinda weave it into the bottom of the net, so it doesn’t fall out. Then you just lower the net into the water and, uh, wait. Then you wait some more. Then maybe ten or fifteen minutes go by and you pull the net up. If you’re lucky, there might be a couple crabs in there eating the chicken. So you dump the crabs into the cooler and drop the net back in the water. Of course, a lotta times there aren’t any crabs at all and so you just gotta try again.
And Russell? Russell drank beer and told me stories and listened to mine.
“I’ve been through some dark times,” he told me. “Doin’ coke and whatever else. Somehow you just got to learn how to fall in love with life, you know? I mean, shit, man, just look around, right? How fuckin’ great is this? We ain’t got shit to do but sit in the sun and maybe catch a few crabs, or maybe catch nothin’ at all. It don’t matter. And then we’re gonna go back home and boil these fuckers up and melt some butter and talk some more and maybe a game’ll be on. That’s it, man. That’s fuckin’ it.”
There used to be this TV program in the seventies called The Dick Cavette Show. I have an old tape of it where he interviews John and Yoko. On the show, John talks about wishing he could be a fisherman—pulling his dinner from the sea, connected with the tides and the swells and whatever. He says he wishes he coulda been that kinda person—not someone who needed to perform and question everything and be forever unsatisfied and wanting more.
Looking over at Russell, goddamn, I wanted to be a fisherman so fucking badly.
I mean, why can’t it ever be enough?
What is this fucking turmoil that rips apart a beautiful day like that? The sun, the marsh, Luna hiding in the shade behind us. Why is there this restlessness that won’t let me alone?
I look at Russell and I admire him completely.
He’s figured out the greatest challenge for any of us, just being content.
He’s the fucking hero.
That’s the truth.
And I learn from him.
So we ate the crabs with melted butter and a big hunk of bread.
We sat in the living room, in Savannah, Georgia. And, for maybe once in my life, that was enough.
It was enough.

We All Fall Down

Akira lived in the basement apartment of his mom’s house.
Actually, I didn’t even know he’d be there, but I knocked a couple times and then his voice came through—soft, always calming.
“Yeah?”
The bathroom window was still broken more than a year later. I could see the reflection turned upside down of the tall grass and the eucalyptus leaves crackling together like newspaper cutouts. The Presidio stretched out all the way to the beach behind me. Just forest and army housing. Akira lived at the very edge of the city. I’d always loved that.
“Hey, Akira, man, it’s Nic.”
He became suddenly visible behind the dirty glass garden side door.
Long dreads all tied together behind his head. Eyes soft and lined and smudged with black underneath. Skinny, skinny like me.
“Holy shit, Nic, what the hell?”
He opened the door and I stepped forward, giving him a hug. He smelled like pot and incense and something else familiar.
“I always knew you’d show up like this,” he said, keeping an arm over my shoulder. “I just had a feelin’. So what’s going on? How you been doin’?”
My eyes looked down beneath a shadow covering the base of the door and cobwebs and things.
“Great,” was what I told him.
I followed him inside. I mean, I knew the goddamn way.
I’d been using again for about five months at that point. I was enrolled at Hampshire college, but I’d pretty much done nothing my last semester there except teach myself how to shoot drugs and finally make it through all of the original Legend of Zelda. No one knew I’d relapsed, though. Not even my girlfriend.
But coming home for summer break, back to San Francisco, well, I was pretty much ready to self-destruct good and proper. As much as I’d tried, I couldn’t find crystal meth in Western Massachusetts. Heroin, though, was everywhere, so I’d gotten pretty sick on that shit. Actually, when I went to see Akira, I was trying to wean myself off of opiates with a whole bunch of Vicodin I’d stolen.
Opiates weren’t ever really my thing, though.
I mean, crystal was the drug I’d fallen in love with.
Actually, it was Akira who gave it to me for the first time. But, look, I was gonna find it one way or the other. I was searching. Akira just helped me find it. I woulda done the same for him. He’s one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. I sensed that about him the first time we met.
So there I was, being led back to his room, where I see the same bed and couch and Bjork poster and record player and actually a fucking drawing of mine that I did and forgot over a year ago.
Since then I’d been in two rehabs. At one point, I’d been sober and going to meetings for over six months. As it was, it had been more than a year since I’d done crystal. I mean, I hadn’t done it since the last time I saw Akira.
We sat down on the bed together and we talked and laughed and smoked a bowl.
Then I asked him—all casual like.
“You still talk to D ever?”
Akira looked at me and then looked at me again.
“Ha, ha, man. What you thinkin’ ‘bout?”
“You know, if the factory’s still on, or what?”
He lit a cigarette—a True.
He offered me one.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it’s goin’. But D ain’t there no more. She went crazy, man, so Gavin’s running the place now.”
“Crazy?”
“Uh, huh, all paranoid ‘n shit. You wanna see if Gavin’s around?”
“Sure,” I said, again, not wanting to sound too, uh, desperate or something.
So Akira called and, yeah, the factory was still operational.
We got in the car together—my dad’s car. We both lit cigarettes and drove listening to a mix tape I’d made. The afternoon light was turning dull and gray as the fog slowly stretched out across the bay. The Bay Bridge kept going on for way too fucking long, spilling out onto the different East Bay freeways like veins running in every direction.
The cookie factory was a series of warehouses with trucks coming in and out. There was a smell of cooking dough always—hot butter and sugar. There was a code Akira had to enter to get in the big electronic gate and then we drove around back, to the offices they’d converted into a sort of live/work space. The work being selling drugs.
I always loved how the place just looked like straight outta some fuckin’ movie. It was like magic, exciting, full of possibilities. Of course, it also looked like the kinda place the cops would straight raid in some drug trafficking movie. I could see the helicopters circling, the flashing sirens, the guns being drawn. Really, the place was a perfect set up.
But not that night, I told myself. That night was protected—sacred—my night. I willed everything to be okay.
We climbed up the cement block stairs and then around to D’s, or, uh, Gavin’s door.
Akira knocked.
It was a good couple minutes before we finally heard something click. Then the door opened very slowly and the arc of a crossbow was pushed out, the arrow sticking right over Akira’s head.
“Who’s with you?’ asked Gavin.
Akira sort of crouched down lower. “What? No one. What’re you talking about?”
Gavin panned the crossbow slowly above our heads.
“Alright,” he said. “Come in.”
We went quick through the door, both of us trying to maybe duck down a little.
Gavin locked everything, then let the crossbow hang down. He still hadn’t dropped it though.
“Akira, Nic, it’s been forever, right?”
His eyes were very wide. He had a dirty truckers hat covering a bald spot, with long hair still trying to hang down in back. He had on loose shorts and a tee-shirt and big ol’ construction boots. His hand was bandaged, which he quickly pointed out.
“Nearly cut it off with a hacksaw. Good thing I jerk off with my left hand, huh?”
What I did was, uh, laugh awkwardly. That’s what I can give myself credit for.
The factory was set up like this, right? A waiting room with a big screen TV and couches to sit on. Gavin’s office is in the back and, normally, you wait in the waiting room while they fill yer orders. But, that night, Gavin led us back to the office.
Basically the office was a bed and four computer screens all playing different porns. There was a swivel chair, where Gavin sat. There was also a table in the corner with a woman sitting at it. She said absolutely nothing to us as we entered the room and Gavin didn’t acknowledge her. She was too busy with a big pile of cocaine on the table. She was like a fucking precision machine the way she was going about cutting and doin’ those lines.
Cut a line.
Do a line.
Cut a line.
Do a line.
It was fucking crazy.
But, anyway, Gavin asked us the question that made me love the cookie factory more than any place in the whole world.
“So ya’ll wanna line of coc, or, no, meth, right?”
“Awesome,” we both say together.
“Meth?”
“Yeah,” I answered that one.
Fuck, I’ll tell you what, when he handed over that plate with the two generous lines of crystal cut there, man, it was like they almost looked evil to me. I could see it right there, in the color and smell and texture. It was sinister. It was like being in the presence of death.
But, fuck, I did the goddamn line, now didn’t I?
Akira did his line.
I counted.
It wasn’t very long before the rush of it exploded in me like thousands of Cupid’s arrows shot up and down my whole body.
I breathed out long, long and slow.
There was no turning back, right?
Motherfucker.
And then that girl cutting lines sat up and spoke suddenly. Her eyes were crazy open and her words were hard to understand. Her accent sounded Jamaican maybe.
“Earthquake,” she said.
We all looked at each other.
“What?” asked Gavin.
“Earthquake,” she said again.
And then it hit.
The whole fucking place like lurched on its foundation and then just started shaking, shaking shaking. The sound of metal and concrete grinding came through deafening.
Growing up in San Francisco, I’d been in the big ‘89 earthquake when the Bay Bridge collapsed, but I’d never felt the world shaking around me like that night at the cookie factory.
Akira and I got in the doorway—force of habit from countless earthquake drills at school.
The shaking went on.
And then it stopped.
“Holy shit,” Gavin almost yelled. “What the fuck?”
“Man, a fucking earthquake,” was my brilliant observation.
“Yeah, and she sensed it, man,” said Gavin, pointing over at the girl. “That fucking bitch sensed it—like a goddamn animal.”
The woman didn’t respond.
She went back to her whole line cutting/doing thing.
In my stomach I knew.
There was a tightness there, a knotting and twisting.
That earthquake was the start.
It always worked out that way.
I start using and the whole world just closes down on me. There are never new opportunities, no call backs ever come—my car gets towed and I end up losing everything all over again.
The world shuts.
I always know it’s gonna come, but I try to tell myself it’ll be better next time.
And maybe the earthquake wasn’t a sign—didn’t mean anything.
But a week later I’d been kicked outta my house and would eventually find myself living in the park behind Fort Mason.
So you tell me?
‘Cause it goes the other way, too.
The longer I stay clean, the more the world just opens up with possibilities and hope.
But it’s so hard to remember that shit.
And I guess that’s the fucking problem.
So today I wanna remember.
Let me tell you what happens:
It
all
falls
down.
Just like that.
Every fucking time.

Cash Money

So, more and more, I've come to realize how fucking obsessive compulsive I am.
I was putting on socks just now and the little emblem was facing inward and I had to take them off and change them around.
I create these lists of plans in my head and I just turn them around over and over.
Writing them down, like in a planner or something, doesn’t help at all.
I’ll be walking on the beach and the sun’ll be setting and they’ll be fucking dolphins cresting their backs and fins out of the water, but I’ll be lost planning out what movie I’m gonna rent—where I’m gonna get dinner—what meeting I’m gonna go to—what I’m gonna say to whoever whenever I see them.
My mind fucking traps me inside it.
I struggle to stay present, but it’s almost impossible.
I guess the world is just so big and overwhelming and unpredictable and frightening that I need to find some area of control.
I hate to think of myself as a goddamn control freak, but that’s what I am.
Really I can’t fucking stand it.
I want so badly to just slow down, take things in—feel the miracle that is each moment.
So that’s my focus today—to be present in where I am—to take my fucking time and not miss my life going by.
But, as hopeless as it seems at times, there have been moments recently when I’ve been able to bring myself back into my life.
This morning like always I took my dog up to Griffith Park. Actually, I had my friend’s dog with me, too. She’s much smaller than Ramona and not used to exercise so I’m very careful not to let her overheat or overwork herself.
I almost killed a dog like that once.
It was totally my fault.
What happened was I took another friend of mine’s dog up to the top of Westridge on a hot still day in August. This was about three years ago when I was super compulsive about exercising. There was a feeling in me like if I didn’t work myself to the point of nearly incapacitating exhaustion everyday, somehow I had failed. Actually, the drive in me was so overwhelming that I literally couldn’t not exercise. Nothing was ever enough and every day I drove myself harder and harder.
It was as if pushing myself to the point of breaking would somehow take me away from all the terrifying feelings surging inside me.
It worked temporarily, but just like with drugs my tolerance increased and I had to keep going farther and farther.
I had my friend’s dog and my mom’s two dogs with me and I went running on the trail.
I couldn’t stop.
The sweat soaked through my clothes, but I kept running. If I didn’t complete the trail I wouldn’t be able to stand myself. It felt like my life depended on it.
I glanced back over my shoulder and O, my friend’s dog, had collapsed on the hot trail. He could do nothing but pant and lie and there was blood in his mouth and excrement coming out from behind.
For some reason my mom’s two dogs were totally fine. They just crowded together in the shade of a bare, tangled tree branch as O lay there.
I poured water on him—tried to get him to drink, to stand. The pads on his feet had torn off so there was blood all over.
I called the police but it took nearly four hours for them to reach us.
At the emergency room they told me O had suffered from massive heat stroke—his blood coagulating all at once, then literally losing the ability to clot on its own. He was bleeding to death internally. The possibility of him living, she said, was about 5%. She threatened to charge me with negligence and animal cruelty.
I fucking cried and prayed and visited O in the hospital ever day for hours and hours.
His owner, my friend, had to come back from his trip early to be with O.
Two weeks passed where O’s life was in critical condition.
By some fucking miracle, though, he survived.
Three years later, with my friend’s dog, Cash, I am very careful. I keep stopping, even when she probably doesn’t need it, to let her rest and drink water.
Ramona is a big meathead who can run for hours without stopping. She sprints circles around me, climbing up the canyon walls and chasing birds down through the brush in the valleys. But Cash is slow and not accustomed to a lot of exercise.
I’ve been building her strength up slowly—watching her closely—walking along at her pace so she doesn’t feel compelled to keep up.
And I’ve seen her progress.
Today she made it to one of the top peaks overlooking Glendale and the San Fernando Valley—something that would’ve been impossible a few weeks ago.
She’s even started running with Ramona a little—chasing her up the steep water carved trails through the thick, dry brush.
And me, well, I’ve been there with her—present for the excitement in her face as she’s begun to play more and more.
I didn’t rush her.
I let her take her time.
I couldn’t control it, but that was okay.
Man, to get comfortable giving up trying to control all aspects of my life would be such a fucking relief—to stop obsessing over every little thing.
Of course, perfectionism is another side to that same fucking o.c.d. shit.
So maybe I won’t try for all aspects of my life.
If I can just allow myself to let go little by little, well, that’ll be progress.
I guess the problem is I don’t even know how to begin.
But I guess walking along with Cash is a start.
At least, that’s how it feels.

David Bowie

Everything is always changing.
Whatever plans I make for the future are mostly irrelevant.
I mean, I have no idea what’s going to happen.
Most likely tomorrow I’m gonna drive my friend to school in the Valley and then take the dogs to the beach—come back and work on the apartment—write—go to a meeting in Atwater.
In January I’m planning on going to this writing school thing in Vermont. I need to figure out paying taxes and parking tickets and maybe getting some part time work in the meantime.
I wanna go up North and see my family.
The Melvins are playing in November.
Those are my plans, right? My expectations for the future.
But things change.
The other day my friend got in a super bad accident on the 101. No one was hurt, but his car was totaled and I had to go pick him up and take him to school and get him to group. I’ve been driving him around a lot this week—spending more time in fucking Northridge then anyone ever should in one lifetime. I keep repeating that Frank Zappa line,
“Where you been livin’, Reseda?”
Kind of a super depressing place.
Anyway, yeah, everything I’d been planning for last week totally didn’t happen ‘cause of the accident. All my obsessing over every little thing I was going to have to do turned out to be a complete waste of fucking time.
Things changed.
That’s the way it goes.
But despite the unforeseeable shit and the goddamn fluidity of all things, I still have to live each day with a certain amount of conviction, right?
I have to assume that I’m not gonna get hit by a bus—that my beliefs and wants and likes and dislikes are fairly permanent—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get shit done.
I have to plan.
I have to give that school in Vermont an answer about whether I’m going to attend this spring or not.
I have to assume that I’m still gonna want to study fiction in however many months that is away. I have to buy plane tickets and figure out payment and get someone to watch my dog.
I have to move forward as though things are going to stay as they are—even though, of course, it’s always possible that in seconds everything could change just completely.
So that must translate into all aspects of my life, right?
When I feel something in the day that I’m in, I have to honor that, don’t I? I have to commit to whatever it is I believe at that moment.
Of course, I’m not talking about impulsivity, or following some crazy, fleeting, destructive desire.
I’m talking about feelings and beliefs I have in me that are as constant and steady as my lungs expanding and contracting like they do.
Should I deny those emotions because someday they might change?
Should I hold myself back?
Honestly, I’m not sure I could, even if I wanted to.
It’d be like dying. It’d be like lying down in the snow and darkness—closing your eyes as the cold turns to heat and calm—sleep—nothingness.
Mechanical insides.
Black tar stars.
I’ve come to really care about this kid I’ve been working on the apartment with. He’s my friend, right? In a year from now we might fucking hate each other, or I could move to Paraguay, or he could join the circus. Whatever, I mean, right now we’re friends. I have to commit to that. I want to commit to that. I don’t want to live some sort of perpetually cautious, closed off, half-life. I’m not fucking capable of that.
‘Cause, the thing is, as fucked up as I can be, I am almost ridiculously fucking genuine. I feel whatever it is I’m feeling so it possesses me just completely. I commit to that feeling. Sometimes it’s totally the wrong thing or I find it later changes, but my experience of the feeling is never false. It is gasoline and fire all over me, but it is not a lie.
So should I not be that way?
Should I be more callous and realistic?
Hell, I don’t know.
That’s not who I am.
I don’t know how to not give myself fully.
I’m not satisfied if I can’t live like that.
When I love, I love so big.
That is genuine.
It is true.
But when things change, as they do, it’s totally fucking devastating.
Still, that process of life shifting and earthquakes and glaciers and tides and rain falling—that process doesn’t negate what existed before.
I mean, does it?
Love is beautiful and painful and terrifying and insane. It possesses me fully and incapacitates me completely.
Maybe I should love differently.
I really don’t know.
The fact that things fall apart can’t possibly take away from what was once beautiful, right?
If anything, it does just the opposite.
That’s a hard thing to accept.
I want the good feelings to last forever and the bad feelings to go on and disappear.
But life is all about ambiguity—complexity—not good or bad, but everything in between.
Change is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I can’t allow myself to live fully in the day that I’m in.
Change can be fucking painful, but the risks are worth it.
I mean, they just are.
However, I will say that when it comes do dealing with that change in a mature and responsible manner, well, fuck, I have a long ass way to go.
I think I’m still like twelve years old in a lot of aspects of my dealings with other people.
But, you know, I’m trying.
Anyway, like with everything, I guess it’s not some external thing that’s the problem.
I mean, it’s me.
I’m the fucking problem.
Christ.

After Word

I guess it was Wednesday that my editor approached me about writing an afterword for the paperback edition of Tweak that’s coming out in a couple’ve months.
I’m not totally sure what an afterword is exactly ‘cause I usually skip that part of the books I read. The forward and the afterword seem sort of extraneous or something. Maybe I’m just lazy.
The one afterword I do remember reading, though, was Jerzy Kosinski’s for his novel, The Painted Bird. I read it mostly ‘cause I was curious about how much of the story had actually been biographical. The afterword didn’t really tell me. It was more of a reflection on his experiences after publishing his work.
So that’s what I set out to do—just talk about what’s happened since publishing Tweak.
Of course, I wanted to include my relapse—if nothing else, to show that the struggle is ongoing and to maybe take some of the shame away.
But more than anything else I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned since the book came out.
A lot of the stuff has been super positive. I never really understood how sharing our pain and vulnerability and insecurity and fear seems to allow other people to open up with their own stories and secrets and shame.
It’s very liberating in a way.
I think it helps us all not to feel so alone—so messed up and crazy.
It kinda normalizes how hard things can be in a society that promotes smiles and strength and confidence.
“Put on a happy face.”
That seems to be the dominate societal refrain most of us have been hearing since we could fucking crawl.
So admitting how scared and confused we all can be at times is like Sisyphus casting aside his boulder and walking freely up the mountain.
Well, maybe not that dramatic, but still.
Anyway, the other thing publishing Tweak has helped me with is dealing with criticism and negative, even hostile feedback. I’ve always been way over sensitive in general, but having to face that shit was way harder than I imagined. But, honestly, working through the hurt and facing the criticism has helped me to develop greater strength and conviction in my beliefs.
But there is one thing about my book that I do feel super conflicted about. Looking back, it’s really hard for me to reconcile the fact that I’ve exposed other peoples’ lives in my writing. Of course, I tried to disguise their identities, but they know who they are.
Honestly, I’m no longer sure if their stories were mine to tell. I wrote about myself, but I exposed them. This is particularly true with the portrayal of my ex-girlfriend, who I called Zelda in the book. She has suffered a ton, right? And I regret very much adding to that and I can’t help but feel some guilt for what I’ve done.
Of course, when I wrote Tweak I was much younger. I didn’t understand how sharing someone else’s secrets, no matter how anonymously, is violating their right to their own story.
I genuinely had no way of knowing that.
It was only through the process of publishing the book that I began to see the error in my actions.
Other writers have done it, of course.
Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski are the two authors I admire most who consistently wrote about their real life friends and lovers—exposing their most intimate secrets. I respect them both very much and I guess I partly used their example to go forward with telling these other peoples’ stories in my book.
But, like I said, I feel fairly conflicted about this now.
I’m not saying I’d take it back and, anyway, that thought is completely irrelevant.
What I can say is that I’m committed to not doing it again. I want to focus only on writing about myself.
Now, I’m really not beating myself up over this. I mean, even in terms of Zelda, I know I can’t take responsibility for the struggles she’s had. I don’t have any power of her and, honestly, she’s probably not even thinking about me anyway. But, as part of my recovery, I think it is super important to admit my mistakes and not just brazenly stand behind something I no longer believe in.
Admitting when I’ve been wrong is really scary, but it is also very freeing and feels sort of strong to me. I mean, that’s the only way to change, right?
And making mistakes seems like the only way I ever learn—which can really suck.
I guess I’m pretty thick headed.
But, as I’ve said before, I’m committed to doing whatever it takes to change—to get well—or, weller—‘cause we never actually arrive in life, do we? We are always traveling. Until we’re dead, of course.
So, once again, I’m just trying to move forward.
And I believe I can.
I’ve been listening to a ton of Sly and the Family Stone these past couple’ve days.
“You can make it if you try.”
That’s right on.

Disorder

So I kinda really don’t wanna talk about this ‘cause it’s embarrassing and I guess I’m sort of calling myself out on some shit that’s really still pretty fucked up.
I’ve heard people talk about emotional sobriety and how that’s different from just physical sobriety and I guess that’s kinda what I’m working on today. But old behaviors and habits are hard to break, even when they cause me a ton of pain and anxiety and whatever. Hell, maybe that’s what makes them so attractive.
The point is that I want to change. I swear. But I don’t know how or it’s not that easy, or, just having the awareness of what I’m doing that’s fucked up doesn’t mean I can just be different all of a sudden.
Maybe the answer is in the twelve-steps. Maybe the answer is in finding God. Maybe the answer is in a Buddhist monastery or a vision quest or acupuncture or some self-realization seminar. Maybe the answer is in Hare Krishna or Mormonism or Islam or the goddamn Manson Family.
But I don’t believe in any of that shit.
So I guess the answer has to be in me.
That’s the only thing I can believe in.
But I can’t just snap my fingers and change.
I can’t.
Anyway, the thing is, I am genuinely committed to being alone right now—committed to self-discovery and a quest for contentment in myself. But I still get fucking restless and bored and lonely and I can’t help but try to reach out for something to take me outta myself.
What I do most is play this game.
I’m not proud of it.
I know how unhealthy it is.
I have a hard time holding back, though.
What I do is I find some girl—a target, I guess. Usually it has nothing to do with her—it’s all about the fantasy and the, uh, game, right?
What I want is someone to obsess over—someone to engage me in a relationship of emails and text messaging proclaiming our longing for what will always—always, always—be an ultimately tragic, impossible love.
Girl’s who are already in relationships work best ‘cause that makes the possibility of anything actually real taking hold almost impossible.
And sometimes they play along. Sometimes I have multiple fantasy relationship going at one time.
But the other day I got totally knocked down when I made a mistake about who I was approaching and her response to me kinda clarified that all this behavior is something I need to get a fucking handle on. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s as destructive as using, but there are still a ton of parallels. And it has led to it in the past. My relationship with my ex-girlfriend I wrote about in my book started off with the game. The pain it caused still cuts in to a secret place in me like swallowing crushed glass and razor blades.
Believe me, I don’t wanna be writing about this. I genuinely hope that calling myself out will somehow make me have to take more responsibility for my actions and will take some of the magic away.
The girl that kinda threw this all back in my face was just someone random I met at a meeting.
She told me she had a boyfriend.
I didn’t see how that made a difference.
And then she texted me back that she was feeling really uncomfortable and that she’d, you know, see me when she saw me, but that was gonna be it.
Man, I felt like such a fucking asshole—and I was.
My only defense is that doing this shit has been fucking ingrained in me, by me, since I was like twelve.
Maybe I’ve watched too many movies or read too many books or there’s just some misfiring connection in my brain.
Or maybe I’m a bad person.
That could seriously be it.
Maybe I’m like one of those diseased animals in the herd that is cast out, abandoned, left to be eaten by the fucking jackals.
Actually, I’m not even sure what a jackal is, but I like the sound of it.
Anyway, I don’t know whether I believe that there are bad people out there, or not. There are certainly a lot of people I don’t like.
Me most of all, you know? At least sometimes.
I hope writing about this helps. I hope exposing this ugly side of me will take some of the power away.
I feel like scum.
I’m beating myself up so bad and I don’t know how to stop.
There’s this negative voice in my head.
I swear it’s like a goddamn third party.
It tells me horrible things.
It suffocates me in doubt and criticism.
Fuck, it’s a bad day today.
I wish I could give something more positive, but this is all I’ve got.
I guess it’ll pass.
That’s hard to remember, but it always does.
Nothing stays the same.
I have to know that—I fucking have to.
It’ll pass.
And I can change.
It’s fucking hard, but I have to believe it’s possible.
I mean, it just has to be.

Junky Girl

            I can’t write at my apartment ‘cause it’s too fucking hot and the bed’s there so I always just go to sleep.

Plus the dogs are a distraction.

Besides Ramona I’ve been taking care of my friend’s dog while he’s at school during the day. Her name’s Cash and she’s like some American Eskimo mix—small and white and fluffy and the sweetest thing ever. She’s the total opposite of Ramona, though they were both found on the streets.

Anyway, I can’t write at home so I usually drag my ass over to some coffee shop—partly, I guess, for the not very satisfying illusion of interacting with other people.

I mean, sometimes they’ll talk to me.

That’s the most I can hope for.

I’m way too shy and insecure to approach anyone on my own—without drugs, of course.

So I sit half praying for some sort of interaction, but it usually doesn’t happen and I end up leaving, hating myself even more than I did before.

But it’s probably for the best.

My, uh, “picker” as my old friend Zan put it, is totally broken—in need of repair.

Today I saw this striking girl, right—blue, blue eyes and black hair and intricate tattoos and this look of like pain and intense longing in her face.

I tried to catch her eye, but she just walked past into the coffee shop, disappearing for a good long while.

When she came back out she sat in the corner and lit a cigarette. She stared off at nothing. She stared and stared. Her cigarette burned down between her fingers. She fell asleep.

I scanned her arms for tracks. They were finally visible on her wrists and the backs of her hands.

So I watched her, like the fucking masochist that I am.

I watched her nod and jerk awake and spread her legs out.

She looked so…gone…disconnected…numb.

No anxiety, no pain, hardly even an awareness of where she was. Ignorance. Unconsciousness. Bliss.

My mind turned ‘round like a radio scanning for some sort of signal up in one of the canyons.

It would be so easy just to walk over there, offer her a cigarette, tell her I’ve got a place she can crash, that I can drive downtown to go score for the both of us.

We could lock ourselves up together—tangled in spaced out, time traveling, kaleidoscope, Heroin sex.

I mean, how do I not reach out for that numbness? For that just not giving a fuck?

How do I stay away from the one thing that I know will make everything better?

Knowing that all the fear and craziness will be bled out in the point of a needle breaking the skin.

It’d be so goddamn simple.

I watched her staring and her eyes going blink, blink—blink, blink.

She wasn’t there at all.

There was no life in her.

Just blankness followed by pain followed by blankness.

‘Cause the sickness will come.

Cold—vomiting—diarrhea—aching—cramping—spasms—screaming out but never getting any relief.

That’s all she has left.

Looking beautiful and stoned in the corner—for a moment—till the sickness comes back.

She’s a fucking prisoner.

And me, well, I may be crazy in the head, but I’m not trapped anymore.

I’ve been set free.

And that’s something I wouldn’t trade for a balloon of dope or a teener of meth or anything else that robs me of my life and makes me a slave.

Because I can see it so clearly, man—if I don’t get through the hard shit—if I keep running away—nothing’s ever going to change.

I mean, I’m either gonna have to deal with this now, or when I’m fucking older and it’s even that much more hopeless.

Or I could die, of course.

That’s always a possibility.

But, really, there’s no escaping it.

Not if I wanna live there isn’t.

So I looked down for a second at my computer and when I glanced back up the girl had gone.

It must’ve been a good hit.

Lasted nearly thirty minutes.

Motherfuck.

I breathed out long, long and slow.

I felt something like, I don’t know, sadness, I guess, and something else.

There was a sense of relief in me.

‘Cause I have a chance at life, right?

A fucking chance to live.

And I choose that today—for today.

And maybe even for tomorrow, too.

The world’s open.

I just gotta hang on.

Parasite

This morning my dog, Ramona Guitar Wolf, woke me up earlier than usual.

            She wouldn’t get off me—licking my face and pawing at my chest—unintentionally digging her sharp nails into my skin and making me say something stupid like, “Oww, fuck, Ramona.”

            The she went over to the door and started in with this tentative bark—intermittent—reminding me of her needs as if somehow I’d forgotten.

            I pleaded with her for just ten more minutes, like a little kid being woken up for school.

            More sporadic barking.

            I sat up and pulled on an old tee-shirt. There’s a hot plate set up on top of the mini refrigerator we found buried in the back shed. I thought about making coffee, but was just too tired and lazy.

            The apartment is in East Hollywood. It’s not large exactly, but it’s not small either. Anyway, it has a lot of potential.

            The way it’s set up is that where I’m staying is the back apartment directly behind a tiny, one room rotting old commercial space that used to be a barbershop. It couldn’t have held more than one or two chairs and the barber must’ve lived back where I am in the apartment. As it stands now the shop has been used mostly for storage—the windows boarded up, the floor torn to pieces—thick with dust and strange, discarded items from the fifties—a reel to reel tape player—a vibrating massage chair in its own special case that weighs at least fifty pounds or more.

            When I first moved in to the back place there was no ceiling in the kitchen and there weren’t three gas appliances hooked up, so hot water would be impossible to get. The electricity was being, uh, borrowed.

            But my friend and I decided we could turn the whole thing into a two bedroom place. We’re both newly sober and really value each other’s support and friendship. There aren’t many people I can truly connect with in this world—especially other men, but my friend I met here is definitely a fellow alien. Whatever planet I came from, he came from, too.

            So even just meeting him was miraculous. Plus he loves Ramona and Ramona loves him. He has a little stray dog he found in the Valley and most nights the four of us pile onto my torn up futon and watch old movies and smoke cigarettes and maybe that sounds lame or boring, but it’s pretty satisfying, you know, and just simple.

            Anyway, the place was pretty fucked up when I first moved in. I’d been out of my…relationship…for a little over a month.

            There was this feeling inside me like I was going to have to build a whole new life for myself overnight. I mean, sitting with the uncertainty of my future and the loneliness that came with no longer having a…significant other and person that I’d loved very much…was completely overwhelming and terrifying. Just the fear of having to live with myself, without the validation of a lover, was enough to make me totally want to act out—find the first person that would have me and cling to them for fucking life.

            It was the same thing with the apartment. Not understanding one thing about construction, I felt like we would have to rework the whole place in a single day—rebuild the kitchen, install a gas heater and cut a hole through the outer wall for the vent, put in dry wall and cover it with joint compounding, break down the wall between the barber shop and the apartment, build a door there, prime everything, paint, put down carpeting, get the hot water set up.

            Actually, it seemed like a lot, so I figured I’d give us the whole weekend to finish.

            That first day I worked till I was sick and dizzy and weak. My friend, who actually knew what he was doing, told me I needed to relax. We’d get done what we could—but it was gonna be a slow process—making little bits of progress each day—sometimes seeming like we’d made none at all.

            I had to be patient.

            Fuck.

            I mean, that’s not my biggest strength in the whole goddamn world.

            I pretty much suck at it.

            But we worked each day and did a little bit more and it was strange, you know, ‘cause I did come to accept the process more and more. We’d just do what we could—not fucking kill ourselves or get all fucking uptight planning everything out.

            And we’ve made progress.

            The kitchen is done now, though the drawers aren’t back in. We’ve got the heater set up and, if the gas company ever shows up, we’ll get hot water.

            We broke through the wall and actually found there was this little secret door that had been covered by the plaster. So to get from one room to the other you have to go through this kind of portal, though unfortunately it doesn’t lead to John Malckovich’s head.

            Now it’s the barbershop room that needs to be stripped and redone. It feels pretty overwhelming, but I know we’ll just do a little bit of work everyday and then, without even realizing it, eventually it’ll all get done.

            So then the challenge for me becomes applying those same principles to the rest of my life—patience—allowing the process to just sort of unfold without obsessive planning or struggling against it. To know that, yes, I’m alone, that my life needs to be rebuilt—but right this time—with a solid foundation—not rushing forward—not running before I can walk.

            It’s fucking scary.

            Every impulse in me fights against it.

            But unless I allow the process to develop at its own pace, I’ll just keep leeching onto people with this utter desperation. Because without them, I am left with the thing I’m most afraid of: myself.

            So I’m learning how to sit with myself today—trying to figure out who the hell “myself” really is.

            And until I figure that shit out, there’s no point in doing anything else.

            Anyway, Ramona was barking at me, remember?

            I put her leash on and stumbled out the door.

I’d get coffee on the way and then we’d walk together, up through Griffith Park. Me in my own world, and Ramona there in hers.

            I’d be alone.

            And that was gonna have to be okay.

Defending the Locusts

I remember when I was living up Gower Street in a house near the Hollywood sign. My downstairs neighbors were this couple from North Carolina. The husband was a handsome guy who’d come out here to pursue an acting career. Of course, in LA he was just another pretty face. His wife worked two jobs so he could go on auditions—which never lead to anything—and they ended up getting addicted to cocaine and pretty much losing everything.

That’s fucking LA, right?

Makes me wanna scream so loud just to wake everybody the fuck up.

But, I’ll tell you what, the truth is that every where’s the same. That’s the big fucking secret. When I was living in Savannah, there was the same fucking drive in people for status and acceptance. The stakes are different, of course. In Savannah maybe it’s trucks, or jobs working at a bank, or studying law. It’s sundresses and pearls and Polo shirts and golf and country clubs. Sure, the industry isn’t there, so, instead, they’re jockeying for the best tailgating spot at the University of South Carolina football games.

I went to one of those games, you know, when I was down in Columbia with my girlfriend’s family. Before the game there was a tailgate party with thousands of people drinking and grilling or just getting take out from Lizard’s Thicket or someplace. Chicken fingers, honey mustard sauce, pig’s in a blanket, five layer dip, gin and diet Mountain Dew.

There was one guy with a flat screen TV rigged up to the back of his truck.

And people were dressed up.

They were dressed up for the game in dresses and neckties and dangling earrings.

We took our seats in the overcrowded stadium up in one of the executive boxes.

Things were alright at first.

The South Carolina Game Cocks (a reference to cock fighting, I think) were losing pretty bad and I guess it was just kinda boring.

The thing that bothered me most was this guy sitting maybe three seats down. He was white and balding, with a big belly and a Game Cock’s burgundy polo shirt. He was sitting next to a woman who I assume was his wife. She was very overweight and bored looking, but smiling, smiling, smiling like her face was gonna break apart.

Anyway, every couple minutes or so the man would yell really loud and startling, “LET’S GO COCKS!”

There was like this anger in his voice. I mean, I can’t explain it. But I just looked at his wife and this sadness burrowed into me.

And then there was halftime.

Christ, halftime.

Halftime was, well, I guess one giant commercial aimed at recruiting kids to join the army.

First three fighter jets soared powerfully, and triumphantly across the stadium. Then strong, confident looking soldiers marched out onto the field carrying big ass rifles and there were these cheer leaders dancing all around them in little skirts and everybody took off their hats and started singing, “God Bless America,” and started crying and shit.

That was when I had to leave. My girlfriend was pissed off at me, but I couldn’t take one more goddamn second of it. The sadness was so deep in me—gnawing away at my insides.

So, tell me, is it LA that’s evil and destructive, or is it just fucking human nature?

There was a scene in last years “There Will Be Blood” where Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, basically a monstrous sociopath, has a conversation where he admits that when he looks at people, he sees nothing there worth liking. It’s an eerie and disturbing turning point in the film where you almost shudder at his cold-heartedness.

But, then again, for me, you know, when I look at people, I see very little there worth liking.

Now, that’s not totally true.

I mean, I have empathy for people’s struggles in a way that Day-Lewis’s character did not.

I feel pained about those soldiers marching on the football field.

I feel pained at some kid in the middle of the country walking into his classroom with an arsenal of automatic weapons.

But is LA the monster?

Ha.

We are the fucking monsters.

And maybe that’s the hardest thing to face of all.

‘Cause there are no solutions.

Awareness is as good as it gets.

The Story of M: Part 4 (the end)

Chaos.

My therapist is probably right.

But, well, maybe scarier than anything else was the change coming over me. Like I said, I don’t believe in God, but there seemed to be some divine, unexplainable force pulling me to her—connecting us. I even began to think that maybe the religious community she was involved in held the key to some spiritual understanding or experience that I’d been missing in my life. Everything about M coming into my life seemed too crazily coincidental to pass off as just some random fluke. Plus there was the energy coursing like speed pumped in my vein that existed between us. Maybe that was God. Maybe I was being directed to move up with M and check out what her community there had to offer. I mean, what she called it was a religious school. It was not a cult. It absolutely was not.

And so I started making plans.

First would just be a trial, right? I’d tell my girlfriend I was going to see my dad north of San Francisco and then I’d just drive up to Redding for a couple’ve days. I’d have to rent a car and a hotel, but that was fine. M took time off work for me to come up. It was Tuesday. I’d be leaving in two days.

Now, one thing I can say for myself with a certain amount of certainty and clarity is that my intentions are always almost tragically good and pure. I say tragically because despite my well meaning whatever, my actions usually end up hurting everyone around me and leaving them all burned and me alone and confused. I love my girlfriend. I do. She’s my best friend. She’s this fucking dock in the ragging storm. I’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for her. But I genuinely believed what was happening with M was apart of some greater, divinely inspired plan for me. I believed it with absolute innocence.

Of course, there were other things that might’ve come into play. I mean, it’s probably no surprise that I’ve been diagnosed with a fucking impressive list of mental illnesses. There’s the alcoholism and drug addiction and bi-polar/manic shit and clinical depression and possible borderline personality disorder. I’d been on a combination of Lithium and Prozac for over two years, though my doctor in Savannah was a total quack who never listened to me, let alone adjusted my medication. Basically, I’d been going on the same medication routine prescribed to me when I first got outta detox two and a half years ago. Plus, being on book tour and all, well, I hadn’t been doing one goddamn thing to keep up with my recovery. In my mind and perception I was the center of the world’s attention. I was successful, finally. I didn’t need anyone’s goddamn help.

But, then again, like I said, my intentions were good. I believed in what I was doing purely. It seemed right. So I started talking about it.

When I passed the whole story by my mom, I could feel her tensing up all over.

“Oh, shit, Nicolas, here we go again.”

My eyes were wide and innocent.

“What d’ya mean?”

“I mean this is all sounding very familiar.”

            I do have a history of indulging in these intense, sort of fantasy relationships. I mean, I can admit that.

            “But, mom,” I said. “You don’t understand. I could feel this energy coming from her that was like nothing in this world.”

            She laughed, but not like she thought anything was funny.

            “Nic, that’s called sexual energy. That’s all it is. Trust me.”

            Well, fuck, what did my mom know? She’d been in the same abusive, totally safe relationship for twenty years. She was the last person to ask about this shit.

            So I’ll tell you what I did. Fuck, I mean, it’s embarrassing, but, whatever. All this shit is.

            I figured, you know, if this was all about this thing called God and destiny and whatever, I should ask for some sort of clarity. And that’s what I did. I whispered a prayer in a quiet moment. I closed my eyes and tried talking to a God that I totally don’t believe in.

            “God,” I said, simply. “Show me if this is what I should do. Show me the truth. Please.”

            That night I went up the street to this Taqueria on the corner. I turned around in line and it took me a second to recognize the person standing behind me. It was this girl Emily who’d cut hair at the salon where I used to work as a receptionist. It’d been at least three years since I’d seen her. My career as a receptionist ended when I showed up to work after a night of shooting cocaine. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but the owner left me a message the next day telling me never to come back and that she’d changed the locks on the door.

            Anyway, Emily gave me a hug and looked me over and asked how I was and told me I definitely should come get my hair cut with her. She’d do it for free if I came in the next day. The place she was working was just like a block away.

            So I took her up on her offer.

            Now, I didn’t tell her what was up with me at all. Actually, she’d gotten a divorce since I’d last known her and so she spent most of the time explaining the whole story about her husband having the affair and all. What she described seemed just so totally pathetic. She’d discovered text messages on his phone and she was completely devastated. All I could think was that he sounded like a fucking prick doing that shit. All I could think was that I was basically doing the same thing. I mean, I was just as pathetic as her sleazy ex-husband.

            And, man, in that instant, I swear, the fucking spell was broken. I walked out of there and I knew it was over with M—one day before I’d thrown it all away. When I called and told her she was fucking pissed, which didn’t seem to fit with her whole little God girl thing. Actually, she hung up on me.

            As for what happened next, well, honestly, I dodged the cult girl bullet, but obviously I hadn’t really done anything to change.

            And, until I do that fucking hard ass work, I’m just gonna do the same thing over and over.

            Which is the way it went after M had gone.

            A week later I had another fantasy I was chasing after.

            And there was another one after that.

            Until I landed back in treatement—thanks to a bottle of that cunt Klonopin.

            But I guess it takes what it takes.

            At least that’s what my therapist tells me.

            Addicted to chaos.

            Full circle until I fucking break it.

            Which I will.

            I have to believe that.

            I know I will.