What a Chapter

What a chapter, right?! Jeez, the fireball chasing the newly liberated immigrants. How the coldest of cold, bitter of long-legged licorice took Luke’s death. Her unique use of a solid body guitar as both weapon and imprisoning door stopper was ingenious. Credit where it’s due. The symbolic Mustang roar into the sunset to the tune of aspirated breaths of God would be goddamn cruel to kill us now. I mean, that show-stopper speech, when I told the sadistic addict to keep the money and the car, threw her promises and seemingly genuine mournful tears thinking of the fates she forced us all in. A senseless revolt against the cancerous wig splitting she spread and led me on for the greedy loophole in the capitalist morals that pays so handsomely it’s a wonder bounty hunting isn’t a Fortune 500 conglomerate. My triumphant walk from the delusion keeping me warm for over a year, Over A YEAR. I didn’t have to mention the doves that flocked off as I tossed the keys over my shoulder, blowing her fucking mind that I always knew her real name. There’s nothing slicker than an exit strategy with a built-in free plane ticket and tattered flag of an alibi holding just, but that sentence will never be necessary. Wanted to see how it looked.

*Deep breath*

Anyway, now I’m crashing in a hick trailer with no running water but racing roaches. The shivers of withdrawals keep me sweating through my once innocent Zeppelin hoodie, keeping the swelter zipped and hood up to prevent nats and mosquitos from dive-bombing my ear to hell. My bed is, and it has to be, a southern football enthusiast invention, one-third of a recliner/couch that I share with the trash bags of clothing under dirty dishes from the trailer’s previous owner that isn’t mutually exclusive to the friend doing this loose definition of a favor. The South Carolina heat puts me at odds with myself as the fact that I’m dying of the consistent dichotomy of stuffy to suffocating moldy air. It’s even making the VHS tape struggle to play The Matrix for the fifth time to drown out the rampant scurrying. Or my senses are functioning at fifty percent speed. It’s how I know I’m not dead. Later I’ll switch to Who Framed Roger Rabbit to check if I’m allowed to break the monotony again. I’m not feeling good about it.

Grateful to be caught from my burning four times as bright for 6.3 milliseconds concluded when I pleaded to borrow shower time from my friend Steve’s girlfriend yesterday. I’m sure my last hundred and twenty-six dollars is good for something, but Christ couldn’t have forgotten about a trailer park he got lost looking for one day trying to grant a miracle and obviously gave up on for a more accessible field with a final green blade to work with. Appreciating the coarse granite gravel of my rock bottom was something of a beautiful novelty. Between the sleepless nights, I walk to the only gas station and, therefore, neighborhood hub in ten miles. The hill overlooking the recently finished bypass was my hiking trip over the week that rewarded me with a vast view of the rolling hills browned by dead grass or dirt mounds construction sites left like no one would notice. It’s not the best place for my adventurous shortcuts, with my skin color sending red flags I will never get. I don’t get it because whether I walked in the center of the road or the backyard where I was supposedly invited, the shifty looks pissed me off. It’s hot enough without their laser-visioning judgment shit, I’d be happy to confirm wrong. Although said friend’s reputation around the lots didn’t help.

I stood next to the pump one/two for one- or two minutes, basking in the shade, letting my generated heat dissipate into a less potent B.O. stench in vain. I enter regardless since the A.C. is my only salvation. I’d pick up a few Tasty Cakes and Gatorades to last one more night. To knock down my last whiff of money from my previous employer until their finance office got the note I left about the unsold leave. The log cabin opened up to three isles, two of which were fishing lures. The sinking of my further living demise was putting desperate on the chopping block as I hadn’t seen a lake on the ride here. The last resort of last resorts involved giving the ‘friend’ who’s robbing blind gas money to drive me to the closest train junction.

I’d be left with three dollars if I calculated the tax of the ticket north. Since I didn’t know about my guitar collection keeping his girlfriend’s meth addiction, I stood thinking about my savior as the only one to answer the phone after my discharge besides Grace, who was focused on a relationship that was as doomed as mine was with a relapse. She’s—nice but never that nice. It hadn’t occurred to me that for the last seven minutes pacing up and down the grocery aisle, I was literally balancing my future recovery on the seventy-five cent dunkin’ sticks or a two-dollar seventy-five cinnamon roll. “Is this how much I hate home?”

I was picked up by a mother that hadn’t heard from me in three years. At least half the conversation was upbeat. The last of those dunkin’ sticks were jostled out of me six hours in, and the blazer I threw on to distract—not hide the putrid aroma the previous few days ponders got me would make me blend with the change in style since the last time I spent any time in Baltimore. I avoided her hug with my massive suitcase and tried to talk like I hadn’t been gone and they hadn’t changed address so often the government had no home of reference to give me a clue. Something I had counted on led thirteen months prior but figured I needed to care nothing for. Apparently, the family had come out to see me power through hellos and ‘how was it,’ from cousins. To shock and fucking awe, my older brother had a vodka cocktail waiting for me that could’ve had cyanide in it, given its strength that I downed immediately. I made clear I needed to get cleaned up before any of the impromptu festivities began, and graciously, they agreed if Grandma and Papa got a look at me. That goes without mentioning, like my dad’s first sentences when he made his way down the street to the group of us. “Will! Look at you, you probably fit all your old clothes. You got a little weight on ya, boy! You go a twenty on you, a ten?”

Instant regret aside, I didn’t plan to feed this behavior long. I’ll burn those haunting medical records of my illness and a few keepsakes I was only fooling myself to believe wasn’t evidence of some sort. The medical admission of my brain’s forever ulterior motives to fuck me sideways in the rain on a jumbotron was more cathartic than purposeful. This included the tastefully blood-splattered Zeppelin hoodie with the bandana paired with the rest of the nightwear outfit. Never going back, but damn sure going somewhere before their cling to maladaptive spending habits puts me trapped in the nickel and diming that plagued my childhood. I need a foundation. A low-key home of homes that’ll solidify that I can be more than what that bitch of a witch turned me into in that fantastic last chapter. How does a serial date rapist/murderer with a fetish for candle wax and jazzy Sax turn out to have the tenderest, golden inner self?

I somehow became a soul of war carrying a private battlefield for the fun and scraps. Watching those flames half hard in a memory that made me breathe toxic smoke with a vendetta against my lungs for not choking more on those improvised narcotic pipes, I had a brake check of a switch that pushed me to fan the following plumes from my face. Abruptly, clarity was necessary as the hug she slammed into me with at the arrival terminal seemed to fade in an unpleasantly snap deterioration. “I wonder how Grace is doing?”