Playing Catch-up.

Judgement

2:32 a.m. November second, twenty-ten. Wont drink so I cant sleep. Tired of feeding the black, empty void inside of me. It’s never full, always ravenous until I’m unconscious. I listen to the radio make pedantic chatter about “Obamacare” and I wonder what the fuck they are talking about? I’m 45 and work for cash, have no retirement and get no benefits. It’s the only fucking job someone like me can get, and really I’m grateful I’m not living on a sidewalk somewhere covered in dirt. I’m just another casualty of the California school system, undiagnosed A.D.D. and a teenage alcoholic who fell through the cracks because I was middle class and white and tested with high scores. To them I was just another fuckup taking up space.

When I was 12 some well-meaning liberal assholes came up with a program called “voluntary integration” where the parents of pee-wee gang members from Sherman Heights could ride a bus over to our school on the coast to get a better education and to get them out of the “gang environment” where they lived. No hard feelings towards a few busloads of kids from Sherman, but our school was a fucking war zone the entire time I was there. The well meaning liberal assholes hadn’t considered that there were already several busloads of borderline criminals at our school teetering on the narrow precipice between a life working manual labor and a life in and out of the California Correctional System. Needless to say five years later most of us were reunited in scattered locations across the city. We’d see each other in emergency rooms, drug houses, court houses, Juvi and later county. After a year or two of buying the lie and fighting each other it dawned on most of us that we weren’t enemies- we weren’t allies- we were just casualties of a completely flawed system.

I’m luckier than most- I knew how to read and make complete sentences, so instead of prison or an early death I managed to last this long. 45 years- fuck- who ever would have predicted. At fifteen I figured I’d be lucky to see 18. At Nineteen I had no illusions about the slim chances of seeing twenty-five. Somewhere in there I quit counting years and instead counted off the intervals between funerals, only hearing a word now and then- usually years apart- of who was in or out of the can, who died and how. You never hear the good news- most of the alumni aren’t big computer guys- they don’t have Facebook at Pelican Bay.

I live alone. I see my kids every other week. I actually go to Parent Teacher conferences at my son’s school. Funny- I feel like a fish out of water at those things- all the soccer mom’s with their boob-jobs and their painted on smiles, the beaten down dads looking bored like they’d rather be on the couch or mowing a lawn or whatever it is they do. Lots of pretty young moms there, beautiful creatures with their dreams still intact. Here and there I see guys I think might be a little bit like me. Goddamn wolves in the henhouse. Sometimes worn out, time-hardened weary fuckers like me still love their kids enough to go sit in an auditorium like a fish out of water. I’ve done way harder things. I figure if I do this stuff, maybe my son will get a pass and a regular life, some dreams, a career that doesn’t include hammers and nails, a woman that loves him.

I’m a cynic, but I hold out a little hope for the kids.

After work today I pulled on some trunks and a tank-top and laced up my high-tops and walked around the corner to the basketball courts. I like to shoot hoop by myself after work. When you’re used to drinking, you have to find shit to do to fill that time. I think too much- time to think is my enemy right now. I think too much and I bum out- I look around me at all the vapid pop-culture and the advertisements telling me the things I can buy to have an image- I look at those glossy magazines in the check-out line at the grocers- and I bum out. I went to a therapist once, back when I had a job that gave me health insurance. I wanted to know why I was so fucked up in my head. The lady I talked to was really on it- I liked her- no bullshit. She was the one that told me I’m A.D.D. She said it was really amazing I’d handled as well as I had. She also told me that the reason I feel so fucked up is that for me, the magic is gone. There are no illusions for me- I look at a billboard and see lies. I listen to the TV- doesn’t matter what’s on- game show, the News, a commercial- and I ask, “What are you selling me?” and “Why?”

So I go shoot hoops. I put on my headphones to something that cranks me up to ten and I find an empty court and play. I didn’t shoot hoops for years- not since I was a kid- I never was a big “team-player”. But now it’s comforting. I don’t have to think- I just lob shots in and race in to grab them on the rebound- I jump and shoot, or pull off lay-ups. My right knee is a little fucked so I have to favor it, but it’s nice to sweat for an hour or two after work. To sweat and breath real oxygen, to feel the sun and to not think. It’s funny- I’m the only old guy out there, most of the time. Occasionally there will be a heavy set guy with a clipboard and “COACH” emblazoned on the back of his shirt, but otherwise it’s me and a bunch of kids. To them I’m invisible- I like that. I get my court, they don’t even see me, they just give me my space. That’s a good set-up for me. That would be nice in the rest of my life- just give me my space, don’t even see me.

I gotta try and sleep. Work at 7 a.m. There is no magic. What a fucking life.



11:42 November 4 2010

You just have to be strong- over the top. Unbreakable.
No one else can feel what you’re feeling.
No one else can fathom what you’re going through.
You try to convey it in words and they wink and say, “He’s quirky and weird.”
No- it’s better to keep your moth shut,
Your head down, a grim set to your jaw
Slip the punch and upper cut
Knock the fucking wind out of it
Be strong and tenacious
There is no rescue party
Either harden the fuck up or lay down and die

Be a piece of stone
Steel
Take care of you
Fuck them.


I sometimes look in the mirror and say “You’ll never be good enough.”
Sometimes I think, “You don’t deserve anything good.”

I step back and gesture to myself, standing there
And I ask myself, “How do you sleep at night, the things you’ve done, the people you’ve hurt?”
I glance over at my self and chuckle at the naiveté of the question. “ I don’t- I lay awake until three a.m. most nights, restless, bothered, at a loss- desperately tired yet unable to make the chatter stop. It’s my mind- it does that all on it’s own.

The only way to sleep is to drink myself unconscious- and that’s fucking weak. So I don’t sleep. Cest la vie.