I Nearly Died on Kellett Road

When the light went off, so did the heat. The cold was an oppressive one, sneaking through the scant walls and the window, under the doors like some black spirit of death. I had given up trying to pay for it and just picked the lock for the little cash box that collected the 50p coins I never had. I just took the coin and kept putting it through the slot. That death would have to come back later or take it up in collections.

Morrissey felt so much more real than I wanted him to. Now he made the only light amusement I could find in my current scenario. Somehow, though, I had an amazing girl who wanted to fight through it with me. The cold wouldn't kill me for now, and even though I had negligible money and tobacco I felt like I needed to get out and try to make my stake in London, and for that matter the world. The empty conversations I had with people in shops and cafes beat me down. The calculus was that I didn't have a social security number I could use.

Life had grinded me down aready and I wasn't 25. Of course, I had some irreverence for the fears that people who cared enough to tell me I should have, but that only went so far. I can't claim that I had much in the way of strength or virtue, but Georgia was a soul of force to be reckoned with. Soon enough I got myself into HMP Brixton on Jebb Ave. You can see the building I lived in if you watch some old Clash videos of "Guns of Brixton". That didn't matter to Georgia. The landlord accosted her about my electric thievery. I mean, we were cold and poor, and the box was unlocked and there was no point in trying to argue anything other than being cold and poor. Georgia also had to deal with the ugly fact that I was in HMP Brixton for an undetermined length of time, with the great likelihood that I would be deported afterwards.

Before I ended up on Jebb Ave., and after I, without anything like a good reason, effectively gave up trying to find a way to work and earn a living, with my unemployment due to expire any day, I spent too much time with the Portuguese, English, and other international tramps & junkies at the Brixton tube station. Around Electric Avenue the purveyors of small packages wrapped in plastic wrap set up shop. Sometimes they were Jamaican but always they were unfriendly and wary. They spat the little pellets out and insisted that you put the pellets in your mouth. I always viewed this as optional as I turned around and walked away.

Georgia spent her time and effort searching down a job. She did find one, though from what I recall it would have been enough only if I had a job that paid as well. I didn't have much that was redeeming. I hated a lot. I hated the world and I hated those who fit well into it. Georgia was amazing, and she amazed me, but I was both too broken to overcome the challenges of getting work without a visa and too loathesome to go out and carry on the effort. Georgia deserves much more. When I was in the police station she found me by trial and error, since I hadn't phoned her because I am exactly what she calls me, and came to see me and leave me a note that read, "TWAT" in very angrily scratched letters.

So I was. When I tried to kill my time one day in a way that would make me feel good, if guilty, I came close to killing myself instead of a day's time. I had something like twenty pounds, which should have been spent on food, electric for heat, something to let Georgia know that she meant something to me and this world, or anything other than what I did spend it on. That's my way though, fuck myself but fuck everyone else at the same time so there's no sympathy to be fucking endured. I present that as if I planned it. Truthfully I can barely plan the opening of a pack of gum. I just am an asshole and I fuck myself and probably you in the process as well.

After I returned home I unwrapped my purchase and prepared to ingest it. I rolled a cigarette with golden Virginia tobacco and it tasted that much more savory with the worldly relief to come just presently. In NYC I would have loved a coffee, but this was not NYC. As I felt the morphine ride through my veins I realized that this dose was stronger than it should be. I fell to my knees. I tried fighting it, I gave all of my dissolving resolve and all to remain standing, but once you're on your way out, it's not easy to bring your self back in.

When you're unconscious, you don't have much of an idea of time. As you come to, you may notice that the light of day has changed if you've been gone a while., the television may be airing a different show than what you were watching. I never look at my watch so much for such an event, but I did know that I could expect Georgia back at a certain time and would like to have the small bedsit cleaned up and myself not a mumbling mess when she returned from the work she had. Still, I don't know how long it had been, but I came to on my knees. My body was in order, nothing was asleep, and no physical injuries presented themselves to me.

I had a fear though. My heart pounded. How many times would it have to happen before I realized that I would die that way if I kept it up? The peace I once knew, the relief it once gave me was gone. My horrible life was no better for it, and I had 20 pounds less. I had lost plenty already, and still I was going at it. Something was wrong with me. Georgia had her problems, but I told her that my only wish was to show her that life was beautiful, that it had its trials and terrors, but along with them it had flips and tremendously perfect twists. I was failing at this.

I collected myself from the floor, cleaned the table off and threw away any and all reminders of the horror that I had just ritually perpetrated. In many ways, it would have been a relief if my soul had left me on Kellett Rd. In no way could I let Georgia find me dead though. That poor girl had seen enough. I didn't die, and though the sickness carried on for several years, and Georgia and others suffered enormously for it, innocently in most ways, along with myself, I kept on; I've suffered pain that made death a better option than living. By the time Georgia got home I believe I had pulled myself together physically but could not function but for to love and be lonely. I loved Georgia and I was lonely.

Peripeteia for the Peripatetic

The vomit never came out, but made itself a concern. Paul couldn't contend with much, he was dripping with sweat and breathing through his nose like some bastard might tell you when everything is going to hell as if it matters how you breathe. He had chosen everything he was wearing from the dryer. Already it felt old and filmy. His imagination tortured him with images of a beach and breeze, sun and sea. White cotton clouds and blue painted doors reminded him of better days, days he lived which seemed like a dream at present.

This was the price. If only it could be exacted at once. No, it would be a couple of weeks of this, then he would wake up one morning and the panic would be gone, like an unwanted guest. He got up from the sofa flinging his hands free of themselves and then realized he had taken 3 showers in the past 24 hours and he was building a tolerance to them. They weren't helping. He laid back down. Paul looked at the stereo and realized he would never be OK with anything he put on. The window showed it was a quarter to four. The night had her twists and burdens, but somehow it was less brutal than the day.

His hair felt like it was falling out. A sure sign of mortality, he invited it.

It Really Doesn't Hurt that Bad

God, I Know I'm bad,

but People are So

Uptight.

They all have At Least

One reason Why they

are Right.

I try to Practice

Being Wrong daily;

you Might.

Those wiser Than me

Let me know I'm not

So bright.

Breaking

His friend dropped John off after a calm and mature party. Then he decided that he would need a little something for breakfast since he was starting work the following day. It would be amazing, he had come through and applied at three restaurants and received three job offers. He was getting good hands. Coffee and milk would be necessary. He needed something to ease the pain and weakness of the morning. There was a large water jug in the closet full of change that he saw. He grabbed some and headed out the door. The bus was late and it was past midnight. Already he was realizing that he wouldn't be able to do this well. The better idea would be to turn around and head home, wake up and live the next day the way that his ancestors did: cold and hard. It wouldn't be that bad though.

No, John kept on at his mission. When he arrived at the stop where he could catch the next bus towards a place that would sell anything at that hour he saw that across the street the bus was waiting. He headed across the street. Halfway across he realized that a car was going to hit him. Everything was happening very quickly, and all he really saw was headlights getting closer very quickly. He jumped, trying to clear the car. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to and his head smashed the windshield as he rolled over the car and landed on the ground behind it. He could feel the consciousness slipping away from him, like he was sinking under water. He held his arm up in the air trying to fight through it. He lost.

When he woke up he had no idea where he was. Quickly enough, he realized that he was in a hospital. He felt like he had been hit in the head by a car. His voice worked, though the pain seared when he used it and opening his eyes bruised his brain. "Help!" he shouted. He repeated his plea a few seconds later. The man in the bed next to him got the nurses' attention. The nurse asked him the questions like, "What day of the week is it? Who is president? What's your name?" and so on. He asked for morphine.

Yaysung reminded him later when he'd recovered his faculties more that he could be dead, could be paralyzed, could be much worse off. Yaysung was always wise in ways. He was very much right about this. When they were younger they had experiences that tried both of their constitutions. On one occasion, a sheet of LSD was around. A kid named Bob had it. His parents were old and as their son he always seemed sort of geriatrically quiet. A playboy magazine was sitting in his little room. There were school books, a desk, a computer, and a bed. Two lawn chairs served as furniture.

Bob went off the deep end somehow. He took as much as Yaysung and John, but something different happened. He reverted to a very primitive state, like a monkey. To him in his state, it was ok to fiendishly masturbate there in the room pleading, "GOD please give me a woman!" I totally understand the boy's plight. I can't deny him that. In fact, I don't even judge him. When you lose your mind, you lose your mind. Just pray it finds its way home.

Bob declared that he was going to die. He knew suddenly that he was dying. "I'm dying, and I'm on acid, and my mother doesn't know!" he was having an emergency. I replied, calmly and with a small stifled laugh, "You're not going to die. Well, we're all going to die, but not right now. I mean to say you're not dying. My mother doesn't know I'm on acid either and I'm not going to tell her. She doesn't want to know." Bob kept trying for the phone. I ended up ripping the phone out of the wall so that it couldn't be used any more.

Yaysung was losing patience with him. He was flicking a knife open and had a pretty frightening look in his eye. I asked him for the knife, which I confiscated, and I demanded to know where the acid was from Bob so that I could confiscate that. With telephone, knife, and acid all secured away, we could hopefully find something better than the emergent panic that had so far been the trip. Musically, we would not meet. Yaysung had the best taste and appreciation for music of the three of us, but Bob's collection and taste would bring me to suicidal / homicidal states.

Somehow the time went by. I tried to keep my mind for the sake of us all, and Yaysung held fast as well. In fact, if it weren't for him I would have conceded my own sanity and I can't imagine where that would have led. As the sun came up, Yaysung communicated to me that we should leave Rob to himself and go somewhere more comfortable and quiet. The escape was not easy, because Rob sensed we were abandoning him and jumped into the back of a pickup truck with broken glass in the bed. It was ugly. The neighbors were getting ready to go to work and the world was waking up. The last we saw of Bob was him running off towards the sunrise across an icy baseball field.

Then Yaysung and I went out to a quiet street we knew and stood in the woods for a few minutes. The woods felt safer. I think I knew then that I could trust Yaysung with anything. I saw his character and knew he was a good man. Even as a young man, and making his mistakes, he was always generous and kind to me. He's the best example of a friend I've ever known. And after I was knocked out by a car he was again good to me. It pissed me off, that what he said was right, but it was true. Life isn't fair. That's a lesson that I never learned to like. Yaysung, though, showed me again to look at the positive.

When John walked into the apartment he was living in, he nearly broke down in tears. His vision was bad but he could still see the flecks of dirt and everything all over. The windowsill was never painted. There were the papers all over the floor. There were the bags of letters and documents for his sister. There was the laundry, the remnants of a wardrobe, once kept organized and ironed, all helter skelter. His lover had her possessions mixed in and at once the whole scene leapt up and stole his breath away. He flailed his arms about, and tried to calm himself. How do people -live-?

He mocked everything and everything mocked him. The only noble thing that he thought he could do was to take Andre the french bulldog out to go to the bathroom. Andre was love. Sure he could be obstinate and he pained his mother with his persistent infections and his allergies to everything, his neurotic paw chewing and general human condition. Still, he loved you and you could see in his eyes an innocence that whoever fluffed fluffed and that was that.

John was down on himself. He felt bad for the driver, who never set out to hit him that night. He felt anger at being judged unfairly, and he felt embarrassed when judged fairly. A young Russian med student asked if John did, "think you are a bad person?" "I don't know about bad people," he answered. It felt like some sort of play, will all the vivacity of Waiting for Godot. When he turned 30, his friends asked him what he had learned. It took him a while and finally all he could say is, "I don't know." That was maybe one of the hardest things he'd had to learn.

Yaysung was a good man. John just fell short. Life had shown John though that it's full of twists and flips, irony and comedy along with all the void and pain. You get up and you keep trying. That's all John could do. He did believe that all things worked together for good for him, and there was a reason why. Where he went wrong wasn't so important as where he needed to go. His favorite answer when unsure of what he should do with himself was, "the next right thing" as Joe once told him.

He could die a sad death having missed a beautiful life or he could take what he had and get on with it. Words are that much. Telephone calls seem to be the hardest thing. Yet, once they are made the wheels turn and progress is sometimes made. John was like a child. He was like a big, hairy, uncute, smelly, asshole of a child. Still he was a child of god and like the ugliest creature in the sea, or the most loathsome form of insect he had his part to play. Instead of crying when he walked in and being in the apartment set off a blast of anxiety, he sat down and made the phone calls he had to make.

Three times he called the same institution and trying two different numbers he was left on hold for as long as half an hour. It was sad. How do people live? How should a man live? Soldiers are men made to kill. How do those veterans return home and live among fellows at ease? John did pray for them. Murderers are killers facing death. John did pray for them too. Life makes more life and men are the rememberers, the animals that keep themselves. John's mother told him when he was young that there were much worse places to be born in. Boxer John had a great saying, "You get the same thing everyone gets; a life to live." The telephone. John was not in love with the modern world.

The phony antics, the antics that were genuine, golden, and unscripted all confused and mâchéd into some file on some docket is the sum of a man's name. John Crevecoeur was a tally of transgressions and philanthropisms. What is seen and known is not the man, but a small window dusty and imperfect that he is judged through. If man is animal then these judgements make sense. If man can reason that reparation can be negotiated and made then justice is served when a trespass is made. If a good deed, a charity is made and there is no mark made of it, then it counts as beautiful and true. They are not weighed in the courts of men.

In times of heartache he remembered that the experience was a magic itself, that there were a universe and that this universe was in something, that there was space for space and this helped frame the pain. Mostly when he tried to talk to people about it they told him to shut up and that it wasn't important. What was important was the money he owed them, the lies he was caught in, and that which he wronged. Surely so. When John was in a jail cell for a crime he did commit, though his intent was not criminal and the circumstance so desperate and insane that he couldn't even explain it to himself, he tried to find himself in the papers. Men find religion in prison.

John was free. Sure he had obligations and they got vagrancy laws too, you know. He was free.

Bob claimed to hate Henry James

"It's a game, life." Andrew didn't like this. He sort of snapped a question, "What do you mean that life is a game?" Bob just mumbled a partial list, "Rules, objectives, strategy, opposition, resources... but I'm not playing well. I'm not being very strategic." Head doctors and their crews ask some absurd questions. "Are you hallucinating? Are you hearing voices? Do you think you are a bad person?" He just wanted some freaking medicine, Bob. He didn't want to answer questions.

The internal dialogue sang and shouted, a pychotheatre on a stage with ideas and ceptions, victories, defeats and compromises all dancing it out. Andrea once suggested that quieting the "internal dialogue" was a good thing for feeling better, being alive and all that. So have others. Still, the board of directors met in his head every day. There were decisions to be made. Some of them could be important.

As if this weren't enough to contend with, Bob dragged his young corpse through the underworlds of medicine and the cultures of resentment, judgement, fear and sickness. He was a tourist, and Hades could not conscript him, but he felt like he was waiting in Casablanca. Truly he was waiting for a piece of paper to take to a chemist and to get a prescription for a drug that was meant mostly to prevent seizures. The whole pursuit of the piece of paper consumed at least two hours, conservatively.

A young student doctor asked him questions from a form. Even though the questions were not her own and he was feeling very sciencious about answering them, the only thing that interested him during this whittling away of his life and time was hunting down her ethnicity through her married name and muted accent. When he found it, he made some cordiality with her as a patient. She then let him phrase short answers for her paper of questions.

The doctor was less jovial than other times, but Bob still felt a gratitude that she addressed him with some familiar respect. Saving words put him at ease. Iterations and reiterations of the obvious were torturous. His hands were sweating and he felt a techtonic tide of anxiety and frustration welling up. When he had the paper and a sample of yet another drug, he made his way to the door, and with his hand on the doorknob the Doctor stopped him, "Hey, hold on I want to make you another appointment." So she did.

On his way home he was enjoying the company of the Committee in his psyche. It was calm and well paced, rhythmic and more at ease than usual. He decided that he wasn't really that smart after all. The day before he had been arguing with some anonymous coward on the Board about how one could be phenomenally smart and at the same time an impossible fool. Wisdom and intelligence are separate qualities. He was defending himself; who knows why? As he made it through the streets, he adjusted himself to fit into not being that smart at all.

A woman walked across the street in front of his car. An old man hobbled on his cane over 5 lanes of traffic with green lights. We all stopped and he just kept smiling and pecking away at the steps. Jaywalking as a hobby. While Bob waited, he remembered being younger than 7 and telling his father that he wanted to be a jaywalker. His dad did not like the idea. Bob couldn't remember the actual response, but came up with an appropriate one. That was one of the hard things about his memory. He didn't trust it.

Two years before, he was running across 5 lanes of traffic with a green light to catch a bus at a stop before it left. He then woke up in the hospital. His head hurt more than anything he could remember, and maybe he could remember less with the head injury. Jaywalking is a dangerous practice. Some lessons are learned the hard way. "Bought lessons," Jeff had told him when steeping in a regret one day. As he sat in a quiet apartment on Tuesday when he wished he were at work he thought about how much tea he drank when he lived in England.

He thought a lot. All those questions that crop up, or drop themselves like dirty boots onto one's psyche he hoped would be answered in an afterlife. Bob didn't want streets paved with gold, 42 virgins, perfect teeth or any of that. He wanted to know god's thoughts. That's all. He lived, and so did the other Jaywalkers. Philosophically, he could give himself to the uncertainty and bareness of proof of much and embrace sciencia as much it gave the opportunity to speak logical truths. You can imagine how tiresome that can become as well, and how little other people like it.

As he opened his door, he remembered a doctor he used to work for. They worked on systems for patient records. The notion that patients should be processed like data and the processing and data should be governed by standards and rules, that the laboriousness of a rigorous bureaucracy had its own beauty. The discipline there would give the patient at least a continuous thread to follow and road to forge. Determinations could be made, respected, drawn upon, and data would have their own specie.

It just doesn't work that way. By the time he was upstairs in the apartment, he considered the words he had used to describe a painting he had done. "Space Angel" was the phrase he had used. A smile crept on to his face as he thought about the aliens whom undoubtedly introduced the catalyst and blossom of the reflective consciousness and the very human protolanguages smashed with the tower of Babylon. True space angels, he decided, were those very aliens who maybe did it. These revelations were more fun than the doctors. "It's better to go a little bit crazy than a lot crazy," Mario reassured him through a golden capped grin and ancient eyes.

The back of his T-shirt that he wore to the doctor said, "Yes, I am a Rocket Scientist." He got it at White Sands Missile Range the year before. It was a good shirt and idea that others would challenge. Fuck them, really. This was the beautiful thing to be learned from the company of complete bastards: What other people think about you doesn't usually matter to you. The doctor student was Russian. He wasn't really a rocket scientist. His greatest achievements included the usage of an illy brand espresso can as a directional 802.11 radio antenna shield. It sounds impressive, but it's more putting a square peg into a square slot than anything.

So he wasn't so smart. At least he got laid. What did he have to do more than the ethically right thing? In the simplest living that was all he had to know. Since he wasn't that smart, he was given, consciously given to the simplest living. The getting laid part was more than enough trouble than he needed. He was better at throwing rocks at the sky than studying rockets, but he wasn't all that good at throwing rocks. Beautifully, he realized that throwing rocks at the sky was also dangerous. They might come back down, and if one wasn't careful it would be possible to get hit in the head.

So he had been hit in the head by a car while he was jaywalking. The doctors had looked at images where Bob's brain had gone dark. No dye, no blood, no oxygen, no life, no soul. It was just the rocks in Bob's head. He loved the pictures of it, though, and he hadn't used up all his brain, at least. There was some still in there, still ticking. The Board were still meeting and he was still looking at the dark spot. He would rather still be using it, but that happens if it does. Even if he tried the hardest he could to think with that part, think using that part, or use that area of the brain however it was used to the best of his ability, then he would have no guarantee for anything other than driving himself a bit more mad than he set out as.

When the doctor asked what the neurologist said, Bob rambled about a few things. Eventually, the doctor sort of waited and Bob resolved, "...I mean, who wouldn't want pictures of their brain?" The doctor was not amused. She gave a strong flat eye. Then she said, "They teach us in med school that if we learn that there is something different... then what?" Bob cut her off, "I know, I know." Bob probably didn't, but that's what he said. It ended the dialogue.

Yes, life is a game. It is lived, or played, as it is dealt. As a statement or perspective it seems childish, maybe, but it felt true. Why Andrew didn't like it was not Bob's problem. Bob had his own problems. To be judged as a patient was not worth the paper. He didn't like the medicians any more. They seemed really uptight as a whole. He was very prone to bouts of uptightness, and he was concerned about contagion. If he looked at what he had found and learned along the way, he would certainly see that it was less and less beneficial.

There was the game of resource to be played, and he would because otherwise he would regret not playing. Importantly though, he knew that he was playing not for himself but to solve riddles of guilt. He was just a dumb kid. How could they have a problem with it?

I know Time now

It's a joke, I tell myself
And sometimes
I'm let in on it.
Or so I tell myself.

I saw a picture
It was my brain
Slices and the Doctors
He said, "Wow!"

People ask nonstop
Questions that
In honesty
Create lies and whys

If I give up fighting
Against the base
And mundane
Will I win?

Is that the Joke?
Should I play?
I know time now
My hair is grey.