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.