Even when he was a child, he didn't get it. He didn't understand other kids, shoes, cartoons, or canned soup. The only thing that made sense was the magic he found in National Geographic magazines, pages filled with jungles, bare-breasted animal women, painted faced warriors, and articles on the cocaine trade. At night he would pray that god would take it all back, take existence away, undo it all. Unusual prayers for a child.
Still, his mother would surely say that he wasn't outwardly unhappy. He was more quiet and confused than unhappy, though he didn't enjoy the laborious and always ill-timed transfers he endured between wherever was home and either of his grandparents or daytime caretakers, he was a child and could cope with the transience as it was the only life he'd known.
Later though, at 19, he'd find himself in a single room occupancy, sharing a shower that may or may not have been cleaned - ever, staring out the accordian style metal grate protecting the 4th floor bathroom window from intruders and thieves. It was an old New York Harlem building, and there he became a man. He laid in his squeaky, uncomfortable bed, with sheets he'd kept clean but couldn't remember the source of, and realized that this was his life.
He was poorer than poor, living in Harlem, working a mind-numbing job 40 hours a week for 5 dollars under the table giving him 200 dollars less 140 for rent, less 17 for subway fare so about 43 dollars to eat, do laundry, and pay for the telephone line that provided his only hope, his only link to the greater world through a PPP connection on a slow laptop.
He'd come to NYC chasing love, following a girl who had the advantages of a well established and sound family. She was on a hiatus from Brown, and she was a love he found greater pleasure in her than he would later ever find in heroin. Still, he courageously threw himself at the fates, appealed to Giuseppe Garibaldi in Washington Sq., and kept his hope afloat.
Boiler rooms on 6th Ave, subway trains railing, screeching, lurching, and lit brightly with eyes of disgust and contempt kept the wicked from any real rest. To ensure that, the cops would beat their clubs on the bars in the traincars and hunt for people to write up in their little printed ticketpads. Trying a different approach, the staten island ferry gave young Joe an half an hour at a stretch, though the late-night coppers were no more hospitable. For his life, he would recall the young and rather lesser in stature cop dressed in a uniform that fit no better than a kid in his father's suit. Still, the humor was lost and he was made to disembark on the Staten Island side. He found a dry mattress on top of a supply shed in a park near the ferry terminal and made the most of it. Samuel the Swede made this all somehow make sense, and provided more comfortable respite at moments when it was needed most.
The girl, she mocked and made sure he hurt, she became so loathesome that even well into his thirties he hadn't really been enough of a man to truly let it all pass into a history all of the time. It would still percolate to the front of his conscience at embarrassing frequencies, even if those were only twice a year. A true entrepreneur, a friend who saw an opportunity to start a company, to take the world by storm with the vigor of youth, took that opportunity and invited Joe in on it with him. Jim's ethics were sometimes alien to Joe, but the same could certainly be said of Joe, and though both were dubious altruists, they both sought for the best for all.
Joe rode the rejection from his young love into wholehearted work, if his social ineptitude crossed him from time to time. He had left the 200 dollar a week job and was making more than anyone he knew. The first time he was in a parking lot holding 5000 dollars cash he told Jim, "This is the most cash I've ever held." And it was all his. The lesson, though, that Joe gained from all this is easy come, easy go, and so he lived. He worked long and brutal hours, at first, and then became primary consultant for a sort of philanthropy illuminati, founded and fostered by the line of barons of American industry. The opportunity was amazing but something was missing from his life.
He began to seek the transcendental through massive doses of ketamine, and for a spell and while the money lasted (he was overpaying for convenience) he found a sense of security in the universe among the stars and spirits. The k wore off, and he would have to suit up for work and satisfy these mundane challenges with professional grace and curteousy.
Pompey, a pugilist, had been around in this era and they'd become a sort of bosom buddies, where Pompey had found an apartment with a female roommate on the pretense that he was gay. Somehow Joe fell into the role of boyfriend. Gay times they were, in SpanHarl, and the nights were rife with promise, sex, and magic. Still, Joe was missing something.
Sooner or later, the K was becoming far too expensive and too synchronously the well packaged glassine of diamorphine was offered to Joe in an open hand. Joe knew too well the remedy, and though it had claimed Erik's young life, as well as his father's, he was as absorbed and mesmerized with the anticipation of the feelings the powder would provide as he had ever been. Pompey had the works for intravenous ingestion, and so Joe cooked himself a manteca meal of ethereal epicurean standards and as he rode the wave of parenternal comfort and euphoria he enjoyed it without the slightest contamination of guilt.
That one shot soon led to many more. He had a salary and was overly generous with his middle-man Russian connection, always taking care of her to arrange the goods for him. Too soon, though, his income no longer covered his hemorrhaging habit, and he found himself trying to meditate his way into a coma until the next paycheck to pay the man. The life of an unkempt, uncouth junkie lends itself to the expiry of roomates' invitations to share a space, the distancing of friends, and ultimately, the compromise of the professional reputation.
In that very choreography, his young and auspicious start fell apart. He was, eventually, when seeking help discreetly, let to a bed in Staten Island where he could see the city out the window. The methadone they were giving him didn't do much to make that great hunger subside, and young Joe wouldn't accept that he even had an achillean heel of any sort. Joe prayed for immortality when he was young, and in better moods than when he was asking for it all to be undone, for god to take the universe, space & time back. He had the direct deposit into his account, so there was no real barrier other than waiting on the man between him and sweet solace.
Joe committed a junkie sin that day. He looked over at the man in the bed next to him and asked, "you know where to get anything good around here?" The man, name Tom, apologized, "just Harlem." "Like 125th street? They still sell there?" "Hah! Sure man, but a lot of it is beat and you gotta watch out or know someone." The very notion of going up to Lexington and 125th to score was enough of a romance that Joe couldn't turn it down. "What about if you take me to the man, I'll hook you up with some bags." "How many are you talking?" "I don't know. 6?" "You're serious, you're sure about this. We're not going to get outside and find ourselves in the cold and sick and with no money?" "Yeah man, I'm not about to fuck myself, but this place isn't for me, this isn't what I need."
For what Joe believed he needed was a new city, a new adventure, a new lover, a new raison d'etre. All he had at this point was the contrast between sick and well and all the antics and misadventures spun in the process of keeping that sinking ship afloat. Joe lured a man on the way to the cure back out on the street. Tom whined and complained and asked a hundred times how much money Joe had. "Enough for us to get high if it's decent dope. I'll take care of you." It's hard to pacify the anticipating junk sick dope fiend. Eventually they get to 125th, after the Ferry and the train, and cop dope that's well substandard compared to the shit Joe gets through the Russian cunt.
There are worse dope fiend sins, and Joe got over this one fast enough. The penance was paid quickly though, in that he had explained in a voicemail to his boss that he had to go to the hospital to take care of something non-emergency but serious and would be out of work for a while. That time, he was given the pardon. The next time the money ran out, Joe ran to the detox again, this time landing in a bed in Harlem at St. Luke's. The Psychiatrist was sexy and compassionate, and he was unable to endure the blaring Jerry Springer in the T.V. and smoking room. He didn't have any cigarettes. He stayed a night or two, and then checked his bank with the payphone. His direct deposit had his account.
Meanwhile, his amazingly beautiful and loving boss, the Director of Ops, had called the hospital to check on Joe out of concern. They would not give the patient's room number, and could not confirm whether or not he was a patient because of HIPPA, but the nurses were totally willing to give the payphone number. "Hello?! Whodis?! Who?! Thisa DEEtox! OKay, He Asleep! I'll Tell him IF I seem 'im" -- in the background "JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry!"
Joe didn't know this. Joe just knew there was no reason for me to be suffering in a hospital bed on too low a dose of methadone for the habit Joe had been keeping, and had the money to promptly leave and get well. So Joe did. Joe reported for work on Monday morning and was immediately told to see June, the Director of Ops. She knew Joe was in a detox, and she could tell Joe was a mess. Joe's performance had been shitty enough, and Joe grew less and less as concerned about his work as the devilish hunger for relief that diamorphine provided. Joe'd take 3 hour lunches waiting for the Russian to get the man to come by, never mind that Joe was spending 700.00 a week. Joe was crying as he fell himself slipping, falling freely from the generous lot he'd been given in spite of those who would celebrate his failure as proof that their own way, their life and their living be proven Righteous and Wise. Joe saw it all slipping away. The job, the apartment, the money, the meaning, the purpose, the satisfaction and the success.
She agreed to give Joe unemployment, which came to 405.00 a week. For a while Joe rode on that, though it could cover a smaller habit than Joe had been accustomed to and worse -- Joe'd become rather homeless. As all that happened, Joe walked into Port Authority and booked a bus to San Francisco. Joe hopped on it and three days later, stinking, sweating, sick and his psyche shriveled to the core from desiccation of love and lust, inspiration and hope, faith and strength. He couldn't even make it to SF. Joe got off in Sacramento and breathed in California air. He didn't feel so terribly physically sick, though for so long his body had come to sense entitled to diamorphine and the ritual of the needle it left him in some compulsion of hunt for the local dopeman.
He wouldn't find it until San Francisco, where he met up with Jesus and his very white wife. They were generous and hospitable to him. He was still collecting the 405.00 a week, though there had been a gap in the regularity of the deposit for him to be able to access the money. There were trips to Tijuana, patronage of the suppliers of Ttokkyo, and a levity of life that allowed Joe to remember that the universe was a hysterical thing, that the whole of human affairs was so infinitely as light and beautiful as anything he'd ever perceived.
A ricochet off Delaware, where his passport was held by Erik's mom for reasons surely of warmth and concern, and then he was aboard a flight to France. When god shuts a door, he opens a window, and he was brimming with love for the great a beautiful paradox he was suffering. Still, since that girl had mutilated his heart, he felt a part missing, a part that he wanted to share, and a part that he wanted to know of some love's heart. In the meantime, he would have France.
When he landed in France, he had to take a train to get to Bayonne. On this train a girl named Sophie Russo had watched with amusement as Joe careened back and forth through the cars to the bar buying and drinking the whole stock of Johnny Walker Red. Fate has a funny way, sometimes, and Joe, in his transatlantic drunken tightness had disembarked at the stop before the one he was supposed to. Fate, though, had the same stop for Sophie Russo. She and two French college students took him to their lair of teen sex, and Joe demanded to stop at the supermarche for a bottle of bubbly. The students professed their lesbianism, but this wasn't much excitement for Joe, so he gave them the thumbs up and laid his head down. He was phenomenally tired.
So Ben arrived moments later, through Joe's proxy communiques the girls had made for him and Ben invited them to a party at the rented house. The ladies came. Sophie became an angel of sorts, a lover and ambassador to the traveller al bisat al tayer's ways in France. These were days, good days of sun and fortune, though Sophie parted when her job was through. He was left alone in Paris. Elixabeth was a fun and playful hostess, but had her own loyalties romantically. Samuel the Swede came to visit, and, when he was there, Joe met Jenn. Samuel didn't like Jenn, considered her vulgar, and perhaps rightfully so. Joe asked Samuel to disappear while he fucked Jenn, since the room Joe had set up in was a single room occupancy, though much nicer than that which he started out in Harlem.
Time went by and Joe saw something dark and gorgeous, sad and sexy in Jenn. He set his heart on her. She had been the most perfect mate he had known thus far, and nothing he'd ever have imagined. Joe always figured he should be with the quiet nice, prim, proper and paradoxically sexually pantherlike girl. Those were Joes fantasies. The fates weren't devoted to sating Joe's fantasies. The fates had their own rules, their own mind for what should be or would be.
This led Joe to England for a few years. Still, he sought his solace in that poisonous liquor of the plant papaverum, and though Jenn was tolerant, even sometimes sharing the appetite, it was sad and the diamorphine propped the whole affair up; she too was a soul burdened with pain, perhaps more sensitive than he. He did only wish one thing, that she know that life could be happy that she be happy, that she know a happy day, and more happy days than not.
When the time came, the two of them fled to the U.S. to sort out the challenge of working and living legally in the same state as nationals of two different sovereignties. Once again, Joe failed at what could have been a perfect and inspiring tale of redemption and success in the face of that which would destroy most lives in a wasteful and sadly common way. Joe resorted to treatment in Florida, counsel he fought and argued against but proved the most amazing and truely happy time he'd known in his adult life. Jenn went back to England and explained she would not be returning. While he was in treatment she suggested he meet her in Belgium. He was licked and couldn't find it in himself to chase that one. Maybe he regrets that, perhaps he doesn't. For whatever he felt, the fates had woven his life as destiny saw fit and he can suffer the pains.
Pains he can suffer. He's suffered plenty. He's suffered humiliation. He's suffered villainization. He's suffered mockery. He's suffered broken bones and being stolen from. He's suffered infidelity and disregard. He's suffered rejection, vagrancy, imprisonment, lies, solitude, hunger, and poverty. He's suffered himself.
What he can not suffer, does not suffer well, is meaninglessness and fear. He despises the safety of the status quo, and would choose death over predictable events, holidays, and vacations. It often makes Joe wonder if he's meant to be able to work with all the people he meets in professional capacities. It often makes Joe uncertain if he's meant to live a life with the people satisfied with their lives in this modern world.
Joe is more and more certain that his happiness lies in an extreme action. A coup d'Kismet, if you will. He hates jails. The United States has made an industry of jailing men. If he is the only one this strikes as perverse, then he is sad that no one else can feel it. Whatever he must do, he must avoid jail at all costs, even at the cost of death.
Still, the currency of justice, the common celebration of punishment, the love of the masses to throw their ugly stones first, again, and last, the righteous indignance of jackboots and the working man, watching the news at night bore the most serious threat. He had to work within a code; but even keeping the desperate swirling nebulous urgency of a plan without physical harm or real psychic harm to a victim, he would, even if he robbed the treasury, be hated as a predator on weak, a beast vulgar, a monster deviant from the collective. Most Americans were worried they'd have to pay for someone else with their taxes. Every one of them was, and through economic kudzu they were indeed watering the wells of American military barons, among others.
He would be happy to never see America again for 500,000 USD. That wasn't an enormous fortune, but not an easy scoop. The only victimless crimes he could see were, in fact, very close to businesses. Still, would he consider even the agricultural plays, the consolidation, like water droplets, of the most earnest and honest of enterprises, farmers, and their masters, the banks and processors, and all complicit in the scheme, fair and Right?
It wasn't hard for him to bend or twist a rationale of propriety around, and, like most men, he quickly grew tired of the thinness of the efforts of thought and reduced it to the fact that he only had half of one lifetime left, at most, and he wanted the satisfaction of life free and clear from the murky filth of the modern world. Like a desperate and depraved Adamite, he sought redemption and innocence in noble savagery. The judgements of judges, as he learned in life, were enough as whimsical and subject to drunks and manics in robes as wise men calibrated fulcrums.
He did love the white cottons and Tyrian purples, and, he would have to admit, glazed windows and electricity. He couldn't get around that it was greedy and piggish to seek through money an escape from the burdens of men born without land, so long as land itself was piggishly owned and greedily guarded by all that he could not understand in his time. Territory and cash made little sense when considered at real value, other than in defense of one's appetites and security.
A gypsy, he knew, was born a gypsy. Te zhuvel darane svatura tesh del te merav, li'ha'eer. "Let me live a magic life or let me die, gods," in a cut up Romany fashion. He didn't know where he came from, and that phrase was as secret as he could get with the hope of it making sense to someone. Like he needed a motto to be but never actually be known.
There were not likely to be so many Romany in South America. He wasn't sure he loved the idea of the continent, that she may be too wet, and vivid, and teeming with poor and mosquitos. He had time yet, though, and maybe he wasn't sure he should be able to choose just where he absconded to, but truly given to default he would suffer insufferable streets, air, and voices. Now he had to give himself to the great trick, to finding the play that the others dare not find or face. He was getting sleepy though, with a conscious resolve and knowledge that there was a reason, and a hope. With this, he fell to sleep easy.
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