Why I Committed Suicide (21 page)

Oh, some gossip: James’s sister Maureen is pregnant and had to come home from her first year at college. Life is weird but I instinctively know she will make a good mother and a routine of childcare discipline will benefit her. I sympathize with her upcoming ordeal though. Despite my fleeting dreams of boyhood romance I would like to send a note of encouragement since she’ll have to face hostile familial Catholicism over this, but I’m probably not even supposed to be privy to the secret at all. So Maureen, here is a subconscious mental well wishing aimed at you and your child. Be good and be strong, I’m thinking of you.

Tonight a bunch of us watched Jane’s Addiction’s “Gift” while tripping on acid. I viewed it with a skepticism—usually reserved for alchemy—in a packed living room of people, all of us watching it for the first time. It was a creepy and oddly romantic movie crammed with lots of badass music. Just us, Perry, Casey and the ultimate rundown of the heroin lifestyle encompassing all its death spanning love. Maybe it was the acid but the movie really moved me and now I want to try smack more than ever. Isn’t that stupid? To be influenced by imagery and music so much, just like the evil government said I would be. Maybe organized government is my friend after all.

Yeah right.

Nope, I now know that I’ve pretty much been lied to and fed misinformation about every drug I’ve ever tried. Usually my virginal nervousness turns to disappointment because for some reason the amount of pleasure I equate with the evil addictive quotient just isn’t there for me. And I don’t think I’m special either. In a way it’s good because I want my experimentation with everything I can get my hands on (excluding sniffing paint and PCP, nasty business) to only be a
temporary experimentation.
A series of experiences I can look back on and say “I did that” or at least use my exploration as a reference for unwritten characters in a bad after-school special or something.

Heroin is sort of a last refuge, a final drug with the highest ante of all. One last thing to try before I move on to more worldly jobs and sensual pleasures on the physical plane. Somehow I still suspect bitter disappointment from Ms. Morphine but then again I never have thought that the deep ennui I am experiencing could ever be relieved through chemistry, prescribed or otherwise.

But tonight, watching the shocking realism of true love and a reminder of drug-addled despair akin to
Drugstore Cowboy,
I think I’ve been given a subtle reminder to check myself. A warning I somehow know that if I ignore, I’ll face undesirable consequences later. The music and poetry of the world is alive, but very often dirty. To truly create, I fear I will have to roll around in the corruption of life and get an honest sense of despair that a simple visit to hell could never convey, although Dante’s trip proved inspirational enough for him. People had more time on their hands back then to analyze and write volumes about the experiences in their dreams too. Doesn’t it seem as if the theologians that are most concerned with the good of the afterlife are also unnaturally captivated by the bad of the here and now?

I’m scared.
While things are clear to me on acid tonight I can already see I will alienate my family. Too many regrets are coming up.
I’m scared
mom, I know you’ll never understand.
I’m scared
Jenifer, nothing I gain in wisdom will be worth losing you.
I’m scared
Sam, you have already embarked on this different sort of road trip, a ride much more important than you will ever know. Dammit! I may be lacking inner peace but at least most of the time I’m comfortable. God forgive me for the things that will happen. God please forgive me for making them necessary.

I just found out that Jim is moving out of our miniature Monticello after this semester and I’m kind of sad about it, even though I suspected it might happen sometime soon. I just have this sense of an overall tiredness seeping into all of our bones and a general melancholy emanating from Jim because of different things going on in his life. He’s a notorious class skipper, which leads to the eventual disappointing low grades and having to drop half his classes. It’s also pretty damn hard to motivate yourself to do boring school stuff in our house with all these distractions. Jim’s tired of being poor, tired of being hassled by his girlfriend Simone continuously, and lamentably even I get on his case about stupid shit like all his dirty dishes or other stuff only bitches like to nag about, so I’ll bet he’s tired of that too. I guess he just senses it is time to try and move on and who can blame him?

We’ve all been doing more coke, yet slowly excluding each other’s company when we do it. Jim will stay away and I’ll use the excuse of having an early class to not participate. Drug-related relationships are getting more complex and weird around our house. So in a way, even though I’m sad to hear Jim is leaving I know it’s better for him to move back to San Antonio and get his head straight. I’ll miss that bastard though. Jim’s been like a brother to me sometimes and I’ve learned a lot by imitating his casualness. My old friend James gave me the basic Bachelor degree training in slacking off but Jim helped complete my Masters.

We’re all run down and tired from school. The rest of the world looks upon college life and sees it with rose-colored glasses slightly tinted green with envy, but the actuality of doing
it
daily and living hand to mouth is hard. Up North where animosity gets hidden behind thickly insulated walls during a majority of the colder months, people can drive around the cities and view their ghettos with some semblance of detachment, but Texas is a nearly year long festering stewpot of aggravation. It’s getting hotter and it’s going to keep getting hotter, fuses are getting shorter and the mundane tasks of living are seemingly unbearable sometimes. Often it’s so tempting to just say,
“Fuck it!”
and do my own thing. I’ve got spring fever to the N
th
degree.

I hope Dan and Jay are cool about Jen staying with me at the house most of the time. She’s become a fifth roommate and now when people speak about one of us, our names are invariably lumped together. Sam and Jenifer or Jenifer and Sam, the name mentioned first usually denoting whom the speaker originally intended to talk about. I like the sound of it though. Sam and Jenifer. Jenifer and Sam. Pretty nice.

Our old friend Kirk is probably going to take over Jim’s room so we won’t have to worry about extra rent, not that it would be too big of a problem. I think Kirk is cool even though he’s older (about 27 or so?) and he was there with Jim and me in the dorms and he already knows Dan and Jenifer from drinking together at the Tomato and hanging around our house. Kirk always says he wasn’t much of a pot smoker until he started hanging around Jim and me. Since I (positively!) credit Jim with helping teach me about the joys of being most mellow, he can blame Jim. Kirk likes to party too much and will do any drug put in front of him but he’s also established a set of unflinching priorities and responsibilities that keep him on track, plus I already know I can live with him.

Jenifer told me while we were lying in bed last night that Kirk is weird and kind of creeps her out. I tried to pry and ascertain why she thinks that way, but the feel of her hair on my chest distracted me as she nestled into her favorite pillow, the crook of my arm. I’m thinking it may just be one of the subtle differences that women can detect in men. Something men can’t see in other men because they are blinded by friendship perhaps? We’ll find out soon enough I guess.

For one day, Jenifer and I were members of the upper crust, true sophisticates washing out the taint of our ring-around-the-blue-collar and simplistic collegiate lifestyle for an afternoon. The basic skinny is that today was the final showing of a great Impressionist exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. In hillbilly speak that means some high-falutin’ famous pictures were on display. The collection was absolutely amazing. The works are on some sort of tour and we had been kicking around the idea of going for the past few months but it took a deadline and some encouragement from Mrs. Lansing to finally motivate our asses. We got to dress up and be art-fags for a day, leaving Generica (that’s Generic America) with all its McDonald’s, Wal-Marts and malls behind for a few hours.

The Impressionist colors and scenes of life have always struck a power chord in me. I love the artists’ quirks, I love the museums and I loved getting to go with Jenifer. She’s one of the few people that I knew would value and appreciate the experience as much as I did. Other lovers have
tolerated
my off-kilter interests in the past but how many have taken the time to incorporate and embrace my oddities, learning about them out of love for me? Just her of course. I doubt I could have viewed the art with anyone else in the world and felt like it was being equally appreciated. Ours was not a snobbish grasp of the value and history of the pictures but an appreciation for the passion and intensity of the driving force behind the artists and the thrill of seeing so many quality works together. I love her so much, in part because I respect her as having an intelligence level equal to mine. I’ve met women smarter than me in certain ways and I’ve certainly met my share of stupid bimbo bitches with killer bodies but only Jenifer has a unique intelligence I identify with and love.

The vivid scenes highlighting trivialities of life and details that only artists are given the opportunity to capture captivated our minds for the afternoon. It’s rewarding to be touched by an experience but it’s hard to explain the depth of an afternoon with a mere smattering of insignificant recorded details. Let it suffice to say that today we expanded our souls in each other’s company, we got to have a date together, and I’ll remember the pleasant sunlit afternoon forever. Or at least until I get amnesia or Alzheimer’s.

Before we left I talked Jenifer into viewing the permanent children’s exhibit they have at the museum. We mostly goofed around in this one section called the “Shadow Room” where people can stand against this special wall and it burns a shadow impression of your body onto this big screen for a few minutes, kind of a like a police chalk outline in reverse. It was fun because we were the only near-adults in a room full of children and watching Jen laughing and playing around left me star struck yet again by her raw vitality. When my eyes briefly locked with her aqua soul gems I fell into them until she looked away taking a piece of my heart and severing our psychic umbilical cord. I value those silly moments and overly dramatic thoughts that are forever burning themselves into my brain despite the mysterious significance.

I could write whole sonnets on the power her eyes have over me. How the clear blue excites me sexually and withers my confidence. A long time ago I learned this neat trick about looking into a woman’s eyes, a trick that’s worked many times successfully. When I want to appear as if I’m looking deep into a girls eyes and glimpsing deep down into their soul, something that subconsciously drives women wild for some reason, I just stare at the
reflection
of light in the sheen of their eye. It gives off the appearance that I am staring through them, seeing inside their persona instead of creepily staring at them. When I try it with Jen however, I am always drawn into the obsidian pools as if they have their own gravitational force, black holes with such an intense power that it warps the universe to one point. Like Pavlov’s dog I still drool over her and describing the spirit of the mood between us would be like trying to describe God with a single name or word.

Kirk moved in with us last week which was a decidedly uneventful experience. I finally responded to Jenifer’s impassioned feelings and when Jim moved out I secreted the majority of my accumulated Playboy subscription amongst his belongings. It was more to show her respect than in response to her nagging; besides, enough time had passed where I could get rid of them without it being
just
in response to her pressures. I would have gotten rid of them sooner but it became such a big deal between us that if I had let her crappy attitude dictate my decision it would have set a bad precedent rooted in disrespect for both of us. Sometimes as the man I have to bite the bullet and fight for something I don’t really care about if I want to maintain my integrity and trust my decisions will be respected down the road when something comes up that I
do
care about. No woman wants a pushover for a boyfriend even when their natural instinct is to pussy whip them into being their bitch. It’s just one of the burdens of being attracted to strong intelligent women, every type has their idiosyncrasies I suppose. When it was finally my decision again (I think) to get rid of the Playboys it was no big deal anymore and ultimately unappreciated by Jenifer, but I won’t call attention to any of that. Marriage (oops), I mean dating, is sometimes a delicate diplomacy.

Life is just continuing as usual except we will soon have an entire summer at our disposal again. My visit with James has prompted the possibility of a trip to Colorado very soon. The excitement is sexually titillating.

The past weekend, in response to an ad I saw in the
Dallas Observer,
we all went to the Kennedy Memorial in downtown Dallas to be extras in a Public Enemy video shoot. It was cool but very tiring because we had to get there very early in the morning to be in it and Jenifer stayed up late with Jerry doing coke while I was at work. She didn’t really want to go down there with us but the clingy woman part of her didn’t want to be left out, so she was pretty much a Grumpasaurous Rex all day until she finally went and slept in the scorching car. It was cool because Dan and I got picked to be Nazis and we’re going to be an integral part of the video.

The premise has something to do with us (the Nazis) trying to assassinate the first black president (hence Dallas, i.e.: Kennedy) and Public Enemy foils the plot. We got to meet Chuck D with all his Muslim bodyguards giving us the evil eye because we were white AND we were strutting around with the Nazi armbands that the film crew said we couldn’t take off between takes. This didn’t go over too well with the crowd of Dallas black people who came down to be in the video since nobody ever told them we were part of the shoot, but Chuck D was cool and took a few minutes to talk to us and sign some autographs since we were fans. Flavor Flav wasn’t there, which was kind of a bummer, but I got some hands-on experience seeing how a music video is filmed. It kind of reminded me of being an extra on television which I haven’t done for a long while. I smoked some weed with members of the film crew and chilled out with Dan who bought a couple of 40’s at a 7-11 and got really drunk. All in all it was exhausting but fun and hopefully we’ll see the finished product on MTV in a few months. Public Enemy’s kind of fallen off the hip-hop radar lately, but back when “It Takes A Nation Of Millions…” and “Fear Of A Black Planet” came out they totally ruled the scene.