Why I Committed Suicide (3 page)

The paint thing might have been a mistake because the ceiling is black now and the walls are such a dark hue that all the light in the room gets absorbed so there’s a generally gloomy feeling to the whole business. It’s like living in a cave that still smells like the generations of animals that lived there before you. Nobody will fix and recharge our AC for less than $100, which we don’t have. So the combination of paint fumes, cats hit and heat is overwhelming. Compound that with the fact that we are right next to the front room of the house where all the bands play and the stereo thumps every single night and it all keeps making me get the flu or something.

Jenifer is such a sweetheart and lemme tell you why. After I pester her and hang around her and obsess in secret over her, she still came over to help me out when I was very, very sick. I was just laying on the mattress in my loft when she popped in to cheer me up. How can I help but fall head over heels in love with a girl that brings me soup and rinses out the dirty washrag I had on my head for the fever? Maybe it’s a delusional Helen Keller syndrome but it really touched me to have her there. I know I kept babbling to her about how nobody has ever gone out of their way to make me soup before, but it was true. Nobody but my mom has done anything like that in years. I tried to convey how good it made me feel to have her there despite the vomit and fever symptoms, but I think I just played it cool.

Right. Must sleep now.

Ernie, our friend Jeffery and I all took some acid last night and were hanging around smoking pot while we were waiting to start tripping. I asked Ernie to show me how to do a gravity hit off the joint we were smoking. What is supposed to happen is that you bend your knees and take a giant hit off the joint as you slowly rise up to your full height. Somebody then grabs you around the chest and lifts you off of your feet while you hold your breath. Then what’s supposed to happen is that you lose consciousness from the lack of oxygen and then all sorts of visions come into your brain during the few seconds that dream-world overtakes you.

Yeah I know, lack of oxygen to the brain, real smart thinking. Well it gets better.

So I bend my knees and rise up and Ernie grabs me around the chest. For a brief moment I’m looking around and wondering when something is going to happen.
Whammo!
All of a sudden I am swimming across a vast Oceanic world with no recollection of what I did to get there. The air is crisp and the water is warm and the fish can talk without words. I see kelp and blue green filtered light all around me. Then I guess the blood started returning precious oxygen to my brain because I regained consciousness on our dirty floor, down on my knees, with my face hurting like someone had kicked me in the nose.

I wake up and Ernie looks all scared. After a minute his moving mouth starts to actually say words I can hear and understand. Apparently during that split second where I looked around wondering what was going to happen I gave the other guys the impression that nothing was going to happen so they relaxed the grip they had on my arms to keep me from falling. That’s when I passed out and did a full face plant right on my kisser. I was mad because my nose was bleeding and felt numb and I was scared because I was starting to trip by then and I knew the amplified awareness my body was in would cause my face to feel all freaky and I would think something had gone horribly wrong with it while I spaced out. I calmed myself down so that I wouldn’t have a bad trip which was hard because even my teeth felt loose and wiggly. Jenifer showed up right afterwards and she couldn’t stop laughing when I told her what happened. I guess it was pretty funny and when she started tripping she laughed even harder at me when the giggles came. Every time I would feel around on my numb nose she would start to laugh again. So I suppose the lesson for the evening was to not let Sam do anymore gravity hits.

On a better note, the sex coming down off the acid was awesome. We listened to Jane’s Addictions “Ritual” and the Earth moved.

I don’t think that I will ever be happy with a “nine to five” job. Do those hours even exist anymore? There is just too much stuff that I want to do before I get too old to do it. I don’t know. It might have something to do with the concept of what others (the suits) think qualifies as work. I don’t seem to mind sweating it out at the Flying Tomato for $3.55 an hour, but after two years of being there I have to wonder why I like the chump change they offer. It’s so hard to go out and get another job because it’s so easy to fall into the pattern of familiarity. Plus this is a college town and any available job is already staffed with someone who will gladly take my bananas so they can buy food or pot or whatever. The Flying Tomato is a mom and pop, pizza and beer operation except they are owned by a larger company up in Illinois or somewhere really cold. That’s why there are weird things on the menu like spicy hot cider and soup while it’s still 110 degrees outside. All the other stores are way up North, this one just kind of got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way. The people who manage it and who pretty much own the place are a married couple named Becky and Ski. Ski stands for something like Sluslarski or Slurparski or something. No one really knows his actual name and so we all just call him Ski. He’s a fat greasy-haired Polish guy and his wife Becky is actually a pretty nice looking lady with a brain on her shoulders and a hard work ethic but a horrible desire to birth as many children as possible. I asked an old employee one time how a bum of a guy like Ski ended up with a lady like Becky and the rumor I heard was that she got her heart broken by a hunky dude and Ski picked her up on the rebound. That kind of made me sad because she seems like she could do better. There are plenty of men in the Dallas area that only want a woman to birth and raise children all day if that was all she wanted. I’ve heard it’s one of the only reasons they let women into SMU.

The Tomato job is fairly loyal. Once you get on staff and they know you are a good worker you can take all kinds of time off in the summer slow season or whenever you need to. There are not a lot of jobs in this town that can promise you that your job will be intact after you come back from Christmas break. I also work the crappy shifts that nobody wants on Thursday and Saturday nights, which are the main party nights in a college town. I guess almost anyone can get through Friday classes with a hangover or at least sleep in and not damage the ol’ G.P.A. too much. I like those shifts because the Flying Tomato is right in the hubbub of Fry Street with the bars and such. All my friends come by and I get to meet and talk to all the pretty drunk girls and give people free keg beer whenever I feel like it. Most of my friends have figured out that’s where I’ll be and they always come by to visit and score free pizza and beer. Everyone’s happy. The pizza place gets someone who works the crappy shifts and I get to socialize with my friends and drink beer and smoke pot in the walk-in freezer. It’s almost like I get paid to hang out and flirt if I angle it right and it’s a good night. I’ve probably given out more free beer and pizza than anyone else in Texas. My friends from the dorm and the hardcore drinkers from the Delta Lodge always come in and I make it my personal mission to send them home staggering. This job is probably the main reason why I know so many people in this town and have so many “friends” that know my name, while usually I have no clue about what their name could be. It’s all good I suppose, the blessings I bestow will come back around at some point.

So my job’s a pretty great deal, the after-hours clean-up is a bitch and I come home smelling like sweaty pizza grease but all in all I could be doing much worse. I’ve even learned the magic trick to get the dishwasher working. Specifically, where to beat on it so that it works like Fonzie’s jukebox. Summer time is slow time now though. Most people vacate Denton after the spring semester and we cater to the small batch of locals or permanent students.

Damn it’s hot. I seem to be getting hairier in some strange paradox of nature. I shaved my legs one time in some weird sex game with Melanie and ever since then my body’s rebelled and increased my body hair quotient. Don’t ever believe those scientists that say shaving will not make hair grow back thicker. My Chew-bacca legs are living proof. It’s probably the heat that is making me notice the strange gradual growth of hair on my belly and nipples. It’s actually kind of embarrassing to me. Damn, I mean I thought all this crap was supposed to be taken care of during puberty when life in general is humiliating. At this rate I will be an ape-man by the time I am forty. I guess most girls are used to male body hair though. I even heard a rumor that some girls find it attractive. Probably only girls with mustaches and hairy fathers or with my luck it’s only European women and I’ll be stuck on this continent forever. Maybe girls have so many of their own insecurities that they won’t notice mine? Whatever.

The swim class that I am taking this summer is going well. I am way too advanced for the beginning swimmer class but I figure it will be an easy “A”. There are people in there that can’t swim at all and I think I could be on the swim team if my observations of the advanced class are anything to go by.

I thought that my swim class would be a good thing for the summer time, but the pool is fucking bitch ass cold. The temperature change is too much for a body to handle during the summer. It’s hard to wake up early and bike, with a hangover, over a mile to my swim class and then get into frigid water. Then I have to stay in the Antarctic torture pit for the next three hours. At the end of class even the fat girls, with all the insulation an Eskimo could ever want, have blue lips and their pudgy skin wrinkles in rolls of pale bumpy tissue.

I’ve been trying to sleep over at Jenifer’s every night and bask in her sweet AC. We sleep well together. Some people just are not very compatible in that respect, they can’t get comfortable when a foreign body is in the same bed. To me that is a sign that maybe you should give the relationship up. Jenifer and I both seem to relax around each other and we sleep without rolling over and punching each other in the privates or something on accident. There is nothing worse than waking up screaming in the middle of the night, holding your ‘nads and trying to breathe.

Jenifer would sleep all day and night if she didn’t have the occasional need to get up and go to work. She works as a nude model in the art department on campus. Yes, a nude model. Some of the taboos of conventional society that she breaks without blinking an eye amaze me. Her complaint about the job isn’t that people ogle her or walk up to her at random and feel it’s their obligation to tell her that they’ve seen her naked; it’s that the rooms are so cold in the art department. As hard as it is for me to believe, to her it is just a job. I must admit that it bothers me slightly to know that the girl I am smitten with has people leering over her lovely nude body in the supposed name of art. At the same time though, I think it’s erotic to imagine her standing there naked in front of a room full of strangers. A room where half the guys haven’t been laid and are taking this class to see someone naked while half the women are in there for the same reason.

The power of the courage she wields, to be able to walk into a room full of strangers and simply take off all her clothes without a second thought or hesitation. To be the focal point of that class period where all the eyes of the room are taking in every aspect of her physiology, looking and scratching their interpretation of what she looks like to them on the coarse drawing paper. The sketched images of Jenifer coming to life are amazing or fail miserably, leaving traces of charcoal pencil on the sides of the eager student palms as a reminder of their imagined secret. The stifled energy and eroticism of those moments in the classroom must be what leads random men to feel the need to let her know they have seen her naked. They seek to capture some of that energy. To make contact with the girl that so nonchalantly invades their nighttime fantasies and fuels their secret evenings of masturbation sessions where they have to be really quiet for fear of waking a roommate, or worse, a girlfriend in the same bed. I just like to inhale part of the energy surrounding Jenifer and witness the way she dismisses these boys. It is so delightful to see. It’s even more erotic to watch her naked and sleeping knowing that there will be some point when she will be awake and alive responding to my touches. Passionate and giving before she goes to pose for a crowd that will never ever know the love of a creature so beautiful. It’s just a job to her but I keep thinking of that ARMY slogan that says “it’s not just a job, it’s an adventure”. I guess the adventure is for me.

I think that I am putting too much pressure on Jenifer by sleeping over at her place so much but it just makes my heart ache to be without her. I know that I should play it cool and try to let her grow more attached to me. I know that girls get burned out easily on the boy that hangs around too much. This love is making me psycho in the head. Every action is weighted too heavily in my mind to be of any use for coherent decisions. It’s a problem to savor.

Jenifer is a total Fry Street girl. It’s hard for me to imagine, but she was one of those damn ‘townie’ high school kids that hang around the Tomato and drink five dollars worth of twenty-five cent soda refills in a single sitting. The caramel that coats some of these kids’ digestive tracks must be ungodly permanent and sap-like in its consistency by now. She’s been back from A&M for a while now and I still wonder why I never ran into her before. Even after all these weeks of getting used to her being in this small town, I am still struck breathless at how beautiful and sexy she is. I thought that I hadn’t seen her before but looking back I remember noticing her once when she was working at Voertman’s, the book store right off campus. I was still going out with Melanie at the time and yet when I think back I remember pausing and noticing how pretty the girl behind the counter was. Not leering in an alpha male sort of way, but stopping and appreciating a brief glowing moment of eye-locking mutual attraction. It lasted only seconds and then I was away to re-join my girlfriend, blotting out the memory, absorbed in her needs and some form of intoxicating substance. I either can’t believe that I didn’t remember seeing her sooner, or that I even remember the event at all. Maybe on that day our fates were irrevocably entwined together, finally finding a way to bring us back together after one mere glance, or perhaps I am just being moony again. It isn’t my imagination that she is definitely becoming very comfortable with me being around. I think that she has realized that I am harmless. Yes, that is how I am describing myself—harmless—and she is becoming more content being my friend at least. It’s a start, even if we’ve never laid down the distinctive curse of being “the friend”.