Why I Committed Suicide (48 page)

My sister has been up to visit. I watched as her belly swelled up with life and then one day she brought a little girl wrapped in soft blankets to see me. It was my first glimpse of my sister’s little girl, Kalinn, and she’s amazingly beautiful even behind bulletproof glass. Good for her. Everyone has given me and Alecia shit about our lives and our decisions, but she’s accomplished something beautiful. Thank you, Alecia. You might never know how much it meant to have you visit me then, but to see my amazing niece the other day was truly awesome! The best I’ve felt about anything in a long, long time.

The only means by which I have to see myself in here is the piece of corroded stainless steel above the combination stainless steel sink and toilet. It is old and covered with toothpaste flecks and other bodily fluids too numerous to get into. I bring this up only because of the reflection of the person I see looking back at me.

It’s been close to 5 months now and the eyes that stare back at me are still the pale eyes that have been there since I came in. My eyes that have won me friends with a glance, broadcasting their stern defiance. Eyes that look better to be allied with, but I’m not trying to convey that I am a badass in any sense of the word. Even though I have come along way in these months from the soft sickly man that shuffled through the doors and lay in his bunk for the first month, barely eating and shitting arduously one day a week. The food is repulsive as always but its minimal nutrition is feeding my wiry frame. No bulk, just aggressively strong sinew. The body is healing, but the mind…the mind is still not right, the decision to live isn’t always the easiest one. I look in the mirror and I still see the same eyes peering out from beneath the dirty film. The dark circles are shrinking but still gaunt. My skin is far paler than it has ever been since the Texas sun first laid its kiss upon me so many years ago. All that I have done and all that I am as a man, all that I have learned has come down to this reflection of a person I do not even know in the mirror.

The talk around the block is always the same. Typical clucking braggadocio about loose women or what they will be doing with their wives when the mythical period of punishment and atonement is finally over. The sex, the beer, the freedom to be nothing. No talk of the magic dew on the grass as you struggle into the shower before climbing into a truck for a day of working wherever. No talk of life, just the fantastical rewards of men that have survived a battle. The battle with their government. The battle that others have forced them to wage in their own minds. See the demons you are, or have in you, with no distractions from everyday life! Nothing will make you not feel what you are.

There are no glass mirrors, you can’t smash polished steel to cut yourself or another and I’m sure
they
learned that requirement the hard way a long time before I was introduced to this system. All my education, all the things I have been taught and raised with as qualities worthy of a man are gone. I am soul-stripped naked and I lay bare for the world while they hide me away to protect my shame.

I have no common talk or prattle to offer about the things I will do when I am out of here. I have nothing outside of here. I am homeless, family-less, friendless and I am marked with the shame and duty I rightly deserve. The crimes I committed are not what brought me here for I am a monster that needs to be locked away. Yet they can’t see it. The things I have done will never ever be better. I could have all the money in the world, all the sex, all the political power and not one little bit of it will ever change what I did. Nothing will ever change what has happened to the woman I loved. I laugh at the weak reasons they have used to keep me here. They should give me the same slow death penalty I dished out. They should whip me and beat me, but instead they gave me a home and put me in a place where I have shallow friends. A place where I have a TV and a deck of fucking cards and some goddamn Cheetos for everything I did.
They
are hiding me from the world but I can’t hide from the cold eyes I see looking back at me. How do you punish a man that has done the deed to himself for years? Who’s going to make me want to embrace the life again? Say it with me. Irre-fuckin-pairable spinal cord injury.

That my life is forfeit to make hers live.

Done.

That I switch fates and live my life as hers.

Done.

God convinced me not to die. Saved me. Intervened in the course of another’s life to give me back the gift of my own. Do I inhabit these dens of prison and squalor or do I learn to be me again? No, not me anymore, the cold person I have become, infected and dying for the love and joy that I was convinced would be eternal. Some of these mornings are easier than others. The burden of my life is no longer the path of detraction and distraction. The drugs are too easy and too good and not helping. God has given me a gift. Told me that “the marrow of the Earth is mine to suck from the bones of my past.” The thing is, I have to learn
how.
Normal again. Me. The egotistical bastard smarter than anyone in this entire jail will be as helpless as a child when they finally let me go. I have forgotten how to be free. Institutionalized is what they call it. It happens to people that are in prison for ten or twenty or thirty years and I have it after 5 months. I’m scared and bored with the idea that this is my fate. Tired of the taste of blood and puke and the mildew growing in the corners. Too tired to talk about fucking. Too tired to even sing over the voices.

I thought I was crazy for a long time because I have had a song in my head every second of every day for my entire life. Sometimes mine, sometimes off the radio, but always a song, beat or a groove. The wilds of the Earth, one of my many gifts and a curse. The song isn’t there anymore. Not always. It’s the reverse equivalent of a deaf child suddenly being able to hear for the first time ever. Except the silence is disconcerting, my mind a wasteland, as cold as a snowstorm in the woods with thousands of little eyes gleaming out at me through the trees.

I have had a lot of nightmares while I’ve been in jail and recently I keep waking up in a sweat after having the same dream. I’m driving down the road in a car that I can’t really make out exactly what it is but it’s a small Honda/Nissan/ Mazda hybrid of some sort. The road is always filled with emerald green Mustangs. It doesn’t seem to matter exactly where I am driving but I am always familiar with the road every place I seem to be, even when the scenery changes abruptly. I run to get a hamburger and there is an emerald green Mustang parked in the sun outside glistening. I show up at work and someone shows me his new car and it’s an emerald green Mustang. I visit my dope dealer and I see him in a shiny new emerald green Mustang offering me free heroin. My parents are taking me back to their house and in the driveway is an emerald green Mustang for my birthday.

The worst dream takes me to a place where I am driving along in a familiar place and the shiniest, tricked-out, flossing, rimmed Mustang brighter than the sun pulls along side my little car with a gorgeous girl driving. Her windows are down and her college-length blonde hair is shimmering in the morning sunlight but she’s staring straight ahead. Her face and skin and beauty are always perfect beyond comprehension and sometimes she’ll make a sort of sly sideways glance with a slight smirk just to make sure I’m watching and to let me know that I know she knows I’m watching.

In my dream I often try and distract her; I roll down my windows and smile or wave, but the more I try, the more intently she focuses on the road ahead of her. She tears off down the road at a speed that seems casual but there’s no way I can match it in my little bucket. I put her image out of my mind and drive to where I am going.

Flash forward. I am staring at the twisted tree where I had my bike chained before I got put away and it was stolen. My bicycle apparently sacrificed itself for the tree previously by taking the brunt of a drunken frat boy’s car. It’s in bad shape and as I stare at the mangled mess of tires I turn to see the emerald Mustang with the beautiful blond girl racing towards me, quite obviously intending to fuck me the same way the frat boy fucked my bike. Her perfect girlish grin smiles as if to invite me to suck on her perfect small girl breast, exposed by a perfectly rumpled maladjustment of the sexy oversized tank top she always wears. Perfectly. I’m fixated on herbodyhersmilehersexher as the emerald front of the car, gleaming mystically brighter than any green can be, even as its custom front end, sharper than a razor blade, cuts me in half pinning me to the tree. My waist falls away under the car and she’s there watching and giggling, still playing up and getting off on the thrill of her own body, her own sexy come hither glance. Her eroticism is perfect but it’s as false and practiced as a porn star. Her body dances in its seat, wriggling as if to say, “come to me poor boy as you are dying, you’ve suffered so much at least let your last moments be filled with pleasures beyond anything you have known.”

My upper body is still hanging, practically perched on the front of her hood, my back against the gnarled tree, thick red blood soaking from my torso into the car’s unnaturally green glossy surface with little wisps of smoke as it drains from my body, my heart is still pumping, believing that my body is still intact. My vision falters as I start to get dizzy from lack of blood but I can already tell that her/its body has been created to be the accumulation of all my supposed inner desires. Suddenly it’s as if she’s standing beside me with her lips softly grazing my ear as I hear her finally say to me in a low, slow sultry whisper of sexuality that of course matches her form perfectly, “Icangiveyoueverythingyou’veever-wanted…justsaythewordanditwillallbeyours…youdon’thavetodiehere…thereis-somuchwecandotogether.”

As my own blood begins to fill my lungs it slowly drowns me from the inside, it runs from my left nostril now and bubbles from between my open lips. I only manage to gurgle as I try and speak but my mind is clear and words thunder in my head. I can almost see them flashing around me with a life of their own in the still night air,
“Get the fuck away from me beast!”

That’s the point where I wake up knowing beyond all else that something is trying to get inside me while I’m weak. My body is weak from too much emotion and too little food, but I’m meditating now and saying silent prayers. My defenses may be weak but in my waking hours I’ve started to create a mental wall of protection around my body, around my head, my thoughts, my mind and
my soul. Get out of my head dream demons; this weakened vessel is not for you.
I say this over and over as I build. Over the course of a few days I construct my defense brick by brick, applying a substantial amount of mortar to each of the strong earthen porous bricks that I’ve molded individually with a prayer and fired in the kiln I’ve constructed in my mind. It’s slow going but as I lay the bricks around me, the thick mortar oozes from each crack and hardens as it runs down the wall. As I get closer to completing my wall of protection, the dreams that attack at night intensify in their desperation and brutality. Vivid images of blood and pain, sex, blood, drugs, family, hurting, blood, betrayal and always those infernal fucking unnaturally colored emerald green Mustangs forged in the depths of someplace that’s better not mentioned or put to paper. I’ve awoken several nights yelling and thrashing in my bed. As my wall gets higher tendrils of emerald green plants try and grow up the outer side of the wall, desperate to reach me or deposit seeds that will grow inside and feed. It’s harder and harder to resist so I’ve taken to trying to stay awake during the night and sleep during the daylight where the vivid images are not as strong. I should be done with my wall soon and if I ever find a way to get at the thing/person/devil/beast responsible for having the audacity to fuck with me I will make it pay very dearly.

Jen sent me a letter. Well not a letter, an empty envelope with a 2 inch clipping of an article out of the Denton Record Chronicle that informed me my friend Bobo is dead. Oh it hurt so bad to read that, even touching the already yellowing paper hurt my hands. If only I had been there, been around or been out. Could I have even done anything to help? Oh God,
another
friend gone, please show mercy and take her into your arms, lead her into your light.

The right answers have always seemed to make sense and come to me a majority of the time, but I have never been smart like this. The world moves around me in patterns and shadow now. I see the ebb and flow of desires, the slow motion reactions on people’s faces in day-to-day life. I’m in tune with something I searched for so long. An eternal invisible dangling carrot taunting me with the hope that it actually exists, I could smell it and hear it swing and even caught a glimpse as I walked through the fog of my life, but it was only when I stopped looking and finally relaxed that the empathic touches to life showed themselves to me fully.

I am in the middle of my war, a modern day version of my real father that I swore I would never become. What did his Purple Heart get him? A whole platoon full of dead friends and nothing to come home to except the sweet succulent bodies of bikini-clad beach women. I’ve built my wall now, the dreams are mine again, the demons cast out.

Necessity is breeding desire. The desire is making me crafty smart and able to feel the energy I have to read people. I have to have an edge that puts me one step ahead or a little bit higher on the brain awareness level. I know when they no longer care. I know the face of apathy, but I also have the desire and the need to take what I want without unnecessary involvement. I pinch it all. I knick it, I shoplift it and I get away, lickety-split, and the adrenaline rush of success is as sweet as any victory in my long forgotten war, as sweet as any drug and as sweet as being happy because it is happiness, energy and life.

I woke up with a thought of true genius fluttering through my head, but twas lost twixt bed and paper. Can you use twixt nowadays without insuring the wrath of the critics? I suppose I will find out. It’s finally time to go and make a home now. I’m not scared anymore.