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On the Rocks
Down in the Dirt, v147
(the July 2017 Issue)




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On the Rocks

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Success

Jack Moody

    His mouth was moving rapidly but all that came out was a thin string of gibberish pouring out the front of his face like a garden hose. I was fairly certain that my eyes were focused upon his to produce the illusion that I was listening, but then became uncomfortable once I failed to realize whether I was blinking or not. My head was in an entirely different place than my body. My body may as well have not been there.
    Scott was talking about his job. We were in his new house. Scott had gotten me incredibly stoned. I was not used to being stoned, to this extent or otherwise. My god, the amount of words that could come out of this man’s face; it was staggering. I made a point of nodding, chuckling or releasing a shaky “yeah” every few minutes to keep up the charade that I was interested in what he was saying. It’s not that he wasn’t interesting me at all, I’m sure whatever he was saying was of decent entertainment or at least, valid, but the only thing I could be bothered to think about was how terribly I was doing in life.
    Scott was hard working, fit, healthy and happy. He had a well-paying job as a cook in the most well regarded, high-end vegan restaurant in the city (yes, vegan I know, but different strokes, as they say), a girlfriend so attached to him that he had to ask her to move out so he could have his own personal space, a new little house on the east end with one of his best friends for a roommate, a healthy relationship with drugs and alcohol, and such an enthusiasm for life that I found it almost nauseating. I was a struggling alcoholic, overweight, painfully depressed with debilitating paranoia, no job and no girlfriend, not even a semi-recent, one-off drunken sexual encounter under my belt to help satiate my lonesomeness, living at home, broke. The more I thought about the far juxtaposition between me and the beautiful soul sitting to my right, jabbering on without a care in the world, the more the pale yellow walls of his adorable little east end home began to close in around me and my drug-soaked brain.
    I inhaled sharply to regain my composure and caught the tail end of one part of Scott’s ramblings.
    “People come from all around the world to taste our food. They wait on a list for years to be able to get in. There are only fourteen seats in the whole place, and we require total silence while the chefs are serving you. They perform everything right in front of the guests; explain where every ingredient came from and how they’re preparing it. And every ingredient we use has been procured from only local farmers, all within no further than a hundred miles of our restaurant. This is the most top of the line dining experience in the entire vegan world, Henry.”
    I nodded, said “yeah”, and maintained a watchful gaze towards the open liquor cabinet across the room. He didn’t seem to notice that I didn’t care, or was just so wrapped up in his own life that he just wanted to talk out loud about it to someone that wasn’t his own reflection in the mirror.
    “Have you ever spent four hours carving the meat out of chestnuts with a knife the size of your pinky?”
    “What?” I asked, shook back to reality momentarily.
    “I once spent three hours skinning mini San Marzano tomatoes.”
    He then showed me a few pictures on his instagram of the tiny little meals on their tiny little plates. It was the exact kind of food that I imagine snobby, silver-haired ex-pats in turtlenecks losing their shit over while having well-informed, cordial discussions about an article that appeared in the latest edition of The New Yorker. It’s twelve courses of the smallest portions you could imagine, strictly vegan, strictly fucking expensive, strictly I-did-better-in-life-than-you-did food. Even the fucking plates were hand-made and exported by an award-winning potter on the other side of the country.
    I began to grow sick with myself again, and brought my attention back to the liquor cabinet, thinking about how perfectly the liquid in those tall bottles could wash away the feeling of gnawing inadequacy from the back of my throat.
    “Yeah, so things are just going really well lately, man. I’ve just been crushing it.” I could tell by the inflection in his voice that Scott was wrapping up his extended monologue. That was a nice feeling. “But anyway, what’s up with you? How’s the writing going?” He looked right into me with his brown eyes and a well-meaning, weak smile. I could tell he really wanted to hear something positive come out of my fat mouth. My friends, the ones that hadn’t yet given up on me, were becoming desperate to see me in a better place, if only by a small margin. I figured that most of them only kept me around anymore to be comforted by the fact that this is what they could have become, but through hard work and a positive attitude, they instead became who they were so proud to be. I had become a walking, breathing cautionary tale.
    “It’s going,” I said. “I’m still writing if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “Good, that’s good, bud. Anything published?”
    “A poem. That’s all. It was just a small journal.”
    “Well, hey, that’s great! Hell, let’s celebrate!”
    I knew what that meant. My eyes lit up.
    “If you insist, Scott.”
    “Whatdya want? I got Session, Captain Morgan, Tanqueray, Absolu—”
    “Whiskey,” I interrupted him.
    He stopped mid-sentence and hesitated before reaching in and pulling out a half-finished bottle of Wild Turkey. “This work?”
    “Definitely.”
    I was starting to feel a little kick in my step finally. He poured two glasses and sat back down, handed me one. “So...to—”
    “To success,” I interrupted him again.
    “Right...to success.”
    Scott sipped gingerly at the brown drink while I emptied my glass. It wasn’t until the alcohol entered my body that I became aware of my immediate surroundings and not just the tunnel that my vision and thoughts had been squeezed into. A Violent Femmes record was playing on vinyl. It sounded lovely. There were pieces of artwork and photography hanging across the living room walls, done by friends and friends of friends. Scott’s roommate’s pet snake was coiled into the corner of its terrarium, a mass of yellow scales tasting the air with a red tongue darting in and out of its mouth. My palms were glistening with sweat and my left leg was bouncing up and down uncontrollably. Scott was handsome, dark features and darker eyes, a narrow face and a growing but trimmed beard. His long hair was pulled to the back of his head in a bun. He wore a wool sweatshirt that reminded me of wet earth.
    Scott finished his drink and looked back up at me earnestly, thinking of something to say to fill the silence that I alone appreciated. “You workin’ right now?”
    “Yeah,” I lied, “been doing some landscaping with my neighbor’s business. It’s good work, keeps me busy.” I hated myself more with each word that escaped my mouth, but I couldn’t stand my friend knowing that I was doing any worse than he already did. If complete honesty were to be maintained from my end, the conversation would quickly become blisteringly depressing. Through my lie, though, Scott seemed to be pleasantly surprised, and so decided to continue with the line of questioning in hopes that it would continue to be pleasantly surprising.
    “Any girls?”
    “God no,” I said in honesty.
    My straight-faced answer proved to be humorous. A smile grew slowly across his face until his mouth was open, laughing with his teeth and his brown eyes and all. I poured another drink from the bottle of whiskey without asking, drank that down in one gulp. Scott took my silence as an opening to talk about himself once more, which was just fine with me. Conversations with others regarding my own well-being and personal life normally ended quickly.
    “Man, it’s such a different experience going into bars by myself now that me and Sophie aren’t really seeing each other as much. Last night, I walk into the bar down the street, and there’s this bartender working there that I’ve seen all the time, and she’s never paying me any attention, always being snarky and shit. But this time I’m not with Sophie, and all of a sudden she walks up and introduces herself to me, says, ‘Hi, I’m Melody, it’s really nice to meet you,’ and starts laughing at all the things I’m saying, even though I know I’m not being funny. And then there was this sexy-ass blonde tattooed woman across from me at the bar who just starts feeding me food from her plate! I didn’t even say anything, just looked at her! Like fuck, man, if only I was single.”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Doesn’t that stuff ever happen to you? You’re at bars alone all the time!”
    “No. I don’t look quite as approachable as you do, Scott. Mostly my hands are on my head. I don’t really go to bars to be happy. I go to get drunk.”
    It wasn’t until the words escaped my mouth that I realized how sad they were. Scott struggled to find an answer, eventually spurting out, “Well, that’s cool, too.”
    No it wasn’t. We both knew that. Scott was too nice and pleasant and I was too dark and distant. So it goes. Sensing my removal from my surroundings once more, Scott poured me another drink. “Well hey! There’s always tomorrow, right?”
    “Right,” I said, and drank the whiskey in my glass.
    It was raining outside. I love the sound of the rain from inside a comfortable home. I decided it was time to go, and bid goodbye to Scott.
    “Keep your head on straight,” he said to me as I walked out the door into the black and blue night.
    The rain was falling heavily like a sheet of water and obscured my vision as it drummed on the street and the houses and the hood of my car. The faint yellow glow from the streetlights illuminated each drop as it careened down to earth. For a moment, my brain was silent. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a trembling hand over the flame. I looked up into the great black expanse arching over me and let the drops land on my face and the cigarette hanging from my mouth. The rain was going to fall whether I looked at it or not. The black canopy would be overhead for always and ever. The rain was wet and perfect and it came from a stark blackness that I couldn’t pull my eyes away from. I stood there in the rain until it soaked through the cigarette and extinguished the flame, and I smiled.



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