2,000 YEARS LATER AND WE’RE STILL ALL FUCKED UP
Robert W. Howington
“The human race is never at peace.” --- Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey To The End Of The Night
My shrink told me in our third session that I’m not only clinically depressed but that I’m also chemically dependent. I was not shocked by this news. I knew that I was a fucked up individual but I simply hadn’t had it confirmed by science yet.
“Being both depressed and CD means you’re dual diagnosis,” the shrink said, a look of great concern on his face. “Now this doesn’t mean you’re crazy. It just means you have two diseases and both are curable.”
He determined my present mental condition by giving me a series of written tests for depression and drug and alcohol abuse during my first two visits. These tests asked me if, when and why I partook in various assorted legal, and illegal, substances. They also asked me about how I felt about certain things going on inside my head and life in general. Did I get along with people (No.)? Did I like my job (No.)? Did I ever think of murder or suicide (Hell, yes.)? I answered them all truthfully. I didn’t have anything to hide since I wasn’t wanted by the cops --- yet. My shrink added up the numerical totals each question was weighed with and they showed I was a fucked up drug addict.
My shrink said, “I recommend that you go to an outpatient chemical dependence program offered at All Saints Hospital. I don’t think you can get off drugs without it.”
He gave me the person’s name and phone number who ran the program. Though I didn’t tell my shrink this, I never intended on calling JPS because, for one thing, I don’t like people telling me what to do and, for another, I’m not much on group therapy. I once attended a writer’s workshop --- which is really another form of group therapy --- and that ended up being a bunch of malarkey. These wannabe authors would read their Great American Novel rough drafts and they’d be given constructive criticism in return. Whenever I’d read my shit they always told me my stuff had a lot of story structure problems and that my story ideas weren’t publishable anyway. I’d look at them and say, “What do you freaks know about writing? Sue, you’re a fucking bored housewife. Jim, you’re a fucking alcoholic who can’t hold a job. Jane, you’re a fucking waitress at Denny’s for chrissakes. FUCK YOU AND YOU’RE GOD DAMN OPINIONS!” Anyway, a week later I found the piece of scratch paper my shrink wrote th!
e outpatient program phone number on in my jeans pocket all waded up and smeared off after having washed them.
We continued the session by talking about how my two failed marriages fucked me up in the head to no end.
“I started smoking more and more pot after my second divorce,” I said. “I drank several screwdrivers everyday after getting home from work. I had to numb my heartbroken feelings. Pot and alcohol were the only things that helped. Then I graduated to snorting cocaine and smoking crack after my tolerance for the pot and alcohol increased to the point that they weren’t helping me anymore. I had to try harder shit to get fucked up enough to blank out the world.”
He told me that self-medication is a very common practice by people who’re screwed up by things that go wrong in their life.
“But doing drugs and forgetting your troubles doesn’t solve your emotional problems,” he said. “To solve them you have to confront them and stop using drugs as an escape from what is troubling you.”
As he spoke, I looked at my watch. My 45-minute session was 10 minutes away from ending. I could not wait to get out of his office and go home and roll a joint and drink a beer.
The alarm sounded at 5:45 a.m. and I raised up. The cat was on the edge of the bed looking at my dumb sleepy ass. I petted her and said, “I’m still alive and I’ve got to go to work.” I do not like working. I wished I could stay home all day long and daydream about fucking Britney Spears. I wished I could stay home and fart out loud and not have to worry about offending someone. I wished I had an understanding woman taking care of me. “Do your writing, dear, and I’ll work two jobs.” Or I wished I had an older, and wiser, brother to pay the rent and bills. Thinking about ‘what ifs’ does me no good. It just makes me think of the way things could be. And things are never the way they could be. Not in my shitty life anyway.
At work, while processing the usual mound of monotonous paperwork, I got a phone call from a friend. I stopped what I was doing and talked to Dolores. She works from home as a lingerie model (she doesn’t fuck’em or suck’em, just takes her clothes off or role plays). She has an ad in a local sex mag, the Sundowner. Horny men with strange sexual fantasies call her number all day long. When they ask her what she’ll do for them she says, “Body rub, lingerie or total nude. Ninety dollars for a half hour or $130 for one hour.”
She said a guy told her he didn’t want any of that. He wanted to give her $60 to let him stick a butt plug up her ass. “I told him, ‘I’m not letting anyone stick anything up my ass. My ass ain’t for sale. It ain’t for rent. It ain’t for lease.’ Nothing goes up my ass with these clients. Now, I’ll shove something up a man’s ass. I had a guy call me up and ask, ‘Are you all natural?’ I said, ‘My hair isn’t if that’s what you mean.’ He goes, ‘No, I wanted a girl who’s had surgery.’ So I told him, ‘Go to Wal-Mart and buy a Barbie if you want a perfect fucking woman. She’s on sale for $9.99’ It’s amazing the stupid shit these guys want. Getting requests like this is an everyday deal for me. I’m always in a bad mood because of all this bullshit. I’m tired of it. Now do you see why I’m so fucked up? I have done one call today. A nice guy who just wanted his nipples pulled really hard.”
Dolores went on to tell me about her troubles with her two wild, uncontrollable school age kids, her physical and mental health problems, her love/man troubles, her constant lack of money.
“I’d get a real job but I can’t handle being at the same place, and around the same people, for eight hours a day, everyday of the week. Besides, how can anyone support their family on minimum wage?”
She said she’s mad at the world and is fed up with all the bullshit that comes with being alive.
“Once you see reality for what it is you can’t help but go crazy. The world we live in is a terrible place because man has created it. I feel very disappointed by life in general. I hope death is better than this.”
I said I felt the same way. “I know I’m not the first to say this but life consists of one problem after another. And it’s never ending because the suffering never end. Right when you think things are looking up a rock comes flying out of nowhere and knocks you down again. Our survival instinct is always being tested. Today the car breaks down. Tomorrow the refrigerator stops working. I really believe death is heaven, that the only relief from life is death.”
We’ve told each other many times that we’re going to kill ourselves. But we never do. We go on like morons. We keep breathing. In and out. Ad infinitum.
As I drove my car home from a downtown daily grind job that has slowly and methodically coerced me into accepting its soulless, murdering nature for the lousy dollar it brings, I saw an old thin black man walking down Rosedale Street who had taken his dick out of his dirt stained pants. With each step he took an explosive fountain of urine splattered onto the pavement. SPLURP. SPLURP. SPLURP. With a grin on his face, he looked up into the bright sky and said, “A nice day...if it don’t rain.”
A couple of blocks down an overweight black woman walking down the street with groceries in her arms suddenly stopped and grabbed her stomach. An expression of pain came over her face. She dropped the bags and raced behind a stairwell next to an abandoned office building and pulled down her pants and squatted. A waterfall of shit came streaming out of her ass. I thought, “I hope she has toilet paper in one of those grocery sacks.”
A group of down-and-outs were gathered under a shade tree behind Bert’s Liquors. They cradled paper sacks carrying 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor. They were smiling and laughing, happy in their cheap intoxication and chronic unemployment. To them a dirt floor was just as good as a carpeted one, provided they’re registering an 0.15 on the alcohol meter.
A tattered, sun baked and grossly wrinkled white man, his long beard and unkempt, stringy hair matted into angry snarls from the grease and mud he lives in under the freeway overpass, searched through a Dumpster behind a Mexican market. He placed a few wretched items in a shopping cart overfilled with bulging plastic garbage bags and false hopes for a better tomorrow.
I pulled up to a red light and watched a man in camouflage clothing come out of a 7-Eleven and use a quarter to play a scratch off game he bought with his last two dollars. He doesn’t believe in God, America or anything else but he believes in the lottery. A loser again, he tossed the card down in disgust and walked back into the store and shoved a gun into the cashier’s face and demanded money. A police officer eating a donut and drinking coffee in the back of the store drew his firearm out of its holster faster than Doc Holliday ever did and shot him dead. The loser lost for the last time.
Meanwhile, I speed home to my empty, one bedroom apartment. Once there, I smoke crack for its momentary euphoria. The wonderful crack I abuse eases the tight grip severe depression has on my mind. Pot and alcohol and cocaine do too but crack is the greatest, most intense high ever invented by man. So much so that if you let yourself become addicted to it you will be at its mercy and crack shows no mercy for it is a killer. It will murder your mind and then it will murder your body. It’s definitely the Devil’s Smoke. Why? Because once smoked crack gives you a feeling of total ease with yourself and your surroundings, an absolute happiness envelopes your entire being. It makes you feel like you’re floating on a soft white cloud above seas of endless sugar. Since I’ve never before experienced this kind of intense feeling of joy, crack literally forces you to do another bowl because you don’t want that joyful feeling to leave you. Crack’s grip on your soul is strong because it’s !
But crack’s only drawback, unfortunately, is you can’t get a hard-on while fucked up on it. Try it. You’ll see. You become a dead man down there where it counts. Even if you’re horny as shit you cannot get an erection while high on crack. If you want to fuck a bitch like crazy it won’t happen if you’re smoking da rock, bro. Just wait, however. Let the crack wear off. Give it an hour. Then you can fuck her brains out. But you won’t be high. So it won’t be the same as being on crack while fucking her. So then you probably won’t want to fuck her anyway.
As usual, I lay on my bed and do what I did in the previous millennium: abuse drugs, drink alcohol and watch unreal t.v. shows so I can forget the reality of the great dull zero that is life. Mankind has not advanced much in how it treats itself --- one-third of the world’s nation’s are at war, eight million motherfuckers are locked up in jail cells worldwide, tens of millions are enslaved and millions more are starving to death --- but it has reached nirvana in how it gets off. Amen for that.
