Everyday Madness, Chapter Three

Last night, aiming at suicide, I swallowed an excessive amount of prescription drugs; a combination of Methadone tablets, Percocet, and Xanax, but instead of sleeping myself to death, I spent the night sweating and eating thick crust pizza while wearing nothing except my Winnie the Pooh slippers and an orange beret. I tried to masturbate but my cock had no feeling and played dead. I smashed my hand with a hammer just to feel something.
Coffee is black and best served hot. The devil lives in Tazmania. Sometimes, when people ask me simple questions, I pretend not to know the answers. The sky is red and my teeth are bleeding, but tomorrow will be worse. I am the anti-man. My name is Reilly and I want to die.
*
When I open the door Melanie is standing there. Her hair has been dyed pink. She smiles up at me. I’m not sure what to say.
“Your goddam hair’s pink.”
“Do you like it?” she asks and steps inside.
“No, not really.”
“Fuck you, then.”
She hugs me, her head barely reaching my shoulders. Hot breath blows on my chest and the smell of strawberry shampoo gets in my nose. I can feel stiff nipples through the thin yellow cashmere sweater she’s wearing.
“Actually,” I lie to her, “It’s kind of sexy.”
“Thanks.” She smiles and shows straight, bright teeth. She seems pleased. “Where you been?”
“Running. It’s good for me. Flushes the toxins and releases endorphins.”
“Have you eaten yet?”
“No.”
I cook thick bloody hamburgers and we take shots of whiskey while they cook, enjoying the smell of the meat frying in the pan. When we eat, she puts too much ketchup on her burger and the thick red slush mixes with grease and drips down her chin. I laugh and give her a napkin.
Finished with the food, I take a Xanax and sit back in my chair. Melanie lies on the carpet, points her arm straight up, and uses her fingers to trace phantom images on the ceiling. I close my eyes and try to imagine what happiness feels like, then fantasize about being a bear. There’s a dead spot on my back, almost at the base of my spine. It’s numb most of the time, but every once and awhile there’s a tingle and the sensation of hundreds of pounds of pressure pushing down on that one little spot. It’s tingling now.
Melanie gets up and walks over, grabs my hand, pulls me to my feet.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
“Okay.”

Afterwards we lie next to each other without speaking. A giraffe is humming Dixie from somewhere unseen. I turn on a John Prine album and the music relaxes me.
“My life is a waste,” Melanie says.
“Was it really that bad? I thought I made you cum.”
“You know what I mean.”
I do and say, “That’s what drugs are for.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“That’s life. My life at least. Makes yours look good in comparison, I guess.”
“There has to be some point to it, some greater purpose.”
“Well, you could always try to justify your existence with a belief in some imaginary higher power. I hear disillusionment works wonders.”
“That’s crap.”
“Yeah, probably.”
I light a joint and we pass it back and forth. The red ember glows in the dark.
“You just have to accept that we are mean, selfish creatures living insignificant lives.” I tell her. “The best we can hope for is some kind of control over our destinies.”
“I just…I just need to know it’s all for something.”
“I just said it’s all insignificant. You’re born, you suffer, you die. If something nice happens in between, consider yourself lucky.”
“You don’t think that’s what life is? The nice stuff in between?”
“No,” I say, “I don’t.”
Even in the darkness her body looks tan. Her legs are short, but muscular and defined. My gut looks pregnant, my skin white as the moonlight trickling through the window.
“Then it’s all just a waste. There’s no point.”
“Pretty much. Yeah.”
“How can you live like that?
“Drugs help, even if just for little bits of time. They bring happiness, euphoria. I’ve heard people say that it’s not real happiness, but what is? Only feelings are real. I think drugs are the real God, and if that’s true it means I can capture God in a bottle, a line, or a needle. I like that thought.”
“You might as well kill yourself.”
I stub the joint into the clay ashtray between us on the bed.
“I think about that everyday of my life.”
“What about love? Love’s something to hope for.”
“Love is the worst kind of bullshit.”
“Have you ever loved anyone?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“She left.”
“Why?”
“I guess she didn’t love me anymore.”
“Do you love me?”
There’s a nickel sized bruise on her ass and I poke it with my finger.
“I don’t know. No. I don’t think I ever want to be in love again.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re only twenty-six.”
“What does that matter?”
“You’re too young to say something so definitive. You probably don’t even know what love is.”
“I think I do. That’s enough for me.”
“But what if what you felt before wasn’t real love? What if you just thought it was because you didn’t know any better.”
“It was real. It was love.”
“What did she do to you?”
“She just…stopped loving me. That was enough. I never want to hurt like that again.”
“You can’t just give up because that relationship didn’t work out. You’ll be missing out on life. It’s pathetic.”
“It’s enough for me.”
“You’re an idiot.”
*
I go to a party at one of the big white houses on Greek Row. The house belongs to a fraternity that everyone claims is run by coke heads. There’s a band playing and I wander among the crowd with a huge bottle of gin, smoking a joint and screaming “Do you have cocaine?” but everyone says no and offers to buy some from me if I can find any. A girl in a pink shirt approaches and flirts while touching my arm, but I am too nervous and turned off by her eagerness, so I tell her to leave me alone.
I climb the stairs and walk down the halls. Kicking open bedroom doors, I only find drinking, smoking, and fucking – no sniffing. A huge drunken beast charges me and I have to smoke a joint with him to avoid personal bodily harm. Frustrated, I finally call Rich and he brings me an ounce and some digital scales.
I make base in the big beast’s room He’s high now, and appeased, so he tells me his name is Matt. I begin selling grams for sixty dollars, with no price reduction for quantity. A greasy man with black fingernails trades me for some heroin that I quickly put up my nose and the night gets better. Once they’ve all had a taste I raise the price to seventy-five but they keep coming back, faster than before.
A girl sucks my dick but I’m too geeked up for anything to work down there so she finally gets bored and passes out next to me on the couch. Just before six in the morning, a guy, older than me with bloodshot eyes and the stink of liquor - shaking, near death - enters the room with a handful of coins and dumps a clatter of quarters onto the glass coffee table and begs “I’ve got $4.25, man. Hook me up with a line. Please.”
I laugh and tell him to bring me money, paper money. He starts to cry and lays on the floor near my feet. Matt comes back and tells me he’s going to bed and that I need to leave, so I drive home, bang my head against a wooden chair over and over, then sleep for twenty hours.