Is that the answer?

Is that the Answer?

This small excerpt is also from broke'n my work in progress. It actually occurs fairly late in the story, but really could have occured at almost any point after the first few chapters. Jimmy (the protagonist) is walking along the streets of the upper middle class neighborhood where he grew up, and now that he has lived a very different life sees things differently. He is once again a stranger in a strange land.


As he walked on along the suburban streets where he had grown up he saw the familiar houses and cars in a new way. These were rich people. Most of them, if asked would say that they were middle class – but he knew different. He’d been in poverty - miserable grinding poverty. Poverty where there’s no milk for coffee-ever. Where there’s no money for juice, not even for kool- aid. He’d been living the kind of life where the only way to eat well is to steal food. He knew junkies who ate prime rib whenever they ate meat. After all, if you’re gonna steal, why steal hamburger?

Most of these so called middle class people wouldn’t dream of stealing anything. Their idea of being broke would be not being able to take a nice vacation, or not being able to get a new car. Being broke was being hungry, walking cause you didn’t have cab fare, or even bus fare never mind a car. That was a dream. And he knew the reason for much of it. The reason was in his veins, and in his pocket. It was heroin. It was coke. It was all the drugs that gave pleasure to lives where everything else was absent. And it was a problem bigger then anything he or anyone else he knew could solve. The solution lay in the eternal quest for happiness.

Happy people, content people don’t need drugs. They have what they need already. But what about all the people who will never have what they want or need? The people who will die alone, and lonely - those who society has shunned to the point that they no longer even try to fit in. They just fill in their forms, get their check, bang it into their arms…and the rest of the month?

Well thats why we keep building more prisons. That’s why...is that the answer?