“These are the writings of a very young man, whose life unfolded nowhere in particular; he had no FATHER, no country; he cared nothing for the things one cares for, and he fled from every moral law, as many pitiful young men have already fled. But so tormented was he, and so afflicted, that he only drew on toward death as toward a terrible and fatal innocence. Since he did not love women- although full of passion!- his heart and soul and all his strength were wasted in strange, sad delusions. The dreams that follow (his loves!), that came to him in different beds or in the streets, the way they develop and the way they end, arise perhaps from delicate religious ideas. Yet these strange sufferings possess a disturbing authority, and force one sincerely to hope that this soul, who has lost his way among us, who evidently desires death, may in that final instant find sober consolations- and be worthy of them.”
Arthur Rimbaud, The Wastelands of Love
Harry awoke with what he thought was dried saliva, or vomit, on his cheek; he was wrong. Blots of blood were on his pillowcase. Blood was a clot in his ear. Blood was caked in his matting. Blood was a crust in the corners of his maw.
Harry sat up carefully, painfully. His body ached from fighting, and he had a disabling hangover. He wrestled out of his meager bedsheets and made his way to the bathroom mirror. He studied his bruised face in the mirror, touched gingerly the crescent beneath his right eye. Turning on the hot water, he filled the cups of his palms and carried the water to the bread dough that was his face. He rubbed delicately that rigid batter, the batter that was his face.
Harry attempted to piece together the previous evening. It had begun innocently enough. Him and a buddy had been drinking beer in the friends’ shed, his friends’ name was Jeff, and the two of them went back to elementary school together. They had been seated around Jeff’s dirtbike, it was a YZ 250, and Jeff loved that dirtbike. Jeff was a dirtbike fanatic, Harry didn’t understand fanatics.
It had been a wet, mild dusk, and the sky crept down to insinuate itself within the autumnal mists. It was one of those dismal, opaque evenings that are such a wonderful reason for suburban boys to drink about, but, maybe only a suburban boy would understand that. Regardless, they drank. They drank beer, a lot of beer. They drank rivers of unabashed beer.
Harry and Jeff had been plopped beneath a lantern talking of the same mundane shit that half-drunk male kids talk all across suburbia: cars, girls, memorable incidents, invented lays, superficial dreams and aspirations, nonsense, bullshit. It had been an uneventful evening which had culminated into an uneventful conclusion.
Harry recalled walking back to his mobile home through the light rain, and his breath issued from between his lips in punctuated cloudbursts, yet he’d felt warm. Beers were crammed in every pocket large enough to contain a can of beer. The night was pleasant and empty, and perhaps that had been the pleasure Harry had relished most, a night erased of any discernible life, any light. He’d drank a beer as he walked, and he was grateful for the solitude of the journey. No cars prowled past, no familiar voice interrupted his reveries, no yammering insistent friends to intrude upon his self-absorption.
Harry was transported then, backward into the rapture of nearly a decade, backward into the occupied long scrawls penned on paper, syntax aligning into inadequate sentences, swelling into the paragraphs which deliver swollen pages of novels. And he was then laid upon his stomach, with a crooked left arm in a strange bed, the comfort of a Marlboro between his index and middle fingers, scribbling scrawl-
He commenced to slugging
My face when i
Spit into his hideous
Eye.
I saw too many lights,
They burned like salt,
Tasted of copper,
Sounded in dizzy thuds.
My head dragged through glass
In a sightless span of
Asphalt stretching into
Hectares of omnipresent strip malls.
Through my half-closed
Eyelids i witnessed K-Mart
Somersault, and i could
Almost taste the big pretzels
And frozen Cokes.
When we came to on
Barstools, he wiped
My face, and his,
And ordered shots of bourbon.
Vignettes of numerous beatings; so much nastiness and violence etched upon the pages. So much of his nasty life coagulated between the lines of notebook paper. And to what end? All the means of drinking and fighting, and carousing and manipulating...to what? and, for what?
Harry remembered (read of on his cluttered bed) the night drinking Cisco (cheap wine), emerging from a blackout into the sodium glare of his friends’ backseat. He came to being beaten with fists and foreheads, two friends of his friend. They’d broken his nose, left his lips split open, jaw badly bruised. He’d folded over and sobbed for mercy, pleading to “just stop already, enough!” They didn’t stop, not for a while more; his friend eventually stopped them. Just a petty squabble gone wrong, misunderstandings.
Harry read again on his cluttered bed (remembered) a beating he took from another buddy, in the reservoir, another drunken night and its’ share of drunken misunderstandings, and resentments, and revenge. On the slopes of the reservoir he’d been hurt badly. With two black eyes and bruises covering his shaved head, he had had to face his family the following day at Easter dinner. His grandfather asked him sardonically, patronizingly, if he’d been beaten with a baseball bat. His grandfather had been a fighter, a pro boxer, before marrying his grandmother. Harry desperately loved his quiet, almond-ugly granpa.
Harry (read and remembered on his sullen bed) and the two friends he had fought with over ridiculous, small quantities of weed or beer. They’d fought, and Harry again was stomped and choked and warned to “Stay down!! Goddammit!” But of course he’d get up again, get knocked down by one of them and stomped by the other again...O’ banal madness!
All the inconsequential incidents: the sucker punches, the broken beer bottles, the ravaged furniture, torn shirts and coats, the slicing and gashing and scabbed knuckles; and blood did run down the walls!, and windows did get shattered!
A tear (or was it the light rain?) slid down the furrow of Harry’s cheek, and he let loose with an unearthly howl, so...
He sunk the pen he had been writing with cleanly through the top of his left hand. The sensation of this act, strangely enough, was not pain, but a dolorous curiosity, so he turned his hand over and studied the pen tip which protruded through his palm, and he smiled.
The night left a mark of its own doldrums upon Harry and Harry’s half-drank can of beer; and Harry relished the nights’ mist flung doldrums, savored the quiet recollections, was resolved to peer all night into his reveries. The mobile homes crept by scowling, but Harry didn’t scowl. He took a long drink from his half-drank beer and felt his pockets (for the third time in three blocks) to reassure himself that he had more beer.
Harry laid perplexed on his strange bed (with a crooked left arm, the comfort of a Marlboro between the index and middle fingers, scribbling scrawl-). It had been an uneventful evening which had culminated into an uneventful conclusion. He could not recall how he had been hurt so badly, and he searched madly for a cigarette, a notebook, a can of half-drank beer. He scrawled another sentence over the rough spot called Life, took another swig from the half-drank can of beatings, pieced together a medley of scratched tatoos and cheap wine in the park (Hampton).
A suburban drunk is like no other, but you meet him everywhere telling you what happened to your face last night.
“Sorry about the mess.”
Unknown author