London Calling, pt. 5: This is The End

The silence of the car and the stillness of the air only exacerbate the tension building in me as I sit on the side of the road in the Delta. I'm surrounded by endless expanses of nothingness pregnant and oppressive with the force to make me realize my insignificance like some piece of forgotten flotsam on the face of the endless seas that girdle this earth. I don't have to have my eyes open to know that my knuckles are white from trying to throttle the steering wheel or that every single muscle in my face is taut from gritting my teeth. A cacophony of emotions burns, rising uncontrollably after so much work on suppressing them for weeks.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm feeling them for the first time.

I explode into tears, with a violent scream I feel coursing through every single last fiber of my body as I shake myself and try to rip the steering column from its welds in my car. I weep. Jesus, I weep so hard that I lose control of myself. My body contorts and twists as it tries to fit itself into the fetal position, as if my body is trying to move to the one evolutionary comfort hard-wired into our very souls. My face hurts so much from the tortuous effects this effort of blatant emotional display forces upon muscles that are far too often unused for a society to be truly successfully expressive. There is a sort of dignity that comes from this sort of honest, cavalier display of humanity; however, I lose it as I slowly slide down in my car seat, moving from weeping into a sort of snuffling, self-drowning crying that almost lacks the energy to even exist in the first place.

I'm broken, ruddy-faced and tear-stained, stewing in a cheap suit soaked with sweat from an August funeral. And alone. So alone in this place, where the only landmark is a dead tree off somewhere and cicadas are so loud I can barely hear my own pathetic blubbering.

I get it, I'm nothing.

I first heard that Becca had died in the bathroom of a Village Inn. The seafoam green wall and the creme tiles on the floor and I were soon acquainted as I slid down the wall to lightly come to rest on the floor after hearing the voicemail from Aaron. The message never really set in, no matter how many times I replayed it and no matter how many customers walked in eyeing me like I was some insane junkie. It's been a week since I fled Conway for Memphis in some vain attempt to try and find salvation from this crucible. Salvation was just a veneer it seems, and losing Becca demolished the little dream I had of my reality.

Becca was an archetypal college friend. She was someone you could fall out of contact with for months at a time, yet would still know you on site and care about every little detail you could tell her. She was patient and kind, she was caring, she was honest. She was a blast to drink with, too. Jesus, the nights where that girl saved me by opening her place to me and my drunken antics. The Night of the Throw'd Chairs, one of my absolute favorite nights of all time, was all under the aegis of Becca. She was also a pillar throughout many of my classes. If it hadn't been for her support, I might not have made it through some of my classes. If the revolution had come, and backs went against the wall, she would have been in my Politboro.

Becca lived and died around Helena-West Helena, a sleepy town on the Arkansas bank of the Mississippi. That damn river is going to call me until the day I die, it seems.

The days between when I get the news and the funeral are a blur. I worked on the pipeline, I talked to plenty of people, I did things. Numbed, that was it. I was completely numbed to an infinite degree. The thing that kept troubling me was that me not feeling anything didn't keep me from thinking about my lack of feeling or, for that matter, Michelle. Not since I came back have I wanted to just hear her voice as much as I do now, and it's a pain in the ass to realize that I probably still love this girl. Confusion is not the emotion I want on top of mourning the loss of one of my best friends. A heart can only handle so much, and Tom Waits is calling me.

The road curves, guiding me through Fordyce, Kingsland, Rison, Pine Bluff, and the multitude of towns that depend on the fertile soils and unnerving flatness of the Delta for their sustenance, and very existence. It is this swathe of black soil and wide open space that feeds the mouths of the world, that gives life to an innumerable mass the world over. It is this living soil that will house Becca to its finality. Ashes to ashes, I guess. I don't want to ponder the whole life-death-circle-of-life bullshit right now. I'm tired of the phoenixes, I'm tired of the martyrs, I'm tired of the messiahs. I simply want absolution and manumission from this torment, and being the maladroit I am I can't seem to find any way out. I wonder, more seriously than I would like to admit, if somehow Becca died because of me. Maybe, somehow, I've had some sort of karmic retribution upon myself that is so enormous that it somehow steals innocents' breath in order to punish me?

Hell.

I stomp the pedal to the floor, speeding into the east and (hopefully) leaving that self-destructive train of thought to choke on my carbon monoxide, just in time to almost be caught by a state trooper. Not again. Some miles later, I reach the sole funeral home in Helena-West Helena in a complete and thorough daze that robs me of any sense of time or place. The automaton that ruled me when I was next to the Thames has taken over again, and before I know what's over or even before I can tell something has started, I'm off with a friend in my car to stay the night at the Isle of Capri Casino in Lula, Mississippi. After all, what better way to memorialize our friend who had a lust for life and genuine happiness than burying ourselves in the disorienting lights of slot machines and the intoxicants provided en masse, for free by the single greatest source of revenue for the impoverished State of Mississippi? What better way to remember the passing of a friend, what else can I do to forget the monumental loss of one of the most beautiful people than by doing whatever necessary to force my mind into not firing those synapses?

Being the shallow asshole I am, I'm almost late for the funeral when I decide to go to McDonald's for breakfast. The funeral is a nonevent, for me. I don't know these people. I don't know these memories. I don't want to. I'm fucking lost and adrift in myself as wave after wave of conflicting emotions dash my brain and heart into the hard rocks of life over and over again with unrelenting fury and inhumane delight. You want schadenfreude? If humans weren't ingrained with this disgusting trait, we wouldn't do half the things we do to ourselves to make our pain linger that much longer every time our miserable, filthy little hearts find themselves ruptured.

The burial is intense. The heat pressing down on the congregated people there from all walks of life, the sun that sets skin aflame with a simple kiss, the emotional tension and outpouring that is such a constant that it almost desensitizes you to its presence as soon as it is encountered. A Methodist reverend dedicates Becca's remains to the soil that has provided these people with their very way of life. Small talk follows, that inane sort of thing that people do instead of either falling silent in reverence towards the power of the moment or ripping your goddamn heart out and sticking a pin through it on your lapel. Negotiations begin on lunch and other worthless drivel, and the road calls again. Leaving, we see a honor guard from the Army approach.

It sucks being in a nation that enshrines people who die so young they never truly lived.

I don't know what brought it on. I don't know what sort of Joshua it took to break down my walls that had held in all the emotional responses I should have been feeling for the last weeks, but when it came I was unprepared. I weep on the side of US 79, somewhere south of Stuttgart for the better part of a quarter of an hour. My mind seems to have stopped working, I cry things out to no-one in particular, I make mad statements that have no subject, no verb, no direct objects. It's as if Irving Washington has taken his censoring to my very speech. These animalistic and pathetic utterances are not even worth wasting the time or energy on, but for some reason doing it makes me feel better. A catharsis that happens so naturally and fluidly it is almost like I'm not doing it myself. Everything is fuzzy and glazed over. I'm losing touch.

Suddenly, clarity. Sadness waxes evanescent and is replaced by sobering, clear, pain-fueled rage. RAGE. There is no fairness to this whole goddamn farce that I call a life. First, Michelle. Then, jail. Then, Becca. Where is the fucking justice in this, why is this happening so fast, with such intensity? Fuck karma. There is no way that karma exists if this is happening to me, I have done my fair share of lying, cheating, stealing, and general illicit intoxicants in my time, but nothing to warrant THIS. No, this is bigger. This is more pointed, like a knife aimed right at the heart. This much pain has to have a purpose, I refuse to believe this much misery is simply chance! I scream and rant and rave in my car. I curse Michelle with every name, every word I can think of for making me so numb I couldn't cry when someone far more deserving of my tears than her died. I curse her for every little thing she ever did to hurt me and to make me so blind that I can see no one but her in the single greatest moment of pain I've ever felt. I curse Lynn for not loving me anymore. I curse my parents for living in such an inaccessible part of BFE. I curse me for every single little transgression and sin I've ever committed in my life before I descend into tears again.

I'm volatile. I'm desperate. I want, more than anything else, some kind of peace. I beg God for help. I beg Him to kill Michelle and bring back Becca. I ask Him to kill me. I ask Him to give me the Michelle from two months ago, the one who loved me as much as I loved her. No, not her. I want someone who I can love like I loved her. I ask Him to simply leave me alone. I cry and cry and cry, my dirge for Tom Joad. Then, the tears stop. The anger dies. I sit, staring straight ahead in a moment of odd, shimmering tranquility that I imagine settled over Dresden when all was said and done. A moment that is so still and quiet that not even your lungs dare disturb it by drawing a single breath.

This adventure is over. I have roads to drive, gas to burn. I have to live.

Keep on rockin' in the free world, 'cause your pretty little face is going to hell.

London Calling, pt. 4: Burden In My Hand

Assuming that all things are equal,
Who'd want to be men of the people,
When there's people like you?
- Arctic Monkeys, "Teddy Picker"

Good things are gonna start happening to me now.
- Navin R. Johnson, "The Jerk

When dawn breaks on Sunday, I'm up with it. Despite the copious amounts of toxins that I willingly (ignorantly?) dumped in my system the night before, I feel absolutely amazing. It's almost as if I've shed a filthy layer of skin, a dead sheath of epidermal loathing and hate that forced me to be wrapped in the very thing I've been trying to escape since I set foot on native soil. The company, the jokes, watching 300 on an amazing projector in Kevin's rec room. All of it helped to purge this necrotic part of my heart, or at least sufficiently opiate me to it.

Basically, I haven't even thought of Michelle in two days.

I manage to catch Kevin's wife and thank her for her ear before she's off to count pills, and chat it up with Kevin before I go. The least I can do to thank that jerk is leave him Chuck Klosterman's IV as a parting gift. If he's read even half of it, he must absolutely loathe me by now for dumping something like that on him. Sure, pop culture and the over-analysis of it is fine and dandy, but when you combine a pop culture critic with a man who's entire subsistence depends on furthering and sustaining pop culture as well, it's like a monkey with a hand grenade: You don't know what's going to happen, but you know it can't be good.

The drive to Little Rock is entirely uneventful, a blessing at this point. To put it simply, I'm vegging beyond vegging out. I hum every song on the radio in a tone that is not just tone deaf, but has no idea tone even exists. Tone is dead to my hum, and it'll wake up with a horse's head in its bed if it's not careful. What's really strange is driving away and hearing Kevin's voice on the radio for a good 30 miles outside of Memphis before I switch to another station.

Sometimes, you just can't lose a good friend no matter how hard you try.

Serene and sedate, I pull into Little Rock during the early afternoon. I honestly don't remember if this was the time I pulled in to our quaint little capital, but it felt like early afternoon. It felt like reading a book on the grass at Riverfest Amphitheater, it felt like riding a bike across the Big Dam Bridge, it felt like going to the beer garden at Dickey-Stephens Park and watching the Travs wallop some team while being pleasantly baked in the gentle, warm air along the banks of the Arkansas River (So, the Travs don't always win, but they do to the people watching them as per the laws of Arkansas sports). I'm happy, in a serene manner not entirely unlike that of a marshmallow Peep floating in a pranked fountain. So much so, in fact, that I don't really remember what I did that day until the early evening. I'm pretty sure I saw Lynn at UALR. I'm pretty sure I tried to call Aaron or even swing by in Jacksonville. I'm pretty sure I saw Mary at some point. I sure as hell know I went by Dillard's to harass and joke with Marcus all afternoon.

Marcus got off work and agreed to meet me and Mary at Carino's in North Little Rock. Mary and I, consciously choosing to be uncharacteristically punctual, arrive a full 45 minutes before he can even show up, giving us more than enough time to put away several bellinis. Marcus and his fiancée arrive, and the night gives way to hearty laughs, jokes, and do-you-remember-whens. Times like this, when I'm surrounded by unrelenting love at the dinner table, make me wonder what it was like to be around Christ as He lectured and preached to the masses. Christ, His most passionate sermons, and food are intrinsically linked as it very well should be. When our minds and hearts are being piqued and tickled, why shouldn't our bodies be equally warm and stable?

Eventually, dinner ends. My friends, damn true as they are and amazing to the end, part ways with me and I drive Mary around for a bit. We talk, we're brutally open with each other, we're entirely at ease and completely, rapturously enveloped in the moment. It's like being back in the pool, a feeling so good that I'm oblivious to everything around me, which is why I'm very curios to catch sight of blue lights in my rear-view mirror.

Cops don't and never have worried me. Sure, there are more than the fair share of pricks out there on every force, those that are drunk on the modicum of power they have, those that feel they are above the law instead of servants to it (Boys In Tha Hood, anyone?). More often than not, the police I've run into are congenial and professional. I've always treated them respectfully and gotten out of speeding tickets or other moving violations. And I don't even have a rack.

The guy pulling me over is a State Trooper, and his backup arrives almost immediately. I had spilled some bellini on my jeans while at Carino's, so their first concern is to make me take a breathalyser test. Since the day saw fit to turn 100+ degrees, their anti-Irish gadgetry has over-heated and won't work. I pass a field test with flying colors and immediately go through the rigmarole of having my license called in for a background check. No problem. I'm clean. I speed, I take little pens from the library, I lie, I take change left in soda machines. But I have no major crimes to....

....there is a fucking warrant out for my arrest?! In Conway?!

Have you ever had a moment where everything in the world you believed in came crashing down around you simply because one of the smaller things at the bottom that supports bigger things at the top turned out to either be a lie or was somehow invalidated? To shorten that sentence and sound all the more pretentious at the same time, have you ever had an existential crisis? I've had two. Finding out I was a wanted criminal was the second. The first was when a friend of mine from AGS, Elyse, confided in me that she absolutely loved giving blowjobs. I don't know why I made that out to be such a big deal, but my world was pretty much based on a few simple presumptions about the nature of reality:

• The Rolling Stones are a better rock band than the Beatles (The Beatles are unquestionably pop, meaning the Stones win on a technicality)

• Apocalypse, Now! is the best Vietnam movie. Ever. And one of the greatest of all time.

• If a town has far too many shoe stores in proportion to the people residing within it, it isn't worth living there, mentioning it, canvassing districts there during a primary election, or anything more than a general life-passing-a-small-town-by sort of phenomenon. Usually these places are either small out-of-the-way towns that were granted interstate access, or former small towns that became squashed between two larger, more meaningfully existing cities.

• Elyse is cute, intelligent, virginal, and most certainly does not get visceral pleasure from giving men oral sex. This is a matter of fundamental importance to the existence of the universe as we know it. It really is. It's a catechism for Christ's sake.

• I'm entirely mediocre in every regard except for my mastery of ad hominen attacks involving compound curse words (See: Assfucking shitwhore).

I think it was because for a split second after Elyse told me this, I figured that all innocence in the world had just become evanescent (Last American Virgin, anyone?). Fucking Holden Caulfield. I'm stuck in the goddamn rye field with you after all, trying to save innocence that is only doomed to be lost. So, that's that meaningless anecdote.

The arresting trooper was far nicer to me than I would like to think he is to most law-breakers he takes into custody. He actually apologized for handcuffing me, telling me he knew I wasn't going to make trouble but that it “a procedural precaution.” Fair enough. He even held my cell phone to my head so I could make the single most embarrassing and humiliating phone call of my life to my dear old mum. On the ride to the station, he even went so far as to ask me why I was so tired, why I wasn't with Mary, and that I should gladly forget that Michelle had deigned it worthy to remove herself from that equation that I call my life. This wasn't an arrest or extradition. This was two actors in some cosmically misaligned drama throwing caution and the script to the wind and ad libbing a few lines of black comedy. There is no way that this is anywhere in the same ZIP code as real.

The Conway officer picking me up wasn't bad, either. In fact, he handcuffed me with my hands in front after the trooper told him I was “a good kid who just made a stupid mistake.” Joke's on him, I used that chance to text every single person I knew in Conway to come bail me the fuck out of jail. Joke's on me, nobody came save for Mary. The guy riding with me wasn't too much for company, though. Being drunk and having just beaten your wife will do that for a person. Understandably so.

When my jolly troupe (Mr. Officer, Mr. Drunkard, and myself) arrive at Faulkner County Detention Unit II, I am finally served my warrant and go through a bit of a cold tremblor as the extent of my crimes that made me wanted man are no more than $2.76 worth of a hot check.

Say what you want about comedy, but absurdism is absolutely amazing for a laugh in a dark moment (Dr. Strangelove, anyone?). The deputies in the jail all shoot me looks like I'm worth killing on the spot when I laugh at the fact that I was arrested in one town, hauled to another for extradition, and then hauled to a prison in another county over an amount that won't even buy a small popcorn at a movie theater. That may be why I was last to be processed and thrown into my cell with three other guys long after everyone else was pulled for fingerprints and mugshots.

Yes, processed. Stripes (Smell odd). Fingerprints (Nifty, all digital!). Mugshot (I'm oddly photogenic). Shower in front of a deputy (The ultimate in humiliation). Thrown in a room with nothing to sleep on but the concrete floor (Been there). Yeah, the ol' fuzz finally caught Tom Joad.

This place unnerves me in a way that almost makes me doubt that I'm really here. Even though I see the people outside my door, the way they completely ignore the prisoners here is an insult that just breeds self-loathing. It makes you wonder if you truly aren't good enough for these good people, these right people anymore. I sometimes wonder if criminals are repeat offenders so often because they don't know how to validate themselves after living an existence in which they are practically denied the acknowledgment that they even take in oxygen. It sounds trite and insignificant, but this place honestly makes me wonder if Michelle was right when she yelled some of the things she did at me that last night.

I'm set to be arraigned at 1:30, whenever that is. Probably an hour and thirty minutes after I'm served two rubbery hot dogs, if logic doesn't fail me. Still, that leaves a lot of time between the applesauce and white bread and rubbery hot dogs to burn. The denizens of cell #22 resort to the one thing that all American men have turned to in times of dire need and absolute malaise: Paper football. We play paper football over and over and never tire of it. We bounce the “ball” off the wall. We try and shoot it through the slot in the door that the food trays were delivered through (The deputies catch on and shut the door within minutes). In a place where time has no meaning and where meaning has no pertinence to begin with, where else do we have to go but back to the comforts of high school boredom?

Two dollars and seventy-six cents. Sure, a law is a law. I broke a law, and I have to pay for it. But seriously. What is the fucking point in shackling my ankles and wrists to go before a judge for two dollars and seventy-fucking-six cents?! For the cost of my stripes, hours for the manpower (trooper, CPD officer, deputies, the judge), my three meals, and the gas to transport me here, the state could have probably done something more worthwhile. Orwell himself couldn't have penned a more biting satire than what this state is willingly doing to itself. Compared to many of the guys in there, I get off easy. I pay a $3 (HA!) bond and walk out after only 18 hours in jail.

I flew home from London a broken, hurt, despairing person who was in a dive straight into self-inflicted oblivion. Then, I waged a war with demons that won and drove me east. Finally, I drove home, happy and free only to end up behind bars with a guy who looked like the Unabomber and had a toenail that he could peel back to keep a small stash of pot in. Sometimes, life throws you a curveball. Sometimes, it just intentionally walks you.

In less than a week, life was going to bean me in the temple with a Nolan Ryan fastball and there was nothing I could do about it. Everything I had worked hard to free myself was going to return, with a bloodlust from hell.