why bother, you pee blood...

The fucking Police was playing when I walked into the bar.

“God damn I hate the fucking Police,” I yelled. Then I remembered something important, I was at the bar because a friend invited me. That friend? He’s a cop. And the bar was filled with cops.

So, like Tim Roth says in Reservoir Dogs, you’ve just got to jump right in and swim. That in mind, I walk up to the jukebox, just as Sting finishes saying something stupid over a backbeat provided by a drummer who appeared in a reality show about storage unit auctions. I put my dollar in. I picked my song.

“Right about now, N.W.A. court is in full effect…”

A few seconds later, a couple hundred cops were chanting along with Ice Cube, Easy-Z and Dr. Dre.

I watched this scene for a few seconds and thought back to 1988. I was a teenager who wanted to be James Hetfield. I drank like him. That was about the end of similarities. I had more of a Dave Mustaine mullet. I don’t think about high school much. Nothing much happened.

Kind of like this party. It’s at a strip-mall bar. It stinks like pee. I want to go home.

But I don’t. Why? I don’t know. Maybe something will happen.

I order a shot of Jameson and a Miller High Life to chase it down. I gave up drinking soon after my stroke. Well, I didn’t “give it up” as much as I just stopped because it hurt to drink now. That made it silly to do. Yeah, I still think about the girls and women of my past. And now, I don’t fight with them anymore. I just look at them and nod. Yep, still here.

Then I eat some unsalted nuts out of a can from CVS.

I take a sip of the beer. Fuck, it tastes bad. Then I take the shot. It tastes worse. But the beer, now it tastes OK.

Why am I friends with a cop? I’ve never had a good experience with one. It’s weird. Except that guy who showed up at my apartment in New Bern at 3 a.m. one night. I was blasting The Faces, signing along with Rod and Ronnie, and drinking way too much. I guess one of my neighbors complained to the police. Instead of just knocking on my door. Of course, I opened the door when the cop showed up in my shorts only. Beer gut hanging out, bottle of Shiner in one hand, devil horns in the other.

“Yes?”

“Sir, could you turn down the musi….Hey, is that a Jump in the Fire Metallica poster?” he said.

“Well, yes it is,” I said slurring just the it.

“Soooo awesome, man.”

“It is?”

“I never got to see Metallica, but they’re my favorite!” he said, to me, I guess still.

“Saw them twice in a month back in high school,” I said, puffing my chest a little bit. I have seen some good music, even though when SHE happened, I mostly stopped.

“Cool, cool,” he said. “But man, can you turn down the Rod Stewart? Neighbors complained.”

“Yeah, not a problem. Gotta be at work in the morning,” I said, fully knowing I went to work when I wanted. Some days at noon, others at 5 p.m., and still others never. Being the boss at that point of my life was a good, and bad thing.

“Night officer,” I said, slamming the door behind me and turning off the stereo. I drank the last half of the Shiner in my hand and threw the bottle in the trash can. It hit another bottle. “Clank, cla, clank.”

I went into the bathroom and peed … blood.

Probably should have paid closer attention to that stuff, I think, now back in the bar in a strip mall in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina, surrounded by cops I don’t know wondering where the fuck the one I know is?

Probably getting a blowjob in the bathroom, his brother says to me. I guess I’d been narrating stuff out loud again. It’s a bad habit of mine. I’ve been punched three times because of it and slapped twice. And got a girls number. Why? Because I fucking asked for it. Who’da thunk that actually works?

How the fuck did Sting get so damn rich? I think.

I order another beer and another shot. It’s going to be either a really long night, or a very short one. I hope for the latter, but know I’m in for the former.

“She’s here,” my buddy, not the cop, but the other one at the party I know says.

I look over my shoulder and yep, there she is, not HER, but instead her. She stole my heart for a moment because I left it out to rot. She kept if from rotting, and poisoned it instead. And her mom told me she liked me best.

Like mother, like daughter.

I look at her and then I smile. Why? Because I figured it out before it was too late.

I scratch my balls and think about cancer cells and Miller High Life bottle caps. This, I think, would make a great fucking story. And then I realize this is exactly why I don’t write for a living. Except for that newspaper thing any more.

No keepers anymore

The first day I was here, back in April of 2010, I drank my last Lone Star beer to celebrate. That beer had been picked up by me when my buddy John and I drove across country to take his wife and his old dog to his parent’s house.

I held on to that beer for quite a while, saving it for a celebration. That celebration would only come when I got a job.

Well, I got a job, I moved to the beach, and I drank that beer. Up until a couple hours ago, I still had that bottle. But, I chucked it in the garbage as I was moving my stuff from that house to yet another moving van.

I’ve moved a lot over the years. Less frequently over the last decade than the decade before, but still a lot by most folk’s standards. Since 2002, I’ve lived in Greenville, New Bern, Greenville again, and Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. I also had a year-long stint in Richmond, Virginia. There was also the move of almost all of my stuff to Gainesville, Florida, where I stayed for about the amount of two months, maybe three, over the next three years. Then, I had to move all of my stuff back. That took three trips. That was pretty fucking awful.

Tomorrow, I’ll be leaving the beach. Well, my stuff will be. I’ll have to come back to get my car and to clean up the place. I may just hang out on the beach those few days. I won’t have anything else to do. All my stuff will be in Raleigh, North Carolina.

For the third time in my life, I’m moving in with my girlfriend. My lover. You get the point. Technically, it’s the fourth time, but she moved in with me the other time.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to this move.

I hated my job, and I no longer have it. That’s a good thing.

Not having a steady income, that’s a bad thing. But I’m working on it. Already got some freelance stuff lined up, which is more than I had the last time I got shown the door.

It’s raining outside. It’s pretty much rained every day since I got canned. I think that’s a sign. That even the beach isn’t worth what you went through to live the life.

Driving 100 miles a day. Killing your old car, then putting 70,000 miles on a new one in less than 2 ½ years. Looking at mediocrity being rewarded, hard work not. It was enough to make me quit. And I did, without leaving the job.

I regret that. It was a mistake hanging on “just because I have bills”.  That’s been my excuse for so many wrong decisions in my life. Hanging on to a job, hoping things would work themselves out on the other end.

Well, it never fucking works. Unless you win the lottery. The, of course, you get introduced to a entirely different set of problems and concerns. Ones that, honestly, I wouldn’t mind facing.

So, I’m going into this new chapter of my life – fuck, I’m 41 years old – with my eyes wide open. I am not going to take a job working for slave wages “just because it’s in the business” ever again. And I mean ever.

Yeah, I may get a job in the biz again. But only if it’s one I want. And know that I’ll enjoy.

Hell, one of the ones I turned down I would have loved. But, the place would have made me miserable. So I chose destination over substance. And for a little over a year, I knew I’d made the right decision. Then things changed.

I don’t regret the decision. I just wish I could have that chance again. Right now, not then. I’d go now. I’d kick ass and enjoy myself.

That’s what I’m hoping for wherever I end up. It could take days, weeks, months to find a job. I have no idea. I just know that I want something I enjoy.

Maybe I’ll bag groceries? That Whole Foods looked like an interesting place to be. A hell of a lot more interesting than a newsroom with no reporters, no editors and no one giving a damn at 6 p.m.

I’ve been bitter. Way too many times and for way too long of periods of time in my life. I’m not bitter right now. At all.

The random pop ups of the past still happen. But I smile at them now. I talk to people about them more often. And when I do, I don’t cry. I don’t squirm. I don’t try to change the subject. Yeah, it took me a long time to figure it out, but I did.

I haven’t lived in a ‘city’ other than my little journey into Richmond for a long time. I guess Arlington was it. I didn’t see Manassas as a “city”. It was a suburb.

New Orleans? I didn’t live there very long.

Ditto Birmingham.

Although I loved both of them, for very different reasons.

Tempe/Phoenix was certainly the last I lived in for an extended period of time. Not living on couches or on someone else’s dime, or even on a Murphy bed while one-legged women tried to get me to drink cheap beer with them. Damn, I should have drank beer with her.

Today, I’ll grill up some food and wait for my girlfriend to get here. None of my friends could help me move on this end. I’ll take that as another sign. Two people said they’d be here, both waited until yesterday to tell me they wouldn’t.

On the other end, at least a dozen people are going to be there. Lifting boxes and drinking beer brewed in my new home city of Raleigh. I’ll take that as another sign.

I’ve never been one to be into being positive about things. It’s a flaw, not a badge of honor. It’s taken me a long time to believe that too. Yeah, I’m still a pessimist. Yeah, I think it’s going to be amazingly hard to find employment. But, I don’t want to let it get me down. Not yet. It’s too damn early. And hell, I’ve actually networked some and shown some signs of it actually working. When newspaper guys email me, asking if I can work, that’s a hell of a good thing.

I enjoyed all my time here. Yeah, I cried some. I was sad some. But I also had a couple of kick-ass get-togethers, a few latenight drunken stumbles on the beach – both alone and with friends – and hell, I got to live at the beach for two and a half years. Another life’s goal met.

So, tonight I’ll drink the last of another batch of Lone Star beers. This one brought to me in Arkansas by a friend who lives in San Antonio. And I’ll smile when I throw the bottle away.

No keepers anymore.

Who are we kidding, there was never a plan ...

He sighed long and loud. His car was parking at a traffic light in New Bern, North Carolina. He’d made it 37 miles from his starting point – the Atlantic Ocean. How on earth was he going to finish this task in the three weeks he had?

Burying ghosts isn’t something that comes with a manual. He’d been dealing with them like a pit bar-b-que guy must deal with flies, he swats and hopes for the best.

She’d left him over six years ago. Six years, four months and 17 days ago to be exact. Two nights before, he’d finally realized that he’d been pining over her for longer than he knew her – six years, four months and 11 days. That epiphany hit its mark while lying in bed that morning. The wind was blowing outside and the cars were driving by on the still wet from an early rain road. He had to stop. And to make that possible, he had to do something interesting, something dramatic, something only he would think of.

So, he took a shower and went to work. Like he always did. For five days. Then, while sitting in his dusty cubicle at work, listening to the trollish co-worker beside him crying for the God only knows how manyieth day in a row, he got up walked to his boss’ desk and said “I quit.”

Stunned, the copy desk chief stared at him. “It is what it is, man,” he finally uttered.

“Fuck that,” he countered. “You’re just as stuck as I am, dawg.”

With that, he went outside knowing full well he’d never enter another newspaper office again. At least as an employee. That felt more liberating than what he was about to do, and that, he decided, was a damn good sign.

Driving the 58 minutes home he started plotting a course of action. How on earth could he do this? He had no job, was deep in debt and had a girlfriend. She knew he was messed up about his past, but she thought he was just too emotional.

His first decision was she couldn’t come with him.

He dialed her number. They rarely talked on the phone. She hated it. He hated it. His worst relationship moments had come on the phone. Fights from New Orleans to Arlington, Virginia. Crying fits. And the break up from Gainesville, Florida, to New Bern, North Carolina.

She picked up.

“Hey, honey,” she said. He didn’t remember her ever calling him honey. He tried to call her honey or hun a few times. She said it creeped her out.

“Hey, babe,” he responded. “I’ve got some news.”

“Good news?”

“I think so.” He paused. The next words out of his mouth were very important. And he hadn’t thought them through at all.

“Listen, I need some time by myself,” he instantly knew those were the wrong words.

“What?” she said, terrified.

“Let me re-phrase that,” he said. “I need to take a road trip. It’s going to be a long one. But I have to do it alone.”

“OK…Why?” she said, tentatively.

“I have to bury her,” he said. “She’d dead now. Well, she’s been dead for a long time. But I just found the corpse.”

He hoped she’d get it.

“You mean her? The one you always talk about in your sleep?”

“Yes,” he said. “I quit my job today.”

“What?”

“Good news is, I can move in with you now. No more long distance relationship. That is, at least after this trip is done.”

“Honey,” she sadly, “are you going to come back?”

“Unless I get killed driving or while eating pancakes somewhere, yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “I promise.”

“Love you,” she said softly. Her voice didn’t sound confident. He knew she had doubts about his intentions. It was funny, for the first time since they began dating a year and a half ago, he didn’t have any doubts about his.

“Love you too, babe,” he said. “I’ll send you a postcard from every stop I make.”

“OK,” she said, now crying.

“It’s going to be all right, baby. I promise. I just need this. We need this. To survive.”

“I know,” she replied.

“Good bye baby,” he said.

“Love you,” she said, hanging up.

He stared at the phone. He had a real hatred for phones. He hated having life-altering conversations on them. Twice in his life, he’d suffered through that life-shattering talk on a phone. One of them was while he sat on his parents’ living room floor; the other, on a broken down futon. His grey-blue eyes looked around to see where this one occurred. He was sitting on a hand-me-down couch in his holey underwear. It seemed fitting.

In the spare bedroom he kept his suitcases and bags. Under a cheap spare bed, he reached for, and found his sister’s old Virginia Commonwealth swim team bag. He loved that bag. She’d given it to him years ago. “I don’t need it anymore,” she said. He marveled then at how easy it was for her to just give away something that used to mean so much. It was a concept foreign to him. Things that had meaning, you hold on to them. They keep you grounded. They remind you of when times were better. Because, honestly, they don’t get better.

What an awful way to look at life, he thought to himself after that flood of memory.

His first instance of purging came in 2003. He and the redhead were moving. Well, she was moving, and he was moving his stuff. A box of old letters and trinkets popped up while he was taking things out of a closet. His old girlfriend’s letters and memory box. Things that reminded him of her. He looked through it all, smiling at the things it contained. His current girl had replaced her. While he was lost in thought, she walked in.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Just some old junk I don’t need anymore,” he said, throwing the entire box into a trash bag.

“I’m proud of you,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you throw anything away.”

She was right.

Six years later, he was in a crappy apartment in that same town. He’d moved twice, but somehow ended up back where he was. Another girl had come and gone, and she had the audacity to say she left because he lived in the past.

She was right.

And he was throwing it all away. Garbage bag after garbage bag was filled with his past. Diaries and notepads. Menus and receipts. He even threw away the necklace that the first girl he saw naked had left on his bed that night. That was one of the things he never thought he’d throw away. Now, years later, he still can remember what it looked like, but he can’t describe it.

“Guess that’s progress,” he said out loud.

He’d packed up a bag while thinking. He also had his digital camera and his laptop.

His bank account was empty, he’d paid the rent for the month and turned in his notice. He’d get back and have one week to move.

“Good plan,” he said with a chuckle. It made him think of a line from Lucero’s “She Wakes When She Dreams” Which, of course, made him grab his Ipod – which contained only Lucero and Ben Nichols songs.

“Time to hit the road,” he said, slamming the door shut.

He’d go north first, he decided. Go right into the belly of the beast.