Posts tagged iphone

I’ve decided to be manly and good. I won’t leave now even though I feel like we’ve been dragged through the depths of hell. I thought I was done with the cold stalactites of business, the bitter, inhuman poison, the horror and the hate, again. Once more into the breach, goddammit. Again!
Our business was stolen from us. We should be howling mad in the streets, beating people on brownstone stoops and concrete pavements like it was Bensonhurst in the Seventies, or as if it was the year 1986 and I was a cracked-out pimp in the basement of a Bronx tenement building, where Mark and Hector along with all of San Diego, tied to a leaky radiator, was my collective bitch!
I had been on Wikipedia on my iPhone at 7am, desperate because I couldn’t sleep, reading the article on Robert Chambers (killer) for the fourth time, thinking “Look what they’ve done to Robert Chambers, they’ve destroyed Robert Chambers!” Alas, Dorian’s Red Hand, that old meat market is gone, and the preppy-killer-who-could-have-been-me made a stupid mistake and over a period of fifteen terrible prison years, they’ve turned him into a junkie. Life is like a Pedro Almodovar movie but without the humor, or maybe like a Woody Allen in the throes of dope sickness…
Why do I have to go through this– it must be the pills! Was it the pills that made me read Jean Genet? I downloaded The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleu) because I’ve always liked Jean Genet, and Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, and Dylan Thomas, and now I’m grinding my teeth.
How did we end up here, Shane and I, in the middle of Nowhere, California, having been run out of San Diego, sitting in our underwear in an alternate reality version of the Hanoi Hilton indulging in junk food and alcohol while fat Mark and hateful Hector (who I used to call Heroic Hector) were ringing up our credit card to the tune of two-hundred-and-seventy-three dollars with Fanny, the female, Malaysian electronic parts distributor who had been an important secret in the success of our business?
There is Shane sitting on one double-bed staring intently at a historical documentary about the American Civil War on his laptop, desperately trying to forget the insanity for a little while, and here I am spread out on the other double bed, only half wanting to be counted among the living, typing out this singular drivel. Furious intensity!
We dragged the glass display case out of the store and destroyed it. Mark pushed me and I pushed him back; it was all we could do in the impotent agony of our despair and rage, but I believe that Mark and Hector’s hate for us is even worse than ours for them because we had showed them up to be the weak and hideous parasitic sneak thieves that they are.
With the teeth of those vampires in our necks we struggled over the best way to destroy our own glass display case, karate-chop style, without getting stabbed by shards, until we finally dragged it into the garbage disposal room via one of the main mall elevators (to the dismay of the other passengers) where some memory of Tae-Kwon-Do reverberated down my leg and I suddenly kicked in the side, shattering the glass, and thus putting it down like a dog. This is my ode to you, glorious glass display case, and a swan song for our dear old business that we bled for!
We’ll always carry an undying hatred for Mark and Hector. It is the worst thing that they could have done to us. Their cruel act of thievery has forged a piece of scar tissue in the inner sanctity of our minds, a filthy mass, red and lewd that will never quite dissolve and go away but rather throb when stimulated by certain memories. It is an open wound…
Over time, I found myself in the habit of taking too many pills, trying to cope with the stress of this wretched way of life while holding out for my beloved alternate existence in New York’s Lower East Side. Now I was here with Shane and I found it was necessary to shake the pain-killing pills off of me like so many flees so that I could function for business.
I call up Remi, and Twan calls me from Skype (because he doesn’t have a cell phone and only because he chooses not to have one, but we can’t really tell because its Twan…), and we asked both of them to come here and help, and make this new store in the mall a success– to just make it happen.
I once had a teacher at the Chubb Institute of Technology which was right next to the World Trade Center (before it blew up), who pressed upon us poor computer students the absolute necessity of just making things work. It was all we had to do to secure those juicy future jobs that hung, waiting for us, like so many ripe fruit.
“Just make it happen!”, he would cry with intensity, caught up in his role as a charismatic and ridiculously overpaid instructor in the last hurrah of Silicone Alley’s dot-com days, and then launch into some crazy story about a hotshot systems administrator who had the balls to waltz into a corporate datacenter wearing a black trench coat and blue jeans underneath, dancing right past the desk jockeys suffocating in their suits and ties, and eating out of a big old cardboard-encased pie of pepperoni pizza while getting the job done. Here was the guy that would make it happen. That guy was our hero…
The dot-com bubble burst about a year after that, eight years before the World Trade Center crumbled, and now, it’s my teeth.
We took the silver Nissan 350Z and drove without stopping until we pulled up to a golf driving range. Shane hit one of the balls so hard, he broke the head clean off the handle, and that big black hunk of metal went flying, singing past the fifty yard flag alongside the dimpled white ball, and then all the way to the seventy-fifth before giving one last over-under and dropping to the ground. We stood in pause for a moment, and Shane said, “I kept thinking about Mark, I was thinking about Mark the whole time.”
On Wednesday we would march dutifully to the mall and sign the lease. We both looked at ourselves back in the car and knew that Nikki had made the right decision, the choice we both had only secretly envied until this moment.
Later in the day I realized what it must have felt like to be made superfluous. I understood what I had done and could have cried at that moment. I’m sorry, Nikki! I feel like I’ve failed somehow. Damn, I’m grinding my teeth again.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? In a way we are following a pre-ordained path, a path from which there is no turning back once you embark upon it. We’ve both thought of quitting and tell each other that in fits of muted laughter in the car, trying to stay calm, but we can see that hysteria is waiting for us just around the corner. We also see it in the eyes of desperate pan-handlers in freeway intersections. The Great Recession has hit California hard.
We needed everybody who would come to our aid and Shane and I pounded the pavement and took hold of all the hands that were stretched out to us. Was someone going to save us from our grand schemes or were we dragging our friends and lovers down into the quicksand with us? At least we offered free room and board, and transportation, and of course airfare to this strange land next to Disneyland.
I’m expecting that soon we’ll all be here together: Remi, and Twan, and Teri, and Shane, and of course myself, Niko, who my friends call J.P. We were going to build a drywall, build a store, turn it into an Internet cafe, hire an employee, fly Dan the Man over here to help train him, and get the fuck out of here as fast as we can and then go to some isolated, god-forsaken, golden corner of the globe (New York City!?), free from stress and anxiety, and most of all, free from the depths of hell. Speaking of which, Shane went to San Diego for the weekend to see his girlfriend and I took the opportunity to kick the pill habit and get well.
Sometimes the world is amazing, and sometimes horrible, but I keep trying to remind myself to enjoy the journey and maybe go back to reading Jean Genet so that I can appreciate what I’ve got, hell and all, and maybe stop grinding my teeth.