The Poet’s Story
I want to kill myself.
That was my thought.
I want to kill myself.
At first, it kept repeating in my head.
I want to kill myself. I want to kill myself. I want to kill myself.
Then I started saying aloud.
“I want to kill myself.”
My brain was sick. That’s the reason why I dropped out of grad school.
The migraines were too horrible and nothing was okay.
I was studying to be a professor, but I just stopped going to classes.
There was one semester left.
I couldn’t do it.
All day I stayed in my room, lying on the floor gnawing at my nails as my brain tried to murder me. All I wanted was for nothing. I was thinking about it, worshiping it, lusting for it, dreaming of how I could get it. There was no question to me that there wasn’t anything to live for. It was just a fact of being.
So I left.
One day I just walked off campus and went to New York.
I didn’t have any connections or anything there,
but I felt the same way about where I was from.
I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
There was nowhere else.
My career as a student was pretty solid up until I quit. Before then, I didn’t do anything that would negatively impact my studies. There was no sense in risking my livelihood. It was the only way I would be able to support myself.
I never drank, I never had sex, I never smoked, or any of that shit. My grades were perfect, I never missed a class, and everything was fine. I was even the head of a poetry club. I recited Whitman every Saturday.
Yes, I did some chess events too.
Fuck you.
So, because of that history as a human being, the first thing I did when I got to New York was go to a bar and ask for a drink.
Then another, and another, and another.
The drinks kept going down, and they burned more and more, and I wondered why anyone ever did this, but then I started wondering why I didn’t do it sooner. The pain was a good pain, because for the first time the pain wasn’t in my head.
After a few minutes at the bar,
that or at last call,
I tried to get up,
but I fell straight from the stool to the ground.
My face smashed into concrete,
and I passed out.
I woke up on the curb.
Bruises were forming everywhere.
The sun was just beginning to rise.
I watched it from a puddle.
Once I was done being a fuck, I bought cigarettes and spent the day smoking.
I tried to figure out the city.
Smoking is terrible.
It tastes terrible, it hurts, and it burns.
I hate it.
I picked up a second pack.
The city was fine. It was like any other city;
everyone was happier than I was.
I started prowling around parks, like smokers are wont to do on days the weather isn’t too bad. The parks were hard to find, but some of them had big trees that I could attempt to climb. The highest I could get was five feet up on the third branch of a tree next to a sloggy stream cutting through the city. By the time I raised myself up, I had scrapes all along my hands and the tops of my arms. I guess being hung over and trying to climb trees for the first time in your life is tough shit.
People were giving me weird looks.
I returned the hostility.
Fuck ‘em.
You shouldn’t be judging someone for looking like they’re having a bad day.
Fuck off.
They’re having a bad day.
When it was dark I found a brothel.
Well, I was invited into a brothel by a woman on the street who said I looked like I could use a little loving. I agreed with her and followed her like a good boy.
The spot was on the second floor of a townhouse.
It was dark and musty,
as whore houses should be.
I lost my virginity there,
and it was terrifically mundane.
It felt meaningless, like there was nothing to it.
Just an unsatisfying squirt.
I gave the girl my money and then I left.
As soon as I exited the front door,
I covered the sidewalk in vomit.
Three streets over I found a hotel room.
The man at the desk looked at me as if he was eyeing me up to see whether or not I was a troublemaker, but after I forked him over some of the remains from my inheritance, he fucked off and gave me a key.
There wasn’t an elevator in the joint.
It was a three story shithole.
I had to walk all the way to the top,
but I didn’t mind.
The room had a bed, a mirror, and a closet with a shitter and a sink.
Once the door was closed I flopped onto the mattress.
It felt like being punched by bricks.
I tried to sleep.
I couldn’t.
I rolled over and looked at the ceiling.
I was running out of money.
There was no more coming in.
You only have so many parents and grandparents that can die,
I had run out of both.
The rest of the money was supposed to go to finishing my degree, but I guess the world and I had other plans. Still, any way you looked at it, I needed a job, and I needed a place to stay.
I didn’t get either of those things. Instead I went to the library, for the fuck of it, and looked through the books. I checked out a book of poetry, then I left the library, bought a cheap bottle of whiskey from the liquor store across the street, and settled down on the curb in front of the book palace.
First I started drinking,
then I started reading.
After a few hours of that,
I walked around the library,
found the right spot,
then cleared myself a place in the bushes.
That was now Home.
I laid down in my dirt,
tucked my knees to my chest,
then dozed off.
In the morning I got a bagel for breakfast,
then I kept reading,
and it goes without saying I kept drinking.
That was my life for a week,
or for about two months.
People gave money to me because they thought I was homeless.
Actually – they weren’t wrong.
Huh.
Anyways, eventually Skrivvy walked by and saw me. It was early morning, and I was asleep in my bush. He nudged me with his foot. He had dress shoes on, suit pants, a white shirt with a black tie, and a jacket slung over his shoulder.
He told me, “You’re fucking up the whole vibe of the place.”
I vomited a little, but politely: to the side.
He asked me if I needed help as I groaned and rolled over, trying to block out the sunlight. Sleep was so close; I could feel its embrace welcoming me back.
But then he said, “Yeah buddy, you do.”
In a slow, fluid motion he pulled me up and slung my arm around him. To my surprise, I didn’t resist. The rest of the world and myself considered me feral, but that man’s confidence in his being could master the will of any beast.
For half an hour he dragged me through the city.
Once we were at his home, he dropped me off in what would become my room.
I slept, apparently for days.
To be honest, I think I was sleeping even as he was carrying me.
It was Peach who woke me up. He was trying to give me soup. No matter what time it was when I woke up, I remember that I was shivering and on the edge of puking.
I stayed locked in that room for a long time, sleeping and slurping.
When I finally got out of the bed and opened the door to the living room, Peach was at the table reading Chekhov’s The Fidget. After putting down his book, he informed me that Will wanted to see me, then he showed me which room was Skrivvy’s.
After a deep breath I knocked on the door.
Skriv said, “Come in.”
His room was furnished with a desk, a rolling closet with dress clothes hanging from it, and a well-made/all white bed with an open chest chock full of books at the foot of it. Some of them were journals, but most of them looked to be tomes from a long unpracticed discipline.
The scrivener was hunched over a big book on philosophy, copying it into a journal. I stood there waiting until he finished his page.
Once he had finished scrawling, he put down his pen and closed the book.
After a cough, he turned his chair around to face me, then he told me to take a seat on his bed.
Skrivvy said that I could live with him, but that to do so I needed a job. He said there was one waiting for me in the library. A friend of his was a manager there, and even though I had some sort of a reputation, she would still hire me after a good shower. She didn’t think anyone would even recognize me without the needles from the bushes in my hair.
Then he handed me some nice clothes and told me I needed a haircut. I started in two days at ten in the morning. There was also a rule in place dictating no more drinking, and no more smoking. That rule was for the best.
Between the start of my job and then, I spent the first day doing what I had been doing, sleeping and guzzling soup, but the second I went out.
I walked around the city.
It was really pretty, actually.
But what the city showed me was for me.
Sorry.
The day work began I tried on Skrivvy’s clothes at eight in the morning.
They fit – not perfectly – but well enough;
It was like borrowing your father’s clothes.
I looked silly, like I was trying to fill shoes that were too big for me,
but still, I looked better than I had looked.
It was nice to be free from that grime that I was caked in before.
When I was done trying to get comfortable in another man’s clothes, I headed to the library. My job didn’t start yet, but I wanted another book to read. I finished the one I had out.
Actually I had finished it three times. It was a collection of Dostoevsky's short stories that included The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.
His vision of Russia was completing my vision of New York.
While walking through the library it felt like the first time, considering how drunk I was every other time I was around the building. There was something alluring about the place.
Even bombed out of my mind I knew that.
It was filled with books and people that loved books.
That needed to mean something.
After a few more hours of walking around, I went to the poetry section and sat there. At arm’s length there were already dozens of books I needed to get to.
I read until it was dark.
After that I went home and I slept,
then I came back the next day and did it all again.
