Saturday |
Home, such a strange concept. Sitting on the sidewalk, looking up at the place I lived for more than six months, I can't go in if I don't want Harry to find me. I can't live there again if I don't want to take another job from him, but I can watch for him to show up, see if I can surprise someone for once.
Even if he never shows, I have time to sit and watch the world.
Look at all the people going past my house with important places to be. I used to be like that. I always had to keep moving, get to the next delivery.
Now I have time to watch the people like I am again, who don't have places to be. I used to ignore them all, going as fast as possible from the prison of my house to the relative freedom of my car.
Now I'm sitting on a five gallon plastic bucket, the same kind I used to make my shit sanitary in the storage space, with a couple more in front of me. I drum on them, and sometimes people drop change in my cup.
It seems like everyone out here is a user of some kind. The guys hanging out by the liquor store sure are. I see them hang on this block and drink all day, like I did, starting in the storage space. I can't really hold my liquor since the hospital. Something happened to my head, and I get fuzzy. It feels like I'm a little drunk all the time, which is exactly what I always wanted, but now it's distracting. At least it didn't stop me from leaving the hospital "against medical advice" after I got Harry to vouch for me.
If someone came along and offered those guys jobs running around all day, would they be stable enough to hold onto them, or would they fuck up, break shit and end up back on the street corner? What do they do for food? Can I do it too?
Everyone I look in the eye, I see that desperate expression of a person looking for their next fix, even in the fancy people with places to be. Maybe they need to work hard all day to afford the lifestyles they've gotten used to, or maybe they've just been stressed so long, they wouldn't know what to do without it. Just a different kind of user.
There's a guy in a wheelchair by the mini park on the corner, mumbling to himself. He looks crazy but no more than the Dude. He could be mumbling movie quotes, but he's out here. The Dude ended up living in a big house. What's the difference between their two crazies? What would happen to the Dude without his company? What did Harry do to him?
Somewhere, Harry's running that company now. He's the real crazy one.
I've been out here a long time, but I haven't seen Harry. I wonder if the delivery job that bailed me out in the first place even still exists. I wonder if he rolled up the whole company and hid it someplace I'll never find it. I could always call him and find out.
No, I'm not falling for that again.
The only proof I have the fucking company even exists and I'M not the crazy one is this notebook. This is my revenge, the information I gathered about them while they thought they were watching me.
That's all I have left. There was money in my pants when I got them back from the hospital, but that's long gone. Nobody's tipping the drummer. I'm getting hungry.
I started asking around, trying to figure out how all these guys keep from starving out here. What's their secret?
This old guy shuffled by, a nowhere-to-be. When I asked him, he turned to me and shrugged. "Glide." He must have seen how confused I was, so he explained. "Go up there two blocks and head to the right. They serve food every day."
My mouth hung open, drooling.
Breakfast |
Five blocks from the place the system tried to make me call home, there were free meals and a community of other broke people. I was that close to a way out the whole time and never knew it.
I thought I would be surrounded by druggies and crazies. They were there, but not too many of them. I thought they would all be as hopeless and desperate as me, but to them, it was just another day. They're all supporting each other, even though the larger system says money is all that matters and people without it are worthless. The food was even pretty good. I don't know why I was so afraid to spend any time in a place like that.
Most of the people I ate with weren't even homeless. They just needed a break. They needed their own bass players to come find them, give them an easy job, with bosses who tell them when they do something wrong but never really punish. I did the punishing myself, not the system. I punished my body with alcohol.
A lot of them had health problems. If they don't have anyone to take care of them, maybe Glide is their only option.
After the free breakfast, I walked away, planing to come back for lunch. There's another part of the building that's a church. I looked inside.
In there, it wasn't just a day. It was Sunday. The giant crucifix behind the altar sent the message that Jesus watched over all of us, guilting people into being "good."
My mom started going to church all the time when her cancer came. It didn't work.
I guess it was something she knew from her childhood. She told me stories sometimes about where she was born. I'll never see the Andes Mountains, so all I have are those stories, but if it was as great as she said, why did she ever leave? She probably chose to remember it that way after all the years away. By the time I got old enough to wonder if the stories were true, I was already too busy believing in Casimir to care.
I thought of going inside, trying to get a sip of that sacramental wine. My body would punish me back for that now.
The punishment of hellfire is imaginary, but people's own guilt makes them want to confess. They want to know they're okay with the thing they believe is watching over them.
That's like the Dude's system, except that really was watching over all of us. If Harry gets it to market, whatever that means, or it infiltrates too many outside systems, then Sarah or whatever replaces her is gonna watch these places too. There'll be a real all-seeing god, with Harry behind it.
But the system doesn't see everything yet. I found ways around it. That guilt only works when you believe you're being judged and don't know how shitty the system is at understanding the world.
I've seen the wizard behind the curtain. I can spot how much of a room the cameras can see, and I know that system was created by flawed human beings.
I've seen the Dude out from under that big black hood, and if the programmers knew what he really was, they wouldn't work so hard. He's a little evil, but fighting him kept me strong. Now I can take on anything.
Wait, was that what he wanted?
