From my unfinished basement in my sister’s house, with its bare white walls and spiders and my mattress on the floor and my desk, it’s about a cigarette’s distance away to get to the liquor store. I remember when I started measuring time with cigarettes. It exponentially increased my cancerous intake whenever engaging in any activities of travel. Average : 4 minutes 45 seconds per smoke.
I smoked when I walked to the liquor store to get smokes. I was too broke to get booze, already supplementing crumpled dollar bills with quarters, dimes and nickels to get the pack. Of course, I hate myself for it, this pointless vice. Pointless, when you are alone, really. Paying to die faster only makes sense if you are using cigarettes for their desired purpose—excusing yourself at anytime from awkward and boring social situations.
As I walked in, I observed a monstrous women with a DVD of Pixar’s Up, smothered and suffocating under her arm. Her little girl—five or six or so—was fetching beer for her while she bullshit with the man at the register. The gopher girl returned with four 24 ounce shells of Steel Reserve 211, one of the worst tasting and deadliest of malt liquors.
Mommy just needs her happy time. Pop in the flick, retire to the bedroom. Drink into oblivion. You know, just chilling. Relax a bit.
I got my cigs and for some reason Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World began playing in my head. Everything is beautiful and I had my stupid cigarette in hand.
I arrived at my second semester of grad school five hours before I was supposed to check into my room. I left a little bag behind the counter and walked with no direction through the little town and found a path into the woods. I wanted to see a moose. I found a bus instead. Broken down, long abandoned, in an impossible place for a bus to die. I lit a cigarette, took a deep breath to suppress my fears which feed on oxygen, and stepped inside.
All of the items, props, decorations, or whatever, confused me. Dozens of empty chewing tobacco containers, a photo book, scattered miniature knives of broken glass and mirror, nicely made beds, and a stack of magazines. I put the photo booth in my backpack, replaced it with a Skymall I had taken from the plane, and looked at the magazines. The first was normal enough, Us—regular bullshit celebrity material, but the second magazine…confused me deeply. It was a ragged torn porno of girls getting it on with each other, smeared with fake blood. Or, I assume the blood was fake. I looked down though and saw a package for a wall-mounted dildo. Still okay, not the first time I’ve encountered an abandoned place with dildos. But why were the beds nicely made?
I absorbed then, the scene. A lost soul, drooling and masturbating to the bloody girl mag on the counter, slamming their body back into the dildo, bare feet grinding and oozing on the shards on the floor. Clearly, they knew how to party.
I thought then of my hands, thinking about how I had touched surfaces in this fuck palace, and thought I Should Put Them In My Mouth And Clean Them Off. I remembered that my mouth, although wet, wasn’t anti-bacterial and I changed my mind. The nicely kept, clean beds were the only thing that bothered me. It ruined my understanding of the place.
I imagined though, that the same lost soul who destroyed their various orifices in here took one thing with them when they left. A small battery powered radio, tuned to an AM station, which was their happy soundtrack to bodily obliteration, constantly on a frequency to a hidden source, always playing Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World.
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