Yes, I should be asleep just now. There’s a dark foot of water in my tub with an abrasive measure of Liquid Plumber pooled round the dead drain, forming a handsome rotating chemical constellation. Tomorrow the maintenance man will drop by—so they tease—and I can start showering again.

Then I can start humbling myself again going from less ambitious employer to employer, none of whom seem quite in the mind to employ me. Not sure that I blame them. I currently have a chip on my shoulder, and it’s a chip sized for Texas Hold ‘Em. I’m growingly and audibly pissed about an unsatisfied life, about a life of cheerless service jobs at base pay and shit hours, when I can write and do the other obscure artistic things that mean nothing to nobody.

When I was twenty-one, I had to come up from college out of duty. My father died, at forty-six. My mother had already had a devastating stroke and she needed constant minding. My parents were poorly designed. They left me nothing.

When I would leave the house to get medication or food, I had to wonder whether my mother would be dead when I got back. Her doctor—a shit, by the way—once told me with a big smirk that he didn’t know what was keeping her alive. It certainly wasn’t you, Doc.

One day she really did die. I was there. I remember she had said often, “I just don’t want to die like my mother did, with a tube in her throat.” Well, guess what. Selfishly, I asked her in her terminal fleeting moments if she would forgive me—you know, back to that shattered candy dish in ’67. She managed to nod. She kept trying to talk, and I didn’t get it. After she died, I realized she was asking me to forgive her.

That was the farthest thing then from my mind, because she was blameless in the face of eternity. It irks me: I wasn’t even able to give her that, a moment of peace or redemption. She died like a dog, without comfort, really.

Some preacher came around to give me the holies—instantly there. I turned away from his Lutheran familiarity. They asked me if she had any religious needs. I said she was a lapsed Catholic. They stared at me inertly. Some nurse hugged me, unasked. I felt nothing.

I told the god-botherer to cease. If there were a God, all I would wish is to get my fingers round His fucking neck.

I walked out of the hospital and into a drift of attic storages—I lived in strange people’s houses like a spirit. Housed in odd angles and keeping sly, unseen, which I think made them fear me. Sometimes I didn’t live exactly anywhere.

I had been Golden Lad in college but it doesn’t make a shit now. I never finished. Two-and-one-half years towards a BA in History, 3.85 cum out of 4.0. What does that mean? It means on most equivalencies I have the same check box as High School/GED.

I have been humbled for a dollar. I have been afraid all my life—of being hungry, of being homeless, of losing those tiny elements of joy that we associate with concrete objects, since the Universe is incapable of giving us more. I have taken risks to travel as much as I can, to see as much as I might, and coming to grips with the fuzzy remainder memories that are left from adventures in the scenic realm, and in quick couplings.

I have been long earning my black wings, and am surprised that the Faust legend applies to me. No one is so preoccupied with damnation as the libertine. In early days, I drifted from body to body like a vampire. I can’t call them lovers, can I? It was too quick, too nameless, too savage.

The small town (or city) which I have named after its cemetery aspects: Mound City. Coincidentally, I discovered a successful horror author, also born there, also renamed Our Town after one of its cemeteries: Cedar Hill, where my mother is buried. This was the hellhole that I couldn’t steam away from fast enough. I migrated a little around the country, looking for someplace to stick.

As fate has its unlovely aspects, I ended up this past year working in a college town just outside Mound City. We had perfunctory induction classes. After I went chatty in these classes, the Eloi around me wondered what subject I was teaching. Why, Security. I am your newest security guard.

Oh. You could see them retract. And he seemed like such a nice man.

Buffoon in dark harlequin clothes, a badge to give him comic relief. The Harlequin—the clown figure—originally represented the damned soul, often on sabbatical from Hell, in old religious mystery plays. What I really don’t want is to die with a tube down my throat…or you could live without recognition, without justification, without celebration.

You could live to be the punchline of privileged well-to-do students, in an evening of their clever drinking, vandalism, and shitting in stairwells. How alike they all seemed, as if recruited from the zombie call-back list of a John Hughes movie. How safe and uninformed their MTV opinions, their naked ignorance of the history and philosophy they tried to talk, but never quite got right…

Dopey twenty-one-year-old blond boy trying to buffalo me into not running his drunk companions in. Bullshit reasoning with me, believing, as do our highest leaders, that his clever patter will get him out of anything. And I let that bird fly. Boy is he ever to my taste. I turn until my darkness goes.

How nice his posh life is, from my outside. I stroke his Hawaiian- shirted shoulder: an act probably not in my best interest. Not that other twenty-one year-olds haven’t gotten The Call in the night. One girl screamed for hours. Daddy’s Little Girl was where we all are, sooner or later, if we live long enough: an orphan. I could hear her across the quad, taking black comfort in our equanimity.

I hated that goddam job. I hate rich kids. I hate intellectual poseurs. I hate badges. I hate uniforms. I hate when I can’t be writing and drinking—not fucking, I gave that shit up. I’m on my way to sainthood, one bad step at a time. Sooner or later, the whiskey bottle will go. Then it’s just me and my toy cars and comic books. Vanities, too.

We were slated to be laid off from the part time position in May, end of the school year. At the same time, they canned the radio dispatcher for alleged various indiscretions. One of which may have been having cancer. I’ve always been amazed at the capitalist hardball that “liberal” institutions play. His job came up.

By way of keeping us all around till the part-timer rehire next year—only four payless months away!—we were offered a try-out for his job on a rotating basis. But it was all bullshit. The department head hired his wife’s friend’s hubby out of housekeeping. “We feel Jim is on-target for this position.” Don’t you love corporate robo-speak?

That’s the way it goes. Jim’s been leapfrogging all over the place, and now he has a home. Hope he enjoys the ceaseless idiots he is about to (inexperiencedly) face. I walked. My asshole’s tired of being fucked.

They asked me to finish out the week. HA HA HA HA HA HA. No, don’t think so, really not. I traded up to Jack Daniels on the way home, to perversely celebrate my manumission.

My parents used to tell me you can’t eat Pride. But that was before they died broke, and broken. You can’t eat shit either, Mom and Dad. Although fuck yeah they’ll make you try.

In about two weeks, I’ll be forty-four. Yes, two years younger than when my Dad went under the earth. For years that ominous rendezvous spooked me, but the neatest thing is that when you get old enough to start thinking about death in concrete, you don’t mind as much.

Death is the ultimate antidote to the failure of mind and body and spirit. It translates you to something, and even if that is only plant food, you are out of this unlovely, uncomely rat race.

I stopped giving advice to younger people. I have nothing to say to them. The best I can do is show them their future and that’s the worst I could do. The ignorance I had at twenty-one—that there was some point to respiration, other than its own action—was the same Hope that Pandora’s Box was shut from killing, with the entrapment of Knowledge of the Future.

It’s better not to know. Because you will find out all too soon.

“You have too much anger, too much venom?” a girl once said to me.

Venom? Baby, I got cobrafuls.