Carelessly Thoughtful

A Story by Ryan Lowrey

Work in progress Inner city life is never quite what you expect it to be. Especially for a small time idiot in a big time problem.

Desperation is a funny feeling. It hits you like a brick wall. One second you are able to rationalize everything, compartmentalize all those different emotions in neat little boxes. The next second you are in a deep dark lake of adrenaline and intense feelings, scrambling to find the ledge. Water hits you in the face, you suck in the last bits of oxygen you can while your lungs burn and your brain screams for help. Describing how bad it gets is next to impossible, almost as if the bottom fell out and the only direction is down. No matter how bad it gets though, there is always this feeling that it is only going to get worse. It usually does.

I was born in the city. To most people, city is such a relative term. A town with more than four businesses and a post office is a city to some. Only those who know however, can honestly understand what I mean when I say those two beautiful words. Some look upon metro living with contempt, rather living in wide open spaces with fresh air and clean water. The type of places that you can walk in miles in any given direction and find nothing but trees and weeds. Not me said I. I was born in the city, the big, noisy, smelly city.

My story, like many others before it, begins with a boy. This boy was not special, nor was he particularly good at much of anything. The type of kid who would rather smoke weed and drink pilfered alcoholic beverages than read books or play sports. This kid lived with his grandparents. He went to school like other kids his age. There was absolutely nothing that set this child apart from others his age. Awkward with the girls, barely passing in school he was very average so to speak. At sixteen years old, this boy smoked cigarettes. He picked the habit up from the many family members he had that did it with gusto. He didn’t care. To him, it was all just a big joke. He was invincible in his own mind. If you haven’t figured it out by now dear reader, this kid was me.

Our little story begins on the night of my eighteenth birthday. Not a particularly spectacular day. Officially an adult by legal standards, the only thing I looked forward to on this day was the fact that I could buy my smokes legally, not that it really mattered to me really. Traditionally all I cared about was myself, but I did have my moments of selflessness. Usually they only happened because I was too lazy to be selfish. If that makes any sense at all. My birthday, a day that I truly cared nothing for except it was another excuse to get completely fucked up and forget that the world was as s****y as it was. My entire world changed on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, and I was so stupid and drunk to recognize it. Shame really, hindsight being what it is, had I known just how significantly upside down I was going to become I probably would have stopped drinking. Probably not, actually.

The smell was intoxicating. Sweet ambrosia for the sick and abused. Whiskey always smelled good to me, like smelling bacon cooking on the stove, or cookies fresh out. Sweetly sour, with hints of possibilities. Brandon, my best friend forever, or at least until he stopped being able to procure my favorite narcotics, was standing over a very dirty, and equally smelly homeless man. “Bro, check this f****n guy out man, he out like your mom at a rave homie.” Such a clown this guy was, always cracking jokes at my mom because of her drug habit. I walked over to him, handing him the bottle of Jack he stole from Dale’s liquor not even ten minutes ago. “Man, leave the f****n guy alone, he has enough s**t to deal with.” I said, pulling out my smokes from my jeans pocket. Lighting one up, I walked to the other side of the alley to piss. Smoke trailed and billowed around my face, making my nose sting as I relieved myself. Brandon looked back toward me, sucked on the bottle for a second, the whole time watching me, than turned back toward his hapless victim. “F**k this guy man, watch this s**t.” He said, holding the bottle out over the old dude on the ground. “Hey! Don’t waste that s**t, I aint even fucked up yet” I yelled as I finished my business and ran over to grab the bottle. Brandon handed the bottle to me as I charged over and just laughed. He looked back at the man on the ground who was wide awake at this point but too scared to speak, obviously well versed in encounters with random intoxicated youngsters.

Brandon pulled a joint from his own pack of smokes and lit up, taking a couple deep hits off of it before offering it to the man. Shaking his head no, the man just stared up waiting for the inevitable beating he was sure was coming. I looked at Brandon, sizing him up in case I had to stop him, it wouldn’t be the first time I had to intervene on my large friends behalf. Brandon was a year younger than me, but twice my size, built large at the top and small at the bottom. About six foot already, he towered over most his age, and was not afraid to remind anyone about his size. Despite his demeanor and size, I never really thought of him as a bully. He was more like a pit bull, protective and loyal, but not able to let go of something once he got a hold of it.

The homeless man just laid there, looking up pathetically at my friend. Dirty gray and brown beard and sores all over his face that only comes from years of drug and alcohol abuse and street living. He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped with only a small weak grunt coming out. He began to reach into his disgusting black and green wind jacket he was wearing. Brandon instinctively lashed out, kicking the man’s arm away, knocking him back against the concrete wall he was laying up against. The man’s head smacked the concrete hard, the sound a baseball bat makes against cement. We both ran like hell.

The night life in the city was beyond compare. The sounds, the smells. Every sense filled and satiated. The people were a******s, but that just made me love it more. In my opinion, the world needs more a******s. Nice people just ended up screwing s**t up. A******s made the world go round and round and they got s**t done. My favorite place to spend my time was a bar called Jonah Rock. Weird f*****g name, but it was ran by old school Irish pricks who didn’t card and kept the cops away. S**t, most of the drunks in the place were cops anyway. I loved going there, the tenders knew me by name, and the owner sometimes threw a little work my way to support my growing drug and alcohol fondness.

Brandon never got into the whole bar scene. In his own words, “I’d rather drink somewhere people don’t know my name, and couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.” He preferred parties and s**t, usually random encounters where he inevitably got into a fight and depending on the outcome would stay or run like hell. Troublemaker he was, he knew his limits when it came to the bottle. Not me said I. If I wasn’t holding on the concrete to keep from falling off the earth, I wasn’t partying right. After the incident with the bum, Brandon disappeared. No calls, visits, nothing. It was unusual for him to let something like that get to him, so it made me think bad thoughts. Hence the bar. Ever the social butterfly, I was partying at the Rock, alone. Sure, there were others in the bar, but the beauty of the place was the anonymity it offered in the way of everyone minding their own damn business. The bar was not big as far as bars go, but it was dark and smelled like booze and piss. My favorite.

Originally the place used to be one of those old school diners. Like the ones you would always see in movies, long and rectangular with booths on one side, a counter on the other. Sometimes I would imagine what the place was like before. All lit up bright, smelling like stale coffee and pie, with a hint of pig fat in the air. Some old dude with skinny legs and a fat belly in a white apron and a faggy little white hat on, serving empty calories and shame to the masses. Stories go that one of the cooks was caught jerkin off into the soup of the day, the health department was called, and they found a whole list of s**t that shut the place down for good. If that isn’t a perfect analogy for this whole damn city, I don’t know what is.

Shawn, the owner, was tending bar when I had walked in. In his late forties, he looked damn near sixty. Short as hell with a temper to match, Shawn was known for beating the hell out of patrons of his fine establishment with the full blessing of the police department. He had on his typical outfit, blue jeans, some older than god rock band shirt with stains, and his patented leather vest. Guy really liked that damn vest. He knew my name, but also knew better than to say it out loud with customers around. Resorting to his affectionate little pet name, he called me over. “Hey fuckface, come here.” Gesturing toward the bar, I could tell he was upset about something, his normally pale sweaty bald dome was blotchy and red. I walked to the bar trying to hide the fact that I was higher than a soccer mom on Vicodin.

“Hey kid,” he whispered in my ear, which creeped me out more than I cared to let on. “I need a favor. Had a little incident in the ladies shitter. Wanna make some quick cash?” He stepped back and grabbed a glass from under the bar, put it on the counter, quickly grabbed a bottle of Jameson and poured me a shot. I downed the shot and gave him my coolest grin, which looking back probably made me look slightly retarded and not cool at all. “Depends on what it is shorty, I aint cleaning up s**t again.” I said pushing the glass toward him in a gesture of good will as it were. Pouring me another shot, he eyed me up and down. That was the thing about Shawn, you never really knew what he was thinking. M**********r could win the world series of poker if it wasn’t for his damn bald head and his pasty heritage.