Why I Committed Suicide

by sam paul

  My grade may suffer for it, but being under the gun I was forced to use the same set as my previous sordid look into the garage sale underworld, my house. I made it flavorful, showing more of the inside of the house and using contrasting color and hot earth tones with an open filter to help center around the chaos in Dan’s mind as he wakes up late for his date. The opening shot of cigarettes and beer bottles strewn about indicate why Dan’s late for his damn date and I made his aggravation comical as the camera follows him around as things keep frustrating his efforts to hurry out the door. I even threw in cameo stunt work of myself getting tossed by Dan out of the bathroom while shaving. I used our house, our hallway, our bathroom, bedrooms, our porch, my VW and the neighbor’s house over the period of a day to get the actual film work done. It was a big pain in the ass running electrical cords and trying to use multiple desk lamps to light the dark nether regions of our crib with consistency and it was very cool of Dan and Jenifer to take the time to help out and be my actors while I set everything up in a mad frenzy of a day. I did some hand-made, grungy credits on a greasy napkin next to a cup of coffee and some cigarettes ooh look, I’m fucking European postmodern. I edited for two days whenever I could get an open machine. I forgot to book time and there was this cock-sucking beginning editing class in there all the fucking time! I finally got it all chopped together, slapped my music over the top and turned it in on time by the skin of my teeth.

  I know I could have done a better job but pressure will always be a factor in this field so my challenge for next time is to organize my ideas sooner and go for a better quality project. It isn’t how good you could do; it’s how good you ARE doing. Fucking bollocks.

  Gabe’s film was good, better than mine, and I could see the difference it made using his own money to get it on 8mm film. His movie had Dan going psycho over my ex-girlfriend Melanie. It was very arty and a definite crossbreed of the directors I had predicted he might emulate, but it was still interesting. No bitterness here. Cheerleader girl’s film wasn’t all that great either; I wonder if she’s taking this class to get into news casting? Probably radio. Hee-hee! I crack myself up.

  The other night before my film studies class (that’s the class where I get to sit on my ass and watch movies), I got extremely high (that’s the thing I always do). It’s easily the best class I’ve ever taken, I don’t always like the movies and I don’t always agree with my professors take on the ones I do like but it’s still an interesting class. What could be better than being able to get high and go sit and watch movies for college credit?

  Well, snacks would be nice.

  The other night I was sitting through the middle of Citizen Kane, which is already on my list of top ten movies, and I got a severe case of the munchies. So I snuck out the back of the classroom/theater and went to the little lounge where the vending machines live. I reach in my pocket and I don’t even have a nickel in there to spend on food, but I’m sooooo hungry. Since classes are all in session and there’s nobody else around (it’s an evening class) I get the bright idea that maybe I can tilt the snack machine over and dump some of the goodies from their slots. Free food, simple plan, easy money, right? Well the damn machine was a lot heavier than I expected, but eventually by applying my honors class knowledge, I managed to leverage a chair between the machine and the wall to tilt it over a bit. The only problem is that in the process, the machine went over a bit too far and fell face-first right onto the ground with a huge BANG, SHATTER, CLUNK!

  I was still pretty high, so the first thing I did was run outside and lit up a cigarette. In case somebody came poking around to investigate why the Unites States was under attack I didn’t want to be the only motherfucker standing around like a slack jawed yokel. After a while I poked my head through the window and realized that miraculously nobody heard or bothered to check out the loud noise in the building. I was home free.

  All I needed to do was lift the machine back up and reap my bounty. Yep, just a simple lift and grab. I tried and tried and fucking tried with every ounce of save-the-baby-trapped-under-the-burning-car-adrenaline strength I had in my wee bones. I strained my hardest to lift the damn snack-rack back up just a little. I tried just turning it up onto the side for a while and then I tried wedging the same chair I used earlier under the machine to help lift it back up. Nothing worked, the goddamn thing wouldn’t lift even one inch, the best I could do was slide it around the room on the slick floor for a while and make grunting noises. I finally just gave up, wiped all my fingerprints off the machine and went back to class even hungrier than I was before. Let that be a lesson to me, I’ll have to either bring some change or a fucking glasscutter to class next time.

  My body is my only ultimate canvas.

  My life is the paint, lifestyle the brush.

  Expect some parts to need redoing and memories touched up.

  My ugliness is raw beauty, my contradictions are embraced.

  Part of your beauty is that you never gave a damn about anything. Strength was a part of you because courage can stem from being unconcerned. Then along came some things that you cared about and for the first time something really mattered in your life. It dispersed your foundations, making things more stable for a while but also so much more vulnerable. Your beauty diversified, expanding and flourishing as you incorporated this new aspect of your personality. Your open-mindedness and love increased exponentially. Nobody told you about this. Nobody told you how it was so much more satisfying while making you so much more fragile. Measures of trust were irrevocably destroyed because of the pain love brought you, creating the inevitable hurt but also a renewed lack of belief in yourself. That’s what’s so hard. Looking at yourself in blame for admitting a need to feel loved and seeing something you really depended on reveal itself as merely mortal. It’s far better to be have loved and lost…but is it really? Wouldn’t it be far more sterile and comforting to create the ultimate thesis and take the psychological shell to its disastrous conclusion?

  That’s where we disagree. The ending to that story would be disastrous. The sting of shallow relationships and harmless hormonal partners fueling your propensity to self destruction. The first instinct when inevitable attachment ensued between us was to push me away. So now that you’ve been hooked and escape is nearly impossible, despite your rogue desire, are the childhood barriers again in place? You feel weak yet I see strength. I say strength and you believe I wouldn’t know about it. It doesn’t matter what I see or think though, it’s the feelings you are feeling that are primal and dancing around now, demanding compliance. It isn’t getting any easier to be empathic. I might need to seriously look into taking the mind-menders again.

  Scaredy cat, scaredy cat. ASK ME WHO/WHAT I SEE. SAW, SEE, SAW SEESAW SEESAWSEESAW.

  I’ve concluded that losing weight is all about learning to use the body as an instrument instead of the other way around. My body constantly tries to be in control. My body will try to be the boss because it has the ability to tell my brain, even lie to my brain, that it’s in pain. Whether it’s pain that comes from hunger, exercise, lack of sleep, or the need to get more drugs, my fucking body is getting better at telling MY brain about its problems, like a whiny bitch whore girlfriend. I think there are only two true ways for people to lose weight (other than cancer or other terminal factors of course), and the body rebels with its pain stimulation no matter which method a person tries. You can either increase activity cycles and maintain current calorie consumption, or you can decrease your calorie intake. Yes, simplistic. The best way of course is to exercise and maintain your current calorie usage, that way your body remains relatively comfortable because it’s technically receiving its usual amount of nourishment and you don’t run the risk of becoming food obsessive. The body will try and counter your efforts by demanding to eat more at first, but you have to realize you are in charge and you have to be aware that your body will try to trick you into eating more favorites (cravings) or mo
re high-octane foodstuffs. It is not uncommon to casually pick up 3-4 candy bars and eat them on the way home from the grocery store without giving it a second thought. In the dull haze of everyday life where high calorie food is readily available it is easy to tune out what and when we are eating. Our bodies manipulate us. We are used to it. When we feel sleepy we rest. When we feel hungry we eat. Some people are blessed with a skinny metabolism but most of us will pack it on during times of plenty, and if you live in the U.S. you have always lived in times of plenty.

  Drugs are the same way. The U.S. is in times of plenty but I can’t seem to mentally convince my body to cut down on consumption anymore. I guess since I’ve finally found the one drug that I’m not disappointed with and I’m in way the fuck over my head.

  I’ve heard it said that doing heroin is the closest a person will ever truly get to Heaven while on our feeble, frightened little Earth. The sad part is that now I know first-hand that it is true. If heroin hits you just the right way the first time you ever do “just a little too much”, then you’ve tasted the slightest drop of juice from the fruit of the Almighty. To get to the point where a person is a heroin user and gets a “habit,” there’s a lot of initial experimenting and wasting and puking and hurt to go through, which is followed by some self-loathing, confusion and so on. Those aspects of the drug should be sufficient warning; but who would have known that once you hit the fucking zone with the shit, you will always want to feel that warmth and love? It’s seeing something that you can never ignore or un-see again. That’s gotta be why H is the called the devil’s drug. It’s Mr. Beelzebub’s synthetic simulation for mankind that says, “Hey, this is all you need.” Maybe that’s why I’m losing my soul trying to get it?

  Imagine the emptiness that the devil feels every day, pining for God’s adoration and maybe you can understand why he loves to see us ache with the same desire for a mere fraction of the awesome power and love he once felt before inciting the war in heaven and being cast out.

  I’m seething inside today, filled again with anger I’ve slowly been dissipating by relaxing and settling down with Jenifer. There’s this flare of evil temper I have in me that is rarely used anymore, except for the occasional bout of road rage and that’s mostly just to hear myself rant. My mood swings have become bothersome to me.

  Life is entropy, or should I say entropic? The rut that Jenifer and I have fallen into is not a good place to be in. Our love for each other has enabled us to merge into a single package that sustains us now between the shallow peak moments of excitement. I suppose our dissatisfaction with life is just realizing the pointless-ness of everything and being weighed down makes it hard to envision a brighter future. Neither one of us wants to raise a family, which I think is really the only non-material excuse to join the rest of the worker ants scuttling around in society. Up here at college, surrounded by like-minded slackers, it’s easy to believe we might just slip through the cracks and be able to follow our dream of being rich so that we can be left alone and free. I guess being beautiful and used to having things come to us so easily is finally causing the fates to slowly put us in our proper place of disgrace. I see nothing but hard lessons ahead and I don’t want the pain that teaches wisdom. Did I ask for wisdom, because I think I specifically asked to be happily dumb?

  Things are slowing down. The onset of finals and summer leave me full of questions about our future. The drugs are slowing us down. The seemingly harmless prowling nature required to hunt down smack is about to pounce on us unawares. I suppose Jen and I technically have small little “manageable” habits now and it feels as if a smiling vampire is slowly draining us of life. We’re still close to each other, perhaps closer than ever, but sleeping in her big bed creates gaps.

  A few pleasures still manage to creep in, the vitality of sleeping late on cold mornings under thick blankets and the orange glow that comes in through the passenger window in Jenifer’s car going South on I-35 at sunset. Of course there’s only one reason to travel south down 35 now, so even my smallest pleasures are tinged with a black shadow. More and more it seems our usual sex and intimacy that kept us connected is foregone for the sanitized hollow pleasure heroin brings. For the first time I am actually wondering what it would be like to separate from each other, and even considering that thought, however briefly, hurts me to the core. Am I being clingy? Am I nervous? Yeah. What is it like to lose a wife when there has never been another? I love her eyes, smile, hair, stomach and goofy walk. I’ve made her my friend of friends, excluding most others, but dope is now a part of what we do and it’s only good because we do it together.

  Bad News: I finally got caught doing one of the scams I’ve been running in order to pick up a little extra cash on the side to maintain my habit. For months now I’ve been lifting video games for fun and also stealing overpriced CD’s to return for cash from this store called Hastings Records & Tapes. They have a super high-tech security system installed, but the employees there are on sleepwalk mode, so all I have to do is go around the store and pick out a bunch of new shit, then I set them by the door and on my way out I reach around the metal detector and walk out. No alarms or fuss is involved and the employees are all underpaid college stiffs who wouldn’t give a fuck about the company getting ripped off anyway. After getting a handful of merchandise Jenifer and I usually drive off as soon as we can. She parks around the corner and keeps the car running in case something happens and I have to bolt out the door. Sometimes we’ll just do a circle around the parking lot and Jenifer will go in and return the shit I’ve just stolen, saying the discs were a gift from a parent and she doesn’t have the receipt. It happens everyday in that store since we’re in a college town and getting the cash back from 4 CD’s is an easy eighty bucks these days. Sometimes I’ll go back in and get the cash myself and just say it’s was a present from an aunt who doesn’t have good taste in CD’s and ask “can I return or exchange this.” If the clerk is a prick and makes me exchange anything they’ll just give me a receipt for the new merchandise I pick out and then I can take it another store and return it there legitimately. It’s always easy fucking money. Too easy of course.

  A detective was waiting around for me when I went to work this evening and I could tell I was the one he was looking for when I pulled into the parking lot behind the Tomato with my front seat full of dirty laundry. Apparently some asshole trying to make manager at the record store either recognized me on one of my little dashes for cash or maybe from their security videotape and then ID’d that I work at the Tomato. I was preparing myself mentally, thinking “no big deal, I haven’t done anything wrong, right? They just have me mixed up with some other guy probably”, convincing my brain of its own lies.

  So the detective was waiting and I tried to play it cool but he’s played this game before and he brought his own deck of cards. The clincher was that he brought Jenifer into the fucking mix. The camera in the parking lot had her license plates and the clerk ID’d a blond-haired driver so they had her on file, not me. Shit! Do what you want to me but please leave her the fuck out of it!

  I held out, but he broke me down trying to pin this shit on her. He had me damn near in tears because he kept going on about how he just needed me to finger her as the driver, apparently it would amount to a much more severe penalty because of something or other and it would have meant a bigger arrest for him. Vehicle involvement makes it a felony or something I guess and his spiel was probably a load of B.S., but it worked on me. The dick convinced me he really wanted to pin the shit on Jenifer for some reason. He kept asking about her, all I can guess is he must have had some clues from that mall thing with Donut a few weeks ago and he wanted to get her for that too. I finally just broke down and said that I operated entirely independently and that there was no other driver, that whatever was listed as stolen was entirely me acting on my own. He wasn’t happy about that, but finally figured out I wasn’t going to turn in my girlfriend for a felony and he made me wr
ite a list of the shit I took from the store. I named about 5 Cd’s and a video game and that was it. I figured they probably had no idea how long I’ve been stealing from there and so I took a gamble and was right. He took the list, said he would call and tell me when to turn myself in to the county jail and then left. What the fuck??!! That’s the first time I’ve heard of a cop letting someone go after they’ve just confessed to stealing something. I watch COPS, and people always go to jail.

  After all that I still had to work all night. Even though my rhythm was fucked I still made some cash off the register, gave out some free beer, did my laundry and went home just like normal.

  It really fucking sucks that the cops want to get Jenifer so badly. I told her to cool it out; she’s dropped her semester classes and now rides around with her new friend, Donut, most of the day helping him boost shit. He’s good at it, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t give a fuck about her or anybody but himself and if it comes down to it he’ll sell her out in a heartbeat. I can at least say that I have a job that I make a little money from, but he doesn’t even care about pretending to have anything like that. He’s either in a jail or out stealing to get heroin. That’s it. Not one other thing of significance occurs in his life.

  I really hope we can figure out what the fuck we’re doing soon or get the fuck out of this town. I’m not sure how much more of this I can deal with.

  I pulled into work for my Thursday night shift and from behind me the ghostly presence of cheap cologne on a tub of lard stuffed in denim with a badge came driving up in his tan, tax paid-for, gas guzzling “work” vehicle. Apparently that call I was supposed to get from the detective about when to arrange to turn myself in fell through the cracks when the fucker decided to let my charges go to warrant and then pick up a little bonus money from the state by bringing me in himself. It just so happens that I’m so easy to find since I always work the same hours and I was FUCKING HERE LAST WEEK! I didn’t even get to go and tell my manager why my car would be at work and I wouldn’t, so they’ll probably think I decided to go out on Fry St. and party.