The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman

by R. P. Lester

  ***

  Burt died bad. Real bad. Though he was feeling good when he went out. He’d developed an addiction to Morphine and Dilaudid, both extremely potent painkillers. They proved to be his undoing.

  Prison chewed Burt up and spit him out several times in the years following our second chance. I’d run into him in the city occasionally and we’d talk before moving on with our respective days. We never chatted long; by then my daughter had been born and I followed a different agenda (I still sold and did dope, but he was too “out there” for me to hang with). With each encounter, he was a more distorted version of the friend I once knew.

  Eventually, I got the long-feared call from a mutual acquaintance: a Guatemalan maid in some flophouse motel found Burt’s cold, mottled body face-up on the filthy mattress, a hypodermic dangling from his left arm with a pool of coagulated blood next to his blue, shirtless frame. The vials of hospital-grade medication on the nightstand stood empty, silently laughing at his rigid corpse, pleased they’d increased their body count. His eyes were midway, frozen in an unblinking stare.

  Tear stains streaked toward the pillow under his head.

  Sadly, there are so many gaps in my memory that I don’t recall attending the funeral. I was still in “the life”—brain cells perished. If I did see him lowered into the ground, the event has vanished from my mind.

  Can’t say I’m broken up about that.

  Whether I mourned at Burt’s open grave or shunned the ceremony, two things are certain: Burt Trippin was a good, talented, caring individual whose only slip was letting the silver tongue of evil lie its way into his confidence. Two, I will forever remember the man he used to be.

  I miss my friend dearly. I miss the laughter and good times we shared before he was cursed with the cataclysm of addiction.

  And I weep when I think of him.

  ***

  The years crawled.

  Slowly, I got my poop in a group, save for this speeding ticket I had to pay. (When I told the lady at the fines window that you can’t get blood from a turnip, she said, “True, Mr. Coxman, but we can put the turnip in jail.” I paid the goddamn ticket.) When I was leaving the courthouse, I saw the shadow of a familiar face walking up the steps with a disheveled gentleman in a wrinkled suit and a briefcase. Time and bad drugs had ravaged its once pretty features.

  “Hey, Connie.”

  “Innis!” she shrieked. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it! How have you been?!” The chap that’d been lagging halted behind her.

  She threw her arms around my neck, then pulled away. We started talking and she brought me up to speed with her family and other developments. As we stood there speaking, I couldn’t help but flinch from her appearance. Her once milky complexion was splotchy. The crow’s feet and wrinkles smacked of a woman in her late 50s. It was scary. Connie was in her early 30s, same as I, but heavy consumption of pills and methamphetamine can age you quickly, cutting grooves into your face and sending your teeth to the floor like Chiclets.

  When I asked what she was doing at the courthouse, she said she was there for the first day of her arson trial. Her silent companion was her public defender. (By the bye, burning your own fucking house to the ground for financial gain is severely frowned upon by fire investigators and insurance companies alike. I recommend against it.)

  It all came flooding back to me in a fleeting instant. I thought of the drugs, the booze, the sex, the superficial means of escape. I’m amazed at the absurdity of it all—the futures destroyed by shameful pasts, the substances we use as filler to block the pain, to eradicate the memories of personal injustices and perceived slights, to stop that hole in the soul from collapsing us in on ourselves.

  To squash life.

  I couldn’t look at her anymore. It was too much. I bid my “good luck”s before descending the courthouse steps. As I neared the sidewalk, a lightbulb went off. I stopped and did a one-eighty. Considering the charges leveled against her, chances were good I’d never see Connie again (I haven’t). Before I left her to the fickleness of the justice system, there was something I had to know.

  “Hey, Connie?”

  “Yeah, Innis?”

  “Whatever happened to your suicidal cat?”

  She lowered her head and stifled a tear. “She finally killed herself. Jumped off the second-story balcony of my place when we were in jail. My mother said she bounced a couple of times on the lawn like a beach ball.”

  It was a punch to the gut. I stared at the concrete, flabbergasted that she’d been telling the truth about that fuzzy bitch all those years ago. Connie lost her composure at the flashback, a salty stream running down her cheek.

  She needed comforting words, but me being me, I couldn’t help myself. I grinned evilly, knowing I was buying a one-way ticket to Hell.

  “Well, don’t worry, Connie. There’ll be plenty of pussy to stroke where you’re going.”

  Coxman’s Log: 4:11 PM

  I’d fallen victim to this before. But I wasn’t falling for it now. Many would call it prostitution. I simply call it a “suck for a buck.”

  So then.....

  I left the DMV after having my past probed for over two hours. Considering this was a new state, I tried to be relaxed. Subservient. But goddamn if they couldn’t leave “well enough” alone:

  “What’s this arrest for ‘possession,’ Mr. Coxman?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Si. And this conviction for ‘assault,’ sir?”

  “Oh. That’s nothing. It’s old. From a long time ago.”

  “Si, Mr. Coxman. Smile at the camera, sir.”

  Snap!

  ***

  I drove to the Exxon across the street after having officially moved into my new state. As I was filling up my truck, a little Mexican girl sashayed out of nowhere asking to use my cellphone.

  I say “little” as in she appeared to be five-four. And “girl” in the sense that she had a vagina. In every other form of the description, she could’ve passed for a madam at a house of ill repute; she was forty if she was a day. In my youth—or if I was a lesser man—I would’ve broken it wide open.

  I mean shit: long black hair that gleamed under the sun; big, dark eyes that beckoned for a fucking; a white wife beater juggling naked, still-firm C-cups; and a pair of purple Umbro soccer shorts.

  Do they even make Umbros anymore?

  ***

  “Excuse me, sir. Can I use jur phone to call for a ride?”

  “No, baby. Can’t do it.”

  “Okay. Ju wanna come around the corner then? I could give ju something else and ju could gimme a ride. Que piensas?”

  What did I think? I’ll tell you exactly what I thought.

  “You mean we can go around the corner of this store? And you’ll gimme a blowjob or some of that hoo-hoo just for a ride somewhere?”

  “Jes. Ju wanna see?.....”

  “No. Get away from me, perra. You’re fuckin’ nasty.”

  I got in my red pickup and screeched out of there. I’d paid before I fueled so my exit had the greatest impact. I left her at pump number six with her mouth hanging wide open.

  Waiting for a dick that wouldn’t come.

  Chapter Six

  Another Day, Another Dollar

  (That’s Not Yours)

  Charles Bukowski, one of the most underrated poets, authors, and human beings of the twentieth century, said it best: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 AM by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

  My God. He was the lazy, instructional uncle I never had.

  I have but two regrets concerning this most poignant of statements:

  One, I didn’t invent it myself; if I did, I’d have it tattooed on my chest backwards to ogle it in the bathroom with my covetable beard. Two—and this deep
ly saddens me—I don’t have the motivation to send copies to the heads of every major corporation on the planet after wiping my ass with the pages repeatedly; if I did, they could use the ass hairs as dental floss to remove the chunks of their edible labor force.

  ***

  The United States. A bona fide geyser of milk and honey. The greatest country in the world, we’re told ad nauseum. A bastion of capitalism where the fat of the land can be suckled like the thimbled teats of a pot-bellied pig. A place where men and women with a little drive and mountains of luck can succeed in their goals of making it, whatever their individual idea of “making it” may be. A speck of Earth whose indigenous peoples were tricked into nickel-and-diming away their cherished homeland by empty promises from European settlers. (Some history books say otherwise. Personally, I cling to the idea that Native Americans are completely justified in their distrust of the White Devil. They’re doing better than me, though; I have a healthy misgiving for all colors.) A continent of expansive acreage whose trees were used to provide homes, whose grounds were cleared to build navigable roads, and whose raw materials were harvested to compile one of the strongest societies in the history of mortal beings.

  Even the ancient Greeks would marvel at the structural accomplishments of North America. The same minds who conceptualized the Parthenon, the Acropolis, and the Temple of Zeus would soil their togas if they stood before the Willis Tower of Chicago, the JP Morgan Chase Tower in Houston, the Empire State Building of New York City, and the Washington Monument in.....

  No. I’m not doing it. If you have to ask where in the fuck that is, put this down immediately and go to a class.

  A legion of man’s achievements—from the wheel to carts to weapons to power tools to plastic to cement to mechanized machinery to vehicles to aircrafts to national monuments to theme parks to the most cloud-puncturing skyscrapers that Homo Sapiens have ever erected toward the Heavens—were invented or improved upon by proleptical visionaries who saw the potential in this great land of ours.

  Then they let others do the heavy lifting.

  ***

  Surveyors were needed in the wilds of the new frontier, but without men to level the forests, early immigrants would’ve slept at the mercy of the elements. Engineers were responsible for designing the railroads; without workers laying the tracks and cross ties for slave wages, we’d still be driving covered wagons. Architects blueprinted testaments to man’s hubris and creativity, but it was the sweat of metallurgists that enabled financial centers to trade money under steel girders rather than huts of mud and twigs.

  Sure enough, if it wasn’t for the ingenuity and grueling work of our forebears, we’d still be living in rickety wooden shacks, heaving manual plows, shooting inaccurate rifles at each other, and drinking beer because it was cleaner than the water in some areas. Day after day, this country was built on the backs of those who toiled in the blazing sun to push us into the modern fold. ‘Tis true, our ancestors were hardcore. I tip my hat to them all.

  And I’m thankful I wasn’t around for any of that horseshit.

  ***

  When you were a child staring dreamily at the stars, I’ll bet you wanted to grow up to be something that brought joy and personal fulfillment. Maybe a writer, a musician, a fashion designer, a journalist, an artist, a jewel thief, a porn star, a photographer, head of a criminal empire, a Playboy model, or Superman (clearly, some goals are beyond reach even for the most imaginative of souls). But what are you doing with your life? Chances are you’re schlepping away for some soulless entity that views you as an expendable workhorse. You’re seen as a dripping washcloth of performance, ready to be wrung dry for every drop at the lowest wage until you’re a stiff patch of cotton draped lifelessly over the towel rack.

  I feel your pain.

  I’ve never met an employer who viewed me as a flesh-and-bone human, but I’ve worked for plenty that saw me as a cash machine.

  ***

  I hate work. I despise it. More specifically, I despise working for other people who could give a fuck less about me and my well-being. Waking up and going to a place I loathe to nudge some forgettable CEO’s stock is an injustice on par with running out of hot water during your shower. It’s not what any of us were put here to do. Our passions and horizons weren’t meant to be sequestered inside of offices. Our goals were not to “dig those ditches by noon” and die of heat strokes. And we most definitely were not put here to fork over our minds, bodies, and individuality just so high ranking company officials can take a Tahitian vacation whenever the mood strikes. Personally, my catalog of employment reads like a grocery list, and I can honestly say that to be subjected to another’s demands in a work setting is one of the most unbearable torments on the planet.

  ***

  Now don’t misunderstand me, good people—I use “torment” as a metaphor. I wouldn’t dare be so arrogant as to compare employment in a leading nation to the problems of an impoverished country, for there are many forms of actual torture endured by poor souls in third-worlds everyday—false imprisonment, starvation, civil unrest, open crime, and murderous dictatorships being among them (well, maybe some of this applies to America, too, but being mashed under the thumb of a job is the wheel on which most of us are broken). I’ve always had a problem being exposed to the mercy of some faceless blob whose decision making is cored in a greed that King Midas would find absurd, the end goal being the swell of their treasure chest. And, goddammit, it seems like the bigger corporations get, the more money-hungry they become.

  I’ve never understood it: a bunch of guys band together and form a business of some description; they work hard through the years, sacrificing personal time and time spent with loved ones; they make the right contacts, funnel money to the right pockets; eventually, their company morphs into the yardstick of the industry; someday, they garner the cover of Fortune 500 or some other financial publication, yet they predictably want more.

  You’ve made it, fellas. Relax. Either by hook or crook, you’ve squashed the competition to achieve a level of financial security that many only dream about. Enjoy your gold silverware and leave some scraps for the rest of us.

  Perhaps I’ve never thought “big” enough. Maybe I’ve always kept my dreams realistic, humble. Maybe that’s why I don’t swim in a pool filled with Spanish Doubloons. Be that as it may, what I’m certain of is this: contrary to the tutorials from captains of industry who’ve used their preachings to conceal their own megalomania, sometimes it is okay to sit back and enjoy what you’ve created—to rest on your laurels and revel in your cushy bottom line. (“Bottom line.” I’ve grown to hate that phrase as much as, “It’s crabs again, Mr. Coxman.”)

  I say fuck the executives. Let some asskisser or relative of the Vice President come down and slog it out in the trenches. Chances are they’d be consumed and shit out by lunch. We should leave those bastards high and dry to deliver their own packages, shelve their own dog food, and empty their own fucking Port-o-Johns.

  With that last point, most of you are probably thinking, “Coxman, this is utter balderdash! Nobody likes to work, but how else am I going to finance food, water, electricity, daycare, car payments, and life in general? Aside from the necessities, I need entertainment. Something to relieve my mind from the drudgery of responsibility. Your argument is unrealistic. Poppycock to you!”

  First, calm the hell down. I’m not done. Second, you’re right.

  I’m a realist, man. I totally agree that toothpaste and lube aren’t going to pay for themselves. What I want you to grasp is that you don’t have to be subservient to an organization that doesn’t care about you. Whose doubletalk and veiled threats control your every movement. An employer whose hobbies include ruling by intimidation, belittlement to the point of humiliation, and control by the threat of termination.

  I wouldn’t tell you to quit your job absent a second plan. That’s just reckless. But please, if you can find a way to get out of there and make your own way without having to
answer to some eel in a suit that costs triple what you make in a week, for the sake of those who fork over thirty years of their lives to a subhuman collective claiming to have “your best interests” at heart.....

  FUCKING DO IT.

  That’s Your Problem

  (Note: you always hear the term “drug pusher.” While some who sell illegal pleasures have been known to “push” in order to get people hooked, I never subscribed to that practice. I never pushed anything on anybody. Despite what you may think of me, I was a dealer with a morsel of morality.)

  ***

  I’m going to tell you something a few people just won’t understand. The most straightforward “job title” I’ve ever held in my life? Drug Dealer. Crazy, I know. I haven’t sold a narcotic in years, but the paradox of that livelihood still floors me to this day.

  It’s no secret that the work holds grating factors. There’s deceit, treachery, the possibility of being dimed to police, and the air of tension in a crowded room from the presence of someone whose volatility is the stuff of legend. Aside from all of that, there’s the omnipresent threat of having your head blown off just by walking in the wrong house. However, when you subtract the dangerous aspects of the biz and strip the game to its meat-and-potatoes, it’s one of the more honest enterprises out there:

  You have products for sale.

  There is no shortage of customers who want said products.

  Customers locate you, the person who possesses said products.

  The customer gives you cash for one or many products.

  You give the buyer the product they’ve paid for without substituting baking soda for the coke, oregano for the weed, or candy for the pills.

  You have profited from another’s cesspool of sadness and/or need for exhilaration.