The nightmare was over. I closed the door and threw the deadbolt and just stood there with my forehead against the door and let the previous week float through my head uninterrupted. The sound of keys jingling startled me and I jolted up straight. Holy Christ! It was my neighbor Jaime coming home from work. I noticed that my apartment was pretty dark too. It was now around a quarter to seven and I had been standing there in one spot for over three hours. Part of me wanted to knock on Jaime's door and tell her how I had been dropped by the compound, how I had failed, how I was no longer a school bus driver, but I could hear her through the wall talking on the phone to a friend and making plans for dinner, her laughter spattering and sticking to my invisible shield of hate and negativity like birdshit. To knock on her door would be an excersise in futility and I was powerless to change my emotions to more closely match hers. I turned on the t.v. to catch the national news and that is when I noticed the light blinking on my answering machine. Feeling like a sponge diver covered with lead weights, I rose to my feet and walked across the room and thumbed the button.
It was my union representative expressing her sorrow and disbelief at the outcome of my "evaluation." She told me that it was an illegal action that the compound director had taken, yet there WERE witnesses to the day that I threw a chair at him. Even though he took no action on that day, what I had done was clearly a terminable offense even though I was provoked into doing so. No matter what I did or said, he had me and he knew it. I was touched that she had called me. I slowly began to realize that my being there had made much more of a difference and impact on things than I had ever really thought about.
I tried to call her back, but there was no answer, and I remembered that it was Wednesday, so she would be busy with church related activities. I had even been invited to attend her church services. That was a little too much for me to handle at the time. A white man bicycling his way into the South Side of St. Pete to sit next to a young black grandmother of 47 in a predominatley black church. I lacked the courage and maturity to realize the scope of the honor that had been bestowed upon me. At the time, I thought Shirley was just playing with me. What I did instead, was to draw inside of myself, hating the whole world and everything in it. I dragged my futon matress into the closet, made myself a soundproof cocoon for later, drank myself into oblivion in front of the t.v. then prepared for the big sleep. I put 3 tablespoons of Epson Salt into a glass of hot water. Before Dave Letterman could get through the Top 10, my guts rumbled like a volcano and I hit the bathroom. After losing what felt like 5 pounds easy, I wrote a letter to the landlady, saying that I was going to be staying with my grandfather for a few days and went down and placed it in her box.
I shook 5 visterils into my hand and downed them with my last beer then watched an old episode of the X-Files and waited for them to kick in. Taking that last piss was like wading through molasses. I unplugged everything except the fridge then crawled into my cocoon not caring if I lived or died. I slept for 3 and a half days and the dreams that I had were extremely vivid, and life changing. In the time I was away, every little petty thing that I had blamed my unhappiness and bad fortune on had simply melted away. People in my building remarked on how fresh I looked and how being with my grandfather had done a lot of good for me. A day later, my downstairs neighbor Missy whom I had shared a love/hate friendship with for the past 5 years, offered me her car for $300 dollars. From then on, things started going right for me for a change. I am not one to say whether it was right or wrong to tempt suicide the way I did, and I can't say whether or not something wrong inside of me actually DID die those 4 days I spent feeling sorry for myself in that closet wrapped up inside 90 pounds of cotton, but all I do know now is that this is MY goddamn life, and it is up to ME to do something with it.
The previous events happened in February of 1996.
