Ryan's Suffering

by Lloyd Paulson

  Instead, I made faces at the cat, and kept flipping it the bird, wishing it would go the fuck away, all the while wondering how my life had turned to shit after that night so many years ago. To tell the truth, life before that wasn’t so fucking awesome either.

  My thoughts chased themselves in circles, while a familiar friend was lurking in the corner of my mind. He was a bare suggestion of an outline, faceless and nameless. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, he was whispering so quietly, because he was talking so quietly his breath would barely tickle the fine and delicate hairs inside my ear even if he was whispering right directly in it. There’s no way I could hear the word, "Suicide," whispered over and over, endlessly. No way at all that I could hear that thought. I fucking swear.

  The cat just stared and watched me, purring. And purring. And purring.

  Corn-Fucked Wasteland Binge Drinking

  Mike was also a womanizing asshole. Since I was not a woman, I looked upon his affliction as a source of endless entertainment instead of an annoyance.

  Life rather was on a semi-permanent hold after my first trip to the loony bin. Yes, I said "loony bin", not a "psychiatric inpatient ward", not a "mental hospital", not a "convalescent home" or a "pathway recovery center", not any other "politically correct" phrase people would prefer I use. The word "loony bin" turns people off—fuck if I give a shit—I’ve been there, and that’s what I think of it. It’s a psychological kindergarten, complete with coloring time (work therapy), snack time (yes, there’s milk and cookies, and the cookies usually suck a big fat cock), and naptime (although they usually call it guided meditation). You can even eat paste, if you’re so inclined.

  Attempted suicide lands you in the loony bin—that’s how I landed there the first time. A few recommendations from the veterans:

  First, if you're going to swallow pills, don't overdose on acetaminophen products, like Vicodin. While the high might be pretty fucking decent, the acetaminophen overdoses are nasty. It plays hell on your internal organs. Worse, you may actually damage your liver bad enough that it's going to kill you, but it's just going to take a week to do it, and it's going to be very painful, very slow, and very spectacular in the process.

  Two, if you're going to swallow pills, swallow enough to do the job right where they need a coroner and not an ambulance, or you're going to get your stomach pumped, and that fucking sucks so much that it blows. The ER nurses have no sympathy for the pill poppers, and they're going to ram a tube down your hatch, pump you full of charcoal (you're going to be blowing black chunky shit out of both ends for a week) and they don't really give a fuck how comfortable you are as they do it. After all, just a short while ago you were trying to off yourself, so what should you care about "a little pressure?" They quit giving a fuck about twenty-five attempted suicides ago. Now it’s just a hassle and you’re just fucking up what was shaping up to be a quiet midnight shift.

  While an active form of suicide can get you committed, suicide doesn't necessarily have to be active to be effective. You don’t necessarily have to die to commit suicide; I think you simply have to stop living. I managed to pull that off for a time, but then Trish fucked it all up.

  I was twenty-one, living in an apartment on the top floor of a small house on Maple Street. Well, calling it an apartment was actually stretching the definition a bit, but that was how the paper advertised the place. It was just a small studio efficiency. It was all I could afford.

  I had enough room for a bed, a small chair, and a small dining room table. I had my own deluxe kitchenette, and my own bathroom. Although how can you call it a bathroom when you can’t actually take a bath? There was a toilet, a sink and a plastic shower stall. Bathroom? It was a shower room with a shitter. All told, it was three hundred and fifty square feet of luxurious living.

  When you are taking home slightly more than minimum wage working oddball factory jobs for a temporary employment agency, the square footage you can afford doesn’t go very far, especially when the prospects of working next week might only be fifty-fifty. Therefore, renting a full-blown apartment would have been extravagant on my pay.

  Besides, when you are single, what does it matter if there’s a door between the bedroom and the card table you call the dining room? Of course, asking a date to come back to my place for a nightcap and some procreational recreation was not the plan of attack, generally.

  Not that I was the quintessential prowling bachelor, looking to bed my next victim. I tended to keep to myself. I’ve never thought of myself as a very lovable person, nor have I been exactly the most sociable of people.

  I "lived" in my "apartment," to stretch the definitions of each of those words to the fullest.

  Living meant I simply existed. I was going through the motions of life. I got up. I went to work on some days, when there was work available. I read books when there was no work. I had two friends, and had just recently lost one of those due to the curse of the young bachelor, otherwise known as "marriage". It seemed like incarceration, and occasionally I could visit him there.

  That left me with one friend, who had a permanent factory job. Lord knows how he got in; factory jobs in Michigan are nearly non-existent. Mike was even a member of a union. He received an hourly wage. Mike worked forty hours a week, steady. He received overtime more weeks than not. He had a spacious two-bedroom apartment. I couldn’t even afford half the rent, which is why I lived in my little shithole instead of splitting the rent with him. Mike made payments to the bank for his truck instead of to a local mechanic dumb enough to both keep my car running and give me credit. In essence, he was everything I was not.

  Mike was also a womanizing asshole. Since I was not a woman, I looked upon his affliction as a source of endless entertainment instead of an annoyance.

  On Friday and Saturday nights, if Mike wasn’t working, and I had the night off too, we would go ‘Out’. This little ritual had started shortly after I moved into my luxury condominium and Mike turned twenty-one.

  Mike spent his first weekend of turning twenty-one years old recovering in bed after a few of his co-workers tried to give him alcohol poisoning. He spent the next two days bed-ridden and vomiting so hard he had ruptured blood vessels in his eyes.

  He refused to go the hospital though. "Did it to myself," he said, smiling, his head hanging over the edge of his bed over a trashcan when I stopped by to check on him. He didn’t learn his lesson, and stopped by my tiny cramped apartment the next Friday.

  I opened the door, to find him standing on the top of the stairway, sweating like a pig.

  He smiled, pushed past me into the apartment, and flopped down on my bed.

  "Glad you’re home."

  I smiled tiredly at him. It was the middle of July, and I was sweating profusely. I had been relatively comfortable lying on top of the covers of my bed in front of a fan, but walking to the door had drenched me in sweat. I had been vaguely wishing it would storm, to cut the temperatures back down to normal. The air was thick with humidity, the breeze non-existent. "Why’s that, Mike?"

  "Cuz you’re coming with me to the bar, Ryan."

  I pointed at the book on the card table and metal folding chair I called a dinette set. "I was reading."

  He crossed his arms, and lay back on my pillow. "So read in a fucking bar."

  "It’s too noisy."

  He smiled. "It’s air conditioned."

  I considered this for a moment. It had to be nearly ninety in my apartment. "You puked your guts out last weekend. Didn’t you learn a fucking thing?"

  He sat up and smiled. "Nope. Not a goddamned thing."

  "Your eyes are still bloodshot from that adventure, dumbass."

  He wandered over to the mirror on the wall, and peered at his eyes in the reflection. "Yep, they sure the fuck are." He turned and smiled at me with a toothy grin, eyes wide to show me the burst vessels.

  "Mike, I can’t afford to. I only worked twenty hours this week. Rent’s due next week."

  He stood up, and p
lucked his shirt away from his chest a few times. "It’s hotter than hell in here. I’ll loan you a couple bucks."

  I crossed my arms and frowned at him. "You know goddamned well I’m not going to pay you back."

  He walked over, and pushed me out my door. "Fuck you, bro. We can argue in my truck. It has air conditioning. Way too fucking hot in your apartment. And drop the loser book, pussy."

  He followed me down the stairs, and I climbed into the passenger seat of his truck. Mike had left it running, and after the stifling heat of my apartment, it was like stepping into a freezer. I broke out into goose bumps, the drops of sweat on my skin turning into pinpoints of ice. I shivered, feeling refreshed. I hadn’t realized how tired and hot I had been lying in the thick, humid, sludgy air of the apartment.

  Mike drove us to a small sports pub two blocks down from my apartment.

  We split a pitcher of beer.

  I had to yell to be heard over the sound of a cat being strangled, otherwise known as fucking karaoke. "You were right. This beats the hell out of sweating my ass off in my apartment."

  "Fuck yeah, bro."

  He chugged half his beer, and belched loudly. "You know what you need, my friend?"

  I rolled my eyes theatrically. "Yeah, what’s that, Mikey?"

  He flipped me the bird. He hated it when anyone called him Mikey. He then smiled broadly, holding his beer glass up. Mike chugged the rest of the beer, and slammed the empty glass down. I cringed, wondering why it didn’t break. He looked directly at me, deadly serious. "We need to get you laid."

  I laughed. "Yeah, that’s your answer to everything."

  He yelled out his response loud enough for the entire bar to hear. "That’s ‘cuz pussy’s awesome!"

  Two girls at the bar turned around and frowned at him. He smiled and winked at them. Surprisingly the giggled at him and turned around. I have no idea how he gets away with that shit. "Well your tits aren’t big enough for me, big guy. Not happening. I don't care how good you are at sucking cock."

  Mike stood up, and cuffed me upside the head as he walked past me, and ushered me out the door.

  Mike drove us to a dance club called D.J. Barracuda’s out on the edge of town, just beyond the highway on Michigan Avenue. We had to stand in line outside for the better part of a half hour. We snickered at some of the people standing in line, waiting to get in. This club was the best in town, which wasn’t saying very fucking much. In the corn-fucked wasteland of the Midwest, shag carpeting, a disco ball and top-forty dance music was as good as you could get without heading into a much bigger and prosperous city.

  We bullshitted as we stood in line, wondering if we were trying to get into Club Nineteen Eighty Nine. As in everyone seemed to be wearing high tops and jean jackets, Metallica in black letters across the shoulder blades, Megadeth t-shirts, and Poison patches sewn in. It was hotter than hell outside, and they even had the long hair to compliment the faded jean jackets.

  We half-wondered why the girls didn’t have leg warmers and the big poof. You know, their bangs curled and shellacked with hair spray so it stood straight the fuck up—the taller, the better. I vaguely wondered if Swatches were going to make a comeback.

  Once we were inside, it was dark, and ice cold. The music was loud. The pop and dance shit wasn’t exactly my kind of tunes, but the young ladies gyrating on the dance floor admittedly piqued my interest. Only human, I guess.

  Mike threaded his way to the bar, and bought the first round. He handed me a beer, and we found our way over to a recently vacated table.

  After I had slammed a beer, and was feeling mighty damn fine, Mike decided to spoil my mood.

  He pointed to a table on the far side of the dance floor, near the front. "Go over and ask her to dance."

  I looked, and saw several girls sitting at a table where he was pointing. They looked like a bunch of stuck-up whores to me. You know, the ones who need to know what kind of car you drive and how much you're contributing to a 401k before they’ll engage in anything more than polite chitchat. "Which one?"

  "The blonde at the end, closest to us."

  I stared at her for a minute. Hair pulled back in a ponytail. Tight blouse. Tight jeans. Mid twenties. Made her a few years older than us. My first thought was I had about a zero chance. That bitch was a Princess. With a capital fucking "P."

  Being a "Princess" is not a good thing, at least in my fucking book. Being a Princess meant whatever she wanted, she got. Regardless of price. If you can’t afford it, she’ll fuck your friends that can afford it just to get it. No morals or scruples. Meaning I couldn’t afford this bitch even if I could get her attention, and if I could garner her attention, I could never trust the wench. I wanted nothing to do with her. She’d be annoying to talk to—she’d have a high squeaky voice, and was probably an ex-cheerleader, and an ex-prom queen. Daddy’s little girl, and daddy had money. I shook my head. She was probably a lousy fucking lay too. While you are banging away at her, giving her your best moves and doing your best to get her off, she’d be off in la-la land wondering what the fuck she’s going to wear the next day.

  Mike frowned. "Get your ass over there, pussy."

  I stood up, thinking, "Fuck it." Nothing to lose, anyway. Might as well make this entertaining.

  I walked over, and squatted down next to her at the edge of the table. "Hey."

  She smiled at me, which surprised me. I expected a look of disdain. "Hey."

  She didn’t have the annoying squeaky voice I expected. Fuckola. Batting zero so far. Ok, so how do I make this entertaining and not a complete waste of time? I glanced at her appreciatively. She was actually quite stunning, once you ignored that fact that I disliked her on general fucking principle.

  I looked up at her face, and smiled. She actually continued smiling in return, a smile that lit up her eyes, which was another pleasant surprise. "I was wondering if you would help me out."

  She looked at me warily. "You think this pick up line's going to work?"

  I laughed. "Trust me. This is no pick up line. Quite the opposite, in fact."

  She shrugged. "Okay. What do you want help with?"

  "My friend told me to ask you to dance. I don’t particularly want to dance, and I'm probably about the last person in the world you'd even give the time of day to, but he called me a pussy. Unfortunately, in bro code, that means that I have no choice but to ask you. So here I am, proving to him that I am not a pussy. I was wondering if you could be so kind, and shake your head and tell me ‘no’, so I can go sit down again, and tell him that you said you don’t dance with losers like me. It’s a win-win. We don't have to be unpleasant about this, which was how it was going to go down if we did it his way. You still don't have to dance with me, and I can go back and drink my beer without you making me feel like shit about it and without having lost any status with my asshole friend in the process."

  She smiled. "Interesting. Okay. I'll help you out. It's a deal." She theatrically shook her head "No". "I don't want to dance with you."

  I smiled at her. "Okay then. Have a good night."

  I started to walk away, then stopped and turned around. "Thanks so much!" I gave her a thumbs up that Mikey couldn't see, and winked at her.

  She laughed, and winked back in return. That went better than I expected, and I was feeling pretty damned good about how smoothly I pulled that off. I smiled at her, turned, wiped the smile off my face, and walked away. Mike threw his hands in the air. I shrugged, and tried to look properly dejected. He asked me what I said when I turned back the second time. I made up a story about how she doesn’t know what she’s missing, and he congratulated me on the quick comeback line. Mike bought me another drink as a consolation. He then told me if a horse throws you, you have to try to get right the fuck back on again. I spent the next hour doing the same routine, and he kept buying me drinks as consolation prizes. I loved this arrangement, and I worked on perfecting the art of getting shot down to get Mike to buy me free booze.

  More bewi
lderingly, when Mike managed to engage a pretty brunette on the dance floor, I saw from the corner of my eye that the first blonde who shot me down made a beeline straight for me.

  She smiled, grabbed my hand, and dragged me into the depths of the club. What the fuck? She paused only briefly near the back offices, and a bouncer who didn’t even look at her nodded. She dragged me in through a door marked Private, which turned out to be a nice office with a dark oak desk with a leather surface.

  As soon as the door was closed, she was kissing me and dragging me towards the desk. I was so completely overwhelmed; all I could think was "What the fuck?" for several seconds as I was completely stunned. This shit doesn't happen in real fucking life. Something's seriously fucking wrong, here. I grabbed her shoulders and broke away, as she leaned against the desk.

  She was gazing at me, smiling, as she placed her hands on the desk edge.

  I shook my head, and stepped back. "What was that for?"

  She laughed. "You're not interested?"

  I turned around, running a hand through my hair. "Lady, I don't know you. I don't even know your name." I felt extremely tense, a live wire of current that was coursing through me.

  She ran a hand through her hair. "So shyness isn't an act. You are quite the gentleman, hmm? Most guys wouldn't think twice about a chance with me." She stepped towards me.

  Behind her, the dark striped cat was sitting on the desk, staring at me. Its tail draped over the edge of the desk, ticking back and forth, like a pendulum on a clock. The green eyes were slits that bored in on me. I looked back at her, and I could feel the hair on my neck standing up. She was unbuttoning the top button on her blouse. I sensed danger, but I didn't know why. "You're extremely attractive, but…" I glanced at the cat. I could hear warning bells in my head, but I had no idea what the danger was. I kept backing towards the door, "I'm not into one-night stands. I'd prefer to know you on a personal level, first.