Black Neon

by Tony O'Neill

  “What’s unbelievable is the fact that I’m here. I must be out of my fucking mind.”

  “That was God again. Or fate. Or whatever you wanna call it. I had a dream about you last night, that’s why I called. And there you were, all ready to check into rehab again, start up with all of that bullshit again. I got to you just in time, Randal. Saved you from yourself. Look around you, man. You’re in fucking paradise.”

  Randal looked around the little bar. A cool breeze blew in from the ocean. The smell of marijuana smoke hung in the air. Glasses clinked, laughter echoed around the cool, wooden shack. “I’m gonna be cut out, you know. This is it. I couldn’t stay clean; I just skipped out on rehab and got on a plane to fucking Jamaica. I’m done. I’ll never see a penny of my inheritance after this. I bet Harvey’s down at the lawyer’s office right now, thinking of new and exotic ways to fuck me over.”

  Jeffrey shook his head, and smiled indulgently. “What you mean is – you’re free. That money was just a trap, man. That’s what they used to control you. If you weren’t the guy they wanted you to be, they’d threaten take your money away. Look at you. You were unhappy when you were clean, you were unhappy when you were sober. You needed to get away from all of that bullshit, Randal. That shit was either gonna kill you or drive you crazy in the end.”

  Randal shrugged. “You could have a point. I managed to get a bit of money squirreled away. Enough to last me a little while.”

  “I got a place, the next town over. It ain’t a mansion, but it’s home. I owe you, big time. If you hadn’t set that shit up with Gibby I’d still be scuffling in Hollywood, man. There’s no need to work. So long as those checks keep coming, the cost of living here is low…” Jeffrey shrugged. “There’s nothing to do, and all the time in the world to do it.”

  Randal nodded. He looked around the beachfront shack. “So what do we do now?”

  Jeffrey smiled, and motioned for the bartender to fill their glasses. “We get drunk.”

  “And after that?”

  “You’re free Randal. I’ll help you get over your speed jonze, and then you can do whatever the hell you wanna do.”

  Randal picked up the glass and held it to his lips. The strong, pungent smell of the alcohol stung his nostrils.

  “To new beginnings,” he said.

  Jeffrey clinked his glass to Randal’s. The warm breeze that blew through this place cooled the damp shirt against Randal’s skin, and he shivered slightly. They tossed back their drinks, wincing, and then Randal threw his arms back, stretching, beginning to feel relaxed for the first time in as long as he could remember.

  “So come on,” Jeffrey said. “You’re in Jamaica. Nobody knows where you are. Just think… you could be in some crummy rehab right now, eating stale hot dogs and writing some fucking essay about your higher power. Well fuck that… the world’s your fucking oyster. What do you wanna do, Randal?”

  Randal rubbed his face, and yawned. All around him were the strange and foreign sounds of the Caribbean – alien-sounding words rising and falling in a musical synchronization, speaking all at once, voices thick with the mish-mash rush of patois. The soft undertow of song was carried all around the island; booming out from passing cars, the melodic implorations of an old man as he sold plantains by the roadside, the languid, rhythmic pulse of a reggae number crackling from a transistor radio behind the bar. Suddenly there was the rasping, mosquito-like buzz of a moped as it tore past them, the sound rising then falling until there was nothing left but the echo that bounced off the green hills inland, ricocheting out to the warm, still sea. Jeffrey was no longer on junk time, Randal mused, he was on a different clock altogether now. Still, it was a clock that was divorced completely from the rigorous demands of American Time. Maybe that was why withdrawing over here had seemed so easy to him. Maybe the pain originates not in leaving junk time behind, but in being dragged kicking and screaming back into the nine to five constraints of Their Time. Maybe his own withdrawal from Meth Time and into some other time would be as easy as stepping out of his clothes and into the warm blue waters a few feet to his left. Maybe this was what he had needed all along – to be divorced from Time completely. Maybe the drugs had just been a means to an end. Maybe his problem was time itself, and all of this, all of this madness was just a simple attempt to disentangle himself from its all-consuming constraints.

  “You still with me?” Jeffrey said waving a hand in front of Randal’s thoughtful face. “I told you that stuff is powerful.”

  “I’m good.” Randal said with a contented smile. “Thanks Jeffrey. I got a weird feeling you could be right about everything. I think I finally know what I want to do.”

  Randal sat back and smiled dreamily.

  “Oh yeah? And what’s that?”

  “I wanna do nothing.” Randal watched as the barkeep refilled their glasses. He picked it up and held it to his lips. “I wanna do absolutely fuckin’ nothing.”