A friend in need.

“You look like you feel like shit.”

Hank has a wonderful gift of pointing out the obvious.

“Thanks, asshole.”

“No problem. Now, why so glum, chum? I haven’t seen you this shitty since you quit drinking.”

Since Hank actually lives inside my head, you would think he would cut through the inanity of conventional conversations but I think it is all a part of his strange process. He thinks he is helping me. Nursing me through this ridiculous breakdown.

Time will tell.

“Bad Egg is dead.”

“I know, buddy.” He brushes the graying hair out of his eyes and pours himself a slow drink. He turns and sad-eyes me for a long moment. “I know.”

My imaginary companion kills that drink and pours another before walking out on the aft deck with it. He expects me to follow and I will, eventually.

I despise being alone.

As history will show, I will surround myself with people sometimes even if I hate them just to keep the silence from crushing me. The silence breeds the voices, the stories, and the words. I have lived with the words crashing into me for years. The drugs held them back for a while but eventually just fueled the fire even more.

The words come faster than I can type. Faster than I can speak. The memories and emotions and snapshots of a life well wasted. A life lived in excess. Add to that an overactive imagination and a passion for mental sadomasochism and you have one fucked up human being. How do you hold a normal conversation when you are imagining the speaker wearing disco satin and roller skates and there is an actual soundtrack of 70’s soul playing over skating rink speakers and a god damned strobe light flashing somewhere?

I just came to pay the cable bill…

I follow Hank out into the sunshine with a glass of hot tea. Ice is a luxury when you live on a boat. I have a solar panel which gives me enough juice for the laptop and some lights at night but the generator runs on gas which is expensive and a hassle to row back and forth from town. I would just as soon drink my tea warm.

It is one less thing to deal with.

“It has been a hell of a year, hasn't it?”

He stares out at the closet neighbors’ boat. It is actually 3 boats lashed together, two small sailboats and some homemade mishmash bullshit that looks like Frankenstein water sealed it with his big clumsy hands. It is an ugly thing and it pisses me off for some reason. I can’t help it. I would sink it if I thought I could get away with it.

“Yes, it has.”

This past year actually began a long time ago with the realization that I would never be able to work like I used to. My body is nearly crippled from years of abuse and injury. I have been shot twice, stabbed 3 times, and ran over by a couple of cars. I have fallen from a cliff, overdosed a few times, been in more fights than I can remember, and once dropped a Foosball table on my foot while having sex with 2 thick mountain girls in Wyoming. I have broken nearly every bone in my body at least once. I have treated my temple like a honkytonk and I pay for it every day.

The drugs and booze began as recreation and graduated to necessity. It helped to numb the physical and obliterate the emotional. The emotional is the hardest to kill.

You cannot live my life without carrying more than your fair share of scars.

So this year began a few years ago. This year I gave up drugs and alcohol. My life had burst all over the pavement after my mother died. It was already completely insane but I lost my shit when she went away. She would have loved the fact that I pulled myself from underneath my Lost Weekend but she didn't live long enough to witness that.

Long, long nights of sweating, crying, pleading, shitting, and puking, purging the last 30 years from my body, begging God to end my life and She did nearly call my bluff a couple of times. I would never wish that time of my life on anyone.

       I spent a good portion of the last year locked out here on the boat, by myself, talking to Hank. Sam and Moon live here but I have become such a stranger to my own reality that they almost seem like peripherals. They are there, but only out of the corner of my eye.

       But when I try to see them, fully, they disappear like the forgotten words of a song you have sung a thousand times. Sometimes, I wonder if they even see me anymore or am I just a smoldering cigarette abandoned in an ashtray no one has the heart to throw out?

        Sam speaks to me sometimes. I watch her mouth move and I hear sounds and my mouth responds with something else but I have no idea what. The motions are second nature when you have been going through them as long as I have. 

         She holds my clammy hands and whispers to me and I smell her vanilla skin and sometimes I cry for no reason. She crushes me against her at those times and all I can think is that I wish I was man enough to be her comfort when she needed me. Instead, I wallow in myself and grow more silent and antisocial every day.

          So, Mom dies, I quit the Life and go insane, everything has changed, and now Bad Egg is dead.

          “You are going to tell them about him?”

          “I suppose I will have to. Otherwise they won’t understand.”

          “They won’t understand no matter what you say. They didn't know him.”

          I will have to think about this one for a minute…