trances make nice presleep mediation.

It’s my fresh fucking page. This is my work, and my life, and I`ll do with both as I may, but by God, failure is sure hard to swallow. My pen sits still for a while, and the ashtray is left to burn up.
I walk out to my kitchen. Through my bedroom, into the hallway, past the front door, and into the dark, grease pits. My sink backed up yesterday, and I can’t get past the fumes of stinky shit coming up through the pipes.
It’s a hard stench as I flick the light switch and squint at the bright luminescence on the ceiling. It hurts, but I adjust and fix the whisky. The bottle was full yesterday, fresh, new and clean, and was now a capless quarter. The night was long, but hearty, and the rum had been a good companion. It wasn’t truculent like Celine or Hemingway, just present and calmly enjoyed.
Two nights, two nights of blank pages and shitty reports to the guys who call everyday looking for something good to publish, and I have nothing for them. The calls get angrier after six or seven hours past deadline. I’m nothing special though, I’m a fucking reporter with a shitty story to report about. It’s still art. I can still bitch when my integrity is compromised.
As I slam the last of my whisky, two knocks echo through the dim apartment, over the counter and into the rear.
It’s probably Josephine, she’s high, looking for a fuck. Don’t give it to her, Shar, don’t you fucking give it to her.
I open the door, and she stumbles in. Her purse hangs off of her and swings about her body. She slurs an appeal for a place to stay, and tries her best to be charming, even seductive, but fails as she stumbles around and throws herself into the closet door and onto the ground.
“Fuck Jos, what the hell are you doing here? It’s four o’ fucking clock in the morning.”
“You don’t sleep Sharmin, you stay up all night and drink, you goddamn lush!” She slurs out the ‘goddamn’ and ‘lush’, and glares at me as if I’d just slapped her. From the ground, her slurred words and made up eyes bulge out like periscopes from her skull. Her little black dress shows panty, and I begin to reconsider my adamant denial of any fucking tonight.
She’s right, Shar, you’re just a fucking failed writer, a goddamn lush.
“Fuck you, Jos. Don’t come here looking for a quick fuck and a warm bed, and then attack me like that.” My retort is half assed, a complete failure. It becomes evident to all parties involved that she will get what she wants. It’s only a matter of time.
“What’s in the cup, Shar?” The bitch is pissed, completely correct and completely aware of it.
I let the rest slick down my throat, and walk back into the kitchen. I’m not drunk, but I am certainly a buzz case. Josephine riles herself from the floor, barges into the kitchen and promptly slams herself into a chair. Her body seems to reverberate from the force of the actual act of sitting, and she recovers with a widened eye and a shy look around.
I pour a glass of wine for each of us, the last of the shitty red, and I sit myself down; making sure to make the whole motion effortless, so as not to portray my actual inebriated state.
She just stares at me. Her eyes are bloodshot, presumably from the coke, and her hands are shaky from the events to occur.
It will probably be the normal drunk, fucked up bullshit. We tear each other’s clothes off, fuck, and she leaves in anger tomorrow. Sometimes she’ll take money, or food, or both, but she always leaves in anger. It’s like the common denominator.
“So, are you f-fucking finished your bullshit yet? Are we going to fuck?” She slurs out both ‘fucks’ and it seems to emphasize them, as if she were completely in control of my mind, and simply commanding it to do as she pleased.
You are going to fuck her, Shar. You know you’ll fuck her, you always do.
“Jesus, Jos. Do you get any blunter? You can’t come here looking for a quick lay and a bit of cash. Whores do that, Jos, fucking whores do that.” I stammer the last part out. I try to appeal to her sense of common decency, and realize quickly that through the cocaine and alcohol, she barely holds on to her clothes, lest her sense of common decency.
Trapped, you dumb bastard, that’s what you are, you’re trapped. Fuck her, get her out of here.
“I’ll be in the bedroom you fucking drunk. I figure you’ll be there soon enough.” The last part is almost a chuckling statement of superiority. She loses her drunk, stale, coked-out incivility and seems to almost possess a functional psyche. Although she insults me, the invitation excites my natural male instinct to procreate and I hold back for as long as my will holds out. Sadly, that isn’t long.
Well, at least according to the clock on the wall. The time I sat at the table seemed to be an eternity, and a lifetime of drunken, rapid thoughts seemed to course through my brain. I was proud that I had lasted for what seemed like an hour, but it was not quite so.
I calculated the pros and cons of keeping her here for one more night. I considered the sad creations I’d been doling out to the ‘paper lately. I could almost repeat every word on the page, and none of them seemed appropriate. They all seemed so fake.
The whole profession was a joke. I knew that.
But here I was, in the centre of a blossoming novelist’s dream, and I was simply another drunk. I suppose, by that standard…so was Hemingway.
It could not be forgotten that a by-now-nude slovenly slattern was waiting for me to copulate with her in the bedroom. It seemed amazing how something so terrible as alcohol could speed up one’s thoughts.
I ventured into the room. I sauntered apprehensively to the bed, and flopped beside her. I downed my wine and kissed her hard.
She started taking off her panties and moaned something about going down on her.
When I refused to tongue her, she bit my bottom lip hard enough to break skin. The taste of blood was in both our mouths, and Josephine spat onto the floor and turned back to me.
“Fucking eat me out, you lazy cocksucker.” She half moaned it, and it was almost seductive except that now, without her panties off, I could see how ugly her unshaven legs were. They were riddled in scratches and scars, and it seemed that I was not her first for the night.
I got up.
The kitchen seemed to spin as I got in there. The knives in the drawer gleamed when I opened it, and the clanging clearly bothered her, because she screamed from the bedroom that if I wasn’t going to lick her, she wanted sleep.
“Go somewhere else, you stupid slag.” She didn’t respond.
I chopped an apple, and ate it slowly as she fell asleep and forgot about me.

Underthehoodofcarsthatmakenoiseslikethecheetahwho runs not quite fast enough

It’s a good life if you don’t weaken. Let’s be honest here. I hate to sound solipsistic, but I think they’re out to get me. “They” being no one at all.
I wanted to leave the quaint surroundings I’d inhabited for so long. Josephine had left again, and I was alone. Calls had been coming in from all the streets of the cities where we’d been up and high. People who wanted something would call to complain about their lives hoping I’d get the hint and offer all I had to quell the calls and get some rest. I didn’t offer. I sat in my solitude and listened in the dark. I wasn’t actually listening, but wondering where Josephine was, and if she was still alive.
The calls didn’t stop, and I knew that if she were to make contact, she wouldn’t call; she’d show up.
For six months I waited in an unpaid apartment, and all I really did was wait. I had a big bag, but it was gone by the end of the second month. Food became scarce, but I managed on gifts from the various saints that knew my affliction and sent their minions to me at my door bearing gifts of cold soup and stale bread.
It’s amazing really, eating off the plates of the rude rich. They see their immense backyards and expect that to extend the whole of the world over. This was no one’s backyard though. No gold trickled through these troughs, and no human being was human here. Instead, the Indian cattle roamed the street, the only ones out after dark, peddling cheap momentary decorations and claiming that only theirs won you back the soul you traded to be treading circles in empty, scattered apartments.
Jos didn’t come back to ours. By the time I was discovered, my emaciated body was asunder beneath my mattress trying to keep warm, a phone beside my ear listening to a scag bearer who’s Last Temptation had come and absolutely needed some one to talk at. When asked who I was, I could move my jaw, but not my vocal cords to speak. Two well fed police officers looked at each other and tossed me in the back of an ambulance to suck at the bare coffers of the health system.
Josephine heard about my health and made attempts to see me without exposing herself. Once as my old high school friend, once as my landlord; clever guises.
I laid there, struggling to breathe, balding, jutting and gasping through painful conversations as to how I was treated here and who my next of kin was should I die.
I didn’t die. In a fortnight I was released, and my absolutely desolate craving for a big bag laid down on me hard. A big bag isn’t easy to find on streets like these. Empty eyes are on every corner but approach is a tense subject when you dry yourself out with cigarettes and a forty.
One knew me. He slapped me on the back and instead of responding, I simply gasped hard and kept walking. He slapped me the next day, but not after that. He learned. He learned not to bring his cheap addiction near mine. We were separate and we were in competition for our souls here, not a cheap commodity, that.
During those four days, I crawled from one shelter to another. Some roofs leaked, while others held firm beneath a cold moon and rich lights of city banks miles above me. Busses and cars whizzed along their trajectories, and out of every corner at the very bottom crawled another wonderful creature unrecognizable from those miles up.
None of them was Josephine, but I took solace in that I knew she was not watching from above me.
Old Ren drank bleach and died. When I heard about him, I went to Old Ren’s best friend and sought some type of nicety like that. I was in the market for cost effective creativity.
Noel Rado was a perfect target for this creativity. I couldn’t see what his full tattoo said beneath his stained undershirt, but “THEC” stood out, and I made out an A on his left pectoral.
I spoke to him briefly in the context of our mutual understandings. Above us both, outside, a spotlight crossed the sky, and darted back against the towering structures beside it. Money passed through the air, and with the right gloves, you could catch the invisible waves carrying it. Meanwhile, a mile below, the worst scrapped for the pennies dropped in the sidewalk cracks, and upended themselves to intoxication.
Noel laughed as I stretched my bony hand out to him. The crumpled paper in my palm hit the plywood table, and I felt the Cup of Trembling topple when it hit. Noel dug briskly through a small wooden box and buried it once again in his metal case.
From it he’d removed the capsule that was to be my final swallow. The last bit of air outside seemed wonderful for being free. I walked for seven blocks and reached the apartment wherein I used to wait.
Inside, I could see Jos, naked and writhing on some poor man who’d come to replace me. I could hear her fake moaning and crept up the stairs.
She gradually got louder until she screamed that she was coming, and I opened the door. Neither one stopped. Two big bags drifted across the floor and I stepped into the bathroom, stared in the mirror and chewed the capsule. As I fainted into the screen, I noticed the blood across the floor, and realized that it was in fact blood I’d lost in the wait.
Gradually, the whole apartment filled with blood, and the ceilings began dripping a foul yellow liquid, and the drapes were made of hair, and the lamps were shining colors of all intensities. The walls drained slowly, and out the window, behind the great watchtowers, a kite flew across the sky into the hydrolines.
I watched them finish fucking and decided to die.