Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

I acquired that habit a long time ago. Watching a woman deeply asleep in the morning is one of the most beautiful paintings God’s ever created. Jenifer didn’t know yet, but I did. We are meant to be together.

This IS going to be real. Real enough to stand the test of time. The problem is that like so many other times in my life when I knew, the opposite sex of the coin has reservations. So I let the evening of torment and agonies ensue. I drowned out the mere prospect of thinking about it with alcohol and whatever else was around to postpone any imaginary pain and insecurity until another date with her. Alas poor Horatio, I am the king of all.

The smell of her and this intense summer. The prospect of the wide open road inspired by a winter of Jack K. and the pink paperback edition of everyone’s classic motorcycle Zen companion manual, the latter of which I have been toting around in the back pocket of my pants to strike intrigue into the female persuasion that have cause to need the benefits of a phone call. Usually some sort of lame excuse provides that backdrop. Honestly, it really isn’t too hard to inspire the mind of young college co-eds who have been taught all their lives that after prom it would be man-snagging time and there would be no better place to look for that intellectual best friend for life than their college campus.

In college there’s a heavy moral pendulum that suddenly releases and swings back along its lifelong arc. College is a place designed for exploration. Eager minds, raging hormones and cheap beer by the keg all in one mixed up sexual stewpot. Just heat, simmer and serve.

I’m infatuated with Jenifer. She is cool and laid back about everything and it works for her. Normally I would be slightly embarrassed to show a girl that I really like where I am living. Of course she’s already seen the Lodge, and being that she is from Denton, she’s probably been around the Deltas more than I have.

The Delta Lodge is an “alternative fraternity” that I pledged way back when I was a 17-year-old freshman in the fall of 1991. It was hard for me to balance getting good grades, the dependence of a new girlfriend and the “I don’t give a fuck” party attitude of the Lodge but I managed to squeeze into the brotherhood while I was young, unnoticed and nai’ve to the ways of the world. The place held some of the magic that the Animal House/Revenge of the Nerd movies offered. I knew that I wanted the full piss-in-your-face college experience and I knew that to do this I would have to associate with the people my “higher” education was designed to keep me from. I wanted to be able to look the hardcore drinkers in the face and have the stamina to kick each other in the nuts. Well maybe nothing that crazy, but I knew the flophouse frat called the Delta Lodge was going to play a far greater role in my life than anything I had done up to that point and would finally test my mettle. This was the one spot in Denton where the one percent of the population that truly knew they were cool, dark and different deep down in their soul could hang out. A place they could gravitate to and not feel persecuted. Either that or just party their asses off and stir up trouble in a fairly safe haven.

The Delta Lodge became my escape from the serious side of college while I still lived on campus in the dorms. When the chance to live in the “house with no rules” became available this summer, I took it. The house is three stories tall and perches on one of the tallest points in the city. During the hot summer nights you can climb out of the third story window onto the crumbling roof and look at the stars and tops of the trees for miles all around. I scrawled my name in big black spray-paint up here for the entire world to see, or at least those folk brave and drunk enough to climb up here for themselves. The other day I found an old broken television and painted the words “I am watching you” on it in an acidic moment of clarity. I dragged that old TV up to the roof and perched it up on the highest chimney so that the television could watch those who watched it for so long. Down in the depths of this old house is a basement filled with foulness and an old light that hangs from frayed and shaky wires. The walls here resemble a New York subway car, it’s layered with tales of graffiti and past pleasures. There are catacombs of crawlspaces with dirt floors and secret exits under here too. Here and there, among the hallways of the main body of the house, is a sporadic doorway that leads to someone or the others room. The cast of players in the house is ever changing except for a few mainstays. I have been in all the rooms at some time or another and each one is so different in shape and décor from the others that I could spend hours going into the details of each. I have put in a lot of time stumbling around this house drunk, listening to aspiring local bands in the front room, painting the walls, tripping on acid and smoking obscene amounts of marijuana with good people I would not have otherwise met.

This summer is my break. This summer is where I cast off the domineering presence of Melanie (the ex) and have choices to make without fear of fighting and repercussion. Melanie was THE girlfriend. The first super-serious girlfriend I ever had. She had a great body and a buck-toothed face that kept me pussy-whipped for two years. The one that made me wait almost four months to get an AIDS test before I could fuck her. The one that was always getting bladder infections and smoking cigarettes in that annoying matter where each drag took an intense showy draw to inhale. This method of smoking caused her front left vampire tooth to be slightly off-color than the rest of her teeth. She was the one who tried to be so classy and gothic without ever figuring out class is not defined by money but rather is a sense that exists in your soul. The one who always had me give her oral sex without ever truly wanting regular sex, or so I thought. I kept a journal of that whole time we were together and used smiley faces as symbols to denote what sexual activity I participated in on certain days. A frowning face meant just oral sex for her, a neutral face meant just oral sex for me and the face that grinned like an idiot meant the whole walla-walla-sha-bang. When I go back now and read my journal from that time, I see that at some point I was getting quite a bit of the grinning like an idiot good stuff.

I had a lot of developmental experiences with Melanie that looking back now seem like good things to have done, but at the time they were a little bizarre for me. Hell, some of them are still bizarre when I think of them. The handcuffs and bondage was nice and I could even stand going to the gay bars and getting drunk while she played the fag-hag role. I could have done without that one experience where I was wearing makeup while naked and handcuffed to the bed when the Resident Administrator walked into our dorm room though. Melanie would study and sleep mostly but she was pretty cool about letting me trip acid all night and then stumble into her bed during the dawn hours.

I finally moved out of the dorms and all that silliness and while we’ve been broken up I’ve had sex with her once after she made a surprise visit to my pad. My roommate Ernie warned me not to do it with her, saying she was just trying to get back together, but my cock wanted to believe she only wanted “one last fling” and so I had to invoke another tear session when it turned out her and my cock didn’t have the same understanding of the “one last fling” concept. At the time I was kind of pissed that she thought she would get me back merely by fucking me again, but some girls are taught their whole life that sex can equal love when they want it to.

Basically I can sum up Melanie by saying that I really thought I loved her for a few months and convinced her to love me, and then we got trapped in one of those relationships that doesn’t quite work, but doesn’t not work enough to call it off. I was in that whole soap operatic scene until the beginning of this summer. I’ve been dead-set on celebrating my relationship freedom until life threw me this crazy curveball in the shape of Jenifer.