Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

I’m back on the stuff again. No matter how hard I try to get legit, H still creeps back into my life somehow. I’ve used it to the point where my habit almost matches Jenifer’s. We drive her “new” new car around and talk about moving away but it’s so hard to have the same old fucking conversation about something we’re never going to actually do. Is our love strong enough? I am lowering my guard again slowly and loving life a little more this summer instead of worrying about the future. I go down to Dallas with Jen to see the dopeman whenever I can and our ride together helps us bond which sounds stupid and ridiculous but it’s actually sort of romantic in a fucked-up Sid and Nancy sort of way. It’s about as close as we get to being physically united anymore. Riding with her and feeling the sun on my shoulders and face, squinting from the light and listening to loud music reminds me of our glory days (daze) together, before life hit us with a 2 x 4. God, I still love her so much but I’m scared we won’t escape this, so I’m trying to value every moment and second we have left together. We depend on each other a lot now, since sometimes I have money and sometimes she has money (mostly her, unfortunately). We’ve even learned to work as a team and steal together again, robbing the huge evil corporations of their wares in a life full of everyday narrow escapes and dodging bullets. It’s finally getting almost intimate with us again but it just can’t last can it? Even the pecking order has been reestablished for the most part but her friend Lori still intrudes on us along with anyone else just hanging on for the ride.

Every evening we separate and I go out alone among the usual band of wolves to face the night before work. I stay with whoever will have me and the odd hours I keep. Some nights there’s this wonderfully nice girl that lets me stay in her bed. She’s attractive and we have sex on occasion if she initiates it, but my lack of passion for it disturbs her. There’s a guy who lets me sleep on his floor but he went through my backpack (I’ve consolidated) while I was out one day and he found some of my needles, so now he thinks he wants to do heroin with me. I don’t think I can handle that. I’ve talked before how I’m not good with the virgin needle thing. One guy lets me sleep in his bed with him at his grandma’s house but we don’t fool around. He’s just another nice person who feels sorry for me and I can wash some of my clothes there. My only other friend is Bobo, yes that’s her real name, who used to live with the nice girl that lets me sleep in her bed. Bobo’s mom has cerebral palsy so she moved back to help take care of her and I’m allowed to sleep in the back room of their house sometimes. Bobo’s really cool, she’s just always had bad taste in boyfriends.

There are no plans, no ambitions, no hopes, no dreams, no future, no chance at life in any of this and yet here I am.

My predictions of doom have been realized, but thankfully not until another full and glorious summer passed along. I got fired from 7-11, not for selling weed to the customers, not for missing work, not for stealing food or cartons of cigarettes and not for cooking and shooting heroin in the bathroom. I got fired for actually doing something dumb that I couldn’t foresee, double cash lottery tickets.

People would bring in their winning scratch-off tickets and I would punch a hole in the ticket, pay them their money and put the tickets in a special drawer. Well every so often I would “forget” to punch a hole in one of the tickets and it would ‘magically’ fall into my pocket instead of the special drawer. Nothing big in the winnings department, just enough little payout tickets to save over time and have in reserves. The managers would barely freak out when they counted out our registers in the morning because small stuff slips through the cracks in every business and graveyard is technically the last shift of the day.

Since I am locked out of being able to have a bank account (thanks to a minor misunderstanding with First State Bank) I go to a check cashing place by the highway that also sells lotto tickets to the illegal Mexicans or degenerates like me that have no other place to get their money in usable form. One payday I brought along the tickets I’d been saving and tried to cash them in. The lady looked up the serial numbers and told me they were previously accounted for and that she couldn’t pay me. She also kept them. Uh oh! I didn’t know they checked the tickets or did anything with them after they went in the special drawer. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I said “fine,” made up a quick story about buying them from somebody and getting ripped off.

The next day I got a beep from 7-11 to go to an employee meeting, but it was the middle of the day and I was still sleeping so I blew it off. They know I work the night shift so I’m normally exempt from early morning meetings anyway. When finally I showed up late in the afternoon I could sense the vibe in the air as I walked in. They’ve apparently already talked to everyone but me and in the back there’s a guy in a wheelchair who’s been waiting all day just to talk to me. He tells me how 7-11 hires him to do nothing but sit and watch store videotape all day long to monitor any hi-jinks, and that he knows what I was up to. I play dumb at first but after while we both agree that it was pretty stupid to cash my paycheck with all my information on it and then try to turn in some stolen lottery tickets, especially since they have me on videotape doing it. I guess that explained why I was getting pages from work in the middle of the day. Blah blah blah, I just opened up and told him everything, saying I needed some money and thought a little extra lottery cash might help me out. I also tell him that I’ve given away a few packs of cigs to some friends and that I’ve had a couple of cokes without paying for them. He appreciates my honesty, calculates the value of the stolen merchandise, deducts it from my current check, pays me the rest and then fires me.

I’ve got to hand it to 7-11, there was no fuss and no legal problems, they handled the mess I created internally, with class, and we parted in our not-so-amicable ways. That’s the way America should do things, by golly! Instead of whining to the cops about every fucking thing just handle your own business. On the positive side, it means I no longer have to bite my tongue anymore when Officer fuckhead Goldberg comes in for free donuts or free drinks and still has the audacity to shake me down or make light of what he did to me before. FUCKHEAD! I guess I hadn’t mentioned that perky part of the job, but we all have our challenges and he rarely worked the late shift anyway.

Since then I’ve moved around a lot, mostly alternating between the same crew of people or staying at Bobo’s house. I try to stay out of her hair though since she’s got a lot of responsibility and she does a lot of smack that she mixes with some of her mom’s medicine and it puts her in a virtual coma which scares me. Everyone I shoot up with has been in a position where they would have died recently if another person hadn’t been there. It’s so easy to just fall asleep the wrong way or while doing the wrong things. That if there isn’t anyone there to wake you up in the bathtub or pull your face off the pillow or put some coffee in your belly and smack you around a little to wake your ass up, you can drift away and pass on. I believe the medical term is respiratory failure, but that just means the body gets so relaxed that it forgets it even needs to breathe. That’s really fucking relaxed and it’s also how you get to see heaven. White lights dance around, angels sing and everything you’ve ever done while alive will appear before you while your body is free and totally at peace. Fighting back to reality (or getting dragged back) can give you one motherfucker of a headache, but can you really put a price on touching the loving hands of God?