Chapter 1A Chapter by miahstrThe smell of smoke is rich in the air plastic canister filled with light-able tobacco, a glass shaped bong filled with sand... Echo of the computer fan fills the room... I’ve been sitting here for hours... They smoke their lives away. Is this what happens, I think as she passes the bong back to Tyler. He takes it slowly and as if he'd done this a thousand times... He takes a hit. Every breath he takes begging to inhale this carcinogenic lifestyle... How do they do it, I wonder... How can they live a life like this? Every breath countered by one with an oxygen mask. Coughing: the sound of lungs screaming for air in a smoke filled room. I can't wait to leave... I'm suffocating... Not from the smoke in the air, I suffocate with boredom... Sitting around a computer "smoking a bowl"... Music is a soft melody in the background... No one speaks... Blank stares in lidless eyes... It's 4:00am.
Why am I here? I think, as I stare at the computer screen as the playlist on Pandora shuffles to a new track. I guess I am saying hi to an old friend, an X-lover really and like the breath that draws in the smoke from her cigarette, I inhale her every chance I get. We’ve been “familiar” with each other ever since High-School. We dated for awhile but her fidelity was always a problem. She would find someone else she was interested in and would “accidently” kiss them. After awhile it was clear that we weren’t going to work. However, there was always chemistry between us. We just clicked… clicked in a way that I didn't with anyone else. So as the years went on we would fall back into step. I knew though that she was toxic. She gets up and goes to the bedroom. She falls asleep; it's 5:00am.
A strobe like effect made from the ceiling fan and a light fixture in the corner of the room, keep me up for the rest of the morning. I am alone in a desolate living room sitting. I wonder when the world will end. It's Dec 21st 2012 the end of the Mayan calendar and I can't help but notice that I'm still here... I'd rather not be... Up until this point; my life has been comparable to a late night tv drama. From a certain perspective I've been pretty lucky to live the life I was given. I am well fed. I have a family and a certain number of friends. I made it to college and have a steady job. In this particular moment though I feel like existence is futile. I knew that I'd recover from this state of mind given a few hours rest but that task was daunting. I start to count the tiles on the kitchen floor one by one. I give up halfway through and use the area method that we all seem to learn at some point in grade school. If there are 10 tiles on the top half of the the kitchen and 5 on the side and if you lose two tiles from the angle of their placement relative to the cabinets then there must be roughly 48 tiles give or take those underneath the fridge and stove. I would tell Bridget this at some point because that is the kind of guy I am. She’d more than likely stare at me in puzzlement and ask if I had really taken the time to count the tiles in her kitchen. My boredom finally gets the better of me and I phone in for escape. Stacy answers the phone with that groggy voice that we all must have when we first wake up. “hello” she says “Hey stacy, I have a favor to ask.” “Yea?” “ Could you pick me up from Bridgetts house?” “Do you know what time it is?” “I'm cashing it in stacy” She’d given me these coupons last christmas. It was a nice idea and was very thoughtful. Handwritten coupons decorated with terms written in small print on the back. The one that I redeem now is for a free one time favor. Little did she know I’d actually use one. “Fine, I’ll be there in 20 min” she said as she hung up the phone. Its 6:00am.
I can smell gasoline in the air. I can barely stand it. She had loaded her car with gasoline canisters bunched together in the back seat. Stains marked the light brown upholstery that covered this beat up 97 ford escort. It was a hatchback, what I would call a love wagon. It was white and with a big rear end. It was practical, much like its plaster skinned owner Stacy. "End of the world?" I said pointing to the filled gasoline canisters in the back. "You can never be too careful" she said with a smile. We drove down the Arizona I-10 that connects Phoenix and Tucson. She's driving a bit fast but being no fan of back seat driving I don't mention it. This ultimately ends as she speeds by a patrol car who then turns on his sirens and pulls us over. I stare at the gasoline cans in the back and look at her questioningly. “what it’s not illegal to load up on fuel”. She is cut off short as the cop approaches the vehicle. she ended up with a ticket for "wasting a finite resource". Which I suppose is just a fancier way of saying that you were speeding. She was taking me home... It was 7:00am.
As I walked through the front door of my childhood home, I pictured myself exiting one prison to enter another... This one was decorated...Christmas tree in the corner, leather couches, lamp, T.V... Windex bottle on the entertainment center, somebody had been cleaning. "Hey mom" the words came from my mouth as they had a million times in greeting before. "Hey sweetheart" The reply I had expected. She had always called me that... It was a wonder that I had escaped the delivery room without it written on my birth certificate... Instead, I was named Jon without the "h" of course... Who wants a silent letter in their name? It's like a secret that everybody knows, but never talks about. I walked into the restroom and there I stood, I could see myself in the mirror dark circles underneath my hazel eyes. Light brown slightly curly hair that curved upwards in the back. Given another inch or two and my bangs would cover my eyes. I wore a goatee on my face it had been a month in the works and was devoid of a soul patch. The reason behind this was that in second grade I had an accident on the playground. I was high atop the monkey bars and being the 8 year old that I was I attempted to swing around the bar only to fall flat on my face. My teeth tearing through my lower lip. Which left me with a quarter sized scar that sat underneath my bottom lip and prevented any real soul patch from growing. I left the bathroom and headed down the hall. My room had been turned into a storage unit for the plunder of the household... We weren't wealthy, but seemed to collect "s**t" we didn't need anyway: an unused bike, old mattresses, set of china carefully put in boxes and neatly stacked in the corner. This was my cell for the next week. I lay down on a makeshift bed made from an old mattress set on the floor. It's 8:00am.
I try sleeping, but I am troubled by thoughts of another me. One that existed when this room was my own. My thoughts linger on a girl. She was getting married... to my pastor. X pastor really... X girlfriend too. People get confused when I tell them this story: how boy and girl fall in love, date as churchgoing Christians. Then married pastor whose life is plagued with relationship problems, jumps in my life and takes my girlfriend away from me... But hey that's college right? Or is that Christianity? I forget. Despite the many problems you might see with a 30 year old married pastor dating a 19-year-old girl. The transition for her was quite smooth, me on the other hand… After college I moved. It was California here I come. I was away from home and the chance of ever seeing her again. Now I was home and the memories and nostalgia of a previous life haunted me.
I grew up in a small town situated in the middle of the desert by a dry Riverbed known as the Gila River. It hadn't always been dry. In elementary school we had a substitute teacher pushing 90 years old that could remember when the Gila was the lifeblood of what used to be the territorial seat of Arizona, before the river had been blocked off by diversion dam. I had lived in Florence Arizona a town where everybody knew everybody; well until the area just northwest of the town was flooded with major housing developments. I grew up in a time when getting a Burger King meant times were changing. Small business now had to compete with major corporations trying to move in on small town territory. When a Super Wal-Mart moved in just 9 miles west of us, the local grocery store disappeared as if it had never existed. The town’s economy was driven by one resource: inmates. Florence was the home of the Arizona State prison. It was said that back in the late 1800's when they were deciding where to put Arizona’s first prison and where to put the first university it was a toss up between Florence and Tucson. Florence got the prison and Tucson the University. I often wonder how things would have been if that had ended the other way around. Since then Florence was the home of cowboys, ranchers, and inmates. It was kind of ironic really, most people never left Florence. You could say the town itself was the prison, whether you thought yourself an inmate or not. There is a famous equation that a well-known professor Frank Drake devised in 1961 to determine the probability that intelligent life exists in our universe. It's a set of variables when multiplied together provides a mathematical solution to an age-old question that begs to answer if we are the only intelligent species in our universe. In a supposed infinitely expanding universe the solution to this equation with guesstimates as variables often make the idea of other intelligent life existing more plausible than one might think. However, when applying this logic to the probability of finding a girlfriend in a sparsely populated area who shares your interests, you find attractive, is single, and went to college the idea that you will ever find love seems less likely than Hollywood would like you to believe. This is where I existed. I had no prospects in the form of possible relationships, single and obliged to think that love was just a form of lottery. I was, as is often the case... just living. I awoke from a place that exists between conscious thought and dreaming. I looked at the watch that sat rigidly on my right hand. It was 9:00am.
Out of my makeshift bed I leapt to the door. The one thing in my life that I held dearest greeted me. My little 4-year-old brother stood there wide eyed and grinning. He was excited to see his older brother who'd not been home since Thanksgiving. Dragging me by the hand we ventured into the living room where a city of toys with streets made from the ragged off white colored carpet was the canvas to which he constructed an artful interpretation of a city with his many action figures and Lego’s. We sat and played in his fantasy world, where dinosaurs could talk and everything was accompanied by the sound effect of things crashing into each other. These were the moments I enjoyed most. My mom had him when she was 37 and me when she was 19. Jake and I were separated by 18 years. He could've easily been mistaken as a product of my own fertility. The fact that Id had more than one pregnancy scare in high-school, and that he was well within the parameter of those scares, I often imagined him as a "could have been" product of my own sexual exploits.
My newly acquired iPhone 5 sat in my hand the Facebook icon was in the top right corner with a red bubble with the number 4 staring at me. I often feel like a slave to social media, in this moment I had 2 choices: one I could tap the icon look at my new notifications and spend 15 min in the news feed looking at the stupid s**t people post, or I could ignore the icon and continue playing with my little brother. I tap the icon....
Facebook pops-up immediately and I thumb through my notifications. One is a post from a close friend of mine, it's a Meme with a picture of someone holding a gun with the caption "Always hold a gun in the right hand" at the top and "yours" at the bottom. A debate about guns spurred on by gun violence in schools has made gun owners weary as they see possible laws that could infringe upon their rights to own guns... Namely in this case assault weapons... Which has driven the sale of assault weapons up and has made the voices of gun owners even louder. I can’t help but get the feeling that this situation is going to blow up one day. Where gun owners and non-gun owners will bring this argument out into the street and people like me will get shot in the face. This isn’t the situation now but fear is a powerful thing. I look through the curtains and see my older brothers car out front as he pulls into the driveway. Its 10:00am. My older brother and I have had a precarious relationship for the latter half of our lives. We are only 18 months apart and couldn’t have grown up to be more different from each other. He has a particular style about him. He loves to party, gamble, drink, and smoke. He has several tattoos one of a half-naked angel on his forearm with a listless face and a finger to her lips. Her wings continue onto the back of his forearm where a cross sits off-centered between her wings. It would have looked better if the artist had centered the cross better. Yet it does add a bit of character to him. He is 6 3’ with a large frame short cropped hair and clean-shaven. He has a C-shaped scar on the side of his face that cradles a mole. One childhood summer we had fought over something that only brothers would fight about and I had gouged that C-shaped scar into his face with my fingernail in self-defense. Later in retaliation he’d hit me up the side of the head with a shovel while playing in the backyard. He sports a scar on his face while I now have a small bald spot on the upper right corner of the top of my head. You can decide amongst yourselves who came out better off. I love my brother but he is an a*s. My brother fondles with the half broken door handle as he opens the front door and greets me with the usual “hey bud” I reply in turn as he walks into the kitchen fumbling over all of Jake's toys that sit on the living room floor. He’s just come from work and he wears his work outfit. He works for a plastic bottle making company. If you've ever had shamrocks chocolate milk then you've more than likely drank out of something he has helped to make. So next time you drink from a plastic chocolate milk bottle think of my brother. I follow him into the kitchen the tile floor is cold beneath my feet and I can smell the pumpkin rolls on the counter. These little holiday delights are the product of my mother's cooking. I pick one up and hurriedly stuff it into my mouth and my brother follows my lead as my mom walks out of the door to her room and scolds us both. It was worth it… She starts to make something for lunch while me and my two brothers sit on the couch and watch cartoons. It’s 11:00 am. © 2017 miahstrFeatured Review
Reviews
|
Stats
255 Views
3 Reviews  Last Updated on January 14, 2017 Author |
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing