3 posts tagged “france”

    I dream of suffocating vision, binding tunnel vision strangling my eyes.  I dream I am drunk and high and there are puzzle pieces strewn across my otherwise empty floor in my otherwise empty room.  A former roommate looms over the pieces and stares at me with dark circles under his eyes. The majority of puzzle pieces form a picture of a lighthouse.  I realize this should be in the bathroom down the hall, framed in ancient drift-wood and having 4 pieces misplaced at the bottom.  Not that it matters, in this puzzle, there are merely two shapes.  Every other piece is identical-- in waking and dreaming states. 

    You can still fit in even if you don't belong.

    My diminished key-hole sight causes me to panic.  I lose control of my body and drunkenly stumble out of the room.  What the hell is wrong with me, I ask myself.  I make it to the bathroom and begin urinating in the toilet.  The toilet relays the news, "You're piss is dirty.  You're going to fail."  A current roommate, Graham, apologizes, somewhere off in a distant nadir of my mind, for blowing smoke in my face.

    The toilet grimaces and becomes the Great Pit of Carkoon.  I fall and it consumes me.  Darkness and exudate outline rigid spikes as I dangle from a giant tongue(I hope).   Despair overwhelms me.  Tinges of thought, prickles of suggestion, move my mind to believe I am in hell.  And this, when this thing pukes me out, I'll be in heaven. 

    Apparently that is a terrace outside of Versailles Palace, lit by barely pre-crepuscular light.  Gold receding into silver blue into black.   I sit in silence overlooking courtyards below much as I did in waking state, looking down at the end of Richmond, the bend in the James and a traveling commercial train. 

    I wake up shivering and drink several glasses of water.  I have to go pee for the last time.  I get there, wait for what, to my bladder, seems like forever and in the end it's diluted.

     Nothing is as difficult as the decision to answer or ignore incoming calls.  For me at least, it had been this way my whole life.  Until recently, a new path flattened the hazy overgrowth around me, and I was set in forward motion to an unknown destination.

     It started about three months ago.  I was at a party with some friends, a college somewhere northwest of where I am now.  It is pretty hazy.  All I remember is drinking my fourteenth beer and then blood-- blood everywhere.  Something had broken, some sort of glass structure.  I didn't fully understand what, but I knew it had been my fault.  In earnest, I gathered the splinters with my hands, some piercing my skin.  Blood poured out on tile flooring and two silhouettes told me it was okay, and to stop. 

    I didn't stop.

    Blood kept pouring until my hands were red, and someone grabbed me by the shoulder, picking me up and hustling me to the bathroom.  In my beer-full dream, I wept as someone picked little shards from my palm. 
    "I'm worthless," I told the person, and believed it. 
    The person helping me was my friend, Parson.  He reassured me I wasn't worthless, that I was worth something, but I persisted. 
    "I'm a horrible waste," I kept saying, "A horrible piece of shit, worthless, worthless, worthless."
    No, he would tell me, you are my best friend.  Whether that was true or not was the least of my concerns.  What happened next is most important.  After cleaning out my wounds, Parson left to tend to what I later heard was a broken hookah.  By "tend to," I mean he paid the guy for it.  He was going to sell it to us anyway.  But now it was broken.  A false, empty purchase, like the day I was birthed to my parents, I had in my head. 

    Parson was full of money.  He drove a nice car that he had replaced after totaling his first.  He paid for the damages, but it was ultimately with the backing of his mother, a banker, that pulled him through.  On the other hand, there is me, alone in the bathroom with only a sad, depressed version of myself, filling myself with horrible thoughts. 

    I look down at the ripples in the toilette.  My tears are falling in with the rest of the waste.  I'm Poor, my drunk version told me.  I'm Poor and I'll Never Amount to Anything.  My Girlfriend Won't Love Me.  My Parents Have Abandoned Me.  None of it true, except for right now.  I reach in my pocket to grab my phone.  To talk with God or who knows, but I grab my phone.  It fumbles from my pocket and hand, spins through the air and splashes right into the middle of the toilette.  Water spills up onto my leg, and this is the grain of rice that tips the scale.  I actually begin crying. 

    I bend to fish my phone out and reach for some towels.  Parson comes back and walks me out.  The rest is a blur.  All I remember is crying for what seemed like an hour while some girl desperately tried to study in the far corner.  I must have been in some study hall.  The study desks, four linked desks, looked like swastikas from above, up on the stairs.

    Somehow Parson managed to drive us back-- a two hour drive-- somewhat drunk.  He asked me questions all the way back, wondering how to contact my girlfriend and tell her I was in bad shape.  He called people to message her online since he couldn't get in contact with them. 

    God, she was fucking worried the next day.  She felt waste. 

    Waste is something unneeded.  Like worrying about nothing, she would tell me.  Like wasting your worry, your feelings expecting something much, much worse than just a sad, sad drunk.  But expectations narrow your reality-- which is why dropping my phone in a toilette was a blessing.  My view-screen is permanently fucked up.  I could break my two year contract with those miser-y bastards and get a new one, but this is a sign.  A sign to answer every call.  My view screen is white.  Just white.  A harsh, clinical whiteness.  And I have no fucking clue as to who is calling me.  As to what is coming my way.  So I let it come.  I accept everything. 

Sometimes I let it stay. 

And sometimes I let it go.  

There are some pretty typical things drunk people do.  They claim they aren't drunk as they fall into the refrigerator door.  They pay less attention to things like line-cutting to the keg.  They also don't really care much.  They can put up with the freezing cold, as long as there's enough alcohol in their system. 

There is a party about twenty blocks from my campus.  "BadDeal," "CharlesTheFrench," and myself all realize this, and we, having heard that it is going to be huge, start walking.  BadDeal has two friends with him.  One is a really quiet tall guy and the other is a short blonde girl who I would rag on by saying her daddy never loved her. 

A lot of unimportant shit goes on during the walk.  Say, like getting accosted by a dude looking to feed his "children."  If by children, he means "alcoholism."  I'm not judging him, I just wish he wouldn't lie to me.  BadDeal says he had his hand on his knife.  I really don't think the knife is necessary in the Fan, but you never know.  His friend, Drew, he brings up the subject of Duckman.  Duckman is a legendary hobo of the Richmond area.  Apparently, this skinny black dude with a gigantic fro did far too much LSD back in his day, and now?  Now he is a duck.  A duckman.  The Duckman.  If you're ever in Richmond and happen to come across him, try and hold a conversation with him past two quacks and a bike horn.  That's usually the best he can convey of himself.  It's sad, you know, being a duck in a human civilization-- makes things tough.

So we get to the party and the guy at the gate tells us if we're looking for a bad time, we should turn around.  We walk straight in.  The fence opens into about 12 square yards of a patio, with a small back porch and an underground entrance wrought in stone. In the basement, you hear Daft Punk playing the entire night. I lead the group inside to find alcohol, but am immediately swamped by people.  Now unable to move, the group I'm with starts to break down.  Once we've headed back from the kitchen towards the front entrance of the house, the group starts to break apart.  After I get beer, I don't see BadDeal and his friends again until after the party. Above the inside of the front door is a carboard sign, held up by ductape that says "$3.00 for a cup."  Okay, cool, whatever.  Typical.  What isn't typical, however, is the arrangement.  The keg has the single longest, most packed line I have ever seen in the history of partying.  I feel like I am on the Baton Death March.  Moving an inch a minute.  A girl stands in front of me with a foot of space in front of her.  I tap her on the should and say, "There is a foot of space in front of you, use it."  That is how packed it is.  The third time I get in line, it takes twenty minutes for me to get some goddamn ale.  A group of people get fed up and fall back.  Maybe this is the Trail of Tears.

Deciding that standing in line for beer isn't going to cut it, I make two very important decisions.  First, I switch to jello shooters for a good fifteen minutes.  I do this with CharlesTheFrench.  He hasn't even finished his third beer, and his hands are now full of cups.  I gobble my shooters down as soon as I can fish them out with a hooked finger.  The second important decision I come to is that lines are for idiots.  With this in my head, I go outside to smoke a cigarette, reassured that I will never wait more than a minute or two for beer again.  Not at this party. 

Outside, I see, "SheWillSueYou," one of "Jane"'s friends.  I go to give her a hug, but end up fumbling my lit cigarette into her hood.  I fish it out and hope she doesn't catch fire.  She doesn't, so what she doesn't know won't hurt her, especially when I ask for a swig of the mix she brought.  It is coke and rum, mm.  The swig I take is actually closer to a chug.  I will be peeing in bathtubs and lying to strangers in no time.  SheWillSueYou asks me if Jane is with me.  I say, No, I thought she was with you.  She isn't.  She calls Jane and is all like "AND HUNTER IS HERE, I AM STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO HIM, YOU SHOULD COME."  Jane says she will, and SheWillSueYou and her friend go inside.  CharlesTheFrench is bitching about the cold.  "I can't feel my legs," he says.  I tell him that he just needs to drink more or he should go inside.  But, like the awesome dude he is, he mans up and waits for me to take the last drag.  We head inside, him leading.  Roman sees him and goes, "Hey man, is Hunter with you?"  Then he looks two feet to his right and sees me.  CharlesTheFrench is upset that he is "the guy with Hunter," and says it should be the other way around.  This is patently untrue, as I take charge and cut a swath through the crowd towards the beer.  Never will I let idle people halt my consumption of the magic swill.  I just jut my arms outward and use them to pry people out of my way, using a single-word command: "Move."  A lot of people are too drunk to realize I am giving them an order to let me to the front. 

CharlesTheFrench follows closely behind and we cut about two thirds of the line, using the beer pong room as an entrace to the front door foyeur.  While I wait on the edge of the beer pong room and the foyeur, a girl is asking her friend if some guy named Frank is in line.  She seems to want to get in front of me, so I just turn my head to her and say,
Hunter: "Frank's not up there."
Girl: "Oh, oh, okay" 
She turns to her friend. 
Girl: "Franks not up there."
She turns back to me.
Girl: "Do you know Frank's roommate?"
Hunter: "No, not really.  I mean, he seems cool but I don't even know his name."
Girl: "God, nobody does, it's weird."
And she leaves.  This secures one less person being in front of me.  I get my beer and drink all of it before I pass the end of the line on my way upstairs to the bathroom.  The bathroom that is clogged to the brim.  I wasn't kidding about being on my way to peeing in bathtubs.  So, I go in and straddle the air above the tub, flop my dick out, and start pissing.  If you have a party without operational toilets, this is what happens.

And then the worst thing happens.  They run out of jello shooters.  I am too lazy to get back in line.  I am in a good place and am okay with not waiting around.  I need to make moves.  We go out on the porch and, in the middle of everyone, there she is.  A sea of white eyes, and one pair that I recognize.  Well, actually, I recognize a bunch of people out there, I just wanted to use a Ben Folds reference, which I guess I botched.  Anyway, she's the important one.  She sees me, but I don't come over to her.  First, I light a cigarette.  I smoke my way over to her and her friends.  Jane, she is now in possession of the remaining rum, SheWillSueYou saying that she should drink the rest.  It is a fair amount, and she is going inside to get beer.  I tell her I'll call her when I'm making my way to her place.  She says okay and I leave. 

CharlesTheFrench and I are gone from the party, and we see several cop cars in the area.  Minutes later, the party is absolutely busted.  Jane calls me and tells me this and that she will pick me up.  "Are you fit to drive?" is my only response.  But she is.  For the first portion of the drive.  As she drives back to her place, she gets progressively worse, asking me for my opinion on how to handle the road.  I tell her to park as soon as possible, and that she should not kill us.  Other than risking our lives, she is the cutest lush I have ever seen.  After smoking some bud, she is all smiles as she claims, "I am not drunk!" and falls to her knees, against the refrigerator.