We Are All We've Done by Troy James Weaver
“The living and the dead are just alike in most respects, interchangeable”
Fiction by Troy James Weaver
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Before I slip out of bed and slog to the bathroom, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is say, Dammit, I woke up, then I fall back asleep for about ten minutes to give it another shot. Ten minutes later, I roll over, say, Fuck it, I’m meant to be alive—then the slipping, the slogging, the brushing, the shit, the shower, the shave. But even before all that, before I even say words, before I scratch myself and roll out of bed, I stare at the glowing red numbers on the clock/radio and wonder where all the time has gone. Eight hours asleep every night for twenty-nine years, I’m nearly only half alive to begin with, not to mention all the napping I get done on the weekends.
I dial up the suicide prevention hotline, get a busy signal, wonder if that’s a sign of the times.
Before the toothbrush scrapes across my teeth, before the shit, the shower, the shave, I stare into the mirror and think about how I’d like to go back to bed and give the whole not waking up thing another try, then I think about how my little situation could be solved with the installation of a gun rack, because if I had a gun rack, right above my bed, I’d have to someday get a gun to fit it—might wake up one day and not be so afraid to use it, if I had one. And say, if I had a blender, I’d make a margarita, just because, what the fuck else do you do with a blender? Can’t shoot yourself through the face with that.
On the drive to work, I count the trashcans lining the curbsides like tombstones. So much trash, every single day, piling, crowding, it becomes part of the landscape. Beautiful. There’s so much I’d like to throw away, be done with, I think, then other times I think, Fuck it, I’ll be a hoarder. It’s too easy to let go of shit. Then, Shit, I forgot to take the can down to the curb again. My home is beginning to resemble a landfill. I don’t even recycle.
The living and the dead are just alike in most respects, interchangeable. Dead guy in a morgue or bride with a budget, they only like certain shades of flowers, deliberately difficult hues to match, all exotic and hard to find. On top of that, they want the expensive shit and have no money to buy it. Yet, tell them that. Just try and make a suggestion. I dare you. They tell you, It’s okay. They’ll try to be flexible. Flexible means shooting down every idea you come up with, every alternative, yet it doesn’t do shit. Minds are made up. The dead and the living are just the same—same demands, same sadness, same fucking same thing.
The flowers make me sneeze, the sneeze clears me up, and I feel it, like, it’s unpleasant and then it kicks with this incredible high—voltage through these plaqued-up veins. For a few seconds, I can breathe, I feel good I’m alive and I’m finally thankful. Shit-taking sometimes has the same effect. It’s like throwing away the shitty friends you thought you needed only for a spike on your stats chart, then waking up and realizing they threw you away, not vice versa. I need to take the fucking trash out.
The guy in the corner who cuts the flowers is Hawaiian. Speaks pidgin. One time he told me, Just listen to the first word and the last word, everything in between is meaningless. I’ve read so many books that’ve made me feel that way—just meaningless. He’s a bad book, but he’s an alright guy, doesn’t mean I can’t let you in, feel his presence, make him known. You don’t have to read him. Just look. He’s got this scar on his arm, near the crook, which is from the time he almost died, back in Hawaii, when he was in his mid-twenties. Punched his arm through a car window and yanked it out, left half a pound of meat on the asphalt, a few pints of blood at his feet. Said he saw the white light, like a pinpoint in the dark, and he kept reaching, just reaching out, because he knew he was almost home and that’s the real struggle in life.
This woman I work with will either die from skin cancer or a barbiturate overdose, that’s the consensus. We’re taking bets out back, during our smoke break. I’ve got ten on cancer, says one. Twenty says it’s pills, says another. She’ll die in her sleep, I say, I’ll put twenty on it. But I know she won’t die in her sleep. I just say it because that’s what I want. It’ll probably be some kind of cancer. It’s always some kind of cancer.
Sun hails down on me like satanic proverbs from the mouth of Baphomet. I sweat into my eyes and say, But fuck—masculinity is kissing bruised lips. Everyone is silent. The taller dude than me starts laughing. I say, Masculinity is asking your mother for rent money then blowing it on a few cases of Bud Ice, some weed, and a box of condoms. Everyone starts laughing. I say, Masculinity is jerking off to Monday night football. The laughter stops. What the fuck, man, says the short guy.
10:30 AM. I’m letting loose in the bathroom, thinking about the show I watched on A&E last night. The serial killer Dean Corrl was the subject. I’m thinking about Dean inserting glass tubes into his victim’s urethras and then smashing their dicks with hammers while expelling my bowels, focusing on the floral print wallpaper, biting down on my lower lip, praying that come lunch time my rear driver-side tire is still holding its air.
15 minutes left on my break, I dial up the suicide prevention hotline. I get Becky on the other end. Becky tries to tell me how my life is worth living, even if sometimes it feels like it’s not. I ask her what she had for lunch. Ham and Swiss on rye, she says. Just like Bukowski’s childhood, I say. Thanks, but no, I say. I’d rather eat a short rope with a side of tears. She doesn’t laugh like I do. She doesn’t laugh at all. It’s just so easy not to laugh sometimes, people taking things so seriously.
Old Lame-legs, a sixty-plus grump with a humor problem comes waltzing over to give me some shit. I say, Hey, how’ve you been? His face sags, old and ugly, and he says, Terrible, just terrible. I say, What’s wrong? He says, Your face, that’s what. Your face, it’s just all wrong. I grin. I say, Well, yours, your face, it’s just beautiful, a vision, something to behold. He frowns and grunts and hobbles into the cooler to be a dick to the flowers he’ll soon lay over graves in the countryside.
When I started this job I was a driver, drove something going 'round four-hundred miles a day, five days a week. I did this for two and a half years. We’d start at six in the morning, getting off at four-thirty or five. Driving like that all day and all alone wears on you after a while. I started talking to myself around then. Then the tears only severe isolation can bring came on. I started punching myself in the face so I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel and kill somebody. Another trick for not killing is drinking a ton of coffee and when it’s time to piss, just hold it in and drink some more, the darker the better. You’ll never fall asleep with a near-bursting bladder, I’ll guarantee it.
The lady I work with who will die of cancer, she’s got these cans on her and she likes to get up real close to me and heave her lungs out so I’ll take a lonesome peek at that breathing vision. It makes me uncomfortable, even though I always look, and I wonder about what my wife would think of me now. I back away, she inches closer. I don’t know what’s worse, the sexual discomfort or her bad breath. Neither one are very pleasant. Nothing seems worth whatever it is she’s trying to give me.
The little Hawaiian guy missed work one time because he had a sty and didn’t want people to notice his eye being watery. I don’t want them to think I’m a little bitch, he said, and all I could think was, Masculinity is missing work.
Between the ages of eight until well, now, I use to check myself for cancer—my balls, my lymph-matter: armpits, groin, neck, all over—and now, now I just ignore any pains or discomfort or ticks my body complains about. Just roll with it, that’s my motto. Like this weird red mole that just popped up on my chest. Melanoma? Who the fuck knows?
Needles are the worse, the absolute no. The taller motherfucker than me at work, by maybe an inch, the part-timer, he sells plasma twice a week, has track marks to prove it, so, needles? No. They aren’t a distraction or even a problem for him, just an annoyance. I mean, is it the same thing? What I mean is poverty makes it rather easy for him to make the decision to get stuck with needles, same way as the heroin addict. They just cope in different ways. Whores to the struggles in life, shooting, pulling, all these people worshiping the same gods, whether it’s money or smack and not even knowing it or not knowing anything, really. I mean, they all share the same face, if you look hard enough, these gods, these people, these lives.
The overweight black dude, maybe my favorite person in the world, who drives all the way to Dodge City and back every day, comes up to me while I’m packing a hundred red roses delicately into a cardboard box and he says, What if I took this knife and slit my throat, right in front of you, looking you in the eyes while the blood spurts out of me and onto your face? I laugh and think great idea, give me that matador confetti, but then, all serious-like, I look him in the eyes, and say, Well, to be honest, I’d be fucking devastated! He laughs, says, Good answer, and then he proceeds to tell me what position he fucked his wife in last night, in what room, under what circumstances. The kids were in the backyard playing with some firecrackers. I stared at the wall and imagined cute things dying so I wouldn’t cum too soon.
An hour from closing up shop, the phone rings and rings and rings. I’m already on the line with a customer, but I say, Hold it a sec there, would you, Barb? The assholes I work with won’t pick up the other line. I look at them, each and every one of them, six all counted, and realize they are all either on the phones with customers or with customers who have come into the store. I look down at both of my hands. They’re empty. I don’t wear a headset. I must have been daydreaming. I mutter something under my breath, but it’s so silent, what I’m saying, and I’m so zoned-out, I don’t even know what I said that so offended everybody.
I call the suicide prevention hotline and get someone named Sandra. I ask if it would be possible to speak with Becky. She tells me that Becky is no longer with them. I hang up the phone and stare out the windshield as the city passes by, just blurs of green and grey with no distinction.
When I get home and see my wife, things go warm and everything that came before recedes. We drive to Starbucks. We eat horrible food for dinner. We play with the dogs. We argue about mundane things. We watch Seinfeld. We go to bed. She falls asleep. She snores. I sleep with a smile on my face, even knowing the hell to come from the ordinary of the day to day the moment the alarms sound. I sleep and I dream. I never remember my dreams, but I know that I’m dreaming. Someone once told me the moment you stop dreaming is the moment you’re no longer alive, the moment of your death. Isn’t that something?
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If you enjoyed reading this piece, then you might also like "Deathwish 008: Amy," which you can read here.
Troy James Weaver is the author of Witchita Stories (Future Tense Books) and Visions (Broken River Books). His work has appeared in numerous publications including Hobart, The Nervous Breakdown, Atticus Review, Heavy Feather Review, Everyday Genius, and elsewhere. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and their dogs.
Cover Image by Artist Enrico Nagel, featured on NAILED here.