This is ugly, unfinished,, and the only non-work related writing I've done in a long time. But, it came to me yesterday and without hesitation I put it down. It's not been proofed, cut up, or otherwise analyzed. It's a mess I'll be the first one to admit this. But, I want some views on the base of this. This is more a sketch of a character than the body of what may become the work. I'd like some views here. Be as harsh as you must. I'm thick-skinned. If it's a piece of trash, I want to know. I definitely have my misgivings about it when looking back over it. So, here it is.
Persisting as it did, the day drug on. True, for him, this routine hung heavy and draped low over his shoulders pressing its leaden weight down. And he bowed to its might, its majesty, its sheer immensity for he knew no other way. His discipline, his ethic, his sense of the right of responsibility had long since been slaughtered by a free spirit. In fact, his spirit could have been said to have undertaken its assault by another sort of the spirit, that made by the laborous process of distillation and deep, wide barrells. His apathy bled from every pore, oozing into his compatriots (all of similarly suspect character) and theirs cyclically bled back into him. This was life and he gulped it down day by mottled gray day.
And that brings to mind another subject; that concerning the color of his life. Life does, dearest reader, bear a color. You may not have endeavored to ponder this, but surely life shimmers and emanates its own shade, reflecting in the face of the liver a sort of construct built of his past, present and future. It offers insights into his soul, his body, and his mind. But, you may ask, "How does one discover the color of his life?" The answer to this is a simple one. Inquire of yourself the state of your happiness. The more bountiful, the brighter the color, and inversely the less of it you can spot, the less color will exist. If happiness is the shade, then the events create the base for that shade. Vibrancy and spontinaity can be said to exude brighter, livelier colors: verdant emerald, scintillating yellow, haughty reds... and similarly inaction and apathy act to bleed the color out of the self and the existence. So, this being as it is, his world has existed, to him at the very least, as a stoney and lifeless gray. Yes, there are multiple shades, and yes they do change from time to time, but gray is gray. Lacking the stimulus for living, he sinks down. His brushes are broken and his hands are weak for lack of exercise or ambition. And so he sinks down. Has he reached the bottom?
At this moment, Vince surely feels he's reache bottom. He kneels, one knee to the floor in front of the toilet, venting out the ills of last night into the bowl. A mighty wrech rises from his throat, and with a sickening splatter and plop, there goes the call he made to his ex girlfriend, begging her forgive ness. Wrech! Up comes the yelling, the berating, the, "Slow down!" and the, "Just sit down!" Wrech! There's regret and self-pity. Wrech! From within the cave slithers out the doubt and the staggering and the darkest parts of himself.
His mouth wreaks. His head pounds. And though he's vented out all of these demons, and though he can vent no more, they will rise again tonight and tomorrow night and every night until his little gray soul winks out. Vince doesn't know this though. He's too busy puking his guts out over the bowl. He's too focused on the here and the now to examine, with careful consideration, the big picture. And therein lies his greatest weakness. A more introspective man might one day look in the mirror and loathe the piteous reflection gazing back. But Vince is not that man. Vince is stumbling, and Vince is so drunk on his inaction that he does not see the road in front of or behind him. He sees only his shoes treading the ground and as he does not look ahead, he falls.
Last night, Vince fell especially hard, and with an especially resounding thud. And for the first time in his life, he's stopping, turning his head from that bowl, gripping the sink with his last vestige of strength, and he is standing. The face that regards him from behind the glass leers. The shaggy, unkempt beard dominates the lower portion of his face. Its black wirey hairs are tangled around one another, strangling one another for purchase on the craggy jaw. The eyes are bloodshot, rimmed red and pained from what? Crying? Drugs? Definitely not crying. Vince doesn't cry. The eyes regard him from back in their sockets, skittering into the skull as though they're tired of looking at the world, and wouldn't that nice mass of brains be nicer to look at? The nose has been broken a time or three. It's squashed, wide, and lords its dominion over the face in the manner of a very fat and ugly monarch. He lacks pigment. Were it not for the unwashed, greece-stricken black locks pasted to his head in a similarly haphazard manner to his beard, one might even think him albino. He takes a moment in consideration of that face. Had he always been so? "Fuck it." He turns around, steps to the bathroom door, kicks it opened, and steps out. Perhaps another day, when he doesn't have engagements to attend to he'll give this more thought.
The phone rings. Vince's hands shoot to his temples as harsh fingers of sonic fury batter him. But he's moving. He's a cat now, bounding and stalking the prey. He pounces, capturing and readying for the kill. He's got it now, and to his ear it goes, "Yeah?"
"Vinnie?" It's another man, voice high, tender.
"Sam?"
"Vinnie?"
"Sam?"
"Didn't your mom ever tell you not to answer questions with questions?"
"Who the fuck else would it be? I'm not fuckin' married or anything."
"The way you were talking to Rachel last night you could've been." Sam's voice takes on that observant, knowing tone. Perhaps he's even rubbing it in. "Baby... you know I've always loved you. I'm so sorry. I'll quit, I swear. I never meant to..." his characterization is exagerated, overblowing Vince's baritone, adding the effect of the slur and the clogging with tears to give it that special touch.
"Fuck you. It wasn't like that." He's on the defensive now. Everything, to him, may as well be a slight against his character, even the japes and jests of his companions.
"Uhh... hello! I'm not the one that had his head in a fifth of bourbon all night. Stone sober here, champ. I watched it and I know, so quit your bitching. Anyway, I wanted to make sure you were okay." The concern is genuine, or at least it sounds so.
"Fucking fantastic. Oh yeah, I only flipped out, got the entire place pissed off, made an ass of myself, and wound up getting kicked out on my ass in below zip weather with no car. Yeah, Sam, I'm fucking peachy. Thanks for askin' sweetie." At the end of this, he carries his voice into a parody of the flamboyantly gay, exercising that lisp that he draws out with ease when he feels particularly mocking and cruel.
"Jesus, Vinnie. Cut me some slack. You coming by today?"
"Probably... if I can kill this hangover... I'll do my three S's, have some hair of the dog, and let you know."
"Mmkay. Dude, you seriously need to decompress."
"Uhh... yeah." Sarcasm is flippantly thrown forth, "Never coulda guessed Sammy."
"Fuck off. Just forget it."
"Right," his sarcasm sticks hard, unrelentingly persistent. "Later." He hangs up.
Vince will go. He has little in the way of obligations. He has mundanity, regularity, he has stone and clouds and undyed wool. He has what he has come to know as his life, little though it offers him now. But first, his three S's.
The shit comes first. Vince loves to shit. He loves to ponder higher concepts pirched atop his alabaster throne. Watch as he pontificates, jeans tangled about his ankles, a book of philosophy in hand. His face reddens, eyes narrow, mouth tightens, and he issues a grunt forth, all the while wondering if this is anything close to the Nirvana he's discovering between those dog-eared covers in hand. And more is exuded from him; more guilt, more rage, more beans? Yeah, Vince was in the beans last night. That Mexican joint gave him one hell of a morning, didn't it? No, focus on the Buddha Vince. Focus on the self, the zen, the eightfold path. Close your eyes, remember the way. Surrender all material possessions... plop! He's done.
He rises and regards the shower. It's dirty, caked with bits of wirey black hair that Vince, knowing the origin, neglects to regard. The drain is stuffed with bits of human debris, flakes of soap, all that waste he scours away all too unregularly. And with a tiger's leap he engages the shower, disrobing and slamming the water on. He doesn't even wait for warmth. The cold shock might bring him around, just maybe.
Two and a half seconds into the soak he's realized that cold water is an awful idea. He's shivering now, standing rigid and imobile. He regards himself with a sense of self-deprication, shivering like a baby at one end of the chamber while his enemy taunts him from the other. He turns up the heat.
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