I liked how the Kony piece came out. I have a couple more ideas along those lines kicking around. I just can’t seem to focus on them right now. My mind wants to go a bit further than that, and my body, the traitorous bastard, wants to go along for the ride.
I’ve been daydreaming a lot lately. I don’t know why. I’m not even sure what the daydreams are about. Some of them, I suppose, are leading me into some of the places I’ve traveled to in my life, some of the memories within those places. I’m not stupid. Well, I’m not that stupid. I know the old song and dance about never being able to home again. The thing is that home, for me, is all over the place, because that’s where I feel the most at peace. Living out of the duffel bag, and having a dozen different places to hit in just as many days. It’s not so much the memories, although I probably spend too much time with memories, but the places. I love those places (there’s too many of them to list), and I’d love to go back to them to create some new home movies of the mind.
This is not new territory that I’m discussing here. This comes up in a lot of my lengthier conversations with people, and it’s almost certainly been in this journal before. I’m just explaining away the daydreaming. It’s bothering me, and I think that’s largely due to how distracting it’s been lately. I would even go so far as to say it’s never been this distracting. Everything I do on the page seems to be taking longer than usual, and I’m much more prone to being distracted than I normally am.
There’s a lot I want to do that I can’t do right now, and it’s driving me nuts. Acting, traveling, mastering time travel (that last one is going particularly poorly). I need to do something to make these things happen, but I’m not sure what. That’s driving me nuts, too.
Next time should be something along the lines of the Kony piece. Writing it was an interesting experience, and I need more of those more than ever right now.
*********
Stuck in Carmelita Park
By Gabriel Ricard
Andrew stopped just shy of the entrance. He wanted to finish his cigarette. He also wanted to take a moment to stare at this building, which has to easily be the scariest looking pharmacy he had ever seen in his life. It was a weird way to think about something like that. Until about a minute ago, he had never actually considered the idea that a pharmacy could be intimidating. There was just something about the place, the way it looked. He saw something strange in the doors, the walls and the freakish neon sign that seemed to dominate the mood of the whole street. All of it pointed to some kind of random menace that made him feel like a lunatic for even taking the thought seriously to begin with. He sighed, shrugging and walking a couple of steps closer towards the entrance with the cigarette down to about the halfway mark. He took another drag, turning away from the entrance and walking a couple of steps back towards the street. It was just exhaustion. Everything could be brought back over to exhaustion under the right circumstances.
For one thing, he still wasn’t used to being on New Mexico time. It was only a two-hour time difference from Virginia, but it still seemed to be doing some damage. Everything still had that weird half-asleep quality to it, as though his body was trying to pretend they weren’t damn near on the other side of the country. Between that and Meghan’s general insanity, it was hard to find the time for any kind of real sleep. He had to content himself with an hour here, a few mildly delirious minutes when it was the middle of the afternoon and Meghan wasn’t anywhere around. It had been a week, and it was starting to catch up.
He tossed his cigarette to the ground. Somehow, he had hoped the staggering amount of binge drinking he had managed to work in would help with the drinking part a little, but that didn’t seem to be helping much. It was clearly managing to make things worse. He sighed again and went for another cigarette. It was bitterly cold for late-March, and as he looked at the pharmacy again he realized that part of the problem was that the damn place looked like a Wal-Mart. Certainly, it was a large enough monstrosity to qualify. Maybe, that was the thing that made it look like some kind of third-rate temple of doom. He had always hated Wal-Mart just a little more than anyone ever thought possible.
Well, whatever, he thought, lighting the cigarette. This was what he wanted, and it was exactly what he was getting. Right down to the letter, all of his long-drawn dreams were coming true. He was traveling, he was in a city he didn’t know, and he was in the company of a girl who needed someone to keep her company while she looked to clock out of the world at large before her twentieth birthday. He was twenty-three as of a month ago, and he could remember feeling the same way she did now when he was seventeen. Everything felt like some kind of depressing song, a Dylan epic without the punch line. It was that usual unhappy teenager gimmick, but like anything, there was always room to turn that into a permanent vocation. If you weren’t careful, you went from being an unhappy teenager to a nearly suicidal adult. He had tried to explain that to her about an hour ago. She responded with that cruel youngster’s laugh of hers. After that, she threw a leg over his, dragged her fingernails along his cheek and told him to stop over thinking everything.
When he got down to some honesty, she was generally kind of a bitch like that.
She then told him to go to the store and buy some condoms, which pretty much brought him up to the present. He took a long drag from his cigarette and jumped only a little when the automatic doors of the pharmacy opened up. It was an elderly couple. The man had his arms around the sobbing, broken-down woman as he led her on into the parking and to wherever their car might be. He didn’t watch them for very long. Whatever was going on in their lives, it was doing a pretty good job of beating them into the ground. It was depressing, and he didn’t want to look at them. The same way he hadn’t wanted to look at the man who had been coming out just as he was walking up to the parking lot. He looked just as used up as the couple did. Andrew could remember the guy almost saying something to him as their paths crossed. But he didn’t actually say a word. They just shared a brief glance, and the man disappeared into the evening to find whatever dignity he could.
Twenty-three, and he had already started to feel like all three of those strangers. He had another week to go at Meghan’s place, and he had been seriously doubting for the last day and a half that he was going to last that long.
He crushed his cigarette into the pavement and finally took those brave, definitive steps forward. This was ridiculous. This whole being afraid and tired thing was absurd and a waste of time. This was what he wanted, after all. He had dreamed of going out into the great unknown, armed with nothing but some cigarettes and a few one-liners. Most of his life seemed to be geared towards the first available chance to live that Charles Bukowski fantasy, and this was it. It started with Meghan and extended to the booze, the endless hours, the damming weather and the constant threat of emotional and psychological chaos. He had written a few hundred poems, several dozen short stories and a couple of novels on the strength of speculation alone. He stepped through the second set of automatic doors. His eyes flinched as it seemed like the overhead lights were suddenly coming in for a closer look. He didn’t have to speculate anymore, he thought as his eyes adjusted. He was here, and he was living in the middle of everything at once.
It would be smart to stop bitching and just go with whatever was lined up next. That’s what adventure was supposedly all about to begin with. Part of you gave in to fate, and the rest stayed awake to make sure you were going to live through it. Finding this pharmacy was a good example. Meghan wouldn’t even tell him where one might be. She just wanted to see what he would come back with.
He looked over to the left. He saw a long chain fence that went from the ground into the ceiling and separated him from pretty much the entire rest of the pharmacy. He could hear a weird mix of cheering, sobbing and breathless fury under the guise of frantic, loud conversations. Because of the fence though, it was impossible to see exactly what was going on.
What the fuck?
“See some I.D.?”
Andrew almost didn’t hear the voice. He was too busy trying to come up with an explanation that could go even halfway towards making some sense. He thought back to that horrible green neon sign outside. It had definitely read pharmacy.
“Sir?”
Andrew turned to him quickly. He saw an old man dressed like a casino employee from the 1970’s. He more or less understood what this old guy had asked for, but he was still having trouble processing the actual request.
“I’m gonna need to see some I.D. before I can let you in,” the old man said again.
His nametag read Bernie. Right off the bat, Andrew could see something in him that was somehow effortlessly compassionate, almost-but-not-quite easygoing to a fault. “My I.D.?” he muttered. Giving up on making some sense of all this was probably the best way to just move forward. Still, he was so confused that he could barely concentrate. It was too tempting to try and see what was beyond the fence without actually cooperating with this weird old-timer named Bernie.
“Well,” Bernie said, smiling, “I’ll have to see some proof of age if I’m going to let you in.” He put his hands behind his back. “That’s the way it works, right?”
“The way what works?”
Just like that, Bernie’s smile broke out into something even more ambitious. He was suddenly very excited with whatever he was going to say next. “Oh, son-of-a-bitch and a saint, you’re from out of town, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Andrew said, looking around again. This had to be a pharmacy. It just had to be. He listened to the sounds coming from the other side of the fence, but the weird mix of English and Spanish made it impossible to put a complete sentence together. That’s what the fucking sign said, for God’s sake. “I’m from Virginia.”
Bernie broke out into a short but enthusiastic laugh. “Well, then, you’re probably wondering just what in the hell is going on here.”
His mood was addicting. It was hard to be confused or depressed around him. “Well, I thought this was a pharmacy,” he said. “But I guess…I was wrong?”
“You’d think that,” Bernie said, smiling and nodding. “I can understand why you’d think that, but you shouldn’t worry. This is indeed a pharmacy, and quite frankly, the best goddamn pharmacy in the country.” He leaned in a little. “As far as government test projects go, you really couldn’t ask for anything better or more exciting.”
Andrew could hear someone screaming in Spanish, followed by the sounds of struggle. He looked away from Bernie and over to the part of the fence that was a door leading to the rest of the pharmacy. The door burst open nosily and two thugs in puke-green cop uniforms pushed their way out with a small, trembling Mexican between them. Andrew figured he was about the same age as this guy was. He looked like a cartoon character getting ready for a death scene. Anyone who seemed to have lost whatever he had just lost would have acted the exact same way. Even when they had him at the first set of automatic doors, he was still struggling, still trying to break free to get back into whatever was behind the fence.
It almost sounded like a goddamn casino.
“You still don’t get it,” Bernie said, his voice making no attempt to hide his supposedly pleasant authority in this place.
“No,” Andrew admitted.
“You know how much prescriptions can cost for the uninsured, right?”
“Sure.”
“Well, what if the government wanted to help out with that, while simultaneously relieving some of its own stress?”
Andrew thought about that for a minute. Jesus Christ. “It is a fucking casino?” He was suddenly and very briefly pleased at how quickly he had figured that out. When that passed, he found himself just confused and strangely annoyed that something like this existed in the first place.
“Why the hell not?” Bernie clapped his hands together as the thugs came back in. The playing field has to be leveled somehow, and there’s no reason why we can’t make that fun at the same time.”
Obviously, something like this carried a lot of questions. Andrew went with the first one to actually pop into his head, stupid as it was. “What about socialized medicine?”
Bernie gave him a look as though they were old friends sharing a very old joke. “Come on,” he said, chuckling and mockingly pushing a hand against his arm. “Really?”
“I just felt like asking,” Andrew said, taking out his wallet. One way or another, he was going to have to go in there. There were still condoms to buy, after all. He tried to laugh but gave up in pretty quickly. He held up his I.D. for Bernie to inspect. “Do I have to participate if I’m just here to buy condoms?”
Bernie looked at the I.D. for a second, and then gestured for the wallet to be closed. “Course not,” he said. “This isn’t China, after all.”
“Of course not,” Andrew agreed. He put his wallet back and faintly wondered if Meghan knew anything about this. The way she hardly ever left the house sober, it was kind of doubtful, and he was already debating about whether or not he was going to tell her about this. By the same token, he found himself also debating whether or not she would even want to hear about it to begin with.
Acting quickly, Bernie moved towards the door and opened it. “Well, whether you’re just buying condoms or whether you’re reaching for the goddamn sky with both hands, welcome to the party.”
“Thanks,” Andrew said, walking in and not being particularly surprised by the scene in front of him. It was a pharmacy moonlighting as a casino to the desperate. Knowing that much, the imagery could pretty much fill in the blanks on its own. There were several tables, several games, lifetime losers and temporary champions living out all aspects of the great human drama. He could hear god-awful elevator musically gently massaging the background. He could see a portion of the place cut off for the actual prescriptions and the actual pharmacists behind actual counters. To the left of that were three check-out lines.
Away from that and it was just the everyday crap you might buy at a pharmacy. Andrew couldn’t see a single person in that part of the store. Everyone was playing the games, and everyone was clearly betting the world over and over again. He wanted to stay and watch, but he also wanted to have the damn condoms picked up and paid for. Choosing condoms was a hellish process and an exercise in relentless indecision, and he wanted it over with quickly. Taking a few minutes to watch this casino thing and make sure it really was real fine, but it was more important to take care of the other stuff first. He walked down the aisle, taking repeated glances back at the action. Bernie seemed to be on to something. The people playing did appear to be having a pretty good time. That even went for the ones who were going to have to go home and explain to their children why college was far from the only way someone could take a piece out of the world. He looked back at them again, and then looked around the aisle he was in. He realized he was in the wrong place. He moved quickly to get out of that aisle and on into the next one. He landed right at the various boxes and rows of condoms.
Choosing them was like choosing a brand of peanut butter. There was no way anyone was demanding this much variety in their precautionary measures. He looked over his potentially unending options. Was there such a thing as too much sensitivity? Did the His and Her Pleasure ones offer just as much pleasure to her as the Her Pleasure kind? He went from one to the other and felt the seconds take on a surreal crawl when put up against the stupid music mixing with the jubilation and terror of the gamblers. Finally, he dammed the consequences and grabbed a box of Ultra-Sensitive. That seemed like as safe a bet as any for the both of them.
It wasn’t like Meghan really enjoyed sex anyway. To her, it was just an obvious way to spend time.
No one was on line to pay for anything that didn’t involve a prescription, so moving through the check-out process was quick and painless. The cheerful teenage girl behind the counter went through all the motions and never stopped moving around and mouthing the words to whatever was playing on her iPod. She handed him his bag, and he thanked her as he turned to take in the real mob scene guilt-free. He had a few dollars left, but he had no intention of joining any of the games. Suffering from something that could generously be called terminal anxiety made the fact that he had come out to New Mexico at all something of a demented miracle. There was no room whatsoever left over for gambling. The plastic bag dangled at his side as he slowly moved closer to the action. The Blackjack table was the one nearest to him, and he went towards that one first. It faintly occurred to him as he watched that this would actually mark his first time ever in a casino. He was surprised that he hadn’t thought about that until just a moment ago.
Of all the tables, Blackjack was probably the dullest and least populated. He saw some slot machines adjacent to the pharmacist’s and wondered why he hadn’t noticed that before. He ducked and weaved his way through the crowd, at one point almost crashing into a man who had flung himself from the table in an overwrought, wildly dramatic gesture. Andrew didn’t even pause for the apology that wasn’t going to come anyway. The guy had already returned to the game. Andrew left him behind and stopped just short of reaching the slot machines. Something had caught his eyes, one of the tables, and he had no choice but to stop and check it out. He stared at the table for a long moment, watching the players, making absolutely sure that he was right about this.
“Go-goddamn-Fish?”
One of the players looked up, annoyed. “Christ, junior,” he said, rolling his small eyes. Despite the nickname, Andrew couldn’t imagine they were that far apart in age. “Would you mind keeping it the hell down?”
Andrew almost didn’t hear him. “You’re playing Go Fish?”
Another player, a much older woman, looked up at him, even more irritated than the douche bag who had called him junior. “It’s for people who want to ease their way back in if they’ve taken a big hit but need to play again.”
“Or nervous first-timers,” said yet another, some college loser pushing thirty with no concept of a degree or even an idea in sight. He just looked the part, right down to his sci-fi convention clothes and the horribly apparent lack-of-sleep that was wrapped around his eyes. No one looked at him, but he was still suddenly nervous at what he had just said. He looked around. “I mean, for some people.” He nodded. “Not me.” He nodded again. “I just felt like having a laugh, you know?” He moved one card to another part of his hand. “I used to love this fucking game.”
Poor bastard. “I guess they’ve thought of everything,” Andrew said, more to himself than to anyone at the table.
“Well, there ain’t gonna be anything to eat,” said the woman, “Between now and when they finally get the damn buffet installed.”
Without meaning to or wanting to, Andrew felt his eyebrows go up. “They’re putting in a buffet?”
“Well, sure,” she said, shrugging at how obvious and a natural a thing that was. “It’s a casino, for crissakes.”
“I thought it was a pharmacy,” Andrew said.
“It’s a little of both.”
“Oh.”
“More towards the casino part though.”
“Right.”
And then, just like that, the woman resumed her game. She put down a pair of red sevens and cackled like a B-movie villain. Andrew only watched for a handful more seconds before resuming his walk to the slot machines. There were ten in all. Eight of them were occupied, which didn’t surprise him a whole lot. He stood before one of the unoccupied machines and thought about the change kicking around in his pocket. He wasn’t going to gamble. He knew this, but he didn’t a reason why he couldn’t just try his luck at something as simple as this. A quarter wasn’t going to kill anyone, he thought, and it wouldn’t change anything to do with this fear of screwing up that ran through his legs and pushed against his knees. His ability to chance everything on whatever mood the world was in had reached its pitch, but a quarter wouldn’t change that. He reached into his pocket slowly, taking the quarter out and bringing to the machine as some kind of weird sacrifice for everything he had ever been afraid of. Two years, a year ago, he never could have imagined doing this.
One quarter, one story about giving gambling a shot that he could be honest about when yelling it later on down the road. He put the quarter in the slot. If he could travel halfway across the country for a horrible teenager and the chance to knock five or ten years off of his life, then he could waste a quarter. His hand on the lever, he looked around the casino/pharmacy. This could actually work on a much grander scale. Scary as that was to admit.
He pulled the lever and didn’t close his eyes. He wasn’t that nervous. This wasn’t a big-money risk, and this wasn’t going to be any kind of gateway to something that would eventually spin out of his control. The machine went through its little electronic gestures, noises and motions. First, it was one cherry, then two cherries, and then three cherries to signal the bell and a dozen or so that rattled and reluctantly made their way into the world via the little tray at the bottom of the machine. Andrew didn’t smile, even though he was willing to admit to himself that he was secretly pleased. He gathered up the money and dumped it into his pocket. It was a nice change of pace, and he didn’t want to push it around these parts any longer. He walked towards the exit. He took the long way so as to enjoy the chaos and strangeness of the place for a few moments longer. No one back home was going to believe this place existed. Or maybe, they had already heard of it and had never gotten around to telling him. The change wasn’t weighing him down at all. Rather, it pleasantly kicked around with the couple of quarters and dimes that had already been there. It was a nice, easygoing feeling. Meghan wasn’t going to give a damn, but he was going to tell her anyway. He moved closer to the exit and watched a couple at the craps table. The wife had the husband by the sleeves of his shirt like a child stuck in disbelief. Her wild, pitiful eyes went from the table to him and back again. She was trying to tell him something over the roar of the activity. If Andrew had to guess, he knew he would probably lean on some idea she had of betting the last bit of money they technically didn’t have.
This could certainly be a wealth of short story material. That was kind of obvious. The change in his pocket suddenly felt a little different, but he couldn’t quite put a name on the change. He ignored the feeling and went back to the short story thought. A good writer would have to come by during at least distinct points in the day. Maybe, it would be three at the very most. The climax of the evening was obvious and essential, but it might also be good to come in near to whenever they closed, if they closed. And it could definitely be enriching to pop in during the early morning hours to see the truly patriotic in action. A middle-aged man in a fairly decent-looking suit hurled an unremarkable handful of poker chips towards the pharmacists and was immediately attacked and disposed of by those thugs in charge of keeping order. He turned again towards the exit but stopped again because once again the change in his pocket was play hell with his mind again. They felt heavier. The memory of winning, of those few seconds when the universe actually moved alongside him instead of against him was actually weighing more than the money itself. This money was important. It didn’t just want to retire to some ordinary circumstances. More than life itself, it wasn’t to stay in the game. Andrew stopped to let these thoughts sort themselves out and to watch the games go on a little while longer. This wasn’t some kind of full-blown gambling addiction roaring from around the corner to take over the world and call all the shots. He realized it was a feeling very much like the one he had experienced when getting on that first bus from Richmond, VA to here in New Mexico. It was all about taking the first step, going against years of paranoia, anxiety and habit, and then wanting to go another step to see if a third step was at all in the realm of reasonable.
It was the same as seeing how bad things could get with Meghan. After years of holding back, always having a joke handy about the concept of playing it safe, it was damn near exhilarating to see if it was possible to make up for lost time.
And so far, it certainly did seem like that.
Mentally and quietly, he went through the contents of his wallet and pockets. There was about five dollars in change, a couple of dimes and six singles. There was also a bank card, but this feeling wasn’t great enough to take that under consideration, so he didn’t. According to a helpful sign set up near the fence door for gambling retards like him, the chips started at five dollars and went up to a thousand. Five of those six singles weren’t really going to do any significant in their life span. He could put the money down, play it and walk away with whatever the result might be. He knew that, and he knew he wasn’t just trying to reason himself into not feeling guilty for going through with it. Same deal as with Meghan and New Mexico, and it was just a matter of time before it cropped up as another weird in risk in a different situation. He walked over to the craps table. At first, he stood just a little behind all of the others. He wanted to know it was possible to draw back and change his mind anytime he wanted. But as he thought this, he was already taking out the five singles and waiting for a chance to get the dealer’s attention.
Five dollars was better than ten. A weird story was better when you had something to prove you were there, right? It was simple fucking logic.
A computer programmer-type was in front of him trading in a handful of hundreds for some chips. They were just finishing up when the sound of a shotgun suddenly changed the bulk of what everyone was paying attention to. Andrew gripped his money so tightly that his fingers almost pushed through the paper. The fence door was kicked open, and the first thing to grab his attention was Bernie. He could say his legs lying on the floor, blood pooling around them with no particular hurry. The next thing he saw was that Mexican guy who had got thrown out as he was coming in. Whatever was running through his eyes, his small hands, it was all going into that shotgun. He didn’t say a word. Even if he had, no one would have been able to hear him over the screaming or the sound of the two thugs being taken out with two more shots. The Mexican guy had clearly handled a gun before and was pretty damn good at firing. Reactions across the room varied. Almost everyone screamed in some way. A few of them went for the money. Some tried to get into the room where the pharmacists were and failed. Several were content to simply run around in a confused, jumbled mess. A handful ran into the aisles and eventually realized that there were fire exits.
Quite a few simply stood there and allowed the matter to leave their hands.
When Andrew saw the handful of people making it through the fire exits, he ran to join them. He was still holding onto the condoms. The Mexican guy wasn’t really after any of the people. At first, he seemed pleased enough to just fire his gun in the air, taking chunks of ceiling while he screamed in a mixture of his Spanish and English. But as Andrew was just about to get through the fire exit, with dozens around him who yet to realize those doors existed, he could see the Mexican guy looking towards the pharmacists.
He turned away from whatever was slated to happen next. When he got back to Meghan’s place, he wasn’t going to tell her a damn thing of what had happened. All things considered, she probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway. And as far as playing the odds went, well, he thought, there was no shame in being proud of knowing what it meant to get one step forward out of two steps back.
He was here, after. Why in the hell couldn’t that be enough?
