Suicide Note Ch. 2

I'm addicted to sadness. That's what I've been told by various people throughout my life, professional and non-professional alike. There is a lot of truth to that I suppose, as much as I hate to admit it. I've always wondered why I don't quite work, why I never seem to feel right, why I always feel at least a little off kilter. I once heard a comedian that would tell this story: "You know that feeling, when you're leaning back in a chair, just balancing there, and then you tilt too far back, and you almost fall but then you don't? I feel like that all the time!" I do feel like that all the time, like I just ran a red light and narrowly missed slamming into another car crossing the intersection. Disoriented, shaky, surprised to be alive and wondering how long it will last. Sometimes hoping it won't.

Memory ( twelve years old) : I was seen showing my friend how to masturbate. I was jacking off in my room and coaching my friend how to do it when I looked up and saw my friend? Mike who lived next door leering at me from outside my window. He had climbed up on the roof to see if I wanted to come out. The next day at school everyone knew. Kids I didn't even know would come up and make jack-off motions at me with their hands. The girls would look at me with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. One kid, a popular Jock from a rich family harassed me mercilessly, taunting me in class and at lunch, always in front of big groups, usually of all the cheerleaders and popular girls. He was always trying to get me to fight him, which I refused to do. Not only was he much bigger than I was, he had all his big Jock friends around him all the time. The biggest reason I never let him goad me into a fight is that there was no way I was going to fight fair. He had the advantage in size, so I would do whatever it took to make sure he never bothered me again. I was terrified of what I might do if I got too angry. I believed I'd end up killing him, or he'd end up killing me, which even then I thought would have been preferable. I do remember bringing a knife to school one day, vowing that if he tried to get me to fight him I was going to stab him. He never did. Eventually people forgot about the whole thing. I never did.

I have always had an affinity for darkness. Not the all-too-popular, horror-type darkness. More like Douglas Adams' "Long Dark Tea Time of The Soul" type darkness. I guess you could call it "existential frustration", to coin a Jungian term. I've never "gotten" it. When I was younger, I thought as people got older the world would start to make more sense, things would become clearer, "all would be revealed". For me it's been the opposite. I'm more confused now than I was at eighteen. The reason I think is because at eighteen I really didn't know how fucked-up I was. I was clueless. Ignorance wasn't necessarily bliss, but it sure as hell was easier. See, now I know how fucked-up I am, and I know how fucked-up the world is. Not a minute goes by when I am not reminded of these things. Whether it's the news telling me about another murder, or starving people in India, or some other disaster being reported by the Oh-so-cheerful media, or it's some private catastrophe I've orchestrated in my own life, awareness provides not quite enough rope to hang myself.

I used to quake at lyrics from bands like Ozzy and Iron Maiden and Judas Priest until I realized the darkness inside me was at least as intense and frightening. I remember when Judas Priest was sued because of their lyrics in the song "Suicide Solution". I knew how ludicrous it was to blame them for someone committing suicide, because suicide is either in you or it isn't, and no matter how hard you try, if it's not in you, it won't happen. I still haven't figured out if it's in me, but (wait for it!) hope springs eternal. 

But I digress. It isn't intentional, my mind just likes to run in circles sometimes, like a dog chasing its tail, or a man with his foot nailed to the floor or... yada yada yada blah blah blah. You get the picture.           

Back to the task at hand.

I didn't actually try to kill myself until I was twenty-five. I was almost at the end of my rope, although at the time I thought I was actually at the end of it. A few months earlier I had quit a great job that I hated almost as much as I hated myself. I consequently lost my new apartment and moved in with a friend from a show that I was doing, I think it was "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas". I leeched off of him until he couldn't afford it any more and he moved in with another friend of his, leaving me homeless. A girl I was seeing (read fucking) offered to let me stay with her in her parents house. I had nowhere to go so I did. In hindsight she just felt sorry for me. She was also fucking me out of sympathy I think. Things went really wrong when she came to me one day and told me she was pregnant and needed money for an abortion. Having no money myself, I asked my stepfather for the two-hundred and fifty bucks. He gave it to me along with the requisite lecture on responsibility ( I was way too far gone to even hear him).

I took the girl to the clinic and gave her the money. I told her I would wait, but she said she didn't want me to. I argued with her half-heartedly and then left. I sat in my car for a few minutes and I was getting ready to leave when she walked out of the clinic, arm in arm with some guy, laughing and smiling. I ducked down so she wouldn't see me. As soon as they left I drove straight to her house, got what few belongings I had, left her a scathing note and got the hell out of there. Now I was truly homeless. I had a part-time job working at Pay-Less shoes making minimum wage. I slept in my car for a couple of weeks, showering at a friends house every three or four days. Then one day, I went to work in an extraordinarily foul mood. I started doing whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing when the manager came over and started giving me a hard time about something or other. I just ignored him and went about what I was doing. He got more and more angry, until he started shouting at me. Then he said he was going to fire me. I stood up, threw the shoes I had in my hand at his feet and said "Fuck You!" and walked out. From there I got in my car, drove straight to the beach.

I sat on the sand for about an hour, contemplating what I was about to do. Finally I threw my keys in the sand, kicked my shoes off and started walking toward the ocean. I reached the water and just kept walking. No one seemed to notice me wading into the water wearing a shirt and tie. I walked until the water got over my head and then I began to swim, looking back at the shoreline every so often to see if I'd reached the point of no return. I was a strong swimmer and I got quite a ways out before I started to have second thoughts. The thoughts weren't about me, they were about my mother. She suffered from debilitating depressions and while I was swimming I kept seeing her face and seeing her in a coffin. I knew that if I did this it would kill her.No doubt about it. If I had known she was going to die four years later anyhow, I might of kept swimming and saved her and myself alot of pain. But I didn't know, so I turned around and swam back to shore.