But eventually eight o’clock finally comes. Elaina goes over some of the closing procedures with me, then has me go around collecting all the trash to take out to the Dumpster. I strain against the stinking black plastic bags, heavy with wet coffee grounds and whatever else, practically having to drag them behind me as I push open the back fire-exit doors. The sun is nearly down, but it’s still hot as a motherfucker, the sweat pooling on my body, spilling out on the baking asphalt. I remember suddenly that Sue Ellen has class tonight till ten thirty, so even when I finish here, I’m going to have to be alone. The trash clatters and crashes into the Dumpster loudly, and I jump, even though I shoulda been expecting the noise. My breath comes all sharp and metallic. If I could get away with screaming right now, I would scream. As it is, I just whisper hoarsely to myself, “Fuck, Nic, fuck. This is your life. This is your fucking life.”
Ch.20
Everything is work.
Either I’m working or I’m exhausted from working or I’m dreading going back to work.
Today will be my sixth opening shift this week, even though I don’t get paid overtime. Actually, it’s my own damn fault. My boss cornered me about coming in today, and of course I agreed ’cause I don’t know how to say no.
Especially when I’m sober.
So the alarm clock beep-beeps at me, and I quickly shut it off to let Sue Ellen sleep in at least a little bit longer. We’ve been living together only about a month now, but between my work and her work and her going to school, we barely see each other at all anymore. Plus, even when she is home, the TV’s always on, so she practically exists more in the world of the Today show, America’s Next Top Model, The Hills, E! Entertainment News, Celebrity Rehab, and Gossip Girl than she does here with me. I swear, it’s like those television people are more real than reality could ever be. And if she’s not watching the lives of others on TV, she’s reading about them on Internet tabloids—Gawker, TMZ, Perez Hilton—clicking from one site to the next. Sometimes she even has both going on at once, the Internet world and the TV world, eyes shifting back and forth. Honestly, at this point, it’s more like we’re living as roommates than anything else.
But, really, I can’t blame her for wanting to escape. Our existence is suffocating. It grabs hold of my throat with both hands—pressing down slowly—crushing the bones and veins and tendons there. I wish TV could take me away like it does for so many people. I wish I could immerse myself in its simple story lines and unambiguous morality. I wish I could find friendship in these onscreen personalities and indulge my consumer fantasies in the luxury-car ads and blowout electronics sales. I wish so badly I could get lost in it like most people do. I wish that’s all it would take.
But for me the TV is just bleak and depressing. If anything, having it on all the time makes me even more aware of how hopeless and empty my existence really is. When I was using, I didn’t need to watch TV; I was the star of my own fucking reality show. Every day was like an epic—like a goddamn David Lean movie. Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, or at least the twenty-first-century, fucked-up version of it. Running the streets, breaking into buildings, meeting up with crazy drug dealers, having crazy sex, stealing, running scams for money, living so close to death and life and insanity and greatness. I didn’t have time to watch TV then. But now I’m rotting away in front of it—paralyzed—too scared to live my own damn life. ’Cause, really, what life is there to live? Working this dead-end job? Eating takeout with Sue Ellen? Too tired to write. Having to be too goddamn careful of my sobriety to go out and do anything. I mean, shit, man, what the hell kind of life is this? How could this possibly be worth it?
I always said that I’d rather live a shorter life blissed out on drugs than a long, normal life sober and miserable. I guess at Safe Passage Center I’d started to believe that I could actually live sober and fulfilled, but now I know that’s just more rehab bullshit. Sure, in the safety and little utopian world they create within the treatment center, everything can be all positive and supportive and exciting. But not out here in the real fucking world, where we have to work eight-hour shifts and we can’t relate to anyone—where people my age go out drinking every night and I have to stay in watching Flavor of Love season two.
It’s just not worth it, man.
It’s not fucking worth it all.
It’s not worth it as I make coffee in the kitchen, watching tiny brown roaches scurry off to their cracks and crevices as I turn on the light.
That’s three trips the goddamn exterminator has made here, and we still can’t get rid of these miracles of evolution.
I mean, it’s not fucking worth it.
Not any of it.
At all.
I pull on clothes, light a cigarette inside, even though Sue Ellen would flip out at me.
I drink coffee and put on music, real quiet.
There’s maybe time for me to listen to one song, I’d say. It’s just about the only connection I have to anything beautiful anymore. It’s the only connection I have with anything that means anything.
And, of course, at work I can’t ever put on any of my CDs ’cause the two managers somehow established a monopoly on the stereo system, so we end up listening to these soulless, hipster emo bands all day long.
So I play Marc Bolan, like I said, quiet—the song’s “Life’s a Gas.”
The alarm next to the bed goes off a second
