Illustration Credit: Aaron Cooper
Note from the informational ether: “Nosedive” is a collection of essays and narrative prose written by Ben Lee over the course of a year prior to his death. Per his will, I am posting these on his behalf with no changes made to his original text. He’s not that Ben Lee. He’s also fictional.
Part 1: Is Suicide Punk?
Chapter 4
I slept in the tub because I puked in the bed, or so they told me when I woke up in a tub full of what I choose to believe was my own vomit. It’s not often a good idea to overthink things such as this. Plus it was already bad enough with the mess being solely and only my own.
The first thing I did, and would always do, in a situation like this was examine my nose for any debris. Dirt suspended in the blotted dimness, creating the effect of a place where time continued at a normal pace on average but from moment to moment slowed down and caught back up or went too fast and had to wait up. Nothing was permanent like a pocket in the universe through which all things passed randomly. This made it hard to see very well in the rotted mirror. The black hole on my face blended with the space around it.
“The fuck are you doing?” someone croaked.
This, someone, was my future ex-wife Allison, leaning against the wall with one arm draped over an open toilet. I had not noticed her before, and although we apparently spent the night in the same room, I couldn’t remember a thing about her.
In a normal situation, a surprise like this would have made me jump but my hangover reflexes were so slow that it was impossible to surprise me. I had a temporary form of precognition, rooted not in the ability to see things before they happened but instead in a more literal sense of the word. I would see something (something such as the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, miserable curls of hair sticking to her bruised face) and some time would pass before what I was seeing would register as an actual, concrete thing.
“I’m checking my nose,” I said.
“We already did that,” Allison sighed. “It’s clean. None of the throw-up or any of the other shit got in. If you make me check it a third time, I’m going to fucking kill you.”
“You already checked it twice?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Ben,” I said.
“You’re Gun Show Guy.”
I examined my nose hole in the mirror a few minutes before it occurred to me to flip on the light switch.
Drinking in excess was one of my least favorite things to do, but it was also one of my most frequent and dependable hobbies. Still, I was always kind of a light weight. That’s okay because getting blackout drunk is a moderate amount of punk. Although a drinking problem indicated a dependency on a fairly corporate alcoholic beverage market and an abandonment of one’s self-control, which is not punk for all the reasons any kind of corporate addiction could never be punk, and to explain this any further would be an indication that the person reading this is not punk enough to be cognizant of the Punk Reflexive Property that serves as a shortcut around things that are self-evidently punk or not punk.
“Can you please help me check it one more time?” I asked, unable to find any debris in it myself but equally unable to shake off the feeling that something must have gotten in there.
“If you were as dedicated to keeping sperm out of my vagina as you are to keeping shit out of your nose, you would have worn a condom,” she said, rolling her eyes at me.
So that was news to me, and surprisingly important news at that. She checked my nose for a third time, strobing bright white across my face with the flashlight on her phone. Even though she allegedly had done this two times prior, she treated it with a patience that almost made me reject her assertion regarding those previous times. The only reason I didn’t fully reject this assertion was the reason I am agnostic and not an atheist – nothing is absolutely sure and I’d feel better if there were a God even if there probably isn’t.
“I need to buy Plan B,” she said.
Her light cut out but the haze remained.
“Cool,” I said, not realizing until a moment later why, specifically, she was asking.
“How much money do you have?” she asked.
“How much does it cost?” I asked.
“Like fifty bucks.”
“I don’t have that much money.”
“Well, I didn’t ask you to pay for the whole damn thing. I asked you how much money you have.”
The problem with answering this question was twofold. Firstly, I didn’t know, off the top of my head, how much money I had. Secondly, I discovered upon looking down at my limp, hanging dick that I wasn’t wearing my pants, which was the place I usually kept my wallet, and furthermore, I couldn’t locate them within the bathroom.
“My pants?” I asked.
“Your clothes are in my room,” she said. “You wandered in there after your first little accident. Let’s go.”
“I think I should wash up first?”
“Fine,” she rolled her eyes. “Find me when you’re done.”
The tub clogged twice when I rinsed the evil away, alleviated with a French kiss between the plunger and the drain. And if I had been stuck in a fading pocket of time and space, the tub was a machine designed to carry me from that pocket back to the stability of our known reality. Droplets provided the catalyst for the machine’s primary transport function. Seemingly without moving from where I stood with my head pressed against decaying tiles, gaps of grout like missing teeth in a gear, I found myself back in the realm of the known.
No towels hung from the towel rack or even populated the linen closet just outside the bathroom door. I left behind me footprints on the bare wood floor and speckles of water spotting around each step.
As a child, my father ran over a rabbit just in front of our house. The rabbit had been whiter than the snow stacked two inches on top of the ground, and with Dad grinding his teeth, anxious he might crash the family sedan (also white, and though two inches isn’t anything insane, Dad grumbled, “They need to clear the roads. There’s ice underneath.”), I’d be more surprised had he seen the little fella.
We didn’t stop when the car rose and rested like a labored breath, but when I looked at the window, the white rabbit pulled itself across the snow, leaving a trail of blood. It occurs to me now, but hadn’t before, that the best thing for it would have been to die right there in the road or at least soon after beginning its pilgrimage back home. The blood was a sad opportunity for this rabbit to commit a reverse-Hansel and Gretel with a predator instead of a witch following the bloodcrumbs back.
Naked, I searched the house for Allison’s room – although, I still did not know her name. Naked, I found sleeping tyrants. Naked, I found Biscuit curled up at the foot of a bed empty of all but my vomit crime scene. Naked, I found Allison naked, digging through my pants.
“Maybe you should marry me,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“I was lying here thinking while I was waiting for you to shower, and I think you should marry me.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“How about this? You take me out for breakfast instead of buying me that Plan B we frankly cannot afford. We wait a month, and if I’m pregnant, you marry me. If I’m not, we keep dating until you fall in love with me enough that you want to marry me.”
“I don’t even know you,” I repeated.
“Yeah,” she said, twirling a finger until she tied knots in her hair. “But I’ve decided you’re going to fall in love with me. I’ve never had a real boyfriend before.”
Contained within her warm abrasiveness was love I could not abandon. I wasn’t aware of that yet. Love was either below the surface where my subconscious lurked or something I’m adding to this story now, colored by how I feel about her now, attributing feelings yet to come to a time before they truly existed. Then again, something made me nod in agreement to her cosmic wager.
“You have five dollars and no credit cards,” she said. “If I am pregnant, I’ll have to get my parents to support us. They’re rich, and you seem to be poor. So am I.”
“We could both get jobs,” I said, shuddering at the thought.
“School’s my job,” she said. “You can get a job if you really want.”
She was in med school, of all things. Her sister, who I knew at the time as Stinkbug (but whose name was actually Amanda – their parents had six kids, all of whom had names beginning with “A”, which wouldn’t even be punk if they spelled every name with a circle-A.), well, she hadn’t even graduated from high school, I’d learn later. That’s a whole other thing I may discuss another time.
We bought five dollars worth of donuts and ate them on the floor of my studio apartment. I had a mattress, a kitchenette, a bathroom and stacks of books, almost all of them bought at garage sales. Allison wandered all 300 square feet of my compact hell hole with the interest of God looking over my entire life to decide if I’m a good person or not.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked, tapping her index finger on her nose to remove any ambiguity from her question. “Like, what was the thing that really set you over the edge to give that big ‘fuck you’ to gun nuts?”
Just like all people, she assumed without question that my worst decision was an act of attempted Self-Immolation. I let everyone believe that. I let my parents and lawyer believe that. I let the judge and jury and prosecutor believe that. I let the news reporters believe that, who scampered to this story like a rabbit to its burrow. I’d tell the truth only to Allison on this day and, later, anyone reading this bullshit right here.
“I was depressed,” I said.
“That’s dumb,” she replied.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to be mad if you kill yourself.”
Hidden among my books was a tattoo machine, sterile needles and some ink. I pulled it out and placed it front of her. This was another, subtler act of pre-cognition. I wasn’t fully aware why I grabbed the machine until I was saying the reason out loud.
“I think I’m done with drinking,” I said.
“Show me how to use this,” she nodded.
I set everything up and cleaned the back of my hands with alcohol wipes. After a few minutes, Allison was etching thick, black Xs into my skin.
This was among the least punk thing I had ever done. That’s not to say that being straightedge is unpunk, but like most things in regards to being punk, earnestness counts for a lot of the equation. I was back to drinking later that night, Allison calling me, and I quote, “A dumbass.” She still hadn’t told me her name.
A week later, she got her period.