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 9
The worst part was when Allison forgave me, and the second worst part was when I didn’t get in any trouble whatsoever despite totaling my car into a tree, toxic waste on my breath, consciousness evaporating and redistributing into the clouds. This is how acid rain is made. This is how the ground disintegrates.
I awoke in a hospital bed to a mantra that sickened me:
“We’ve been through enough,” Allison said. “Thank God you’re okay.”
“You’ve been through enough,” the cops said, and that was all.
The insurance company couldn’t do a thing without a police report saying I was drunk driving, and the agent assigned to my case sighed and shrugged and repeated that most hated phrase, “You’ve been through enough.”
My own mother said it as a question meant to be rhetorical, “Haven’t you been through enough?”
No, Mom. I hadn’t.
Luckily, my doctor had some good news for once. Over a decade after I lost (and later reconstructed) my nose, the universe ripped two things away from me within a day of each other, both irreplaceable but only one I’d miss. The first was my child. The other, my foot.
Dr. Abrams made more eye contact with her chart than with me and muttered, “I know you’ve been through enough as it is,” before informing me they would amputate my foot.
“Can I see the chart, Becky?” Allison asked, intoning Abrams’ first name in a clear attempt to transcend her current status of patient’s family and find her way back to respected colleague.
While they argued over whether or not a surgeon should slice off my foot, a small glow of peace flickered within me. This would be fine. Take a piece of me bit by bit. Sacrifice my nose, my foot, every hair protruding from skin, each finger one by one, eyes, teeth, legs and arms. Everything. Take everything. Slowly cut away at my body until there is nothing left. Above all else, that is what I wanted and still want to this day. Make me suffer and only me. Donate my organs to those in need.
And when all of that is over, when they’ve sold me for parts, my name will be forgotten. I’ll be purged from all memory. I’ll be purged from the census. It’ll be as if I never existed in the first place, and only then will I be okay.
As melodramatic as this may seem, it is what I wanted. It’s what I’ve always wanted. The relatively happy years were nothing but distractions from the horrible truth hidden deep within my cursed mind. I needed to die.
“Honey?” Allison said. “Honey? Are you listening?”
I hadn’t been listening.
“Are we cutting off this foot or what?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so, babe.”
“That’s pretty punk.”
“Yeah?” Allison said, and she laughed.
Amazing she could laugh, all things considered. And to be honest, my amputation really was punk. They fit me for a prosthetic that would hang from my leg like a dull blade ready to land the softest blow. I refused to ever put a shoe on the thing, though it shamed me just as much as my gap-nose had a decade prior. Shame was the point. I left it out in the open for everyone to see.
The night before the funeral, Allison had me make a promise I couldn’t keep. She made me promise we would stick together no matter what, which is a ridiculous thing to make someone promise.
“We have to be stronger,” she said.
I mean, sure. That would have been nice. A lot of things in the world would be nice. It would be nice if we had universal healthcare. It would be nice if people stopped going into places and shooting other people (a topic forever tied to me, I know). It would be nice if I had a medication that both evened out my various mental disorders and also didn’t make me feel a little off. It would be nice if merit were rewarded to those who deserved it and punishment were enacted only on those who deserve nothing good at all. Just to name a few.
That’s all idealistic bullshit, which I’m aware many people would say about punk in general. Those people wouldn’t be completely wrong. I’ve mentioned previously that one of the tenets at the heart of punk is the opposition to harm. The Punk Oath is an unspoken agreement that takes the Hippocratic Oath and applies it to society as a whole. Punk seeks the institutions causing the biggest harm and attempts to rip them apart. This is the violence of punk working to create a better world.
In practice, punks have often misidentified the problems and imagined into the world solutions that would be more harmful than the problems they wish to conquer. Pardon the terrible joke, but this turns the Punk Oath into a hypocritical oath and applies it to society as a whole. Well intentioned bad ideas are just as harmful as good intentioned ones and more harmful than bad intentioned good ideas.
Anarchy will forever be tied to punk, and yet it’s completely stupid and the most unpunk thing anyone could possibly birth out of their stupid fucking minds. I get it. Government is not punk. Government does some really fucked up shit. I hate the government, too, but it’s not the general concept of government that is the issue here. It’s the systems of government and who we tend to elect that are the problems.
In practice, a lack of government would lead to a corporatocracy, which is to say that corporations would take the place of governments with little to no oversight to protect us from them. Already marginalized groups would become further marginalized, and healthcare would be available only to those who could truly afford it, which would be almost nobody. Nothing about a vision of an anarchist future seems in any way good, and it’s insane to me that anyone who opposes corporations or greed would want that future.
Understanding the need for government does not mean punks have to feel content with their current governments. Government is not the same thing as good government. It’s a pretty simple idea, obvious to its core. Punks don’t go around thinking every punk album is equally good just because they’re all punk albums. Assuming all things in a category are the same is clearly a form of prejudice, and prejudice is incongruent with punk.
I’m not an expert on these things, so I can’t say what exactly the perfect government would be. But I’m pretty sure of two things.
First, the perfect government would be punk. Anything good in this world is at least a little punk if only because punk is fair in a way few things are. And it is earnest – some would say to a fault, but fuck them.
Second, nobody should be left behind. I’m a socialist, so my point of view clearly starts there. Maybe the answer is something else, but it sure as fuck isn’t capitalism. It sure as fuck isn’t people rich beyond rich hoarding their wealth for no other reason than for the sake of hoarding it. They create a dead economy where money sits in bank accounts, growing moldy and unspent. It’s easy to say that money is bullshit, but what’s bullshit about it is the greed and the hoarding when there’s more than enough of everything to sustain everyone.
What sickens me is how that greed is more than willing to let people die. That’s not some grand statement, sure, but it’s worth repeating for as long as it continues to occur. The establishment wants us to stop saying these obvious things because they’re lame to say.
Since they want us to shut up, it’s punk to sing it like an anthem – greed kills. One simple statement we can echo through the ages in empty bars, playing shows to six people as the first opener before the people trickle in for the headliner, trying to ignore the music blaring those two words repeatedly, trying to buy their cheap beer, trying to catch up with friends. But if we sing it enough, it’ll get stuck in their heads and move from person to person like a virus.
Greed kills.
Which brings me back to me. I should have been better, sure. Instead, I got greedy. I remain greedy. Allison needed me. Our remaining son, Damian, needed me.
Once a person has kids, that parent cannot kill themselves for as long as their child is alive. The parts that were one’s individual selves evaporated, but one’s children poured into those parts, replacing the empty spaces. To kill oneself is to kill part of one’s children – the part that is the easiest path to their happiest future.
I got greedy, and even on the night before my child’s funeral, I lied to Allison.
“We’ll be better,” I said. “We’ll both be better.”
Damian woke up crying in the middle of the night. I swung into his room on two aluminum legs stretching from beneath my armpits to the floor. My raw stump had to heal a little more before I could use a blade foot. Dripping from his eyes, mouth and nose, the preschooler was a water feature placed in a bed.
“I miss (I won’t type his name),” Dame said.
“I know, buddy. I miss him too.”
“When is he coming back?”
We had told Damian many times his brother wasn’t coming back, yet he still asked. Every day, multiple times a day, he asked. I didn’t answer this time but countered with a question unfair but eating at me.
“Do you think you’d be sad if I were gone?” I asked.
“Where would you go?” Dame asked.
“I’d just be gone. I’d never come back.”
“Like (won’t say his name)?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like him.”
“I love Mommy.”
“Alright,” I nodded.
At the funeral, I somehow couldn’t cry. That’s weird, right? Feels weird. Amanda coaxed notes from the piano, exorcising ghosts hiding within its wooden body. If only I could have hung myself on the chorus. I could have swung by my neck high above everyone until the note faded and let me splat to the scratched church floor, dead if I wasn’t already.
Biscuit got up when someone asked if anyone wanted to speak. I held his wrist, trying not to make a scene but there was no way I was going to let him talk. The last time I’d even seen him was a year ago. Maybe two. He met my kids three times I could even remember. That’s not enough times to earn the right to go up in front of everyone and drag on this thing.
“Sit down,” I whispered.
“I’m here for you,” he said, matching my volume, leaning in so I could hear.
“This is fucking torture.”
He nodded and squeezed my shoulder.
“I love you, man,” he said.
Thank fucking god, he sat down.
Neither Allison nor I got up. I don’t know. I fucking hate this part. Like, I keep trying to write about his funeral, but no.
One notable thing that happened was Allison’s grandmother got up and said, “There are worse things than losing a child, but not many.”
That really pissed me off. Just shut the fuck up. In fact, everyone should have shut the fuck up. I should have made them all sit their asses down each time a new one stood up and tried to speak.
People don’t get up to talk in a funeral to make anyone feel better but themselves, and what right do they have to feel better? What right do any of us have not to feel like absolute shit constantly? People would be better if people felt worse.
Except me.
I got worse.