The Rag Man

The Rag Man

The truth is, I hadn't seen Cricket since January. The last I saw of her was a shadowy figure in the snow, illuminated in part by a frosted street lamp, her silhouette altered by that ridiculous, oversized coat.

You ever have the sort of nightmare that you can't seem to shake? You wake up with your stomach on empty protest, and the thin skin of your back is crawling like you've slept on a bed of roaches. The air feels like water. Even though the day might be bright and sunny, or even if you find a lucky penny in the grime, or get the perfect job you've been waiting your life for, or fall for a prostitute with a grasshopper tattooed between her shoulder blades, you still feel as though you're trapped in an endless nightmare. Makes you nervous, jumpy. Itchy, even.

I don't know what I was thinking. My boss handed me an envelope that Friday. "Go have some fun, yeah?" Funny how a thin slip of paper with some figures written on it can be your passport to adventure. Drugs, sex, whatever. Money can buy almost anything.

I read something like that once, back in my high school English class. My teacher was some beak-nosed, balding professor who didn't care about his students, and didn't care if we cared. He would just sit at his desk, watching us with eyes that might have once been as sharp as a hawk's, but at the time, they were dull and glazed, like he was on drugs. Maybe he was. I was. We used to sit at the back of the class and do lines of coke off the desks, the good desks that hadn't been scarred by years of graffiti. Made the class bearable.

The only thing I took out of that class was how to use words. Words have power, words are power. They can be used to manipulate people, to convince them you aren't who you really are, to convince the old lady at the cash register that you already paid for your coffee, or talking your way out of a traffic ticket with some arrogant pig. Words are the ultimate trick, better than the pranks we used to pull when we were kids, like Kevin down the street used to pull, until he grew up but never grew out of it. Last I heard, he was serving ten down at Riker's for conning the wrong people out of the wrong money, like the innocent child who wasn't so innocent after all.

I cashed the cheque and took the money right away. I never saved any of it, just spent within a week, maybe even within the day. Rent was overdue, the fridge was infested with stale food, the water and electricity had been cut for months. Didn't care. Short-term pleasures were all I cared about - liquid happiness coursing through my veins, and a warm, unfamiliar body against mine. I knew the stack of bills in my back pocket would be gone by the end of that night.

The nightmare starts when you turn against yourself. I sure as hell didn't realize it when my words turned on me. Words can be used to convince people of a lot of shit, but no one is immune. It creeps up on you, slowly, before you even realize it's there. Imagine there's something creeping just outside the corner of your eyes. It moves when you turn your head, so it always stays where you can't see it. It's there, staring at the vulnerable area just below your ribcage, or the base of your neck, pawing closer and closer until it's almost on top of you, and you don't even realize it until its hot breath is on the back of your neck, its hands sliding down the front of your chest, it lets out a steamy moan, and maybe it even has a stylized insect sketched in purple ink in the crook of its back.

My point is, it's really easy to trick yourself. Day after day, in the dark basement of an apartment building, between the cold washing machines and dust and grime, your tongue pressed deep into some girl's mouth, hers pressed against the side of your cheek. You tell yourself, "It's okay," and eventually, you come to believe it. Slowly, it creeps up on you. You don't even know it until the one morning when you wake up. Empty stomach, skin crawling. A living nightmare, and you're trapped inside wondering how you managed to get yourself into this mess, how you managed to screw things up so badly. And really, you can only blame yourself.

The club was packed that night. I dodged the bouncers at the door and slipped in through the back. Francis was already waiting for me inside, his eyes unfocused, with some girl hanging onto his arm with a death-grip. She would have fallen down otherwise. The flashing lights and pounding music were hypnotic. Swirls of purple and blue. The girl looked at me like I was some sort of intruder. Her hair was greasy and her face was slick with sweat. Francis' eyes, on the other hand, were sharp as always, dark and hooded like he was tired, but alert and active.

"Ready to have some fun?" he asked, like he didn't know the answer. His eyes darted around the room, before he reached into his jacket and pulled out a tightly-wrapped, ragged bundle of toilet paper. At the same time, I reached into my back pocket, rifling through the thin wad of bills, the unfamiliar texture of money odd against my fingertips. Some people say money is the dirtiest thing we handle on a daily basis. It's covered in viruses and germs, traces of crack, fecal matter, and who knows what else. It's also dirty in the metaphysical sense of the word, covered in temptation and corruption and drugs and sex. I handed the stack to Francis as he handed me the sad, misshapen bundle. I wiped my hands on my pants, as the music thundered around me, a physical bass reverberation in my ribcage.

The real horror comes when you realize what you could have been. Unless you're an astronaut or a doctor or a fireman, you're probably not who you wanted to be when you were a kid. No child grows up with the goal of becoming a corporate investment banker, or a telemarketer packed into a cubicle. No ambitious kid with unlimited potential ever envisions himself being dragged out of a car, fucked out of his mind, and slammed onto the pavement with just enough force to clarify one thought - this isn't who I wanted to be.

I was standing in the middle of the club, trying to start the joint I had rolled up in the bathroom, trying but failing, the dancing bodies jostling me and making me fumble the lighter, until I lost it on the floor under the crowd. The smell of alcohol surrounded me, consumed me, mixed in with the tang of body odour and the subtle hint of cocaine. I patted my pockets with one hand for another light. Funny. With how often lighters get lost, you'd think we'd learn to keep a spare.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. A conscious, deliberate tap, not just a random bump in the crowd. "Need a light?"

I looked up and she was grinning. She was drunk, with a goofy look on her face, golden hair wild and tangled, her eyes unfocused. It took me a few seconds to notice she had a lighter in her hand, a cute one with some sort of flower design, a hippie-era novelty, but it worked and soon the familiar rush of chemicals flooded into my brain.

I remember that from a book I once read. Things have two types of energy, potential and kinetic. Potential is energy that hasn't been spent yet. You use up your potential making choices, like getting a job at a fast-food restaurant, or moving to a different city where the cops can't find you. Kids have unlimited potential, and as they make choices and grow up, depending on the validity of those choices, they either end up as wealthy businessmen with nice cars, or wrist-deep in some poor bitch who can't see straight because of the heroine coursing through her veins. When you use potential, you turn that energy into kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is what you get when you're moving. Eventually, you change all your potential into kinetic, and then you're like Steve, who chose to spend all his potential at once, falling from the roof of a building, speeding up without control of your direction, until you smack into the pavement below.

You don't even realize it until it's too late. Everything is connected. Words, energy, power. You wake up in the morning, and you realize all your potential is wasted, and you're moving uncontrollably towards a future you don't want to see like a runaway train, with your bloodshot eyes swimming from how many shots? and that you can't blame anyone for it - not your parents, they were never there - and you can't blame society, or the apathetic people who look at you like you're a shitstain on the tablecloth, or even the slender girl with the pretty eyes and the tattoo that lingers in your mind like she's been burned in.

She took my hand and led me off the dance floor. We were both sweaty, panting, but ecstatic and turned on. I followed her out, and her slender fingers pressed against my palm like small spots of fire. My vision was blurry, so I couldn't make it out at first, but she had something on her back, in the dip of her low-cut dress, dark and oddly shaped. I brushed it with the back of my free hand, and when it didn't come off, I pressed on it with my fingertips. Somewhere in my mind said, "Tattoo," and I repeated it dumbly out loud.

BRB

I've been writing a long manuscript, perhaps a novel, so this site won't be updated for a bit longer. Sorry folks. I'll be back, I promise.