Drawing Dead

I wasn’t always an asshole.

Not at all. There were times when the world burnt bright brother.

Golden glowing days of pure delight, of cool breezes, cooler beer, the sweetest, blondest girl you ever knew and cigar smoke that tasted even better than the expensive coffee you drank down with it.

Oh yes sir, the sun was syrup.

The earth dark chocolate melting in your mouth, wonderfully fecund in your nose.

Her hair, I’ll tell you, it was the palette of an afternoon sky exploding into neon confetti, shining in flashes as the heavens turned dim, raining down on me in warm spooled ribbons like youth never lost, her saliva tingling on my tongue and buzzing on my cock.

But like everything else, those days are in the past.

The good of your life usually is.

That’s just the way it is, no use in fighting it.

In existence, this one anyhow, well mine at least, it’s always odds against. The house forever wins. King a minute, better off buried the next. You can say I’m wrong. You can say it all you like. Won’t change a thing.

Never has.

Never will.

It’s just one long run to the grave, everyone grabbing what they can on the way, ignoring what is more obvious than perhaps anything else. Even if you win you lose. And if you don’t understand that then you never will nothing.

I suppose the best place to start is a month before I turn thirty. Heady days of drunken solitude and debauch brought on by a tragedy that struck me like a sledgehammer in my sleep. I never saw it coming, you never do.

It lodged in my skull prearranged, a tumour no doctor could cure. Following it I passed my days quietly, cruelly, effortless in a fit of quiet dread, bothering nothing but the furthest reaches of my deadened soul, and pushing the limits of my numbed tissue.

An animal in its filthy and deserving cage thrashing.

A waking nightmare sloshed through waist deep, in a continuous hangover remedied every morning by my favourite drink of them all, the next one.

Sleeping badly during days, drinking hard nights. Mostly naked and barely eating. No phone. Few friends. I smoked cigars by the window and when told not to by the landlord went off the handle about it. There was pornography. In time there were low-priced hookers.

If I did go out it was only to gamble, only just down the street and only at night. If I’m honest with you, I don’t really remember most it. It sits mostly blank in my mind, flashing intermittent as a warning light on the dark sea would. Distant, yet distinct, and completely and utterly unavoidable.

All I ever saw was her pretty young face. It hung in my eyes the way the sun does after you look at that son of bitch for a few seconds too many. Most all of her did this. Those breasts sculpted in lifelike flesh from her neat and skintight ribs. Her lips like swollen glossed jewels. That perfect little silken pussy. And the litres of blood in the ever still and pinkened bath water. The way she’d run a three-inch cut up each wrist and how the blood had stop pulsing but now sat in thick strings from the wounds coagulated like the underwater incomplete webs of a murderous wounded spider.

I’m a gambler. I was that way before she was gone and I stayed that afterward. There’s no use not telling ya, in fact if I don’t we can’t move on ahead with this insipid heap of words. The world had gone to smash. After the cops and the parents and all the crying and wailing and sobbing, after the funeral I never went to and the blood spots I’d find every now and then in the clearest morning light, yeah, outside of the booze and the pussy I paid for the card-room was my one and only solace. The teat I sucked at when oblivion threatened to yank me under.

I owed already. About ten grand give or take. I’d walked there every other night, drunk as a sailor on shore leave. Nights of serious drinking. It was about six blocks down and maybe three over. Down the highway a stretch, then a right turn, settled in among the workshops and tenements. The room sat in the back of strip joint that doubled as an illegal whorehouse. Motherfuckers made you get into the room via the back of the joint, across a shitty bare-assed gravel car park, weeds and rubbish mostly. Potholes too, I almost broke my god-damned neck at least ten times getting my sorry ass through that minefield. Wouldn’t even give you a peek at the girls on the walk through, no way, no day, the degenerate gamblers could only enter through the asshole of the joint. And sure it made sense 'cause of security reasons and whatever else, but I was drunk, and had a dick, and therefore it pissed me off even worse than I usually was.

Inside were a dingy four walls painted bruise purple and couple of felt tables where you did your balls. You could still smell the condoms and sweat and the suggestion of pussy and cheap perfume. It obviously used to be a fuck room. They should have let you smoke in there to cover that shit up, but in some ass backwards twist of red-tape fate the proprietor deemed this unsafe. He ran the risk of unlawful poker and whores but smoking a cigar while you lost your money was wholly untenable. Don’t think I didn’t bring this up with the prick either. But I think I would have had a much better chance making my finely worded argument had I not owed like a stuck pig, so I just called him a duplicitous shit-stain and went on swaying and smiling back to the siren call of the tables. The joke as always was right the fuck on me.

You didn’t see the card room straight up: there was the anteroom, half the size of the other one which you had no choice but to trail through first. This was where you traded up money for chips on entry, with a bit of luck the opposite on exit. It was also where you sniveled and begged and hopefully eventually borrowed. The vig was a fucking nightmare, but I was a drunk, past caring and didn’t really plan on losing.

You got past Jimmy at the front door and then you dealt with the Croatian Sensation and the snarling bitch he kept by his side. The night I’m speaking of right now had some subtle differences running to its usual flavor. One – I owed ten large, and just showing my face there was running me the very likely chance of catching a well deserved and somewhat wanted beating, and two - the bitch was gone, the Sensation didn’t have his hot as hell stripper girlfriend by his side waiting to play her usual “kick-you-while-you're-down” flirting bullshit that made the Sensation stare through me like he was planning where to dump my body and had been at it for weeks.

Instead of the bitch with her vodka infused Eastern European accent and that shadow of hair running up to her bellybutton from her panties, there was a younger girl, carrying on her an out of place sweetness, just sitting there with her eyes flicking about all nervous, wearing denim cut-offs and a bright yellow tank-top with no bra. She smiled at me when I walked in. The Sensation must have been out back and I took the chance to smile as best as I could back at her. She sat beside the counter on a bar-stool and looked at the ground and then back at me smiling at her like I’d just discovered El Dorado. I gave her one of the best I had. She was bustling with it. They do that. With me they do. Young and dumb, their cunts just aching to be full of my rousing cum.