The Wilderness Years- Raskolnikov's Blues Pt. 7 Out with a Whimper

And now we come to the electrifying conclusion or more aptly, out with a whimper, the days would grow warmer but the nights were still cold under the towering pines and Pennsyltucky stars, some nights the air dry and stinging and others dank and damp, under the shadow of the forest it was coming to a close and i had still yet to see a bear or slay the beast and of course why would i want to do that when the beast was in me as the song says, i had scraped and saved a few hundred dollars hustling my shit weed and washing the occasional dish, i had managed to stay relatively drunk and high for a few months living on a shoe string budget, by thieving from the local supermarket, by the kindness of women who would feed me, by the kindness of a woman who would feed me, get me drunk, sleep with me and buy me drugs, i had failed and flunked out, there would be no career as a professional student and the options of a career in general were becoming rather slim to say the least, not that i was all that interested in one to begin with, i would go east and make the fries, i would sling roast beast at tourists and work more hours in a summer than all my previous working days combined but i began to count down those last days, to take long walks and look around knowing that i would most likely never see this place again and being a summer away from 25 i had spent the better part of 5 of the last 6 years roaming it's quiet and sleepy streets...

And what had happened in those years spent wandering the little hamlet of Podunk U.? I had shown up a hot shit basketball player,  arriving in my mom's old puke green '78 Olds Cutlass Supreme, a lovely hunk of rear-wheel drive death machine, a car that would slowly fall apart, a car i'd melt the engine in one day while drunk and  highed-up and driving country roads, and you wonder why i marvel that i still have all of my fingers and toes, that's if we're keeping track of course, the place where i'd quit playing hoops and start reading too many books, where i'd spend my 21st birthday sitting alone in my apartment and studying for a test and at midnight walking across the courtyard to a guy named Blotto's place and doing bong hit after bong hit while he blared Psychic TV and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult until the wee hours, (then acing said test), from shaving my head (after seeing Perry Farrell on the cover of Spin, 1991?) to leaving the place with a natty rat's nest of dreads, learning and thinking and writing and going from C student to A student, watching my nuclear family splinter apart one night over winter break while i leaned against the kitchen counter, seeing the most stable relationship you'd ever known get annihilated like a sand castle caught in a wave, i'd spend a lone year in the city slinging bagels and weed, i'd sit one day in Podunk bars drunk off my head and crying as i learned the news of the demise of one Henry Charles Bukowski, the big-haired bartender and her friend casting nervous glances at the man-child in tattered corduroys and flannel shirt downing scotch and water as the tears rolled down his face... i'd drop out and flunk out and fall out, i'd come unglued and then put myself back together and then come unglued again until like a mad scientist i had all the puzzle pieces properly arranged... or so i thought, i went from bright-eyed boy to broken-hearted kid, i went from apathy to nihilism to cynicism to just plain motherfucker, i learned to laugh at the pain, i fucking grew up and out and where once i thought things could defeat me i began to learn that i was the only one who could do that, and if i didn't let it? insert maniacal laughter here, concentrate on that three inches in front of my eyes, left foot right foot foot in your ass... and when the last day came...

There is a strange gap in my memory, i don't know how i got from Podunk to the shore, i'm pretty sure it was the good Doctor who gave me a ride, threw what i could fit in his car and left the rest, gave away some stuff, i spent the last week or two having a good time and saying goodbye to the few souls who mattered, most of those souls i'd see again, except Sam, it would be years before i'd hear from him, he got my email address from the crazy ex-roommate who was convinced we were soul mates, the one who thought i'd look into her eyes and fall madly in love, Sam had found some copies of old poems i had written and wrote to say hello, i had kept tabs on him through mutual friends, he had taken his assistantship and then fell off the wagon, one night while blind drunk two guys he met at the bar went back to his place with him to hear his poetry, of course you know where this is going don't you? Sam, drunk and oblivious, he didn't realize it until one of them jumped in his lap and tried to stick his tongue down his throat that they weren't interested in his poetry, the one had to smash a chair over him to get him to stop kicking the ass of the other, they ran out and he grabbed a rifle and fired a couple rounds, needless to say he was tossed out of school and if not for Sam's gift of persuasion (he told the judge that as an ex-paratrooper that he knew what he was doing, that if he wanted to kill the guys he would've) and a judge sympathetic to vets he'd have found his ass in the slammer, so back on the wagon he went and the tool belt and hard hat got pulled out of retirement...

It's safe to say that i didn't look back as the good Doctor's car pulled onto the highway and led me out of Podunk, it was back on the familiar route towards the blue-black Atlantic, through the city of motels, past the rolling hills of Pennsyltucky and the shit side of Maryland, past Frederick and memories of Audrey (see the Wedding Proposal post) and then the suburbs of Charm City and DC, over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and what seemed like a land of liquor stores, past outlet malls and regally named old money towns and into the flat eastern seaboard coastal plains that led to a cesspool of sunburned tourists and redneck locals, the sign with the seagulls welcoming me to one more season in the sun, Podunk nothing but a fast fading memory, the summer waiting in front of me, lugging my shit up the three flights of my soon to be condemned shit hole, frosted-hair frat boys a floor below blaring horrible music and being fucking boneheads, i was here to to dig myself out of a hole, to work and drink and take drugs and save money, it was a beautiful mess, an old manual typewriter set up on a wooden table next to my bed, over roughly 110 days i had two off and that was because i walked into a shelf and had a concussion, somehow i managed to bang out poorly typed stories, through thumping bass from a floor below, through an apartment filled with drunks and psychos and morons and acid casualties, with barely any time for sleep i sat and banged out poems and stories, a beautiful mess indeed...

Of course i've been over most of this summer, things always pop back into the mind, like a box of lost Polaroids now faded and discolored they fall to the floor here and there, sometimes they're so clear it sends a shiver, like popping wheelies on my bicycle high on acid and riding down 28th St., laughing and shirtless and the metallic taste of cheap beer and LSD in my mouth, the hours spent sitting on the deck behind the Fry Hut and listening to the surf and the gulls, a book in my hand, sticky with sweat and Vans covered in grease, eating at the mission, wandering to the back of the arcade on break and playing Donkey Kong for a quarter and keeping my high score up damn near all summer, on my own things were so simple but of course there was also the hellhole, a complicated and strained relationship with a girl and with my roommates and with damn near everyone i knew except for my boss and the crew i worked with, dubbed the Chemical Crew we were a fine sight to behold.. but we'll get to that, for now the sun had set on my aspirations in academia, it was roughly another 10k tacked onto my tab, in a box a thousand miles a way there was a piece of paper with my name on it, a very expensive piece of paper, i just wouldn't be adding another pricey slab of papyrus to go along with it, oh but it was money well spent, as an education went it had served it's purpose, hell it may have even been a steal, i learned far more than i could have ever dreamed when i had show up here... and now it was  just the three inches in front of my face and one foot in front of the other...