Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read Online Free PDF

pressure, pleading. Most hit the button five or six times, enough for a quick lather and rinse. Sometimes a drunk will go over to the other side, turn psychotic. Sometimes the psych guys will start drinking, some call it “self-medicating” but it looks like clinging to an anvil in the middle of the sea. Like everywhere, some are ashamed of their bodies, turn their faces to the tiles, hold their hands over their privates as they walk. Some glance at others’ bodies, some glance longer. Some stand defiant, with their hand on the button, pressing it like a gambler murmuring, Hit me . Burt comes in every night, stands under the shower for an hour, slams the button over and over with the side of his fist. I don’t know his story. To chat is difficult up in Housing, difficult to start up a conversation with a naked man. Burt looks like he works construction, at least he wears a hardhat, and his clothes are often covered with plaster dust. A big man, barrel-chested, he comes upstairs in the last hour, stands under the hot water until it’s time to close up, his legs spread wide. He looks like a construction worker, but perhaps it’s just a costume. Perhaps he was a construction worker, once, and at some point he lost his job, got laid off. Maybe he never was, technically, constructing anything, maybe he did demolition, maybe they handed him a sledgehammer and a pry bar, pointed to a wall. Maybe he drank, maybe the job dried up, maybe he swung the sledgehammer at the boss one day, maybe one day they pointed to the door. In subsequent months I’ll see Burt walking downtown. Once or twice I’ll see him dozing on a bench in the Common, still wearing that yellow plastic hardhat.

my dostoyevsky
    (1964) Head bowed, faux contrite, my father stands in the dock, listens to what he’s done, awaits his sentence. It could be a year, it could be five. The judge asks if he has anything to say in his own defense and my father says nothing. The arresting officer tells the story of finding him behind the wheel of the Palm Beach sheriff’s family car. In the backseat were the passengers he’d picked up, as if he were driving a taxi and they were his fares. It’s against the law to impersonate a taxi in Florida, but this lesser charge is dropped for the greater charge of stealing an automobile. My father was drunk at the time and in a blackout, though he never uses that word. The words he uses are “toxic amnesia.” Still bleary, he remembers none of it.
    He’s been held in the “stockade” since his arrest, five weeks ago, awaiting trial. But now there is no trial, just the formality of sentencing, as he enters a guilty plea. He stands in the dock, does not fight what the judge hands down—six months’ hard labor in the county jail. In lieu of doing time he could pay a fine, not much, really, a few hundred dollars, he could wire his father and ask for the money, but maybe both of them know it’s better this way. My father, it seems, cannot stop drinking. Not on the outside, not on his own. For almost twenty years, since high school, he has identified himself as a writer, but he has yet to write much, beyond notes scribbled out on cocktail napkins, titles for his novels-to-be. He’s been locked up before—a week here, an overnight there—so he knows what the inside of a cell is like. No leniency begged—he will be sober for a few months and he will write out the novel that sits in his head. Something inside him knows it won’t get done otherwise, that the booze is eating away at his talents, his energies. In six months (no, five , he gets credit for time served), he will emerge with a draft. This setback will be turned into a victory. It will quiet the chatter in his head.
     
    He thinks:
    This will be my prison novel. My Dostoyevsky. My Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn will be green with envy when he reads this shit.
    Except this isn’t a prison—it’s a county jail. Palm Beach, no less, hardly Siberia. Here the prisoners play