Cocaine Take My Pain Away

Henry half in the bag, cob-webs in his head, it was often like this in the morning. He didn’t like early dead-lines and appointments because they triggered the lunatic in him, a blind mad-man at the wheel of a killing machine, Henry the road-menace. 

In a dream and not wanting to wake up, wanting to get deeper inside the dream. Henry in a masters level creative writing course, loving every minute of it,  at a half-open window taking notes, a lazy-eye on long-haired field-hippies playing frisbee outside on the green, the other eye on Tolstoy, Raymond Carver and Tennessee Williams.  

Henry a prisoner of brain-rot and political self-deception, an exile in a foreign country without an english speaking university. If he was in the US he could live his dream and study creative writing, this unlikely because he was broke. 

The US a nation of over-weight buffaloes lost-in and wondering a waste-land, brains frozen, roaming the tundra looking for a cheap meal wanting more than was on the plate. They didn’t need Henry and didn’t want him. 

The odds of Henry making it as a writer were slim to none.  Henry hungry still, wanting to make it and find a sponsor to bank-roll a modest tour. He craved it, going on the road, reading to small crowds in bars and coffee shops, it wasn’t about money for him.

Henry wondered about his work? He didn’t write like anyone, and rarely told stories anymore, he wrote what came to mind, a lazy writer crazy about many short story and poetic prose writers. He knew to be kosher and washed you had to write-out your passion on the page, you couldn’t pretend.    

He would think about the story he was writing on any given day, this story, maybe it was empty, ho-hum, dull. Yet, The Stunning Matures Daily had published his work for a few years now and he had close to 20,000 hits on his website, Busted on Empty. 

After the work on the page settled some, it appeared to be bonafide and legit to him. 

Henry had lost his edge maybe —the great-writers of the Twentieth Century seemed to be honed and fine-tuned, never  blowing hot and cold— Someone on Twitter had told him that his work was cool, industrial-strength. Henry feeling his latest stuff was milquetoast, maybe he would get the edge back, or was the hipster in him a ruse. The iconoclast had wilted and dropped off the vine a few years back.  

Watching the Pro Bowl, channel surfing back and forth, spell-bound watching  “Fourteen Years of Caligula” on the History Channel. The Pro Bowl players hardly trying, feeble compared to the emperor,  Caligula had a set of balls and he wasn't afraid to tackle and mix it up. 

Henry getting old his body ached, all the cocaine in Tony Montana's cigar boat wasn't enough to take it away. There were things in life you were stuck with, stuff the Mayo Clinic couldn't do anything about. 

Jesus Gone Away

Trying to make the most of the holidays in a Buddhist country, it fit him like a hand-made shoe, the mantra of Christmas and the rest, fuck-it he thought. Henry and Jesus a million miles away from each-other, in his heart knowing it was safer not to bother, it was brain-clutter, a dirty old man in the nut-house.  

Henry at it again, writing what-ever it was, sitting in Wah Wah coffee shop, sucking up a bowl of noodles, chile peppers burning his mouth, choking on the stuff, happy to finish it and get to the coffee.  

Wondering whey he bothered with it, the writing or the chile peppers. In a vacuum with-out feed-back, an old punch-drunk boxer in the last round just about out and hanging in there, going down. 

Henry’s literary dreams, dream-prose  wrapping itself around you, 3 D poetry breathing, alive, poised to attack. Waking-up and graving the stuff, it was junk for him.  

What the others thought didn’t matter, he just did it that’s all, there was no reason for it and who said there had to be?

Henry moved from Milwaukee to Hawaii when he was fifty.  The East different, old and new at the same time. A Banyan Tree on top of over-grown roots above ground rising into the heavens, or,  not wearing shoes in the house, eating rice instead of potatoes, eating cross-legged on the floor, eating raw-fish, asian-phobic stuff, things unthinkable for some in the West.  

Twenty years after moving to the tropics nothing turned Henry on much anymore, cocaine was still a kick but it didn’t last. Life didn’t last either, not even for the washed and converted. 

In the end you were left with a big question mark on the page, that was OK Henry thought, there was nothing you could do about it anyway.