Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:50:53 GMT

Desire winds up in a glass ashtray
A short story by Leo Paul Helmar

1.

Do you ever think to yourself during a quiet moment that there could be an undiscovered talent being whittled away by rejection and self-loathing in a backcountry locale, muddling through life writing what could be your favorite works consisting of words and sentences that ring out like they were written on a polyphemus-sized typewriting machine?
Sitting at the front desk to a shabby hotel, doing whatever it takes just to live. Waiting for someone to just read the work, just glance at the canvas, to confirm the brilliance that sits unmolested.
I pray for it, because its really my only hope. I leave copies of short stories on the seats of passenger buses hoping for someone to read them. Read them and then search for the person whose fingertips tapped out that singing prose, the gorgeous words that made them cry and then laugh within a few moments of an otherwise ordinary period of just living.
Alright then, I’ll stop just painting you a picture and remove myself from under the veil of the third person. My name is Leo and I live in a small town in the extreme North. Where exactly isn’t really important. In fact, I don’t really pretend to know what’s important to you, just consider this as a narrative on a place that may not be like your own and a person who may be totally different and somewhat the same as yourself.
I’m a writer and a desk clerk, well not really a writer because I don’t get paid to do it. I write after I get off work at the ghastly hour of four a.m.. I type everything out on an old Smith Corona Electra 120. When I am working at the desk, it’s a special kind of work. I actually hope, for your sake, that I don’t ever have to deal with you on a professional level at my current job. Most of the people I deal with are drunks and delusional and reasonably often medically certified as a nut bag.
I’m a people wrangler. My charges are people who society has sloughed off for the most part, that are marginalized and mostly because they want to live out of the norms. It’s like Dennis Leary’s class of under world people in that Stallone flick. They are making a choice to live in the sewer, and between the hours of eight and four I’m in charge of the sewer to some degree. You can never fully control the sewer, it breathes and lives and it’s an organism. It has a magic of its’ own, and its slick like cold steel if you try and grasp it and hold it down.
It’s part flop house, part mental asylum. I also live here and its overwhelming at times. I’m also a bit of a junky, so there is also a reason I am here. I’ve marginalized myself.
There is a basement bar below the residence where nothing much ever happens. Every night is filed next to the last on carbon-free copy paper, listless entries describing a group of people bubbling over with nervous energy. Empty pools of human beings, living out lives that may or may not eventually be woven into an oral history of a small town that is just so… irresolute, impermanent.
My ambitions are as big as the breathing earth. I want to live in an endless house with rooms I’ll never rub a sock across, fully stocked kitchens of rotting food. I’d like to be able to wander out of one room not sure if I’ll ever return, carrying an armful of what makes me happy.
“I’ll be right back.”
Billy leaves my hotel room looking for weed. He’s pretty trashed so I don’t know if he’ll make it back tonight. He lives right next to me, and I can hear him stumbling down the hallway talking to an old woman who also is probably intoxicated on the non-feeling formula.
I’m alone again, so I have to begin writing once more. I glance at a television and think about just sitting and staring and how nice it is to do nothing, to feel nothing. Instead I put on some heavy trance music, and the clicking of spacebars and letter keys materializes. I am almost not a party to it. I can see the words moving left to right, but I try to let the reptilian brain take over.
There are eight cigarette butts in a glass ashtray that lies to my left. I counted them to give you a mental picture of what I am experiencing.
I am thinking, but it is on a deep, guttural level. I cannot actively analyze the unspeakable things that are happening. To someone foreign to this reality, it must seem so odd. To a primitive life that can only look out onto what appears before it, the things that are happening are perverse. The listless eye of the monitor shines endlessly on the writer, is he being controlled by the shimmering screen?
The hallway rumbles again, someone just going to the bathroom I guess. Two twenty-nine in the morning. Almost has no meaning. I have to be at work tomorrow at eight p.m. Alaska standard time, but who knows how long it will be before that happens. My mind controls the passage of things, so I continue to sit erect and type away, listening to the waves of sound.
I guess I failed to mention that I live in Alaska, which may or may not be of interest. it’s a cold and dark place right now. Its winter outside, so I try to avoid going there. I glide past it sometimes on the way to places I should go, the bank, groceries, drugs sometimes. I sleep in a California King that is much to large for my living space. Someone else put it here, so I don’t feel like making any changes to the general outlay of the living quarters.
It’s seven thirty in the morning now and there are twelve butts now in the glass ashtray. On top of the monitor to my computer, the slip of paper from a fortune cookie sits crooked and upright. It reads “You will soon gain something you have always desired.”
The word ‘desired’ is paused in my focus for a moment. What could it be, what do I desire? Do I know? I’m not so sure. Therein lies my problem with living. There isn’t anything out there for me, or at least it seems that way sometimes. There’s nothing out there for me. I repeat it like a mantra at times when I yearn for something unknown. I usually feed the anxiety with drugs.
A Bob Hope movie is on TV. Its playing silently in the background, layered behind music and out of my direct tunnel of vision. The first inkling of light plays against the snow to throw up a faint blue color that filters, just barely, into my three-quarter closed window.
My first loved called me two days ago. She’s back in town due to the death in the family. I don’t know if I even want to see her.
I lost my virginity to her on an unclothed bed during the last night I lived in Northwood number five, an apartment in the slum village section of town. I lived there with my buddy Steve McNeeve, a crazy, meth-addled guy. Earlier that fateful night, we did a ziplock full of blow and didn’t really clean anything, mostly just smoked cigarettes. I enjoyed it, as I remember.
Leaving that apartment, those moments in transit from doorway to car, are one of the few flighty moments still stuck in memory from that time period. We held hands, and I felt like I had just achieved some level of normalcy. Being with a girl meant that someone out there wanted me, and all of those commercials and in-jokes about the nagging girlfriend suddenly meant something to me, too.
Or at least I wanted them to. I’m not really part of their demographic, anyway. I spend zero dollars on cleaning products. I just acquire them like coat hangers. I get little bars of soap from the linen closet in the hotel. I stole some surface cleaner from somewhere. The relative messiness of my living conditions has little sway on my day to day activities.
She’s back in town, someone she’s related to is dead and she’s married. I don’t know what to make of all of it, and I suppose I’m not going to go to the effort of trying to read the tea leaves. I prefer to be self-absorbed and smoke pot and cigarettes in my room. I don’t really feel pathetic about it, its just hard for me to interact with forces so heavily linked to the outside world.
I live in the microcosm of the Bergdorf hotel and bar. It’s a dwarf planet that will in due time implode unto itself leaving no memory or remnant. Home to oblivion as Elliott Smith would say if he lived here.
I just went foraging around my room to find things that are smoke-able in my bong. I came up with some flakes of weed and kibbles of resin. It wasn’t all that bad, and I feel somewhat stoned. The crux of my problem is that the one thing that makes me happiest would be drugs. I’d rather get loaded than do anything, really, and that’s why in my mind’s eye there is nothing out there for me. It’s a wretched existence at times, drifting through work from paycheck to paycheck with that hunk of desire as the only real drive behind the expense of effort.
Which just brings me back to the fortune cookie. “You will soon gain something you have always desired.” Desire. My drive is based upon a lust for a feeling, a state of consciousness. Its almost like my life is a meditation. Long silences interrupted by the rending of the door to the chamber from it’s hinges and the rush of fresh air quickly eliminating the stagnant breath in the room. That’s what its like to break that period of sobriety.
I see drunks downtown in the elements, stumbling into the sticks and leaves surrounding the gutter, and I almost wish I could have what they have. The solution is only ever so far away on the shelves of a liquor store. Wadded bills and wet, shivering coins shoved across the counter and in return comes sustenance. They lie in the streets, but at least on some level they achieve grace with those interludes.
I think these thoughts having just smoked an array of things that may or may not be weed. Who is happier right now at eight eighteen in the morning, me or the guy just getting to the liquor store for his first fifth of rot gut? Does he have any idea how many cigarette butts are in his ashtray?

2.

Time has a tendency to melt away when I’m working at the front desk sometimes. I inhabit a new mode, a different frequency, where I just read or play video games and hours slough off of the clock. Its an experience that makes me realize the fallacy of time. A powered device measuring meters, increments of space that to it are constant. It has no ability to perceive. I live in increments of thought, of energy expended.
I went downtown about a dozen hours ago to buy some smokes. I stopped at the Skin to smoke one before I went home. There was Christmas lights wrapped around the posts of the second floor alcove, a small space above the dance floor where one can look out onto the crowd and count the hippies. They were white and sort of dazzling as they blinked in their automated patterns.
My focus would become very deep as I stared out onto the field of blinking diodes. Out of the mists of the halcyon light came Jen, one of the day bartenders at the Skin. She sat down on a stool next to me at the end of the bar.
“I just wanted to talk to you about last week, I know we don’t really know each other than well, but after I got whatever I got from you, it made me almost cry.”
She had massaged my hand, the flesh between the thumb and index finger. I apparently acted as a conduit, and some of my manic depression was transmuted to her.
“I thought about you the whole next day, and I was trying to figure out what the connection was. Then I remembered that your dad had died recently, and mine died when I was thirteen.”
An older couple facing perpendicular to us at the bar continued to swirl their almost empty cocktails. Its odd how respectable adults will pine after a second round, but live it down.
“If you need a sounding board, need someone to talk to…”
The conversation makes me take a quick emotional inventory. My trauma feels like its bare for her to see. It’s also flattering that someone who is more-or-less a stranger would care about me. That’s sort of the rub when it comes to mental trauma. People want to help you and want to care, but when you hate yourself, it’s sort of unproductive of them to feel that way. At least through my prism it is.
She says goodbye and goes back to her original post on the other side of the bar. I stubbed the last quarter-inch of my cigarette out into a glass ashtray and walked out of the bar into the dark winter afternoon.
I returned to the Bergdorf and took some bong hits, smoked a pack of cigarettes in short order. Worked at the front desk for eight hours, dispensing ice from the ice machine to keep the guests’ booze cool, did some laundry, took out some trash and generally made sure the place didn’t burn the fuck down.
In the anti-matter soup of space between accomplishing all of these menial tasks, my eyes go glassy and my breathing creeps to a dullness. My physical body is in service to the brain inside my skull.
The bar in the basement of the Bergdorf was dead tonight, excepting a flash mob of youngish nerdlings that attacked Billy, who was working at the bar, asking only for some fruity shots in return for not shooting him with their nerd-phasers, or whatever metaphor you want to use to describe the oppressive nature of their presence. Personally, I will stand next to nerd-phasers, it has a nice ring.
As I sat in the empty bar with my hotel neighbor Billy, I felt the realization of how great this old hotel is. The luxury of that much empty space is apparent when there is normally so much consternation and cacophony happening in it. Empty bars have a feeling of relief, like the floorboards are breathing out after taking off the yoke of all that weight streaming down through the boot soles.

3.

The bubbles clung to the red plastic of the straws submerged in my drink. Every once in a while one would come loose from the pack and float through the path of least resistance up to the surface of the saffron red bull liquid.
The last of a cigarette’s smoke shudders out of the burning end of its’ filter as it sits in a glass ashtray. Four rows of liquor bottles sit on shelves in front of two massive, gilt mirrors behind the bar at the Bergdorf.
The noise in the bar was oppressive, but I sat unmoved by it. I felt calm even though everything around me was twittering, molecules shaking with delight from the sparkling alcohol.
I brought the letter down to the basement bar with me. To the New Yorker in New York, New York. The first chapter of the story of ascension I had written before in my head was to be published in that unmistakable font. John Updike writes criticism in the mother fucker. Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, sometimes shows up on page one-thirty three or whatever with a short poem flown in to the rest of the text.
I’m not even going to send letters to anywhere else. Just the one. Inside is a copy of my story. I have reams of paper sitting in a drawer, all with some sort of story on them, but this one has the magic. It’s called “Sleeping with Pills” and its about descending in life to a place where you aren’t sure if you are awake. My own life is dreamlike and incongruent a lot of the time, and it was only natural that I had to write something where reality is questioned.
Beyond that, I needed to write it. My mind felt like it was becoming limp before I began writing it. My own routine, daily life, is so uninteresting that creating a separate place was a release.
“What’s with the letter?”
Billy is standing in, bravely, as the bartender at the Bergdorf bar again. He’s a prince of a guy, one of the few people I could hang out with for a month straight and just become used to the tides of his presence.
“I don’t really know. It’s a short story I’m thinking about sending off.”
“Is is that one about the guy who’s, like, in a dream, or something?”
Billy takes a shot of Powers and chases it with a Coke back.
“Yeah. I don’t think he really knows where he is.” I say.
Red Bull tastes like heaven. It’s lightly carbonated and refreshing and tastes like Flintstone’s vitamins transmogrified into a subtle, crack-like drink. I’d say drinking one is roughly equivalent to half of a good crack hit.
I’m feeling blue tonight. The Joy Division song playing behind all of the bar noise is depressing, but amazing. “Love will Tear us Apart”. Its new wave and all synth-y, but seems deeply felt. My head is hurting. The pain makes me want to cut into my scalp with a sharp knife to release some of the pressure.
I leave the bar and go upstairs to my room. I sit down on the chair in front of desk and try to breath the sick feeling away. The fortune from the cookie is still there, lingering this time in front of a box of rice from a Chinese take-out place. “You will soon gain something you have always desired”. It dawns on me that it might not be talking about something tangible, but maybe something like acceptance, happiness.
I’ve been sleeping too much. I can tell that I’m slipping into a depression, but I don’t really want to acknowledge or confront it. I feel unclean, and in reality I probably am. I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Drake lately, and it helps me a little. I especially like Pink Moon, a really spare, simple, gorgeous record. Pink moon is going to get you all, he says. Sort of morbid and beautiful, which is a brilliant mix.
The cherry of a cigarette ignites an armed match in my glass ashtray. It surprises me, and snaps me out of the mode of contemplation.

4.

I sent the letter today. Two stamps with American flags on them, affixed to the crisp, white corner of the envelope. Dropped it in to the blue, metallic maw of the mail box.

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