Sprebas

Skulle skriva några scener, men tack vare kass planering blev det att dra ut skiten ur röven. Dessutom är en av texterna jävligt inspriterad (läs översatt) från en tidigare text. Inget jag e stolt över, men nöden har ingen lag.

Scene 2

The first part of the treatment was all conversation. Regular I´m-going-to-a-therapist-and-this-is-how-it´s-supposed-to-be conversations.

 

She had questions. Oh, all these questions.

 

It used to be this was lots of fun. But now I´m here because my girlfriend insists. It´s in her interest I´m getting better. Improving.

 

I tell her, my therapist, all this. I tell her, out meetings, my problem at home and so on. It has something to do with television. Good ol´fashion entertainment in a box.

 

This last month, I´ve been at home from work. On the sick-list. PTSD my doctor called it. So he gave me some Celexa. After that we tried Paxil. Zoloft. Prozac. Oh, that lovely Prozac. It´s not that it makes me feel better, I just don´t care anymore.

 

I tell her, my therapist, when television don´t do the trick, they give us medication.

 

"Oh?", she says.

 

I tell her, before this. Before therapy. Before Zoloft and Prozac. It was me. And my TV.

 

Back then, after my girlfriend had read that article in Cosmo how girls can gain weight from the pill and now insists us to use a condom every time, I went through the days like a suicide victim that had survived. I was longing for my own murder.

 

And it wasn´t just the weight that concerned her. There was things like eye-flicker and thrombosis. Acne. I did not want that to happen to her, did I?

 

Well.

 

I could react I guess. Live my life and all that. But I just switched channel. I could have taken up a hobby. Collect stamps. Golf. Work out at the gym.

 

I was way into Prison break when she told me. If your girlfriend tells you you have to use a condom from now on because some friend had said, it really hurts to install a copper T UID, you best change channel to ER. Or Discovery.

 

Or when you suggest a femidom and she don´t know what that is, change to Navy CIS.

 

And get this. A regular condom is about as thick as a string of hair. So, when your girlfriend tells you that not thick enough. Not safe enough. You better get Baywatch on. And fast.

 

When she comes home with a special mail-order condom. Ultra-safe. With dual layer and integrated carbon-filter for chemical cleanliness. Guaranteed to be impenetrable. Specially developed for anal-sex. Four times the thickness of a toenail. When you can´t feel the difference between your girlfriend and a fence hole, switch to CNN.

 

Before soon, I was sexually oppressed and addicted to porn. And you know there is something wrong with your relationship if you bring your laptop with you to the bathroom. The door was locked and the computer on the toilet seat. A piece of paper on the floor. I was fifteen again. Sneaking of to jack off. Like when I took extra long toilet visits that puzzled my mom. She would knock the door and ask, "Was everything all right?"

 

There is only so much a guy can take.

 

But now it´s my girlfriend knocking the door and asking, "How about a shower together?". Like we used to do back in those days. I finished. We showered. No sex.

 

This is your life, and then you die. Soon she mourn our dead sexlife. I had killed it she would scream. Making up for it by indulging an orgy of chocolate and wine and TV. I could spend a toilet-roll on a weekend. She watched Sex and the city. I took long walks. To our garage. With my computer. It´s not until somebody tells me I know there is something wrong.

 

And a bad habit I developed was I could never get my rocks off to the same porno-clip more than once. I had spoiled myself. The porno-industry is huge, so it´s never really a problem. Until.

 

You know accidents happen. You read about them all the time. You see them on TV. Earthquakes and great tsunamis wreaking havoc, killing thousands and then some. And then you go on enjoying your meal. Because these people aren't real. You know this. On TV whole cities gets swept away by some flood. It´s TV. It´s make believe in a box. People get robbed on the way home. Schoolchildren sell drugs. This happens all around you. But you don´t worry. It won´t happen to you. Then. It sweeps your legs away and turns your life inside out. Now it´s not a small paragraph in the newspaper anymore.

 

I guess that´s how it goes. If something is to happen to you. Say, you´re at home in your bed, all tied up. The disaster is in the living room happening your wife, one dick at a time.

 

After that, you´re changed. Something´s different. Permanently. It could happen to you. Sometimes, fate shuffles shit your way. So you stop reading the news and flip channel when a news anchor starts talking.

 

I can´t watch porn anymore.

 

It was supposed to be any ordinary breakfast jerk. Some web-page with all these thousands of amateur porn clips.  All these orgies from drunk college parties, grainy and shaky videos with more sound than image. I was halfway there when I noticed the tattoo. I had honestly not seen it. A small frog on the ankle. I could not make out the color. I knew it was blue, with green dots. One guy under. Another over. Forrest fire and hurricane. Some oil-tanker releases oil, disturbing an ecosystem for generations to come. Some disasters you can read about. Others just happen. Two guys inside of your girlfriend on the web. You could not make some disasters up.

 

I finished. Wiped it up. This was the point of no return. The hammer had fallen. Wham!. Everything is different. Permanently. Standing there, in the living-room. Naked down to the ball-sack and a handful paper and cum. My girlfriend on screen getting off. Without a condom.

 

My therapist nods and tells me the time is up and hands me a new prescription.

Scene 3

It´s drool on paper. That's what she called it. All this ranting and preaching and complete lack of character was the complete opposite to what readers wanted.

 

I'm at my first meeting with an editor. It took me long time to get here. All those texts I´ve been sending to the magazines. Not even Playboy wanted anything to do with me. Those many many short stories pushed down on paper. Staying up late at night doing what I love only to be told nobody wanted anything to do with it. My soul on paper. Useless. Proving my dad right once more, as when I got home from high school that last day and he asked me to show him my grades.

 

"Now we even have it on paper that you're a moron.", he said.

 

All those texts I wrote about being trapped in a coffin. Slowly suffocating. Some far off allegorical piece about how we all are trapped in our own way of thinking and life. Yes, I wrote more than one of those.

 

Or the one I wrote about the two clubs. An allegorical piece about heaven and hell and how most people strive to end up on the guest-list entering heaven. And St. Peter, the bouncer, telling each and everyone to fuck off.

 

Or the story I wrote about that woman who had a miscarriage that survived. So she puts it in jar, pokes holes in the lid and feeds it milk and vinegar through a straw. Then it grew up and wrote a story about a woman who had a miscarriage that survived. Really clever if you ask me.

 

She said, the editor, she said, it´s not that it´s all bad. Some parts were alright. But most of it was crap. And the way it was written, had I even re--read it once?

 

"John Milton never wrote any easy to understand texts.", I dared to say.

 

Did I just compare myself to John Milton?

 

"Did you compare yourself to John Milton just now?"

 

Holy crap.

 

Then she goes on talking about the three act-structure and how any writer should make the protagonist a likable person, so the readers can relate to him. To feel and care for him. And I don´t have any climax. Any good story needs a climax near the end.

 

"It´s an auto-biography", I say.

 

Does your life have a climax? Does any? What would it be I wonder?

 

When she brings up Aristotle and something about his poetics, she has lost me completely.

 

All that complaining I do, about how our society is an Everest pile of crap ruled by the media and our mainstream entertainment. That´s gotta go, she tells me.

 

No reader want to be told their life has no meaning. And what´s that shit I write about my father? Some distant cry for help kind of crap?

 

By now, I´m getting up, ready to leave. On my way out, before I close the door, she says, "And please, don´t send us any more of your crap."

 

Don´t call us. We won´t call you.

 

Thank you for nothing.

 

I try to stay positive. Bukowski first published when he was about fifty. But if this is how it is supposed to be, I would rather not be published.

 

"Why don´t you write a crime-novel?", the editor had asked. "Those always sell."

 

Gimme a break.

 

So I threw it away. The novel. My master piece. My piece of crap. My drool on paper.

Stas comes to my funeral, after that he helps me steal a car and drives me out into the desert. Right now, where we are, it´s the end of the road. That´s not a figure of speech.

 

This place, the long black road, it´s not on any map. Someone, somewhere, thought it would be a good idea to build a road straight through the desert.

 

"There", they would say. "Why don´t we build something there?", pointing at the great piece of brown nothing on the map.

 

But somewhere down the line the funds ran out. Or maybe some paper got lost in the shuffle in some city planning office.

 

Me and Stas, we didn´t have enough juice to drive the car back. This was always supposed to be a one way trip.

 

"It´s like being born", Stas would say. After we get pushed out of our mothers birth canal, there is no going back.

 

"This", Stas says while doing a ziggity zag and a boggiewoggie and a bit of cha cha cha.

 

"This is the end of civilization. Right here!"

 

On the other side of the road, ending in a sudden stop like the drop of a cliff, is only nature. Out there by the horizon, the sun is penetrating the clouds, drawing patterns in the sky. It´s pretty the way you´d think of heaven as beautiful.

 

Without this road, the car, me and Stas, you would think this was some other planet. Pictures taken by some suicide spacerobot on Mars or some bombed out leftover from a nuclear holocaust. Planet Armageddon.

 

Stas, doing his balancing act on the edge of the road, holds his arms out Jesus-style, and I ask him, did he bring the water?

 

I´ve heard you can survive without water for three days.

 

Three weeks without food.

 

Stas, with a smoke in his smile, shakes his head. No.

 

After that first week without food in a place like this and you begin to wish you could stop surviving.

 

Getting to where we are right now, we had to pass the signs. Every now and then, all the way from that last turn right down to here, we passed the signs. Saying something like;

 

You now have five miles back.

 

You now have ten miles back.

 

Up until this last sign, the one I´m looking at right now, telling us we´re halfway there. Whatever that means.

 

This is a dead end if there ever was one. Meaning if your car runs out of juice or breaks down out here, you are dead. Sure as a roadkill.

 

"You sure about this?", Stas asks.

 

I gaze across the horizon and the burning desert that goes on forever. If I don´t have any second thoughts now, I know they´ll come around soon enough.

 

I tell Stas, "Even a bird that escapes the cage sometimes long back."

 

And suddenly, I remembered what Stas told me as I picked him up outside the state correction facility. That´s what they call prisons nowadays. I guess that´s what you´d call an euphemism.

 

Anyway.

 

He was standing outside the fence with a bag tossed across his shoulder. No shoes. Stas had stopped using shoes long before I ever meet him. He explained at one time that he knew a guy who loved shoes. And one day, this guy, as he came out of a shoe store with his brand new shoes all wrapped up in a box under his arm, got run over by a speeding car.

 

Now get this. His girlfriend asked the hospital staff to give her his clothes, all cut open by the doctors that tried to save his life. In his wallet was the receipt, and she returned the shoes later that day, for a full refund.

 

That´s people, Stas would say. Always planning ahead. Buying shoes that last. But what if we did not have a future?

 

Everything leading up to this moment, me and Stas, ready to begin our crossing, had something to do with a story.

 

I´ll tell you everything.

 

It began with an editor. And a climax.