For the price of a cup of tea, you could buy a line of coke
Henry and Nothing
When people asked Henry what he was, or what he did, to break the ice in candid, unnecessary conversations, more often than not he found himself saying, with a slight air of defiance, simply “nothing.”
Henry wasn’t nothing only in the way that no one is nothing, that everyone is at no time in between definition and appraisal. What he was was unknown to him. He was a mystery even to himself, and in that way his very act of existence made him more of a detective than anything else.
But that’s not to say Henry spent a lot of his time solving himself, pouring over the clues, evidence, and crime scenes that made up the circling trails of his day to day. Almost forty, splitting his time between odd jobs that paid shit and sleep in an apartment that was shit, the man felt his hair turning grey for every minute he spent awake. He felt age work its way through his bones, strangling him like a cancer with each breath he took until one day it would finally choke him to death.
If there was one thing going for Henry it was his looks. No matter how much life seemed to kick him in the gut, he could always find a woman to help him back up. They were nothing special - barflies with too much deep red lipstick, baggy eyes, and lazy slouches. They were thin, but they were sick, and the worse life treated Henry, the more the women loved him. He knew they were empty, but he knew he was empty, and if it meant a couple free beers and fewer lonely nights, he would be the last to complain. He’d keep them around long enough for them to bring him back to his feet, and then he’d push them to the ground where he once laid.
Henry had dreams. He dreamed that someday he’d be a poet, someone people would revere for his philosophies and musings. He’d write things in notebooks, scrawled lines composed in drunken fevers, and the next day he would burn them with his cigarette lighter while he smoked. People used to tell him he had talent. He held onto those compliments like a child holds a blanket, warming himself with the thought whenever he felt depressed and questioning its validity whenever he felt like things were going too well. Things were never going well, but Henry was harder on himself than anyone else.
One day, he found work at the building of a local newspaper. He’d applied to be a reporter, hoping to put his talent to use and maybe get a respectable income for a change. The boss didn’t like the lack of experience and abundance of drunk and disorderly charges that Henry had to his name. Instead, he made him a janitor, and Henry spent weeks wiping the urinals of the piss of his would-be colleagues, waiting until he could finally work up the nerve to give the editors something to judge him by.
He found that to be the hardest part of the job. He hated what he wrote, and what he didn’t burn he kept hidden so that he would never see it again. The only thing he felt like sharing were the bullshit pieces, the stuff he wrote because he knew people wanted it written. He wrote editorials on the state of the city government, various local affairs… the kind of wasted crap that everyone but Henry seemed to care about. He stuck some pages from his notebook into an envelope and vowed to give it to one of the editors the next day.
He hadn’t the nerve to actually walk up to any of them and actually hand off his work, so it stuck it under the door of one of the editors he knew a little better than the rest. The editor’s name was Jack. Henry only remembered this because Jack was his favorite whiskey, and because sometimes Jack would talk to Henry in the halls about this and that.
Henry didn’t have much confidence that his action would prompt any immediate response from Jack. He simply did it to appease the guilt he felt when he’d call his dying father, who’d ask what Henry was doing. Henry still said “nothing,” even when he was doing something that his father might like to hear about, which was hardly ever.
To Henry’s surprise, though, that same day Jack tracked down Henry, who was busily scrubbing a toilet in the women’s restroom. He chivalrously and patiently waited outside the door until Henry was finished, not wanting to step into the opposite gender’s bathroom even though it was only occupied by another man. When Henry finally finished and left with his rags and spray bottles, Jack said hello and motioned at the papers which he found inside Henry’s envelope.
“This story you wrote,” said Jack. “This is some pretty intense stuff. How long have you been doing this?”
Henry was perplexed as to what Jack could have meant. Nothing in that envelope was even remotely describable as “intense.” Tame and banal, perhaps, but intense was not the word.
“What are you talking about?” Henry replied. “Which piece did you read? The one about the mayor’s new policies or the rise in bus fares?”
In his newfound respect for Henry’s intellect, Jack laughed and mistook his confusion for wit. “Nah, Henry, what are you talking about? This story you left me in the envelope, about the guy who sits in his apartment getting drunk every night and picking up random women from bars. Granted, the premise might be simple, but you say a lot of interesting things. This is good stuff, man. I’d kill to be able to write like this.”
Henry grabbed for the piece of paper that Jack held out above him like the Holy Grail. He looked at it closely, noting the way the words seemed to progressively slant to the right as it went down the page, and the burn marks along its edges.
Christ, Henry thought to himself, I put the wrong fucking pages in the envelope.
“This is hot shit, Henry,” Jack said while taking the paper back from him. “I mean, it’s got scorch marks it’s so hot.”
Henry felt annoyed. Angry that he’d let anyone else see his work, the work he cared about, he ripped the papers out of Jack’s hands again. “Sorry, Jack,” he explained. “There’s been a mistake.”
Too excited to care about what Henry was trying to say, Jack kept talking instead of waiting to hear his explanation. “Look, Henry, I’ve got this friend. He works on a magazine that publishes unknown talent. He’d take this story in an instant.”
This angered Henry even more. If there was anything in the world he didn’t want, it was someone reading his stories, and if there was anything else, it was having more than one person read his stories. He tore up his story and threw the pieces in the bin he’d used to dispose of the trash in the restrooms. “Forget about it,” he said. “I don’t want your friend to have my story. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
Jack watched Henry start to walk away, pushing the cart which held the bin holding the pieces of the story and the cleaning implements with which Henry worked. “You’re making a big mistake,” he said, trying to get him to come back. “Don’t you want to be something someday? What are you going to tell people in twenty years when they ask you what you’ve done with your life?”
Henry stopped walking and turned around to look at Jack. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll tell them nothing.”
He resumed his slow walk down the hallway, leaving Jack behind him and never again looking back.
I think the days I like best are the ones in which I do least. There's something in simple inactivity, or just unplanned, spontaneous days off that have an appeal which no other day can amount to. I've never understood why people feel the need to constantly be "out," as though they've attained some sort of status by surrounding themselves with other bored people. I'd much rather be bored alone.
Things are pretty okay, it was my mom's birthday on Friday so my family went to dinner and had some cake afterward. Tomorrow I'm going to hang out with Luke I think, go fishing or something. That's pretty much the extent of current affairs.
I really want to see Pan's Labyrinth, it's playing at the Rialto next Friday and it looks like the best movie ever.
That's pretty much it I guess.