3

I am leaving the hospital this morning and I feel like a poor recorder already because of all the questions by nurses, doctors, and therapists. I long for morphine. I think about jumping from a window to break a leg for fun. I don’t. I lay and wait for Charlie to come rescue me from this place. It would be more comfortable to snuggle back into blissful ignorance and pretend the lacerations on my throat weren’t itching me. I know I will get more nagging questions from the Skulleaters at the club. Even worse, the stimuli of the laughter about how it was, and the quiet I really crave will be gone as I try reducing myself to the joke of it all, and try to belong once again. Being a Skulleater must be the blood and flesh of your life. A Skulleater is an old lady to the Skullheads and I want that so bad I feel bleak and grey as I climb the ranks, paying my dues. I am not a Skulleater yet, and I am desperately planting the seeds to become one. My own nightmare fragments of life need a support system and without them I am nameless, and with them I can gain an identity within. Until them I am like a cat scratching at a chair aimlessly in dark while the whole world slumbers. I’ve lived my life in the dark corners of my own prison, and being a part of this club is more important than my planned suicide I’ve fantasized over for years.
I think I crave someone who will never be my enemy. With Charlie I can be honest. She could be a saint, and I wouldn’t care, even though I loathe saints and never understand them, and always wanted to be one all at the same time. I would not give a hells fire about it. I would never deny her as a friend. I collect friends and lose them as easily as one does her virginity.
Charlie storms in the room anxiously. “Ready love?” I am ready. I am not ready. I love it here, I hate it here. “God you look so fucking blue, and why the fuck can’t we smoke in here?” She has personality. I wish I were her. “Get me the hell out of this laboratory.” I pull my clothes out of the clear plastic bag full of my life-gear, strip down and start getting dressed just as a plump nurse rushes in to unleash me from my IV before I yank it out myself. I stand up to her naked, wanting her to look at my naked body as if I were posing on accident. I’m bruised up and I love my bruises. They show me I’m alive. Charlie stares Florence Nightingale down like she is the enemy. She rarely likes anyone, and is suspicious of everyone.
You have to be suspicious of everyone when you have secrets. I have many, but the one I will never tell anyone, even her, is what plans I have for the club once I become a real Skulleater. I dumb myself down sometimes, pretending not to really know what’s going on. I may not know sometimes, but the club has no idea what’s in store for them once I’m in. I have resentment and someone is going to pay for it. I smile as I roll out of the hospital by wheelchair and climb in the front seat of Charlie’s old Plymouth. I turn up the radio and light a rolled cigar edged with cocaine, driving off into the new horizon.