Homeless for the Holiday's

I woke up behind the wheel of my 1983 Ford Escort, the sun just barely peaking over the tops of the trees. The cold penetrated through the tattered blanket that covered me, making me shiver in a half sick, half drunk way that made my stomach turn. I had less than two hundred dollars to my name, no place to live, no job, I had eaten a cold can of soup for dinner, chased down by a couple of bottles of Mad Dog 50/50, grape flavor. I longed for some pot but I knew that I couldn’t afford it. Reaching for the door handle, I stumbled out into the early morning mist and peed on a tall pine tree.

“Merry fucking Christmas.” I told the trees, the birds, the leaves rustling on the frost-covered ground. Last year I’d spent Christmas with my family, this year I would spend it alone. A feeling of melancholy swept through me, achingly mournful, but it passed, like my headache and nausea.

The state park I was currently living in cost seven dollars a night and offered bathrooms with hot showers. I fished some fresh clothes out of my battered suitcase, grabbed my moldy old towel-badly in need of laundering-and headed for the warm embrace of the crisp, exhilarating water. There I could soak my head until sensation returned and jerk-off thinking about the girl I left behind in Raleigh, North Carolina, the redhead who would have saved me if only I had wanted to save myself. Instead I told her I didn’t need her and I ran away to Georgia, the outskirts of Atlanta to be exact. She had been so sweet, so understanding, and yet nothing was ever quite good enough for me, nothing ever satisfying enough to make me stay in any one place and get to know anyone on a more meaningful, deeper level. Superficial relationships were all I had, all I really wanted, because I was a liar who could never remember his lies, a man who hated everyone because he hated himself.

But the truth is I’m lying. I loved myself, loved myself more than I loved anyone in the world, and that is what made me such a great liar, what made all my relationships strained. I used to have real friends, I used to be comforted by the warm embrace of humanity, but that was gone now, replaced by my single desire to make my mark in the world as a musician. After befriending too many band mates and getting let down time and time again I decided that the thing to do was to leave everyone behind and strike out on my own. I was sick of trusting people, sick of my time being wasted. I didn’t want friends anymore, I didn’t want the time drain associated with them, I just wanted to find other hungry musicians who wanted what I wanted, who just wanted to make music and leave the rest of humanity to their stupid troubles and fears, their longings for love and girlfriends and children and wives and jobs and clothes and possessions. Celebrating holiday’s seemed like another big waste of time to me, something you used to murder the days, something you could shape your dreary life around, the carrot on the proverbial stick to help you make it until the end of the year without putting a bullet in your brain or slitting your fucking wrists. Fuck ‘em all. I wanted to become what I knew I had been born to be, the artist that I deserved to be recognized as.

And that was what brought me here, cold, alone, depressed, longing for another drink, maybe a joint to stop the endless flow of nightmares that haunted me whenever I closed my eyes. The only good thing the nightmares did for me was give me ideas, it was how I shaped my songs, how my writing found it’s voice.

After the shower I pulled out my battered guitar and sat on the edge of a picnic table, found a half smoked cigarette, lit it and began to strum until something came to me. Choking on the acrid smoke I spat out the butt and began to hum, finding a melody and repeating it, elaborating upon it as the sun slowly rose and the tree’s shadows grew longer. The mist that had been so thick only a half hour earlier started to dissipate and the songs of the birds accompanied me as the sun warmed my frozen soul.

Maybe later I would go into town and buy a newspaper, take a look at the classified ads. Try and find a job without the luxury of an address or a telephone. There was always work for a man who really needed it, crazy, desperate jobs that involved hard physical work, debasing yourself for all humanity to see. And then there was the sickening telephone solicitor jobs, the kind where you sat on your ass and talked on a phone but somehow made you feel more weary than one in which you busted your ass because you lost all pride, all dignity, and were reduced to a common hustler, a common beggar. Me, I didn’t like to beg. I would rather starve than beg. It was beneath me. I didn’t even like busking because I felt that one day people would be paying big bucks to see me play in venues large enough to land an airplane in.

Yeah, maybe when the mood struck me I would look for a job, but I still had enough money to live in this park for a few weeks, eating cheap hot dogs or cans of 40 cent soup, drowning my sorrows in buck fifty bottles of swill that only those with no taste or making their home on skid row could possibly enjoy. I could stay alive for a few more weeks and play my guitar, write the songs that would save me from all of this, from humanity, from women, from love, from friends, from the world…

And if that didn’t happen I could always consider suicide. Yep, yeah see, for every man and woman and child on this earth there are always options…no matter how terrible or self-centered.

Hey mom, hey dad, hey redheaded girl of my dreams…Merry fucking Christmas…