tommy gets off his job as an engineering technician for the water department of the city he lives in.
in the parking lot, while getting into his own early model shitty compact sedan, he looks at one of the other guys from the building getting into his slightly less shitty late model suv and feels envy.
tommy drives away while his coworker sits in his suv and punches the steering wheel while thinking about how to come up with the car’s monthly payment.
while driving home tommy stops at his ex girlfriend danielle’s apartment to buy cocaine. inside tommy plays with tabby, the cat he and danielle used to share while she weighs out an 8 ball for him.
tommy asks danielle if she would like to have sex and she declines.
danielle hugs tommy and he leaves.
tommy parks his car in his apartment’s parking lot and slings his backpack over one shoulder. he walks 2 blocks away to a liquor store and buys 2 15 packs of labatt blue light and a 4 pack of 25 mg thc seltzers.
while struggling to carry everything back, john, a homeless man who tommy sometimes gives money and talks to offers to help.
in the lobby of tommy’s apartment building, he and john put the beer and seltzer into the elevator.
tommy opens up one case of labatt blue light and gives john four beers and one thc seltzer. john thanks him and exits out the automatic doors waving.
tommy presses a button and the elevator begins to slowly rise.
inside his studio apartment, tommy kicks off his shoes and brings all the drinks into the kitchen. he looks inside the mostly empty refrigerator and takes out a plastic container of leftover fried rice before loading up the cans.
tommy scrapes the remaining fried rice into a bowl and puts it in the microwave for 2 minutes. while the machine gently hums he walks into the bathroom and opens the medicine cabinet. looking into the prescription bottle of xanax his friend max had sold him, he counts four 2mg pills remaining.
tommy breaks a bar in half and lets it dissolve into his mouth briefly before using his spit to help swallow as from the kitchen the microwave signals that its job is finished. tommy moves to his futon holding the fried rice and a spoon in one hand and a bottle of sriracha and a 750ml bottle of rum with 1/5 remaining in his other hand.
tommy squirts an amount of sriracha onto the fried rice and begins to eat while watching an episode of king of the hill playing from his season 5 dvd.
taking drinks from the bottle tommy watches 3 episodes before falling asleep sitting up still in his work clothes.
tommy blinks awake a little after 7am with a sore neck despite having moved to a lying down position in his sleep.
the soft sounds of the king of the hill season 5 dvd menu fill the apartment. stretching as he stands, tommy turns off the tv and walks into the kitchen filling up and drinking down 3 glasses of water.
tommy finally undresses and takes a cold shower.
in the shower tommy thinks of the future and sees a tv screen full of static. after drying off, tommy turns the tv back on and replaces the king of the hill dvd with a yoga session dvd.
he follows along with the positions the instructor on screen is performing. after 30 minutes the dvd finishes and tommy turns off the tv feeling rejuvenated. in the kitchen he makes a spinach omelet using the last of his eggs and mostly wilted spinach. after eating tommy cracks open a thc seltzer and leaves the apartment to begin walking around aimlessly for an hour.
tommy feels depressed while walking around his neighborhood drinking the thc infused seltzer. he smiles at people passing him and greets people he vaguely recognizes. tommy looks at all the lives around him and wonders if he’s “broken”.
rapidly feeling panic tommy returns to his apartment building at an increased pace. safe back inside his 500 square feet tommy feels his breathing start to return to normal. he retrieves the 2nd half of last nite’s xanax from the bottle and swallows it with a gulp of labatt blue light as he throws his body down on the futon.
he digs his face into his pillow and starts repeating “what’s the point what’s the point what’s the point what’s the point” out loud, muffled by the cotton stuffed fabric rectangle until the calming effects of the xanax begin to take hold.
releasing the pillow and turning onto his back, tommy stares at the ceiling and imagines he’s looking at a shining blue sky with fluffy towering clouds spread around.
one of the clouds begins to take the shape of a horse and tommy smiles.
chemically stabilized, tommy starts to plan his beautiful day off.
“i don’t want to leave this apartment” tommy thinks and checks the freezer to make sure he has adequate supplies to make this dream a reality.
met with and feeling satisfied with two frozen pizzas and a bag of frozen spring rolls, tommy opens his laptop and inserts a usb drive with a sd card attached.
after checking several websites he finds a reputable looking pokemon silver download file. while the game downloads, tommy grabs the 8 ball from his backpack and starts breaking down the white rocks onto his hardcover copy of a photo book, published by a prominent photographer featuring shots of wild animals and plants in the american southwest.
a chime rings out from the laptop speakers indicating the download is finished. tommy makes two small lines of cocaine, parallel to each other, on the book’s surface.
using a rolled up 20 euro note, he inhales the white lines, his nostril showing the fortitude of a worker doing his assigned job on the assembly line.
newly invigorated, tommy moves the downloaded pokemon silver file into a folder residing inside a recently created folder, housed in the sd card attached thumb drive aptly named “pokemon.”
tommy double clicks on the drive and maneuvers files around until he has all his pirated games at home in their correctly labeled folders, with chronology and file size taken into account. tommy safely disconnects his sd usb from the laptop and walks in a circle as the machine buzzes loudly, loudly, softly,,,,softly,,,,,LOUDLY,,,,LOUDLY,,,,,,,,,then softly, once more before a pop up window appears on tommy’s screen with a message promising all is good and correct in the virtual world, any sort of corruption that could appear on this motherboard is due to tommy’s personal mistakes (or, to be fair, those of his “more technologically disreputable” friends and family who, despite warnings from leaders whose political leanings could fall under any of the four extreme axes of the traditional “political graph,” and, if felt inspired to download each and any file they saw or thought of that escaped from their (heavily edited) government distributed free internet application, could potentially cause problems.) to who? honestly tommy didn’t really give a shit.
thoughts containing full plans by rabble rousers and the fools who trust in them, bounce around the available empty space of tommy’s head, annoying him greatly.
tommy inserts the sd card into his jailbroken nintendo 3ds and presses the power button he chops up more cocaine, using a playing card from a nearby magic deck and divides the powder into four very inconsistently sized lines.
tommy plays the pirated version of pokemon silver while inhaling coke lines at every instance of lengthy unskippable npc lectures.
after a battle won against the first gym leader, victory yields a badge, along with a move learned from a “TM,” useless, unfortunately, for the pokemon in tommy’s party, he enters the pokemon center to heal his team to full health.
pressing ‘a’ to skip thru the unchanging dialogue with “nurse joy,” tommy begins to think what things might be like in his life if these pokemon existed here and needed healing after tough battles.
he wonders if his union would fight with a hospital and his managers for the no cost healing of his fighting creatures, maybe they could sponsor him as he traveled across the country battling to win badges, clout and good advertisement for the city water department.
tommy begins to feel incredibly excited.
he sets the nintendo 3ds down onto his desk and cuts several lines for himself. a shrill cell phone call notification begins to sound, sometimes complimenting the pirated gbc game’s soundtrack, sometimes causing a dissonant note that causes tommy to wince and hold his ears closed.
the unpleasant interrupting ring ceases as tommy meanders back into the bathroom for more xanax.
he looks at himself in the mirror and touches his facial hair. “i need to shave badly” he thinks, using his hands to move his face into different exaggerated poses while frowning.
tommy looks at the pill bottle he doesn’t quite remember retrieving from the shelf behind the mirror and unscrews the top, easily bypassing the “child safety” features.
inside the orange tinted plastic tommy counts 3 pills remaining.
his hands like a fishing rod, tommy retrieves one 2mg bar and tosses it into his mouth, using his primed oral muscles to move the xanax bar to a pocket under his tongue where it has the best chance to sit there and dissolve slowly into his whole being.
tommy takes a labatt blue light from the fridge on his way back to the living room. he opens the can using his teeth as he falls onto the futon sighing heavily.
tommy drinks his beer while thinking about how he fucked up his relationship with danielle. she wanted someone dependable, emotionally, and while tommy with his government job (complete with a 401k, life insurance, paternity leave, and even a pension with the state government covering 20% to tommy’s 10% each paycheck) just wasn’t able to wrangle all the childish dreams tommy still entertained, most, he realized, involving himself as the patriarch of a sprawling family, living self sufficiently across 150 acres, tommy having at least 4-7 wives (no more than that, he wasn’t a selfish man, this realization appeared after some of the many intense meditation sessions he had immersed himself into after danielle left him.
“she’ll come back to the flock” tommy thinks as he picks the nintendo 3ds back up and continues walking through the cities of jhoto, fighting trainers/gym leaders and capturing pokemon. he portions out more lines of cocaine and turns the tv on.
the tv guides informs him that a nba game is beginning in 10 minutes. tommy snorts 2 lines and plays pokemon silver while half paying attention to the basketball on the tv screen.
the beer he continues to drink and the xanax dancing around his system allow him to fall asleep roughly 40 minutes after his hometown team defeats their west coast rivals in what is basically a blowout at home, 97-65.
as his mind begins to enter rem sleep, tommy believes that he feels tabby jumping onto his partially blanket covered body and falls asleep smiling alone.
the tv program shifts from post game local news to an amateur movie, written and directed by students from the city college’s film program. all of the actors appear to be taken from the ever present group of “down and outs” known to loiter in and around the courthouse downtown across the street from the main building of the city college. in the film a man in a dirty trenchcoat questions a woman about the disappearance of her husband. after several insulting questions the woman slaps the man, presumably a private eye, without him reacting and storms off out of his office, leaving the door open for both the camera and the audience to sneak a peek at the sound stage where the filming is taking place before a quick cut to a closeup of the detective’s face, deep in contemplation while alternating sips from his flask and drags from his cigarette. the movie ends in a poorly acted shootout where everyone dies and nothing is resolved, but tommy doesn’t register any of this in his deep sleep. he dreams he is on an island. there is a modest shack with several carefully sculpted juniper trees and a well kept garden with various ripe vegetables sprouting up to be harvested. tommy begins to walk towards the shack and it, along with the rest of the scene, start to move back away from him. tommy stops and bounces on the balls of his feet before leaping backwards into the water behind him with his eyes closed. he doesn’t feel any splash and opens his eyes to find himself tucked in bed, and looking around sees a figure with their back towards him tending to an enticing smelling pot cooking over a fire. tommy tries to remember if the shack he had seen earlier had a chimney but can’t think of it. the figure begins to turn around as tommy rubs his eyes and attempts to picture an island shack but when he opens his eyes all he sees is his messy apartment.
after making then eating lightly fried canned chickpeas in yogurt and juicing several carrots along with a quarter of a beet and a knob of ginger, tommy begins to survey everything around him as a podcast about the history of the ottoman empire begins in his headphones. first, he cleans all the dishes accumulated from the weekend, using both his broken dishwasher and the compact drying rack to let the newly clean plates, bowls, cups, pots, pans and silverware to drip dry. second, tommy walks around the apartment picking up any dirty thing he can find and depositing them either into the garbage or the laundry hamper. after folding up his blanket on the left side of the futon and positioning his pillow on the other side, tommy looks at the white piles spread across the large photo book sitting so invitingly on the coffee table in front of him and sighs while reaching for the rolled up bill.
in the building’s laundry room tommy throws all of his clothing into one of three available washing machines and sets the temperature to hot before tapping his phone to transfer money. the ‘ding’ of successfully received funds causes the washing machine to rock back and forth in a sort of preparatory stretch for robots before beginning the wash cycle while tommy stares vacantly at his clothes being forcefully thrown around with water and soap in what he hopes is the optimal “cleaning” way.
after feeling bored then noting the time remaining on the machine’s cycle and starting a timer mimicking those numbers on his phone’s app, tommy takes the stairs back up to his apartment. standing at the front door while trying to catch his breath tommy hears the sound of the tv coming from inside even though as he racks his brain he had never turned it on today. he turns the handle and is stopped from entering by the deadbolt lock, not thrown by tommy who had kept his keys in the apartment. he bangs on the door “what the fuck” tommy hears frantic movement inside before a bug eyed danielle opens the door and drags him inside before relocking it.
tommy looks around in confusion and sees tabby on the coffee table with his nose edging close to the book containing tommy’s cocaine and races over. with tabby in his arms he sees the book is clean and turns to danielle “what is going on?”
she smiles sadly at him “don’t worry i hid everything away from our lil man” tommy stares at her. danielle looks down and continues “shit’s popped up tommy, i don’t wanna get u mixed up in my mess but i have to leave town. tabby belongs to u again i can’t take him, also” she gestures to the kitchen “i left u an ounce for having to deal with all this, with me.”
tommy holds the loudly purring cat but stays silent as danielle walks over to him. she whispers into his ear “i’m sorry” and kisses him on both cheeks then the mouth before dropping the keys she had used to let herself into the apartment on the floor at his feet. tommy looks down at the keys then back up to see danielle’s back as she walks out the door, his mouth falls open but no sound leaves.
tommy stands holding tabby for several minutes with no noise in the apartment but the local daytime news on tv and the purring of a pleased cat.
he moves to the futon and lies down placing tabby on his chest and begins to cry. tabby purrs louder and walks in a circle on tommy’s upper body before nestling into his collarbone.
the phone alarm tommy had set for his laundry begins to chime and he doesn’t turn it off, letting it join the room’s symphony of two news anchors interviewing a traveling motorcycle clown, tabby’s purring and tommy’s soft crying, the sounds creating a melody tommy swears he has heard somewhere before, deep in a dream or from inside the womb, and he smiles, even though he knows it will not last he smiles.
-- louis packard is a poet living in chicago illinois with his wife and cat.