The part about the girl...

God damn I hate my life some nights. I feel stuck in my job, in my life. I figure I just need to start writing this book, get working on something. I'm sorry I've switched focus from the band for the time being. People react oddly when you try to write them, maybe I need to let that part rest for a moment. I need to start the memoir.
Here's a story.

  Even as drunk as I was. I still remember the song that I had playing on the cassette deck in my truck when the red & blue police lights hit my rear view mirror. Turning my slurred vision into some torrid digital projection of the American flag. The song was "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen, & the irony of this being that this was a song that I had always equated with freedom & escape. Now, unless I did some damned convincing talking in the next few minutes, I  would not be escaping the shackles of working class Jersey, Cincinnati, or anywhere else for quite a while.
  The officers approached both my driver & passenger side windows, left hands probing the dark of my truck cab with their flashlights. Right hands rested pensively above their hips by the grips of their service pistols. When the flashlight beams found my face I turned the Boss off & rolled down my window.
 "How you doing tonight Sir? License & registration please... Do you know why we pulled you over?"
  "Because I'm wasted?" I replied, half hoping my honesty would abate this whole scenario & end it all on a hearty guffaw.
  With the typical lack of compassion & humor inherent in most law enforcement agents, the officer informed me that I was pulled over for having a tail light out. My admission to a crime meant that they could forego most of the other formalities in trying to decipher my present state & get straight down to brass tacks. Or straight down to chrome cuffs, which ever you prefer. They shackled me a little too tightly, which is what they often do, & pushed me by the head into the hard plastic panel backseat of their cruiser. As the car departed the side of the road to escort me to the Justice Center, there were no sweet refrains of Bruce Springsteen still in my mind.

  I was drunk. There has never been a sentence more true than that etched out in all history. I had been sleeping in my truck for a little over a week at the time. Living in the local bars once work was over for the night. I would park conveniently halfway between the bar & the job, & when the bars closed I would pass out in the cab until I would wake up for work the next afternoon. Always parched & starving, & feeling so damned lost without her that if I didn't rush off straight to work I would be forced to think about my condition. Probably drive my truck into the Ohio River with my seatbelt on. Oh yeah, of course there is a "Her". There has never been a story worth telling without her.
  I had been living with my then fiancee for years, & we had known each other throughout all the awkward teenage days. we had always been lovers, everyone knew we'd get married, be together forever.
I guess they forgot to remind her about all of that.
She changed her mind, the house was in her name, & I was homeless. hence my present situation.

  The night I got evicted & my new home got towed away, there was a poetry reading at my favorite bar. Everyone already knew the story, & those who didn't got to hear about it over the microphone while I was onstage because I thought it was the saddest story ever told. The bartenders kept giving me shots, every time I would go to the bar for a beer, more shots. Girls patted my shoulder, told me it'd get better. Being in this misery was paying off pretty good that evening. When the bar was closing up I was approached by a very cute girl who said I could sleep on her couch. Figuring her couch to be a euphemism for her, I obliged. She explained that she had to leave early for work the next day & that I should probably follow her to her place.

   I remember the bumper of her car in my headlights. As she roared ahead of me, blazing a new trail to Eden.  I remember also when the police lights came on behind me, how I watched the bumper of her car & it's taillights fade off into the night without slowing down a pace. I remember pretty accurately, the transaction with the officers of the law that apprehended me. After being pushed into the cruiser, the rest is pretty much a mystery to me. I simply do not know what I did or said in the meantime. I remember the waking up though, much as I try to forget. I got this one.

  Tongue. Velcroed to the roof of my mouth. I cant quite open my eyes, or wont quite open them yet. Maybe it's fear of what I might find. The scene behind my eyelids, it broadcasts bold bombast. Black, then hues of gray. Maroon. it flashes like heat lightning to my heartbeat. The thud of dull blood through my temples, resonating off of the inside of my skull like a doldrum, like a metronome set so slow that no beat could possibly follow, & what is that fucking echo? The sounds of male voices echoing back through their lineage straight from English to the primordial gulf. It thuds there, it strikes. My heartbeat against the concrete. like flint against stone, prehistoric electric.
  I try to open my eyes, but they shudder against focus like that first blast of water from the shower head in winter. I see the yellow of the walls & it's the first thing that really makes me physically retch so far this morning. Crayola never dared make a color this repelling to the retina, I guessed it Ochre Lite, or Booger Yellow. It's a color I somehow immediately associated with childhood, just not the good parts. It's the color that swaths everything in the 3 walls of the room, & etched away in a lunatic procession here & there through the paint is a succession of swastikas & misspelt profanities. Smears of things that are either human feces or baked beans. Coupled with the smell of stale urine & orange peels.

  I spring to my feet in some sort of haphazard defensive pose. I have no immediate recollection of the previous evening at this point. I have no idea where I am, but I think I might be dead & apparently I was dead wrong about that whole "God" thing.
I notice that one wall of the room I am in is a glass partition, looking out into a slate gray hallway. I'm in the zoo? In Hell? Aww, this aint even cool.
Naw, I'm in jail. But if I'm in jail, why am I in a jumpsuit made out of the same material as paper towels & as pink as boiled shrimp? If I'm incarcerated, why do I have sea foam green rubber slippers on with little smiley faces embossed on the toes & staring back at me in an ultimate mockery of my condition?  This is Hell, it has to be, & as if to confirm this new conclusion I've come to. A Deputy Sheriff walks up to my glass partition.
I raise both my hands & shrug my shoulders as if to say "What the fuck Dude? Not cool."
He smirks at me from behind the window & yells a little louder than he needs to
"YOU are on SUICIDE watch!"  Echoing down the sally port for all of the other inmates to hear.
"I have to piss." I reply to him, knowing he'll have to let me out of this room where there is no toilet, no bunk, no sink, no bench, no hope.
He points to a drain hole in the floor & strolls away.
"Suicide Watch? What could I have possibly done or said in the 7 mile ride to the Justice Center to warrant this?" I ask myself, as the answer to the problem of why it smells like urine & feces in here instantly solves itself.
  My heart sinks slowly with a sour swallow. The alkaline residue of last nights alcohol fuming slowly with my breath as I asses this situation. Across the sally port, the other inmates watch me from their pens. Their jokes resonate along the gray cinder block walls & distort into even more vicious jokes by the time my ears can pick up the vibrations of their

 verbatim, process these mockeries of my masculinity back into coherent thought.
  They know what this tank is that I'm trapped in, of course they do. These men have nothing to do for 23 hours of every day except look in at the poor fish trapped inside this glass tank & crack jokes between boasts, because they have to do something. Try as they might, they can't make time their bitch.
  I was passed out through breakfast. My face glued to the floor from the drool that slipped from my lip. I could only gauge the time that had passed, by the usual meal time rituals that work like clockwork in the clink.  The trustee's filed solemnly towards me down the sally port in a ragged procession. Carts of thick brown plastic food trays thrust before them. A Deputy Sheriff, three shades of brown & polished brass badge saunter's up to my fish tank & sticks a single key from his ring into the lock on my door, slides it open with little fanfare & informs me that I am apparently no longer a danger to myself, & I get to eat some lunch.

  He is taller than me by a foot or more, all perfect posture & business as usual. He escorts me to another holding pen down the hall where other inmates who aren't a danger to themselves are awaiting their court hearings. I'm aware I look like a freak in my pink paper outfit & inquire about my street clothes as we reach the door to the new cell. The deputy explains that I can't have my clothes back yet. Then he tells me curtly.
 "I always knew I'd see you here Crossley."
As he slides the steel door locked, I look into his eyes without a moment of recognition, my eyes searching wildly for some sign of familiarity in this void. I catch his name tag before the latches final catch "Bruser M."
  Mitch Bruser? Oh fate! Metaphors fail to delve these deeps in which you thrust me recently. Mitch Bruser, that I beat up in grade school. The first kid I ever punched

  I did it dirty too. He was new in our school, showed up one day in Converse All Stars, he didn't have any friends, maybe he thought he'd fit in with us misfits. Maybe he even begged his mother to buy him a pair so he might make a friend, or maybe he just owned them anyway.
  Whatever the case, somehow I was elected by our little wicked 12 year old gang to go over to his house after school, make nice, act like we were playing. I was supposed to lead him into the woods on my bicycle down to the pond. My friends, the jury, they were supposed to meet us there, jump from the bushes as we rode down, beat him up. Teach him a lesson he'd never forget. Unlace those shoes & throw them in the pond. Even at 12, I knew I was S.E. Hinton to the hooligans, so I went along with it, simply because I hadn't been in a fight yet, & I was the only one. Who knew, it might be romantic. It might be fun.
  I remember Mitch that day. When I wheeled up to his house he was in the front yard, trying to skateboard, a vice that my friends & I had already given up for faster modes of transportation, though still respected for it's sheer utility as weapon, shield , & get away vehicle. Mitch looked surprised to see me on a bike, he'd obviously seen me carrying skateboards around town. That he was happy to see me was not lost on me, nor was it any less gut wrenching when his mother came out to meet me. She seemed so delighted in the simple fact that a local boy had stopped to see her son. My gut told me to flee. "He wasn't that bad of a guy actually. "
 "Just pedal your ass down to the pond, tell the guys that Mitch wasn't around..."
  I couldn't. So I had to invent ways to hate him. I said we should go for a bike ride, he had a bike didn't he?  My heart sunk even lower in my chest when I saw he had a brand new GT Pro Performer, hot pink like mine. Even if it was flattery, I turned it into hate. When we went into his room, I saw his toys...He was 12, I deemed it too old for toys, I turned it into
 
  hate. His mother seemed ecstatic that we were going on a ride. The woods were right off of the end of his street. That was convenient, those woods were where the bad kids hung. Had his family not been new to the neighborhood, they might have known.
  I almost had to physically restrain his little sister from riding along with us. Pity the poor parent that doesn't know what mischief 12 year old boys are apt to get up to. Marijuana is almost a god send.
  I pedaled fast in front of him, half hoping he might get lost or call it quits before we got down to the clearing. Mitch, damn him, was right on my tail, just like I was on the tail lights of that girl. The night that brought Mitch Bruser back into my life.

  We got to the pond & there was no grand beat in. My friends they were there, but they weren't jumping in. This one was for me, to test my mettle & to prove my allegiance. It wasn't enough anymore that I made the good graffiti slogans. I had to prove I wasn't a pussy. To prove this fact, I had to lead this lonely boy to a clearing by a sewage backup  that we called a pond in the middle of the woods. They circled us like hyenas & poked & pushed us at one another. To me it felt like a long time, but knowing myself a bit better these days, I know I don't hesitate too long. I reached out with a 5th grade fist & laid one right on Mitch's nose, at the bridge of his glasses. I shot another to the side of his nose where the snot was running from his crying. I felt like an asshole, so I used his tears as a reason to hate him, & I hit him again. Then another, all in the face. The look of disbelief through his broken glasses enough to make me cry... That not being an option, I punched him again.  He never tried to block a single punch, as the tears streamed out from behind his broken frames, playing connect the dots with the freckles on his face. He just stared back at me with a look of betrayal I never understood until much later in my life

  Until he was slamming that iron door shut on me. Locking me in with all the rapists, & killers, & thieves. Exactly where he thought I belonged.
  As the door was slamming, I wanted to shout.
"Hey, Mitch...C'mon, it's only a DUI...It aint like you think."
 I wanted mercy. I wanted to have a human bond, here, lifetimes later. Where he has become a cop instead of one of the "bad kids", & me, probably the bad kid that stoked this desire in him to begin with.
 I looked around the new holding cell I was in. The walls were gray instead of yellow. No more swastikas, thank God, & at least there was a toilet. The inmates where all staring at me. I had been their entertainment for unknown hours. I was just locked up by the kid I beat up years ago. I was already homeless & now my truck was gone. Whenever I got out of this place, my job was sure to be gone also...
I sat down on the bench as all of my fellow inmates scooted over to give my skinny frame a wide berth.
 I sunk my head into my hands & I thought about her.