I was on the outs, really. I was spiritually and morally bankrupt because of my depraved dealing with Gill, all the dope, booze, chemicals, but mostly it was my shitty low-paying job where people took every chance they got to tell me how worthless I was. Every mistake I made would be co-opted for some malicious insult by customers, and especially my boss who referred to me as a "reader" because I tried to read books in-between deliveries. He would literally walk up to me, snatch the book out of my hands, and hand it back to me as I was reading. I would have given anything to make his straight nose crooked after one of those encounters, and his comments: "You think you're going to get anywhere reading those trashy novels?" "Eventually you're going to have to start working to make this work." "You don't even go to school, do you do anything at all?" "You need to get started in school. This job will lead you nowhere." To that one I replied "Buddy, this is nowhere." Of course he had never had any higher education and supported himself with this job, drug store jockey. But for me, no, this was not ok. I began walking around town, noticing people staring at the abominations jutting out of the countryside which some people called modern art. This shit was not art, and the looks on these people's faces when they saw it made me cringe. I began to make crude drawings, and turning them into flipbooks when I was off work and couldn't sleep. They were strange, almost hypnotic. Men lighting candles mounted on top of monkey skulls and then firing rounds at the setting sun with little emblems and symbols popping up randomly in the pages. Hairless monks walking on fire into filthy rivers full of bison corpses and then lighting up Nordic-style pipes, skeletons dancing on the top of pots of steaming water, dead men with bottle caps over their eyes sitting up in the morgue and the bottle caps rolling off and collecting on a drain. All sorts of bizarre stuff. When I would finish one of these I would walk the streets with them until I would see a mark, someone falling apart, someone scared, someone alone, someone trying to reach out for something that couldn't be given. I would approach them, and flip them the book. "How strange," they would say sometimes, and I would offer to sell it to them. "How much is it?" they would ask, and I would say "What do you think it's worth?" Sometimes I would get a dollar, sometimes a hundred. The looks in their faces when I handed over the books to them mended the ruptures in my soul more than they could ever know, and I never saw any one of them again. Eventually, I couldn't make the books anymore. I just couldn't. I didn't know why, it wouldn't come out. One morning I dumped all my materials off a bridge, bought a pint of Jim Beam, and went in to work.
