The downfall of hunger

Haven't posted here in a while. I'm sorry, Rey. I just read your latest post. I'm on foodstamps as well. Have been since the end of the summer that just occurred. I've never been a fan of summer classes, so therefore, I do not receive financial aid from this lovely American government. Don't receive any longer because I'm no longer studying. Never even occurred to me to apply until Jamie Scapegoat, MC of the local Gainesville hip-hop ensemble, Scum of the Earth, invited me to his EBT sponsored shrimp and steak dinner. That summer, my band and I went to Puerto Rico to play some punk rock shows. That's where Rey and I decided to do this site. I'm sorry I've been slacking, but Life's fell through on me as well. Didn't get the jobs I wanted. Didn't get the girl I wanted. But I realize now, after the smoke's cleared and the tears I internalized dissipated, it's meaningless. Before arriving to the island my band and I scrounged daily to eat food. I'm not saying we were worse off than anyone else. I know many suffer more and to a greater extent than we did or every will, but every day was stress, because three times a day, we were hungry. Back then, we were always hungry. I received my EBT card the same week we left to Puerto Rico. Since then, I've eaten the best in my life. I don't worry about much anymore. I got cheaper rent, I get "free" money to eat. I can drink water. The rest is bullshit. I graduated. I don't owe anyone papers or work for grades. I want to create. I don't have to. All I have to do is make it through the day. Everything else is bullshit. The day was beautiful today. Not cloudy, a bit less chilly than yesterday. I ran into a professor today, Apollo Amoko. Told me it was going to get warmer starting tomorrow. Sounds good. I don't care. I'll live even if it gets colder. Tonight, my band plays at the Atlantic. We've made it big or something, at least in context to this town. The plan is to pick up crackheads so that they hang out with us all night and while we play. I love burning bridges. If it's flimsy and shit, let's fuck it up. Why bother trying to make things work? Tomorrow I will still be alive. I have plans, I'm doing things, but I don't have to. I want to. Rey, I'll be back on the island from the twenty-ninth till the thirty-first. Maybe that means something. I'm working on gradschool applications. I'm working on cutting off a mind-fucking, little cunt. I'm working on myself, I guess, because no matter what I seem to do, tomorrow I will not be dead.


A Recording Session

Sam and Roberto play in a band together. Dennis plays in it as well, but Dennis is not in the picture shown right now. Dennis is in a bubble a bit away, not far—because nothing’s far in this small town, but not here now. So focus. Focus on this: Sam and Roberto are dehydrated. They are debilitated. They are suffering beings. Of what do they suffer? They suffer from hanging out too much. It was Roberto’s birthday last week and because he could not fulfill his hunger that drives him to awaken each day, the moods that cause him to enter the rooms of his apartment and move objects around, to act as if he was cleaning, to do the dishes, to jack off, to eat more. This hunger, it owns him, and Sam. Sam is similar. They have aspirations. It’s why they become sad. Why can’t we be normal? they ask themselves. Why can’t we just be okay with doing nothing. With TV. With the same faces and the same actions.

“Too much fun,” Roberto told Sam.

Sam drinks a black tea with soymilk and a tad bit of vanilla—“It makes a difference,” he said.

“I love it,” said Roberto. “Looks like coffee. “

“I don’t drink that fag shit without any color,” Sam said.

They drink some orange flavored energy booster. They plan on finishing up the recordings they did at Todd’s. Todd is a flake. He will flake-out on them. He will melt from their existence in the summer’s blaring heat. They will have recollected Dennis from his bubble home, his house lair, where he hides when he wants to disappear, when he has a girlfriend, when he’s creating his art, working on his drawings. And they will drive to Todd’s bubble. They want to finish the recording, to mix the tracks and MP3atize the recordings. They have a show in a few days. They will go on tour next week. They are broke and need money. They are hungry.

“Did you do anything today?” Sam asked.

“You mean in terms of being productive?” Roberto asked.

Sam lifts his head. He grins. He laughs. He smiles. His hair is big. And his eyes are beautiful and blue. He is thin and tall. He has big hands. Roberto is hunched. He is acned. He has a beer belly. He looks like a Somalian child about to die, wearing hipster clothes. Parts of his hair are longer than others. He wears glasses. He has tattoos on his arms.

Tony, three nights later, will say to Roberto, “Maybe they were fucking,” in reference to Todd’s flaking-out on them, after Roberto had explained, with strength in his gestures, and the wind will have sounded hollow like his voice did (Was it his voice, the voice that explained?), that Todd’s car and Todd’s girlfriend’s car were there. The air conditioning was on. They were there, Roberto knew. Roberto will say, “They don’t fuck.”

Tony is Roberto’s homeboy from the Caribbean and he’s here in this story because he is important. Because Roberto is displaced. Roberto had called Tony each night since his birthday-night to hang out with Tony after he had gotten off work. Tony is a manager at a corporate food place. They exploit him. He works hard. He is a good man. He is a punk rocker. He has a family now and no choice but to work sixty-hour weeks for people he hates, to serve people he despises, to be nice to people he’s been forced to fear, because if not he might lose his job.

They never finished the recordings. The band broke up. They were embarrassed with themselves. They lost ways and stopped speaking to each other. Boohoo, they thought to themselves with anger, imagining each other’s face in front of the other. They imagined each other slapping the other with pleasure.

But after wasting their time at Todd’s, after they spent half-an-hour knocking on all the windows of the home, after leaving a nice note and texting Todd three times, they had walked around the town. It happened to be Memorial Day. Isn’t that great? And there were barbeques all over. People were drinking, so Sam, Roberto, and Dennis drank. They went from house-party to house-party. There was a band from out of town playing their last stop and maybe their last show together. The band jumped up and down on the porch and a lot of people got on the porch with them and jumped up and down until the porch fell down on one of its side. Ray, a friend from the punk rock shows, told Sam that his neighbor, another town hipster, had been found drowned at a nearby beach. The drowned hipster’s family wasn’t able to be reached because they were foreign. That drowned hipster had died alone. Displaced? He’s definitely dead now.

Roberto meets Krystal and they almost fall in love but aren’t sure. They dance, and while they pogo, he holds her hand and she spins around, and after her spin, he’s still holding her hand, and maybe after that they were a little bit surer that they were in love but didn’t want to admit it. Roberto, while she said bye to all her friends so that he could follow her home, called Todd’s number and left a message. Roberto was drunk. He left a nasty message. The next day, eating breakfast with Krystal and Sam, he told Sam that he wasn’t sorry for leaving that nasty message. Krystal ate a cinnamon bagel with cream cheese, onions, lettuce and tomatoes. Roberto ate a piece of it and he loved it.

Written sometime during the summer of 2009