Not Up to It

O.K.  I guess I can't keep quiet.  I thought to leave for a good long while, and I may still be absent from time to time, but I there are things I want to say.

I woke this morning at four full of worries.  Everything seems to be going to shit.  I have been ill for some days, though this morning I feel perhaps better despite waking at four.  I went to bed early enough last night, around ten-thirty, but with a confused and heavy mind.  "What is a man?" I kept asking.  "Man is a nothing," I kept hearing back.  On and on. . . and then I was asleep.

I woke in the night to the sound of the wind gusting in the branches.  It has rained here for days now, though that has been fine, for as I've said, I've been ill and sitting on the couch watching television has been a very nice option.  But in the night, the question came back to me.  It is a sophomoric question, I know, and that is perhaps what bothers me most.  It is the question you ask early in life when, as a neophyte to thinking, you ponder the big questions.  It is a college sophomore's question.  And it has come back to haunt me at an age when I should know better than to entertain such silliness.

But I am exhausted.  Truly, horribly, utterly.  It is the result, I have come to the conclusion, of trying to make meaning.  Every morning and every night.  "Look," I say, "here's what happened."  And then the tale.  Evenings and weekends are spent making pictures and worrying if they mean what I want them to.  More pictures than you can imagine.  They pile up and up and up, and now they are like the mops and pails in "Fantasia."  They overwhelm me.

And while doing all this, I've grown fat with inactivity.  I consume far too many alcohol calories.  And now, when I look into the inevitable bathroom mirror, I don't recognize the thing I see.

All about me, things fall apart, and I can't remember how to fix them.  The house, I mean, the property. I used to be on top of things, but that is now a long while ago.  Things taken care of remained that way for a while, but the veneer of respectability has finally been eaten away by time and circumstance and must be fixed.  But there is no one to fix them and no one to tell me to do it.

And so I liberated myself.  No more of this.  No more "making" things.  You can't imagine the time I got back.  Hours and hours of it.  Beautiful empty hours.

This weekend, not feeling well enough to venture out in the rainy weather, I scanned some negatives I developed in the new one shot developer I've told you about already.  I had mucked them up by not putting enough developer in the tank and then not developing the film long enough, but I wanted to see them, so I scanned them on a flatbed to speed things up rather than in the expensive Nikon film scanner.  Jesus, I thought, these are beautiful.

And so it began again.  Wrongly.  I mean, I don't need this, don't need to start again.  I love the images because they are so fucked up.  Could I even do this again if I wanted to?  And would I have the guts to take the film I shot and voluntarily mess it up?  There is no backup to this analog stuff.  It is not like something done in Photoshop with infinite histories to undo.  But the images were so beautiful to me, so distant, so far away.

Just as there are pictures I never post here, there are stories I never tell.  To do so, sometimes, would be a betrayal.  But sometimes people want their stories told even when you think they don't.  One of the models I work with. . . what can I say?  I can't soft soap it.  It has been breaking my heart.  She has been in a real downward spiral that has her putting needles in her arms.  Everywhere.  I noticed the marks when I was editing her pictures.  There were tracks inside her elbow, of course, but everywhere as she tried to keep from scarring herself up so bad.  And at twenty, she is already beginning to "lose her looks."  I don't meant that people must be "pretty," but this was something different.  She is getting the junkie's pallor, the dark, sleepy eyes, the sallow skin, the toneless muscles.

I had lost track of her for awhile.  I just couldn't get hold of her.  Turns out she had sold her computer and everything else.  She was living with her boyfriend in a house with a bunch of other people.  Druggies.  And bad things kept happening.  Things got stolen, of course.  There was the constant scramble for money and drugs.  She couldn't keep a job.

"We're moving," she told me.  "We're getting clean."  And sure enough, this week they moved back to my own home town.  And when she did, she wrote.  Things got fucked up, she said.  The place they were staying was robbed and the thief stole all the money they had saved to move into a new place.  Now they were living in their car.  She'd gotten a job, though, at a bar.  She told me where it was.  She wanted me to come take pictures to document it.  I had sent her the messed up black and white pictures I'd scanned over the weekend.  She wanted me to take pictures like that.

I took off work a little early and went to the bar.  It sat in a marginal zone of tattoo parlors and smoke shops that sell papers and pipes and "bath salts," and the sort of cheap restaurants that hipster kids might tell you are cool, dirty places selling Korean tacos and Columbian cuisine.  There are Asian gambling joints that are for Asians only and some stores that sell cheap clothing for drag queens who lack the means and wherewithal to shop elsewhere.

I couldn't find the bar.  I stopped the car and called her.  "I think I see you," she said.  I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a girl on the sidewalk a few blocks behind me talking on the phone.  "Are you wearing red shorts?" I asked.  "Yes."  "I'll turn around."

There was a reason I couldn't find the bar.  There was no sign.  It was the literal hole in the wall.  Silver insulation board covered the windows.  The doorframe was ragged and dirty.  The exterior was shot all to hell.  She sat in a chair on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette as the cars whizzed by on the four lanes of highway that is no longer a highway but just a congested artery running through a hopeless section of town.  I pulled my Leica to my eye.  Focus.  Click.  It felt strange.

"No wonder I couldn't find this place.  I guess they don't want any business," I said.  "No, the guy just opened it up for his friends."  Her boyfriend stepped out of the door.  "Man, that's a weird fucking crowd in there."  I got the feeling he was trying to warn me about going in.  I believed him.  We stayed outside on the sidewalk and I started taking pictures of them.  I knew they would not be any good.  I was too timid.  I felt no authority at all.  These would be the photographs of a kid taking his first high school photography class, all non-dramatic angles and bad snapshot framing.  If I was lucky.

Jesus, I kept thinking as she lounged in the high-backed chair and smoked, she is so beautiful.  Their car was parked in front of the bar, the back seat piled with all their belongings.

"You really sleeping in there?"  "Yes."  "Are you really sleeping?" I asked thinking it impossible.  It had been raining for days, the air just hot and sticky and awful.  "We've been lucky.  Since we got here there has been someone to party with, so we stay up most of the night."

She didn't really work at the bar on a regular basis.  If something was going on, she said, the owner would call her in.  She made eighty dollars on Saturday.  And she was to start working at a 7-11 at seven in the morning.  They were sharing a cigarette, smoking it down to its stub.  When it was gone, the boy went back inside.  I grabbed her arms and looked with purpose.

"I'm clean," she said.  "Since when."  "For about a week.  I'm done.  As long as we can drink, we're fine."  The boy came back outside.  "You clean, too?"  "Yup."  "Was it hard?"  "Oh, yea.  We went cold turkey.  Stayed up all night miserable, hurting."  "You able to shit yet?"  "Yes," he smiled.  There was that.  So they'd broken the physical part.  I didn't know how they could do it this way, but they had.  They weren't through with drugs, I knew, but they were through with needles for awhile.

I asked them to climb into the car so I could photograph them there.  I did, but again, I knew I was too self-conscious and that the photos would not be any good.  I sat on the curb next to the car realizing that my hands were probably in piss and puke and shit.  A big Rastafarian rode his bike up behind me.  I didn't turn around because I knew I would look weak and old with a stiff back and a stiff neck turning and grunting the way old men do.  I was better off not looking.  "You want to buy anything?" he asked.  "No, man, we're good," the boy said.  I could feel him sitting behind me not moving.  She smiled up at him and looked away.  There were two things, I thought.  She was embarrassed some.  And she was worried that I would get into some kind of trouble.  More guys piled out of the bar onto the sidewalk.  They were a rough looking bunch of derelicts, fellows who didn't have trouble doing terrible things, I knew.  They were drug addicts and alcoholics, forlorn men with a library's worth of profound psychological problems.  These were not fellows who you would call "depressed."

"You're the only girl here," I said.  "Yea.  That's why I make such good money."  "You're not making good money," I said.  "Eighty dollars is not good money.  How much are you going to make at the convenience store?"  "Minimum.  But as soon as we get enough money, next week, we're going to get a place.  Tommy's going to get a job at the Infinite Mushroom.  We'll get a place around here so that we won't have to drive much."  The Infinite Mushroom was a pizza restaurant.  "What are you going to do there?"  "Cook," he said.  "That's what I do.  I'm a cook.  It's supposed to be a hip place.  Everybody wants to work there.  I figure I'll cook a while and then ask them if I can be a bartender."  He was nodding his head to some internal conversation.  "How much do you think we could sell this car for?"  "What year is it?"  "2002."  It was a Pontiac Firebird.  "I don't know.  $800 maybe."  "That's what I was thinking.  But they need paperwork."  Her dad had bought it for her and she was mad because she said he had bought it at a chop shop.  Her father was an ex-cokehead turned preacher, and he wanted her to come home.  She was virulent in telling that.

"Florida may be sinking," she said.  "If we can get a thousand dollars, we're going to go to Portland or Seattle."  "What would you do there?"  "Pretty much the same thing."

I coud feel the boys looking at me huddled together beneath the roof's slim overhang. There was a time when I was O.K. in a place like this.  There is always danger, of course, but. . . .  I knew now, though, that I wasn't prepared to handle this.  Sitting there on the curb, the world came back.  It was like this.  It was like this for them everywhere with little hope of escape.  To where?  This was not a place of long term goals.  People were struggling from day to day.  What did Tommy dream of at night?  I was trying to put myself in that place.  Making pizzas in Portland.  Running some scams there.  Having a carton of cigarettes and a 'fridge full of beer.  Four walls, maybe, and a car that ran.  And her?  She dreamed of him, I was certain.  Just him and her and the world.

"O.K.  I'm still not feeling very well.  I'm going to go."  "Yea, O.K." she said.  "Before we leave, though, we should shoot."  "Yes, yes, we'll shoot.  Definitely."  I can't explain the way she looked at me as I got up from the curb.  What was she saying?  She just stared unblinking, the muscles under the skin around her eyes going soft.  Was she pleading or running a con?

Back in the car, I pulled an illegal U-turn across four lanes, tires squealing to avoid getting hit by oncoming traffic.  I was sick, I knew, but I felt useless.  I can't do this, I thought.  I used to be able to, but I don't think I can any more.  I've spent forgotten years away from this, living the life we see on television, shopping at Whole Foods and drinking in expensive bars and eating in expensive restaurants in the pretty places.  I don't know, I kept thinking.  I don't know.

The sun is up now, and I have spent the hours here with this.  Why?  I ask myself.  What does it mean? Am I just the stories I tell?  The pictures I take?  Maybe I'll quit drinking.  Surely I would get more things done.

I look at the clock.  She has just reported for work at the 7-11.  Maybe I should drive by and see.