Scoping out cameras, slashing security tags, and that final look over your shoulder before the product slips into your clothes. The jest of the bi-speckled brunette with a bright red name tag spelling M E L I S S A in bold capitals comes by and asks if she can help you find anything “today”. Your innocent smile. You pay for a gallon of milk and walk away with twenty-four dollars worth of cold cuts and cheese in your jacket. The fear and excitement in your all too casual stride towards the door.
Are those security gates real or not?
Serve yourself. Self-serve. Be Adam Smith’s fucking invisible hand. It’s a free market after all so cast your ballot with your dollar. Polls are in and it’s a tie between Seagram’s whiskey and Brother T. down the block with his blessings that come in tiny brown bags.
Shaky hands as you chop out lines with your Citizen’s Bank debit card and roll up a ten-dollar bill. An admirable citizen indeed. Mother Superior wraps you in her warm embrace in the bathroom stall of some hip downtown dive bar. Turning on the sink you cup handfuls of water, blast it up your nose to get those last molecules of dope out of your nasal cavity and into your bloodstream. You pat down your face with those itchy recycled paper towels and step onto the dance floor. The silhouettes of the crowd are pulsing with the bass, the neon lights blur together like a desert mirage and you can’t feel anything but somehow your hips have caught the beat of the electro rhythm.
You’re deep into the groove and then there’s a girl who catches your eye. Flicking back her teased pink hair she does the two-step and a little twirl. Cute. You crack a smile. She notices, smiles back, and extends her hand with an inviting look before she takes a swill from a Narragansett Tallboy that’s dented from her grip.
The last thing you remember that night was grinding up against her ripped denim jeans and whispering sweet nonsense into her ear. You aren’t a junkie until you shoot it up.
Balancing the tightrope of addiction you sleep away the daylight hours and spend your nights buttering popcorn and making snide comments in the back row of Avon cinema. You tell yourself it sounds hip to work at an independent theater. At least it’s worked on the chics.
You think, HEY This is what you get after not 4 but 5 years of college and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy. You could have skipped the loans and been a much happier degree-less bachelor with the mess of the economy we’re in, what a damned shame.
Lewis, your bearded co-worker hands you a flask. You thank him, unscrew the top, and sneak a pull. The whiskey burns your throat and ignites your thirst. Just one more you tell him, before Lewis snatches it out of your hand.
Avon has been playing the King’s Speech for the past three weeks; Lewis still thinks it’s funny to talk in a lisp when he’s selling tickets. Solace is found staring out the window sizing up the hodgepodge of hipsters and college kids milling on Thayer St. Preened for Ivy League, many have never worked a day in their lives.
You get a text. That girl from the rave is having a Papier-mâché market in a squatter studio at Atlantic Mills. The place is called “17 Mules”. Inside there is a “free” room where you can drop off and pick up random anythings, and an assortment of 90s kickbacks; Pogs, Pokémon, Tomagachi key chains, Coal Chamber posters, fiery Jason masks.
With your thumbs, you tell her that you’re coming to the party. She sends you one of those winking smile emoticons. You show it to Lewis, and he gets jealous. He goes on about some story about his ex; all the while you are scheming how to convince your roommate to give ride again in his bombed-out Oldsmobile Cutlass. Lewis’s feelings fall on deaf ears; inside you are chuckling about the Cutlass’ couch seats in which you gotta sit like a grandmother or a gangster. Lewis finishes talking, and you respond, “ I know right,” eyes fixed on the cell phone.
Your roomie kind of owes you anyway, for it was your connect who scoped out the abandoned apartment where you’ve been living for the past 10 months. If anything he’s mooching off of you. Yeah. Sleeping on the floor in dusty cocoon of pillows and sleeping bags, his awkward corner of celibacy, for which you tease him. He even made a hashtag on Twitter #IHCI.
I Have Confidence Issues.