This Mortal Boils
by Chris Adams
Illustration by Mark Reusch
“There ain’t no such thing as a man – ‘jes a little boy in a man’s clothes.” – Elvis Presley
The game, Watson, is afoot.
Which, in my life, is just a romantic way of saying that I couldn’t find anything better to do tonight than sit around and rack my brain with imponderables. Per usual… The cigarette butts in the ashtray are heaps of twisted victims. The beer and whiskey bottles sit there brownly, emptied and useless. The rest of the rickety coffee table is cluttered with the detritus of the evening – a videotape of some rare Velvet Underground footage, a bootleg Bunnymen C90, some matches, a telephone that stubbornly refused to ring all night, a crushed empty soft-pack of Camel Lights, and a fresh one just opened. I’m staring blankly and blearily at the white brick wall of my loft, a blue bulb glowing softly in the halogen lamp. I feel like I’m in a bad film noir – the half-drunk detective sitting limply in his cheap office, chain-smoking and listening to his whiskers grow, waiting for the business that never comes. Which is a romantic way of saying I’m sick of myself, confused, and exhausted. It’s 5 am exactly.
That means I’m exactly five hours into my thirties.
I distinctly recall turning twenty. I was sitting alone in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Dedham – everyone had already gone to bed by the time I got home from an underage tequila binge at a Boston establishment that was legendary for its lax carding procedure. I walked into the house, ate a sandwich, and stared at the clock as it ticked to twelve, watching the last few grains of my teenage years trickle silently to the bottom of the hourglass. I toasted myself (and my absent twin brother) for having survived 20 years on this rock, tossed back a coupla Advil, drained my glass, and climbed the stairs to my room in our redone attic – “The Garret,” as I called it in those days. (I was going through a heavy Camus/Sartre phase at the time – hey, I was twenty.) I lay there listening to Miles Davis and thought about my future. The plan was that, as soon as I finished college, I was gonna “light out for parts unknown,” like some spiky-haired and sideburned Huck Finn, with a rucksack on my back, on an archetypal quest for fame and fortune. I was gonna dance on the dungheaps of the Parisian backstreets, smoke opium in forgotten Chinatown drug-dens, fuck creamy-thighed Dutch maidens in the alleys of Amsterdam, hustle 8-ball in dusty Mexico City shacks, drink absinthe under a Spanish moon, and play heartbreaking ballads on a 12-string guitar in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Then I was gonna write it all down in one five-day burst of inspiration, fueled by black coffee and Benzedrine, and produce a massive tome that’d be heralded as the new countercultural bible. I was gonna be the spirit of Rasputin and Rimbaud, Dylan and Presley, Lou Reed and Kerouac, reincarnated in the form of a pale skinny kid with big hair from the suburbs of Boston. In retrospect, that wasn’t much of a plan, I suppose. But when you’re twenty, you aren’t supposed to make plans. You’re supposed to dream. You’ve got all the time in the world to find out that dreams have a funny way of not coming true. Which is just a romantic way of saying “shit happens.”
Shortly after I finished college, at the age of twenty-two, I was creamed in the face with a reality pie. I had no money, but plenty of student loan officers who made a point of letting me know that that sad fact didn’t mean jack shit to them. So I did what everybody else does. I got a job. Left that job and got another. Was laid off from that and got another. Ad infinitum/nauseum. One long groan through the grind. And, over the past decade, I’ve slowly but surely fallen outta love with life. Which, as the lives of my contemporaries seem to indicate, is just a romantic way of saying “I’ve grown up.”
Damn. I’m thirty years old. DAMN. So, the question at hand is, “to be, or not to be?” Which is just a romantic way of saying “what the fuck are ya gonna do about it, jackass?” Thing is, I’ve always been a lot clearer on the “not to be” bit, defining myself against a backdrop of the kind of existence I’ve taken great pains to avoid. I don’t want a fuckin’ house in the suburbs and a two-car garage, three mortgages, and a kick-ass 401K. I don’t want the soul-crushing humdrum mundanity of PTA meetings, bakesales, neighborhood fund-raisers, barbecues with the Joneses, hypocritical hand-me-down soft-serve religion, and a great deal on some sturdy, weatherproof siding. I don’t want a steady diet of Listerine, Wonderbread, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Coors Light, Nivea, Crest, Rogaine,George magazine, SOS soappads, cable TV, America Online,Regis and Kathie Lee, two Big Macs for a buck, early Monday-morning meetings, supermarket coupons, laundry detergents on sale this week, “Got Milk?,” the car’s at the mechanic, I’m reading the latest Stephen King, I can’t go out tonight ‘cos ER‘s on, dinner every evening at 6 sharp, no exceptions, walking the fucking dog, watching “the game” with “the guys,” and “no sex please, we’re married” to a fat wife who bitches about the yardwork and yaks about Days of Our Lives and Antonio Banderas with “the girls.” I’ve had people tell me “better get used to it, buddy – that’s what being a grown-up is all about.” No, it’s not. You’re wrong. That’s what being a fearful sucker, a cheap commodity, a good consumer, a sorry-ass, unoriginal, homogenized, pasteurized, monotonized, zombified, post-war, late-20th century victim is all about. (And the really terrible thing is that most of these victims have been opiated to the point where, not only are they unaware of their victimhood, they actually think that they’re happy, ‘cos that’s what they’ve been told, and that’s what they’ve been sold.) It’s mouth-breathing trailer-trash culture with well-clipped hedges and routine dental visits. It’s righteousness on the rack, God on the guillotine, with boredom the blade, and security the silent executioner. It’s been said before, but at the risk of redundancy, life – contemporary-suburban-American-style – is a farce, a ruse, a slap in the face, to the dignity of existence – it’s taking it up the ass by the dominant commercial paradigm with terror’s lunatic grin frozen on your face, it’s death on the installment plan at zero down with 110% interest. Which is just a romantic way of saying “I don’t like Ike.”
Oh, that’s just great, Chris. Nothing like coming across as a purple-haired, snot-nosed, bratty punk at the tender age of thirty. What do you like, ya big sourpuss? That’s the thing. Despite the grotesque, shallow crassness in which we choose to wallow, I can’t help but believe that life is, in its primordial essence, a thing of almost excruciating beauty. And even though I obviously think the majority of people out there are spineless, lobotomized lemmings, I can’t help but believe that, at heart, when you cut through all the crap, control, and conditioning, they’re all essentially good creatures, scratching desperately around in the dust for something to believe in, for a sense of meaning, of purpose, and, for lack of a better word, of love. Just like me. And I can’t help but believe that the universe is not a cold, unfeeling void that doesn’t give a rat’s-ass about us, but is, in actuality, a benevolent dream-machine that’s ready and willing to grant us whatever we need or desire, that’s more than happy to give us all the answers as soon as we learn to ask the right questions. In fact, I KNOW this. ‘Cos we’re really in Heaven right now, we just have to become aware of it. And God’s no vengeful tyrant, no furrow-browed, lightning-fisted Zeus, but just a masked kid on Halloween spooking himself in the mirror, an absent-minded actor that gets so caught up in the play that he forgets who He is. And who He is is US. And even if today really fuckin’ blows, there’s always that fresh unfettered clay of tomorrow begging for you to shape it, and THERE’S REALLY NOTHING PREVENTING YOU FROM DOING AND BEING WHATEVER YOU WANT, especially in America. Hell, we could all be alive tomorrow. And, once again, I’ve got Miles Davis on the stereo, and my girlfriend will be here in a few hours, and the sun’s coming up right now and, man, it really is gorgeous. And that ain’t bad.
So, despite hitting the big 3-0, despite not really knowing where I’m going and barely understanding where I’ve been, despite everything I’ve learned to hate, and all the motherfuckers that cross my path on a daily basis, and the myriad insane convolutions of modern-day existence, I authoritatively, without hesitation, choose “To be.” ‘Cos not only is now the best time to be alive, it’s the only time to be alive.
Which is just a romantic way of saying “FUCK, YEAH!!!” And that, in the face of it all, is a pretty grown-up thing to say.
