Help me I am in Hell

An excerpt from my recently published novel (Available now)

Apr 22, 2024

Exciting news! I know there are some people who have qualms about ordering books from amazon, so I have added a bookstore tab to my substack where you can purchase my book directly from me! Granted, it is a tad more expensive because I have to cover my own shipping costs and I’m a one man operation. But this is an excellent way to support my work.

For now I can only ship within the continental US.

Thanks for reading!

What it’s about—

While in the throes of a devastating mental collapse, a self-destructive hypochondriac weaves his way through the dark underbelly of Los Angeles in search of his next fix, be it booze, drugs, sex or just companionship, anything to assuage the constant barrage of fear and anxiety that assaults him at every turn. At once ripe for catharsis and salvation, he imposes himself upon the lives of three women whom he hopes can rescue him—an emergency room priestess with a penchant for speed, a Satanic prostitute who claims to be the antichrist and a successful poet that seems to have everything he has ever wanted. But how much of himself must he hide to trick them into believing he is worthy of their love? What follows is a gut-wrenching exploration of a mind suffocating from addiction and mental illness amidst the ultimate terror of annihilation.

Read the hard-hitting opening below:

I wanted to start out by saying something’s wrong with my kidney. But then it struck me that in the first pages of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground the narrator, a sick and spiteful man like me, says something about there being something wrong with his liver. And I’d hate to seem unoriginal. But what if it’s true? Despite that it’s been said before? What if the very reason it’s worth repeating is because it’s true? Does that mean there is no use in saying it again? Because livers and kidneys hurt once then and they hurt now. They will continue to hurt. For all of time they will ache incessantly like the nagging fear of death that causes the pain to manifest. Anyway, I don’t even know if people would make the connection. Ha. What people? Like anyone’s ever going to read this tripe.

But my kidney does hurt. My kidneys hurt. At least I think it’s my kidneys. No way to be sure really. Sometimes there is this pain in my lower back a little off to the side. A deeply imbedded pain. It throbs like it’s not supposed to. Throbbing means something is wrong. Could be a pulled muscle. Except that it persists. Coming and going. Coming and going. Could it be I keep pulling the same muscle over and over again? Sometimes it is so severe it feels like there is this stitch in my side like I have run hundreds of miles without a rest and I curl up on my bed and I heave and I retch and I wonder how much longer before it kills me?

Maybe there’s something wrong with the way I sleep. Sometimes I wake up in sweats with my temples pounding and my insides burning with a sharp razorfire and I can’t move my neck or turn my head. Other times my arm is dead. Because of how I slept. It is utterly paralyzed. Often in my not-so-lucid moments I see a ghoul with wings crouched on top of me holding my stiff dead arm high above its gnarled face in a long taloned vice grip and it grins malevolently with sharp white teeth and bats its eyelashes like it’s fucking flirting or something. I have to use one hand to peel the other out of its concrete grip. I leave it there dangling off the bed until it starts to tingle, a hundred thousand pinpricks all jabbing me in unison over and over and over again as the demon dissolves, spreading up and down my arm until finally after much effort I can move the tips of my fingers, then my wrist, my whole arm coming to a piece at a time, becoming conscious with the subtle flow of blood. It was scary the first time it happened. I thought what if it’s gone for good and has to be amputated? What if one day I wake up and my whole brain is numb? What if I wake up paralyzed and not a single extremity works and I lay trapped there stuck but conscious of everything? Shitting all over myself while watching the whole of space-time pass by slideshowlike, feeling the kind of despair that even suicide wont resolve?

Could be I’m drinking too much. I wonder if that’s the problem. Hemingway and all the others drank for 50 years or more and they made it out okay. Well. They at least made it out in the way we all make it out. With a shotgun blast to the face. It wasn’t the drinking that killed them. What are my measly few years of alcoholism compared to that? There are of course many chronic diseases associated with severe alcohol intake and I often worry that I may have or get all of them. Some I am sure have already begun taking root in the deepest parts of my cells even though I don’t know about them yet. What I don’t have I am quickly on my way to obtaining. I collect them, these diseases I’m prone to, like another might collect rare first edition books or stamps with pictures of the presidents’ faces. Twenty-thousand cancer deaths each year can be attributed to alcohol consumption. In fact, someone who consumes more than three-and-a-half drinks per day increases their risk of these cancers by as much as two to three times the general population. I consume anywhere from fifteen to eighteen drinks per day if things have been going well for me and anywhere from twenty-one to thirty-two per day if they have not been going so well.

So why do I imbibe with the same desperation as a man ablaze would be for a lake to jump into? I have thought about this long and hard and the only answer I’ve come up with is that it is the consequence of persistent boredom, fear, anxiety, horror and because on most days there is not much else to do. When I don’t drink I go crazy. I chew on my tongue and my lip until blood drips down my chin. I pace in circles around my tiny studio apartment trying to come up with some idea of what to do that would fulfill me. I cry. I stamp my feet and throw tantrums. I rape and pillage. I want somebody to kill me because I am too afraid to kill myself. These days I find it hard to even get drunk no matter how much I consume. I take in bottles and bottles of the stuff and barely feel a thing except maybe less boredom, less fear, less anxiety and less horror.

I have little control over the things I think. I find myself wondering throughout the day if it is me thinking the things I think or the things I think thinking me. What if I’m a figment of my own imagination? What if I don’t exist at all? Is it possible that I’m imagining myself? Or that you’re imagining me? I don’t know if other people have this problem. I suspect they don’t. I remember what I want to forget and forget what I want to remember. I think I might have a tumor or some other type of electrical malfunction that’s causing my neurons and synapses or whatever they’re called to misfire so as to make me think things I don’t want to think plunging me into deep internal monological tangents that I can’t get out of no matter how hard I try.

What are the things that make me me anyway? How does my brain decide what to remember and what to forget? I do try to avoid paying too much attention to anything too specific lest I accidentally pierce the veil of reality and come to know truths no man should be made privy too, lest the urge to swallow up the very universe of which he is a non-integral part overtakes him. I fear that at any moment I will simply pop out of existence making a sound like cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne.

I spend late nights and early mornings in the emergency room lobby. I am comforted by the fact that were something awful to happen to me I am probably in the only place that will be able to help. There will be no need for fuss. No need to scramble to the telephone to dial 911 or to die in hopeless spasms with eyes rolled back in head on the concrete floor of my tiny studio apartment. To be found weeks later by some hapless neighbor who notices a smell not coming from his crack pipe. Here I am safe.

To pass the time I read periodicals on cancer and STDs. I ruminate on the human body. Its condition. It is manufactured so poorly. All its systems are so dependent on all its other systems that should a single one fail or short circuit the whole damn thing comes crashing down.

I keep a notepad and pen in my front jacket pocket. I observe the sick and dying around me. I jot notes. I chronicle their collective and individual plights to study later. One day if my symptoms are as theirs I will know the time has finally come to scratch at the walls for desperate survival. It seems silly to say out loud but we are all a little bit like dairy products. We have our expiration dates and it is always so much sooner than intended or planned for.

I’ve gotten to know the names of all the pretty nurses and they know mine. Amy is my favorite. She works the night shift. She is also a tweaker. On her breaks she goes out to her car and smokes meth out of a green glass pipe. I think they are called oil burners. Sometimes she even gives me a little. We have wonderful micro conversations that only last for ten minutes because she has to get back.

Tonight she has given me a pair of sky blue latex gloves because someone’s ill child has been running around smearing snot on the walls and furniture. That’s my Amy. I didn’t even have to ask for them. When the coffee runs out she lets me make a new pot. Sometimes I restock the cups and napkins and refill the water jug. I even put the magazines and pamphlets back in their racks against the wall whenever some careless somebody has left them strewn about.

I ask her questions about what this pain might mean or that strange sensation but she says she could get in trouble for offering me medical advice. She tries assuring me that I am likely fine. Oh how I wish I could believe her. My emergency room princess.

I look at her now looking back at me over my half-finished plate of scrambled eggs and the lukewarm cup of coffee clutched in my palms. The diner is empty but for us. We find ourselves speaking in low whispers, for whatever might hear us, whatever wretchedness might be listening, we do not want to disturb. The waiter watches us from the corner. His face is white and pasty. Clammy, even. Dark circles make purple grooves like upside down tombstones beneath his eyes. He keeps staring at us. His constant visage out the corner of my eye bugs the hell out of me. He holds a pot of coffee that is nearly empty in one hand and that hand trembles violently, what little coffee is left splashing about within the container like the thick over-brewed blood of some evil thing. Amy snaps her fingers to get my attention. But I’ve forgotten what we were talking about. Is this what dementia looks like? Forgetting so readily? A brain full of gaps without bridges to connect one thought to the next? Maybe I’m just tired.

“You were saying something about a dream you had.”

Oh yes. I had. What was it again? It had just happened. Was I dreaming now? I think about it some. Observe a fly making figure eights up in a greasy corner. It kind of comes to me. A little. It was tonight. Just before she came to tell me she was getting off and did I want to grab some breakfast. I imagine what it would be like to help her get off. Would she like it?

“I kept dozing tonight,” I tell her. “Normally I can stay up just fine. Tonight I was tired. So very tired. I would drift off and wake up and see these things in the lobby and behind the glass doors where the doctors were working. Horrible things. Doctors without mouths marching back and forth in blue scrubs holding shotguns to their chests. Blasting their ammunition into the backs of cancer patients. They were mostly children. The cancer patients, I mean. All bald and in white gowns with clowns on them. Then I’d wake up and they were gone for a second but then they would come back. I saw a pregnant lobster-mother aborting herself right in front of me. In the lobby. Her face all twisted screaming at me like it was all my fault. Like everything was my fault. Throughout the whole of human history. That I had caused everything. I kept waking up and going to sleep again and the waking world kept blending in with my dreams so that I couldn’t tell the one from the other. That ever happen to you?”

“All the time.” She yawns. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. Her hair has gone thin and stringy. Her face has started to break out, lips cracking.

I pick at my eggs with my fork. I feel depressed. I would give anything to make Amy mine. But she won’t have me. No one will.

She shoves her untouched plate of food to the edge of the table.

“I have to get home. My mom wants me to take my brother to school in a couple hours.”

Amy’s mother is dying. I’m not sure what the disease is. She told me once but it’s difficult to pronounce so difficult to remember. By this time next year she will almost certainly be dead. That will leave Amy to care for her little brother alone. I don’t think she has any other family. At least none she has ever talked about.

I offer to pay the bill but she doesn’t let me. She makes more money than me anyway. So I allow it. Outside on the street we make our way back to the hospital so she can get her car. She offers to drive me home but I tell her no. I like the walk. I need it. The cool brisk morning air livens me and keeps me sane. Sort of. We say our goodbyes. She opens her car door and before she gets in she embraces me. She smells of some musty memory I can’t quite pinpoint. Timidly I put my hands on her waist but only for a second and then let go.

“Until next time,” she says.

I mime tipping the brim of my non-existent hat in farewell. “Until next time.”

Sometimes when I leave the hospital early in the morning I feel embarrassed for myself. I wonder why Amy indulges me the way she does. And it is an indulgence. If I were her I would have booked a flight to the moon if it meant I could get away from me. I don’t know if she gets off on it or if she just needs someone to talk to as well. I stay comforted by convincing myself it’s the latter.

She did in fact confront me once about my emergency room visits, and only once, after a long night when she had driven me home. We were sitting outside my apartment in her car smoking crystal. It was cloudy and the sky was gray-blue. It had been raining but it wasn’t raining then. She asked me quite bluntly why I was so afraid of death. Why it petrified me so much and disturbed me so deeply that I had to be continually reassured that I wasn’t about to die. “This world has been here a long long time,” she insisted. “Many people, everyone who has ever lived in fact eventually died. It’s something everyone has to do regardless of anything else. Why be afraid?”

“I’m scared of not being able to breathe,” I explained. “The never-ending darkness with no hope of future light.”

“I made peace with it a long time ago.”

“How?”

“How what? How did I make peace with it?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “I’d rather be unconscious than conscious.”

I thought about that a lot afterwards. How she had managed to surrender to the way of things while I was fighting against them. I do think there’s something off about Amy. Maybe that’s why I dig her so much. Sometimes I feel like a little dog that follows its master around every room of the house. I think she’s probably a little lonely like me. But a nurse that goes out to tweak on her breaks that tends to look more strung out each day than the one before? Something is not right. But I’ve always latched on to the damaged ones. We see ourselves in each other. We have a desperate need though we would never admit it to stick together. We are our own little nightmare cult. We are the ones who do not exist in the consciousness of the world. We might as well not exist at all. Our struggles are after all not external like the ones of the past. We cannot show the results of our fight like the culture can, like the blacks and the women and the poor and the gays and the unions or the whole goddamned USA as it extricated itself from the Brits. Our battle is one of the mind. It is waged inside of our brains against the world. It is a fight against ourselves as we fight with ourselves to accept ourselves in the world as it is. To find a comfortable place to live out our tortured little lives. A place that will leave us the fuck alone. That will not force us to go to work or shop for groceries or pay the rent. That will allow us to simply sit and be humble without intrusion from the outside. In short, we seek a world that will allow us to survive without forcing us to.

Walking back the darkness terrifies me. The solitary lonely dark. It is far too unsettling. The sleeper tremors watch me. Do you see them? Do you feel them? Do you hear their guttural groans and the scraping of their toenails on the old deckled sidewalk as they slouch nearer? Their dead black eyes darker than the darkness itself? Blackness contrasted against blacker blackness? I sense them reaching out from behind the muck. Pulling me and grasping at my clothes. Wrapping the darkness tighter around me. The ultimate dark of no salvation. Sometimes I ask them what they want or why they keep following me like little guardian demons but they just smack their lips and drool some insinuating nothing. It’s okay. I have gotten used to them. They are my cosmic companions through this life of mine and we are friends. I wish I had let her drive me back though. Shots of lightning-heat freeze my veins and turn them to ice. My chest and the bottom of my throat rage and erupt spewing thick putrid lava all through me. What can I do, what can I say? What do you do, what do you say? When there’s nowhere to run and there you are in the middle of a black street on a black night lost there without a soul in sight like some ancient arctic explorer through six months of winter-night? What do you do? What do you do?

I scour the internet for pussy. I’ve heard sex and death are related. I guess that’s because out of sex comes life which must then eventually die. The truth is the sound of a woman’s orgiastic screams while I pummel the shit out of her makes me forget I am alive which in turn makes me forget I will die.

Jackie is a big fat beast of a woman. Her pussy smells rank, like some sort of mold, or maybe she just has a yeast infection. It slides around on my cock milking it for semen as her face contorts into all sorts of shapes of awful and she keeps gasping Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ over and over again while she fingers her clit and I work away. Afterwards she tells me she makes no bones about it, she’s a slut, her word, and proud of it. At 23 she’s fucked over a hundred men and half as many women. That’s why she’s so good at it. The mystery is how her vagina has remained so shapely. Each time I pound her I feel like I’m clawing my way through a mound of inchoate pizza dough. I try letting her get on top but she nearly crushes my hipbones she’s so fucking heavy. Her tits on my face make me go all blue from lack of oxygen. So I just do what I do best and hammer away stabbing her repeatedly in her sweet spot while she goes Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ. Oh how I wish she would invoke some other deity. But it beats masturbation because there’s that warm moist feeling and I don’t have to worry about carpal tunnel. Not to mention she can’t get pregnant or so she says because there are tumors all up in her cunt and when I feel the tumors brushing the tip of my dick it really gets me going. In the morning I can barely wake up. I’m all sweaty and smell like an unwashed cock.

The next time I see her she shows up with three bottles of wine and one of whiskey. We drink it all over the course of a night and fuck until she’s bloody and pulling chunks of viscera from inside her, her fingers and palms bright red with wet gore. We joke about it being a tiny fetus, our love child aborted minutes after conception. I wonder which one of us will die first.

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