Hurry Pothead

"...Painkillers naturally have a lesser effect on those who take them regularly or for recreation. Alcohol helps dissolve the pills and somewhat takes the edge out of "killing yourself" and all. One should really try to avoid drinking beforehand though, or you just end up too wasted to see the task through and feel really shitty about yourself in the morning.

The tablets can be washed down with Vodka or similar crap, so as to make yourself feel better while you're still conscious, awaiting Elvis & Co. Drawing a large smiley-face on an air-tight plastic bag, placing it over your head and tightening it around your neck (with a rubber band), will raise your chances of success and remind your loved ones of what a nutty cracker you used to be. This will surely help your next of kin cope with the grief..."

I.

The fame
wish was like a religious thing
with her,
since always.
It was 85 percent of who she was by the time she hit puberty.
I don’t mean that she sat around as a child practicing the flute, or playing the guitar, or writing verse or making pottery or what not.
No, that she didn’t do. But she did devote all of her time to thinking, wanting and planning success. As far as she was concerned she was ready and fully prepared for standing in the middle of Times Square "completely awestruck" with too little cash, waiting for the saga to unfold. And just so you know, it wasn’t about being famous per se.
I mean you could always kill someone or run around naked in some strategic place, but that wasn’t it. She had, or at least planned to have a lot to say to the free world and she very much cared about the actual thing that would get her famous. Except that for the longest time she couldn’t quite put her finger on what that was.

II.

She started working right after school, making money for the mission.
She modeled for painters, sculptures and "photo-
graphers" around the city of light - Nowhere's cultural capital.
She was so good at it in fact; that by her second month around the circuit, there was not a single art-lover in town who hadn’t come across her bare butt. Live or in reproduction.

She had ‘interesting tones’ and ‘very defined lines’ and she was pleasant to be around, well before she took her robe off. And when she did, oh well, then she dazzled them. Being as Caucasian as can be, an almost perfect Aryan (accept for the Jewish factor), she was almost see-through and at times, seemed to actually reflect light.

Maybe she could have been a real model. A dressed one. She certainly thought so, but she was really really small. Her artistic photographer friends from school, actually had a habit of watching her walk up to healthy, big-boned girls and capturing the enigma on film. She was proportional and all, just small, very delicate and pale and small.
She had a huge mouth on her though. Naked or not, she always played the question game. "If you had to sell Earth to the Martians, what would your marketing slogan be?". "If you could run someone down with an 18-wheeler, who would it be and why?". Artists loved that shit.

She only did private sessions twice. Not a particularly nice experience. But you know, there’s so much you can do for quick dough that isn’t illegal or prostitution or waitressing, which is even harder than prostitution and not as rewarding financially.

III.

Though Father had always said that any occupation was dignified as long as it wasn't whoring or stealing, it seemed that these were the only professions that offered sane compensation for your precious time and/or hard work.
But modeling was not prostitution and at that point she had yet to discover the joys of theft. She just had to have a certain amount of money by a certain time. She already had a ticket. And just so you know, it wasn't that easy either. First off you’re naked. Naked in front of a bunch of people who aren't even supposed to feel guilty about staring at you. Then there’s the seasonal element.

She started modeling around January. Imagine being neurotic as it is, lying on a raised platform, naked, not moving for 45 minutes at a time, almost freezing to death, with just this one little radiator burning an abstract figure into your ass.
And of course, at such forums nothing goes unnoticed. After bathroom break, she‘d come back to the classroom only to find 26 freshly painted masterpieces, all of which could be appropriately entitled ‘Primavera with radiant ass’. Indeed, who knew better then her, that not every person who wants to be an artist actually is - yet all people have equal access to canvass and paint.

Yep, it's true. Money does dignify what is frivolous if unpaid for. And anyway you know, people do things, and though it did in this case, these things don't necessarily say something about their character. Every young starlet in formation has to have awkward pictures of herself hiding somewhere anyway. Just so you know, she didn’t even feel that comfortable naked and she took the risqué chance of pissing all over everybody every time she complied and posed with her legs spread. And that’s got to be worth something. Because If that's not conviction, I don't know what is.

IV.

Gone was her chance for a youthful and honorable death. The plane landed at JFK on schedule, and Woolfgang - Mothers’ Trans-Atlantic lover from years past, picked her up at the airport.

When she was a child, Father was sent oversees on a 6 year stint to the Nowhere government headquarters in New York City. That’s when they met - Mother and Woolfgang, at some social event in the city of all cities. Father was the only man she’d known up until then and when introduced to the wonderful world of Kama Sutra and Curry there was no turning back.

It wasn’t just the food and the sex though, it was the life. She really loved being a part of it - New York, New York; and having the appeal of a New York cabby, Woolfgang made her feel like she was no less than Nancy Sinfuckin'atra. She never fully recovered leaving and going back home when the time came.

New York ruined everything in a way. It ruined what little chance she had for an alright, yet somewhat mundane existence that’s inevitably thrust upon a lot of people, but is especially unfulfilling once you've known better. (Unless that is, someone close to you, an offspring perhaps, really made it big and paid to have you shipped over - first class, where a Soho loft would be waiting for you upon your arrival, fully furnished and equipped with a maid, a chef and a Fresh Direct membership.).

V.

Mother and she would lie in bed in the afternoons, when she came home from school, and explore the possibilities of the fame wish for hours. Mother had a lot of faith and she knew, that the only obstacle in her wide eyed child's way to her dreams of world domination and a ‘Rolling Stone’ cover, was the curse of wasted potential. And needless to say, she saw a shit load of potential there.
They were very close. Even for a mother and daughter. So close in fact, that it made Father's family a little uncomfortable.

They were the easy-to-detect Enfants Terribles of the clan. The red-headed sheep in papa's dark, nerdy herd. Father started calling her Oedipus at a certain point pretty early on, and from then on the division in the family was clear.
Her sister was born with a full head of black curls, and by no fault of her own was cast away to the enemy’s quarters as soon as she popped out of Mothers' burning bush.

Mother would tell her everything. She told her about Woolfgang on her 14th birthday, their first year back in Nowhere, after leaving New York. She told her ever so tenderly, that her girls were the only thing she had to live for, now, after having been torn from her dark knight, his funny accent and the exotic aroma of his cooking, which seemed to stick to his clothing and challenge her first born's over-active-as-it-is gag instinct, whenever he came around their house.

Mother’s going back to the nothingness of Nowhere and to the misery of missionary sex with Father, didn’t do anyone any good. She fled to the States as often as she could and they kept it going trans-atlantic for about eight years. When it ended, she divorced Father, who never even knew about Woolfgang, but felt betrayed nonetheless. He hated Mother for making him a ‘divorcee’. It made him clash with the person he wanted people to think he was and he blamed the daughters, especially the older, redder one, for conspiring.

VI.

They were driving down from Kennedy to some hell hole in Queens, Woolfgang and her. She didn’t know it was going to be a tragically hellish sort of hell hole at the time and so she was dying to get there already. When she went apartment seeking on-line she had no idea of the questions one must ask themselves upon reserving a room that rents out for considerably less than all the other rooms on the menu du jour. But she thought all she’d need is a place to put her shit at while she does her thing. The nature of "The thing" was to automatically hit her at any moment. She was waiting. Damn Woolfgang made it hard to concentrate. She didn’t know how she should be with him. He carefully examined her every time they stopped at a light and said how lovely she’s grown and all that crap. She thought he was going to offer her candy next. She started wishing that she had just attempted to die locally, back home in Nowhere. It was freezing cold and Queens didn't look at all like land-of-the-free-home-of-the-brave America.

They circled around for a while and finally found the house. She felt so incredibly shitty sitting there in the car, in front of the shittiest house in the shittiest neighborhood, after a 13-hour flight, with an authentic mother-fucker. She tried to focus, took deep breaths, repeating the mantra ‘kill me please, kill me now’, thinking how handy a Game-Over button could have been right now.

She didn't even feel like being famous anymore. It was just that she didn't know what else she could possibly want out of life, and ending it was such a huge fucking task in itself. She always figured that if she had the will power and energy to set up her own suicide, then she would just go ahead and set up a couple of other things while she was at it. Good shit. Productable shit, but killing one's self is hard. It's such a huge project when you really think about it and start planning ahead. It actually makes you want to live a while longer.

VII.

Even the shit that sounded easy wasn't after she read about it some. Success in the pesky task of dying, ultimately required pretty much the same mind-set you need so as to succeed in life - believing in yourself and believing you can do it. She, for instance, did not believe that she could get her hands on a shotgun.

A shotgun blast is said to be much more effective than a rifle or pistol, in this kind of extra-special situation. But she was on a tourist Visa and didn't know anyone other than Woolfgang who could help her obtain any fire arm at all, in the US. Woolfgang would probably see right through her desperate demeanor and inform her mother, who would otherwise surely enjoy scraping pieces of her membrane off of the wall.

Death by shotgun is instantaneous or prolonged, depending on karma, and she knew from experience that anything dependent on karma, in her case anyway, was a sure no-no. Not to mention that she would lose her deposit for messing up the room regardless the outcome. See, people tend to instinctively pull the gun away from their head as they fire, leaving 'hesitation marks' on the wall behind them.

She imagined herself continually missing her own head, causing great damage to the room and living to tell the tale and pay for it too. Her biggest concern, of which she learned from a Judas Priest "Behind the Music" installment, was that it was possible to miss your brain entirely and just blow your face off, leaving you alive and kicking yet badly deformed like that kid who listened to a Priest album one too many times and quite understandably, tried to shoot himself in the head.

VIII.

They got out of the car and went over to ring the doorbell. Her ears were ringing from way before. She felt as if she suddenly developped the bionic ability to pick up on high-pitched tones from miles and miles away. Sounds only whales and canines could hear, sounds all the way from Nowhere. Now, a choir of doorbells joined the cacophony playing in her head - the awful soundtrack to the first day of the rest of her life. There was a dog somewhere in there, but the continuous barking was mixed in with what she could have sworn were sounds of chainsaws and parrots, horny cats and frantic chickens, drunken people and traffic and lunatic babies, all orchestrated by none other than Steve Vai.

Enough locks to make you feel at relative risk were undone and an elderly woman opened the door and stared at them. ‘That must be the way people look at Woolfgang and Mother’ she thought, ’the evil eye’.
No words were exchanged but her hostility radar was picking up on something all right. Where was that damn dog?

Woolfgang helped her with her suitcases. They followed the lady to the Second floor. A bed and a bathroom. Virginia Woolf must have been kidding. She sensed that Woolfgang wanted to fuck her. She had a radar for that too. She offered to walk him out and paid up front for a week. Then she went back up to her room and lay on the bed, repeating her signature soul-soothing mantra: ‘Kill me now. Kill me please’.

IX.

She sat on the bed for the longest time after Woolfgang left. She didn’t know what the fuck she was going to do. Why did she come here anyway she wondered and retorted instantly, that well, she had no idea. In fact, even if she could ask someone, she wouldn’t know what the fuck to ask. She panicked at the thought that after unpacking she would have to do something. What was that something? She just couldn’t seem to remember. How does one embark on making it big time anyway?
She had had some sort of plan before. Yes, she had planned to start somewhere by doing some sort of something.

It seemed unreasonable that she should feel so lost after having watched so many installments of E!’s True Hollywood Story. She so wished she could be successful and famous already and just get it over with.
Cute? maybe, pathetic? definitely, she knew she was. Just like the Coreys and the other Has-Beens, whose narrated deterioration was so entertaining there for a while. But she didn't even know what she wanted to do. She wasn't even a Wanna-Be, she was a Neverbeen. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m fine', she tried to calm herself down. 'I could kill myself. I could always just kill myself’.

Painkillers naturally have a lesser effect on those who take them regularly for recreation. Alcohol helps dissolve the pills and somewhat takes the edge out of "killing yourself" and all. One should really try to avoid drinking beforehand or you just end up too wasted to see the task through and feel really depressed in the morning. The tablets can be washed down with vodka or similar crap so as to make yourself feel better while you're still conscious, awaiting Elvis & Co. Drawing a large smiley-face on an airtight plastic bag, placing it over your head and tightening it around your neck (with a rubber band), will raise your chances of success and remind your loved ones of what a nutty cracker you used to be. This will surely help your next of kin cope with their grief.

X.

Be the drive depth or depression, she knew to come to New York. But she was already there for a couple of hours and it appeared like she was going to have to do more if she really wanted to make it in this town.
It felt awful to reflect and see that all the crap everybody always said about her, and not always behind her back as she preferred, was true. What a fucking loser.

Yet she kept on sitting there motionless, uncharacteristically contained for the circumstances, listening to the sounds of the waves of hysteria breaking against her eardrum, penetrating her head, until it appeared at the top of the stairs. Small, loud and blacker then hell, it stood at her doorway and started barking.

Finally she could curl up in fetal position, smother herself with a pillow and wallow in self pity in full force pathos, (a ritual her parents and lovers believed she took great pleasure in). ‘I want to die’, she thought and cried and looked out the window at the winter sky. Had someone been watching, they’d probably wonder if she was looking out for God or at camera #3, but there wasn’t anyone there. Just her with Mascara all fucked up, jet-lagged and misplaced.

‘...Putting so much effort and thought into something...’ she moped. More thought then effort actually, which only made things harder when you really thought about it. I mean, sitting around doing so much nothing, really doing nothing, is harder and less enjoyable then one might think.

XI.

One of the problems with doing nothing, a wise man once said, is that you never really know when you're done.
She felt like she'd been there for hours doing nothing. Just trying to gather herself and falling onto the bed in despair. Falling in despair to the left, falling in despair to the right. Falling in despair to the left, falling in despair to the right. ‘This city is killing me’ she concluded within one hour of her arrival, but then she remembered that with her, she brought a lifetime supply of Marlboro Reds. There was no better time to start nurturing a cancer.

She was a chain smoker from the start, a chain smoker from the heart. When her family left the Big Apple and returned to Nowhere, they built a house. Father wanted to maintain a somewhat bourgeois lifestyle and thought that if he’d built a cottage in a remote place and plant a tree in front of it, they’d all play along and pretend it was upstate New York.

Because the dream chateau was isolated from anything that even remotely resembled a city and Father was deadly punctual, the entire family had to be in the car and on the road by the break of dawn, to beat traffic. Every morning she would have to kill two hours minimum, sometimes five, until her first class began and then some, waiting for her ride back home. Surely she could have taken the bus, but she had an issue with public transportation.

XII.

See, in Nowhere at certain times, especially when the political climate is in disarray, the decision to get on a bus takes a lot of spiritual contemplation. Politics, life and death, the aesthetics of death, the communal layering of society, the Melting Pot syndrome and other such weighty issues. The thought of exploding into a million pieces, which would ultimately mix with other pieces, pieces of members of society which she had no business mingling with in the first place, troubled her.

There’s a special group of professional pieces-pickers in Nowhere. Their job is to re-assemble freshly blown-up passengers, victims of a terrorist attacks or similar messy ordeals, so they could have a proper burial.
But just imagining her vital organs, lying miles away from each other on the cold cold pavement, mismatched by the pieces-pickers who understandably wanted to go home to their wives, have dinner or do just about anything other then bag an ear, was quite unsettling.

She could just see her red beaver in her minds eye, hanging from a tree, photographed by the local papers which were always competing for that unforgettable cover-shot, that would move the masses and be shown on CNN. Was this the kind of notoriety she wanted? It was certainly not. If ever her beaver shot was to be released to the press, it was not to be done in this crude manner. It would be done tastefully and come with a check signed by Hugh Hefner.

And so, she avoided taking the bus and preferred getting up at half past dawn and riding with the family. She started smoking to kill time and there was a lot of time to kill and so she smoked a lot. A hell of a lot. Truck drivers were horrified.

XIII.

She had a regular seat at the corner table of a Gas Station coffee stop, right off the highway. It was the closest place to school that was open that early in the morning.
She smoked enough cigarettes to legitimize a lawsuit by non-smoking bystanders all by herself for a year, and then this other kid started showing up and smoking together was even more fun.
A year later her family moved back to the city. Obviously she didn’t quit or anything like that.
She wasn’t a quitter.

She took a camel filter from her purse. The Marlboros were for the new her, but she just wasn’t there yet. She was so tired. Her eyes felt heavy. She smoked and smoked away. Today was her birthday. It was important to her that she be on the plane on her birthday. She figured that whether her plane crashes or she becomes hugely successful (the only logical possibilities she foresaw), dying on one’s birthday was much better than on just any day. She lit up.

XIV.

Rumor has it that
you could actually die from a Nicotine overdose if you have a knack for cooking and science!
Enough pure Nicotine -
150 grams of tobacco extract, to be exact,
is said to be fatal.
(1 cigarette = 1 - 2 milligrams of Nicotine.
1 gram = 1000 milligrams. 150 grams of tobacco = 150,000 cigarettes).
And though inducing Nicotine death may take as much time as chain smoking a hundred thousand cigars, coma may set in much earlier! In order obtain the extract; soak your 100 grams of tobacco for a few days, until you get a brown icky mess. Strain off the tobacco and boil it slowly until most of the liquid evaporates, leaving about 2 teaspoons of icky brown shit. Add it to your favorite night-time drink, smoke a cigarette and chill, and if you’re lucky you won't just wake up with a really bad cough.

But now she felt lonely and old and empty and that there wasn’t enough time to do anything, certainly not to cook tobacco. She should have started being famous much earlier, at 12 maybe. She remembered her first guitar lesson when she was 14, and how she felt that she was already too old to start learning and how she gave it up by the third lesson, because she still couldn't play like Slash.
Finally she decided there was no denying the inevitable. Something more powerful was taking hold of her. Could it be female intuition finally kicking in?

XV.

The door to her room squeaked as she opened it, cueing the Shitzu from hell.
She started making her way downstairs. Weary of the dog she safely stationed herself on the third step from the bottom and called out ‘hello’ and then again, and then again, to no reply. ’I wanted to go out’, she called out and waited. ’I wanted to ask you for the key...’, she waited some more. ‘Hello?’ she barked in rhythm with the dog – ‘Hello?’.

"Your mom's a bitch" she said to that dog but where was that bitch?
Trying not to get any Shitzu on her shoe as it now followed her possessed, she made her way to the living room. All this time she kept calling out ‘Mrs. Jean, Mrs. Jean, excuse me, Mrs. Jean’ though inside her she already knew. Just like in school, when an anonymous someone vandalized or stole something. It was her. She did it. She killed that old bitch though she could never handle the torture, the stares, the good cop - bad cop routine. She would confess to whatever and sell out whoever the first chance she gets and then have it all played back to her on "Law and Order" which she would watch from jail, surrounded by larger and less capable women who'd make her their bitch and steal all her cigarettes. Her dad would be heart-broken and tell all his friends that she moved to Canada.

XVI.

‘Are you going out dear?’

The old woman finally spoke. She was shocked. The dog was too. It kept barking and barking and she so wanted to step on its neck or for it to step on hers.
‘I can’t hear you, you have to come closer’, said Mrs. Jean as she pointed to a set of keys resting on the cabinet. ‘Thank you’ she thanked her ever so politely, took the keys and signed with her head. ‘What’s your dog’s name?' she shouted as she struggled with the locks on the door, keeping him away with her boot. ‘What’s your dog’s name?'

Finally she managed to get the door open and a great chill passed through her bones. It was snowing out. It was fucking freezing. Fighting the wind and trying to close the door behind her she heard the old lady shout ‘Bigger’. ‘What?’ she asked trying to get back in. “His name is Pigger…my little Digger”. ...'What?'. She walked into the cold. She really didn’t understand how the Eskimos did it. She wasn’t sure if she would rather freeze or burn to death, but she hated it here and felt that for the moment she could go either way.

It takes about twenty minutes to die as a result of hypothermia. She would need to find a deep, cold, secluded lake. As she knew how to swim, she would need to pack her pockets with heavy rocks and tie her hands and legs together. Then she could just hop on in.

The problem is that the cold slows down terminal brain damage and she could very well be found and revived several hours following her pathetic attempt. The local fisherman who finds her will be enjoying his psychotherapy sessions long after she's been discharged from the hospital. A secluded location was of utmost importance. Drowning herself in warmer waters won't have the advantage of hypothermia, but it's more effective in making sure she stays dead.