Shane

Committing Suicide for Fear of Dying:

A Sinner’s Memoir

And Bad Poetry

C.S. Griffel

Prologue: Jan 15, 1991

Who can say when a thing starts? I mean life is a series of choices isn’t it? Each one setting you on a course to make the next. You could say it started when I decided to move to Alaska. You could say it started when I decided to pick that guy up at the bar. I think I could have come back from those. But there are moments, choices that you don’t come back from. This was one of those choices.

The memory of the clinic is sparse. Screenshots. White tile. Glass double front doors. Cold. I couldn’t afford anesthesia. Without any, its painful. Do they tell you that? A deep in your core pain. They vacuum you out, no questions asked and leave the belly devoid of life.

Our apartment was a small one bedroom in the very center of the worst drug-infested neighborhood in Anchorage, Alaska. Chad had to work after. He dropped me off at home and drove away. I wonder-did he think about what we did? If he didn’t, I don’t blame him. He had no assurance it was his.

Gravity grew inside my stomach, an event horizon, the relentless gravity of a black hole. You cannot see a black hole. Black holes are known only by the void they create. They say nothing resists the pull of a black hole—that they devour stars and planets and galaxies, even light itself, yet they are small in comparison to everything around them. They lurk in the far reaches of the universe, eating it whole, just like the secret darkness that lurked inside me.

SHANE

The first time I saw Shane, he was walking across an empty field in the outskirts of the high desert city I called home, a place where the atmosphere genuinely shimmers, exactly like the movies. It was a warm day in March. Not a record-breaking day, but a beautiful sixty-six degree day when you can finally wear sandals again after months of chilly weather. He appeared on the horizon in the distance moving ever nearer. Like the inevitable movement of time towards some particular destiny.

Destiny, if one could call it that, rarely begins in the grand way one thinks it will. It most often starts small and inconsequentially. Shane, for instance, merely walked across an empty field and into the fast food hamburger restaurant where I sat with my best friend, Kathleen. It was a local chain with glorious green chile cheeseburgers, hand cut fries, handmade patties and old-fashioned flavored sodas. The crisp, cold taste of a strawberry Dr. Pepper still brings back the simpler days of high school life. A time when I was still innocent, working summers at the triple A baseball stadium, slinging hot dogs, peanuts and popcorn and flirting with the boys that worked in the team club houses. I was the first to get a job there before convincing Kathleen and the third member of our trio, Bethany, to get jobs there too.

Kathleen and I were sharing a few precious moments together before I had to start my shift at the Kettle, a cheap, short order restaurant that attracted travelers and truckers headed in or out of Albuquerque to or from Santa Fe. Bethany and I were a year older than Kathleen and had graduated from high school the year prior. Kathleen’s family moved away to Tennessee her senior year and she was just in town for a visit. I missed my friend that year and seeing her was a balm to my now weary soul.

I was just recently back from a short-lived move to Alaska. I had arrived there in the autumn of 1990 still fresh and young, just out of high school. My eighteenth birthday was August 27th and I arrived in Alaska sometime in September. By January of 1991 I was ready to move back home, with a heart blackened by a quick succession of foolishly soul-shattering decision-making.

In March of 1991 I was still eighteen and though I graduated from a private high school, had no plans to go to college. I hated high school. I hated doing school work I didn’t care about, like math, for instance, or biology. Why, I thought, would I voluntarily submit myself to four more years of school needlessly when I could just get a job. No, it would require another year of slinging hash browns and working graveyard shifts to convince me college was a good idea.

“So, tell me about Tennessee.” I told her.

“It’s okay. I don’t really get along with anyone in my class. They’ve all known each other for years. It’s hard to make friends.” She reached over and snatched a fry from me. “How have I survived without Blake’s?”

“I don’t know. You should have died months ago.”

“There was a cross burning at a high school in a nearby town,” Kathleen mentioned, “they spray painted on the school that the ‘South will rise again.’” We shook our heads in disbelief. It was bizarre to us that such a thing could still happen in 1991. Growing up in New Mexico, we had no understanding of the way the South was still affected by its history. It wasn’t that there was no racism in New Mexico, there certainly was. But it wasn’t the same. My mom’s senior class—the class of 1960—had elected a black boy as class president. It was just—different, not perfect—different. Kathleen had had a hard time adjusting and we reveled in one another’s company during a few stolen minutes.

The figure making its way across the empty field had drawn close enough to enter the door. “Hey,” I nodded towards him, “what’s this guy’s deal?” His black hair was slicked back into a ponytail over which he wore a leather newsboy cap. His feet were shod in a pair of tatty brown Birkenstocks. He carried a leather backpack slung over his shoulder, looking for all the world like he should be on a drug -induced road trip with Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp.

“Where’s his car?” She replied as he crossed the street and came into the restaurant.

I leaned over in a whisper, “He looks a little old to be walking everywhere.” He ordered the smallest, cheapest burger on the menu and paid in small change. I glanced at Kathleen, snickering at this grown man paying for his lunch like a little kid trying to pay for a candy bar at a 7-11 in all pennies. We received a barely perceptible but clearly disdainful glance as the mystery man slipped past us and back out of the restaurant, hamburger in hand.

“Weird.” We laughed as we watched him walk away. But there was something mesmerizing about his very oddness. You understood that he didn’t give a damn. That he’d devour that cheeseburger bought with pennies like it was Kobe steak. That he’d seen some shit.

I glanced at my watch. “Hey, man, I gotta get to work. I’m gonna be late.”

“Yeah, I need to get back to the hotel. My mom will be wondering where I am.” We stood and Kathleen gave me a hug, “love you.” She said.

“Love you too, call me tomorrow.”

It turned out that what Shane was doing that day was applying as a short order cook in the restaurant where I worked. I found this out a couple of weeks later when he started for his first day.

I wondered if he recognized me too and felt a little embarrassed. We had made little effort to disguise our stares and snickering at Blake’s that day. If he did, he did not acknowledge the fact in the slightest. He did not so much as glance my way as he walked past on his way to the kitchen.

Though Kathleen and I had make jokes about him, Shane was lovely, actually. He had soulful brown eyes and brown hair so dark that it was almost black. Even in a ponytail, he couldn’t disguise the tight ringlets his hair naturally created. A poetic darkness emanated from him. I don’t believe in things like reincarnation, but if I did I would say Shane had been cursed to be born a thousand times, that his soul was in perpetual penance over some sin committed when it was young and impetuous. That he walked the earth bent low by the loneliness of too many dark deeds and too much loss.

Short order restaurants are peopled with a cast of characters straight out of sitcoms. Barb with brassy bouffant blonde hair and neon orange nails who’s been waiting tables since 1975 but isn’t a day over 29. Her uniform, which hasn’t been updated for a decade and looks exactly like it came straight off the set of Mel’s Diner, strains at the breasts and is about two inches too short. She calls everybody “honey” and she kills it in tips. It seems truckers like to be flirted with.

Benny, the graveyard cook , will neither confirm nor deny that he did five years in the state pen, but the rumor is he shot his ex’s lover in the kneecap. Also, he possibly committed an armed robbery, but we’ll never know for sure. His white t-shirt is always stained with grease and red chile but his hair is always slicked back under his hair net, which he wears both on and off the job, and his full, black moustache perfectly and beautifully manicured. It rivals Tom Selleck’s. His Dickies are always, and I mean always, pressed to a prefect, razor-sharp crease.

Robin, with the gender ambiguous name but overtly sexual leer, is the manager. He’s not a bad guy, but he does want to get laid. He’ll never grab any of the waitresses, he’ll just look at you as though you were already standing naked in his bedroom.

Shane stood apart. He was no caricature but a full-blown entity. His dark hair grew in ringlets. He tried to hide them. He grew his hair long and pulled it back into a tight ponytail, but they would not be deterred and they reformed themselves. He found them childish, I found them charming.

When did I first draw his attention as he had drawn mine? It was when Benny tried barking orders at me through the kitchen window. It was filling up with filled orders and I was busting my tail to get them loaded and trays and served to waiting customers. There were only two servers on the graveyard shift and we split the floor fifty-fifty, smoking and non. I had smoking that night. Smokers tend to be drinkers and drinkers tend to come out at night. Nothing stalls a hangover like greasy bacon and eggs over easy. Saturday, 2:30 a.m., the smoking section gets slammed in a matter of minutes.

When I get overwhelmed I turn into a machine, methodical and hyper-focused. Drop off an order, come back for another. Keep going. What else can you do? For Manny I was not moving fast enough. “Hey! Kat, hurry your ass up and clear my window.”

“Hey, Benny. Fuck you.”

It was that attitude that drew Shane’s attention. Made him want to get to know me. Innocent face, nasty mouth, a paradox. I smoked then. Marlboro light 100’s. Though I don’t know why I bothered with 100’s. There was never enough time in a smoke break to smoke an entire one of these extra-long cigarettes. There was a little counter just off the kitchen between two staff bathrooms, a men’s and a women’s. There an ashtray sat, overflowing with the ashes and butts of the smokers on shift, which was pretty much everyone. Shane’s smoke breaks, oddly, began to coincide more and more frequently with my own.

“Can I get a light?” Shane sidled up to the break counter.

“Sure.” I handed over a Bic lighter covered in tropical flowers.

“Shane!” Benny bellowed, “There ain’t no more chopped onion prepped. What the hell you been doing all night? Get over here and cut me some damn onions.”

Shane crushed out his cigarette, “this place is a shithole.”

Benny was kind of a jerk. He ruled the graveyard kitchen with grandiose machismo. Though he never yelled at me anymore. Ever since I told him off, I turned into “mija” and my food turned up in the window quickly and prepared beautifully, at least as beautifully as it can be in such a place.

During our smoke breaks I learned that Shane was twenty-two and recently home from a stint in the Navy. He’d been stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Base. When he was discharged from the service he hopped trains and hitchhiked his way across country. His Vonnegut-esque stories suited my romantic ideals perfectly. Fascinating. Twenty-two seemed incredibly mature to me then. This guy was older, traveled, worldly. I felt like a child in comparison. I’d never hitchhiked across country, nor hopped trains. This was the distinction I suppose. I had been brave enough to move to Alaska, but I would never have hitchhiked or done anything quite that crazy. The conversation turned to questions about me. “How old are you?” he wondered. Fair enough.

“Nineteen.” I lied. I was eighteen but saying the word made me feel like a baby. Nineteen softened the edges of my childishness.

“Want to smoke a joint after work?” and with that Shane officially asked me out on our first date.

He didn’t have a car. He walked everywhere he went. Consequently, he only went places that were within walking distance of his house. He lived back at home with his parents and younger brother. At shift’s end we walked to my car together. I drove a little 1982 Dodge Colt, a tiny 4-speed hatchback with barely more than a lawnmower engine to power. It didn’t always start properly, so I often had to do a maneuver called “popping the clutch.” This requires that you put the stick shift in the neutral position, get behind your car and push it to get it rolling to a decent speed, then hop in the driver’s seat, push in the clutch, pop it into gear—while rolling, min you—and the engine would magically roar to life.

My step-sister lived in a trailer park near the restaurant. I suggested we go to her house rather than find a spot to part and smoke the weed. Her husband, Bill, was the sort of stoner that seems reasonable when straight but is, in reality, loaded with conspiracy theories which all come out of hiding under the gentle coaxing of THC. Elvis was either assassinated in a dark governmental plot to limit his growing influence over the public or perhaps was held in exile some on an island somewhere near the Marianas Trench. Bill was convinced that subliminal messages lurked in every television and movie. Don’t even get him started on Roswell and the alien cover-up. They’re coming for us, man.

The higher he got, the weirder Bill’s theories grew. We took off before he started on the Kennedy assassination. My radio was always set to classic rock. The Eagles, Led Zepplin, Lynard Skynard, The Who, Pink Floyd. The song switched to Hotel California.

“This song is crazy. Do you even know what it all means?” Sort of? “So I called up the Captain, ‘please bring me my wine,’/ he said, ’we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969…The spirit of 1969? Woodstock, I mean the summer of love. It’s all there. Music is about love, man. About love. And they killed it. They killed the spirit of music. We need to go back there. We need to go back to Woodstock and the love revolution. They got it all wrong.” Isn’t it strange to have nostalgia for a time when you didn’t even exist or of which you have no memory? Looking back at the ’60’with Shane, they seemed romantic and beautiful. The weed-induced lyrics, hippie communes, peace rallies and sit-ins seemed not only innocuous but like an impetus of peace. Dreaming of a different world with Shane was beguiling.

The first joint was the start of something. Sex, drugs and long conversations about the nature of God. And man. I was fascinated. Drawn into Shane’s mental world. It was a broken and dark place. But Shane, Shane was smart. So smart. He was just smart enough to torture himself, and not quite smart enough to do anything about it. His mind seemed to constantly wrestle with the troubles of the world. But he was a fatalist. His insights never prompted him to do anything about it. They drove him into the haze of the high.

Like Shane, it was clear to me that the world was a dark place—plagued with war and death and hatred. Death has always haunted me, shadowing my steps, whispering meaninglessness into my ear. Perhaps that is why I was drawn to the darkness in Shane. It called out to the darkness in me. The thing is, I wanted desperately to live in the light, even as darkness shadowed my every step. And I wanted to help Shane live in the light with me. But he cringed back from the light. Its touch seemed to burn him, whereas he floated free and cool in the darkness and he let it encompass him whole.

“Remembrance”

Embrace me, my love and

Remember me To the Ghost of She Who Once Was

And when you brush past a girl on the street

Not knowing that it is me

And glance back for the

Briefest moment,

The knowledge of me

Almost entering your consciousness, yet not,

Recall that I exist

That I live for the moment when I can

Love you