It was like a drunken Last Supper, I thought, observing the chaos before me.
And I felt like Judas.
13
It was around three in the morning. I was on my way home in a taxi. I had ordered it right after the champagne fiasco. Nobody had even noticed me leave.
The driver asked me whether I liked heavy metal.
“That’s the only kind I like,” I said.
He then put on some heavy metal music and told me he used to be the drummer in a black metal band called Delusion. Seeing as he was working as a taxi driver, I asked him whether the band’s name signified the likelihood of making it as a black metal band in today’s world. He didn’t say anything in reply.
After the taxi dropped me off at home, I checked the mail—there was none—and dragged myself up the stairs. I didn’t like living in this place anymore. Not since she’d left. But finding a new apartment and moving was an ordeal I had neither the interest nor energy for. Besides, it hardly mattered where I rotted away. All homes were ultimately graves.
Inside, I sat on the couch in my living room. I was done with people for the day. If anything, they made me feel even worse. However, I wasn’t nearly done with drinking yet. Alcohol was my oldest friend after all. And even though it was the kind of friend that was a bad influence, that never made you improve yourself, it was still better than most of the smug and self-important people I had ever met in my life.
I put on some music. The song that began playing was “I Still Drink Alone” by an obscure Norwegian rock band called The Cumshots. It was one of my all-time favorite songs.
I located a small bottle of Jim Beam that I had stashed away on my bookshelf. It was an old trick of alcoholics to hide bottles of booze around their house so that they could always find one in case they ran out at the wrong time.
Fittingly, the bottle stood next to my collection of Dan Fante books. Like most good authors, Dan had been an alcoholic and the books he wrote were based on his own fucked up life. Eventually, however, he had found God… Whereas I found that if some deity had to be assigned as the creator of this world then it could have been none other than the devil—a casual glance through human history showed this in abundance.
There had even been a religious sect in the middle ages called the Cathars who actually believed that the physical world was created by the devil, for no merciful God could have created something so sick and evil. The proponents of Catharism were usually burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Which, ironically, proved their point.
I took the bottle of whiskey to the couch. I didn’t bother with a glass. I uncorked it and took a hit. It felt good. It was the only thing that did.
Sitting there alone, drinking whiskey, my eyes came to a stop upon an empty spot in the apartment where Vicky’s cat tree had stood. Although I hadn’t liked her cat, Vicky had been the only person I was able to relate to. At least at the beginning. For she had changed over time. Although she had started out as fucked up as me, she eventually grew out of it. She wanted to live a normal life. Whereas I never did. My negativity, bitterness, and self-destructiveness eventually became too much for her. And after she left, I did what I always did in such cases. I became even more negative and bitter and self-destructive. Like a cliché, I began drinking constantly.
One night, whilst out drinking, I had even found a drinking buddy. His name was Joe. We were similar in a sense. He had recently been dumped. I had recently been dumped. He was an alcoholic. I was on my way to becoming one. He was somewhat of a nihilist. I felt that I was the definition of one. And we did indeed have some good times together, I’ll give him that. But as was so often the case, I soon got tired of him.
I took a long hit of whiskey.
Joe was a broken record and full of himself. Also, he always made me buy all the drinks. Because of this, I eventually stopped seeing him, preferring instead to drink alone. I guess a misanthrope like me just wasn’t meant to have friends. And so, I found myself alone again. Well, almost alone. For I still had my bottle.
I gulped down half of the whiskey in the bottle.
But the bottle wasn’t enough, you see. In fact, it often exasperated the fury I felt against the world. Against existence. Against my lot in life. Besides, drinking yourself to death was a sad thing. I hadn’t even been doing it for very long, but I was already beginning to get tired of it. Perhaps it would be better to just end it in one fell swoop instead of drawing it out. It would only hurt for a moment and then all of my problems would disappear. With alcohol, it would still hurt constantly. Although it dulled my capacity to feel suffering, it didn’t do so for long and it didn’t actually fix any of my problems. It was just postponing the inevitable.
All alcoholics must thus have been suicidal. They merely lacked the courage to go through with it. They hoped that the alcohol would do it for them. But the alcohol often took a really long fucking time to kill you. And so you slowly withered away until you were but a husk of your former self.
I gulped down the last of the whiskey, feeling extremely drunk and just about ready to pass out.
But before I did, I threw the empty whiskey bottle into pieces against the wall where the cat tree had stood.
14
I opened my eyes. Someone was aggressively pounding his fist on my front door. I waited for a while. It didn’t stop.
I wiped the dried drool from the corner of my mouth and got up from the couch. My head was pounding like a jackhammer from the hangover. Avoiding the glass shards from the whiskey bottle I had destroyed, I maneuvered myself towards the front door.
“WHAT?!” I said. The reply came back in Russian. I didn’t speak any Russian. “In Estonian or English, please.” I then got a reply in broken Estonian. The guy told me that they’d heard a noise at night coming from my apartment. As though somebody had broken something.
“I had an accident,” I said. “What, you never have accidents yourself?”
He didn’t seem to believe me, and I didn’t blame him. Actually, I did blame him for waking me up over such a petty little thing. As though I hadn’t heard plenty of noise myself coming from their apartments. Drunken parties. Husbands and wives fighting. Drug addicts screaming. It was a shit neighborhood. Yet he made it out to seem as though all the noise was coming from my apartment alone.
The guy then mentioned the music. “Yeah, yeah, I won’t listen to it so loudly in the future,” I lied. “Now leave me alone.”
I turned away from the door and went into the bathroom to take a piss. I looked in the mirror. I didn’t like the person staring back.
Then the phone started ringing. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I muttered. “Let me guess. It’s another telemarketer.” Those were the only people who called me anymore.
I went to pick up the phone. “Hi!” a shrill female voice said. “I’m calling you from the coin club—” As soon as I heard that I threw the phone against the wall as hard as I could. It went silent.
“Fuck this world!” I said, feeling exasperated. Why was everybody always trying to sell you something? If it wasn’t things, it was their ideals, their religions, their hobbies, their lifestyles. Or they were trying to sell you on themselves, on how good and able they were and how well they were doing. When in truth, everything and everyone was FUCKED.
I was pissed off. I really needed a beer right about now, but when I went to the fridge, I discovered it was empty. Also, it was Monday and I was supposed to be at work. But I was already late and the idea of going to the office filled me with absolute horror. So fuck work, I thought. I’ll to go to a bar instead.