Life's Chance

“Ah for Christ’s sake Lenny, give me one chance”

“Are you kidding me kid? You’ve shown up stoned at best every other shift you’ve ever worked, and don’t think I don’t know it’s actually every goddamn day. You may be as broke as this city’s school system but that sure’s never stopped you from spending all your money on dope. For crying out loud, you gave Mr. Janikowski the sweet potato soup - and it’s got fuckin’ peanuts in it! He’s been coming here for 6 years and you were still too damn high to realize! Well look here, you saw him in anaphylactic shock, you saw the goddamn paramedics stretcher him out. I sympathize with ya kid. But this time I got no choice.”

…..

The streets were in that twilight limbo where the only people out are high or drunk or both and there was nowhere he could go. He certainly wasn’t going to try to crash in her dorm room again. That didn’t go particularly well the first dozen times around. He’d been sleeping on the mattress in the storage closet of the diner for the last 8 months, and it was as stable a situation as he’d ever known. But now it was gone. And now, there was only one recourse, and it was in the form of the thinly rolled joint in his tattered jacket pocket. Sifting through the scrunched-up napkins and half-used Kleenex he came to the soft paper he was looking for. Ducking into an offshoot alleyway he flattened and straightened his one mechanism of recompense, taking a match and swiping it across his boot like he’d learned from the Bangladeshi immigrants who lived above the down and out diner. In that part of town, all sorts of useful life maneuvers could be acculturated. He didn’t have any family, and he didn’t have any culture of his own. He was a product of the streets, abandoned or forgotten by the foster system when he was just 14. But he preferred the isolation. The first gulps of smoke made his lungs rage and his esophagus erupted in a cacophony of stifled coughs. He’d mastered the art of suppressing the coughs, taught the hard way that police on patrol quickly flock to the sound of smoking’s sacrifice, and even though they were disappointed that he wasn’t lighting up a crack pipe for their quotas, they were plenty glad to book him for the Mary Jane. That was how he knew he wasn’t going to find another job. Lenny was the cousin of the judge from his last court order and when the judge saw how completely ambivalent and checked out he was with his impending indictment on drug charges, he had a rare moment of consolation and finagled a way into letting the kid stay with Lenny. At this point though, the judge wouldn’t have remembered him had he been put smackdab in the middle of his courtroom again. It was this justice system that the kid was especially well acquainted with. The coughing subsided and the initial wave of anxiety overtook him. He knew the only way through was to keep chugging the joint, and this he did with vacant expertise. Slumped behind a dumpster, he tried to empty his mind. Given his circumstances, he had never been burdened with the privilege of imagining a tomorrow, and so, with a future as blank as his mental state, he drifted into a faded sleep. This was as good a spot as any.

….

He was woken up with a bath. Somebody from their balcony a few stories up was clearly completing their morning routine, which involved watering their innumerable house plants and taking the drainage and tossing it out into the alley, not dissimilar from the 19th century’s excrement buckets. This was how he came to be soaked in soil water, sprouting a bamboo shoot from his jacket hood. The whirlwind flurry reaction was comical if not sad; instinctually he thrust and jabbed in the air the dull kitchen knife he had swiped from the diner and kept clasped in his hand the whole night. Of course, there was no one there. It's highly unlikely that the tenant up above ever realized that they had provided a rude awakening for a vagrant in the dirty alley down below. His upper half was quite literally soiled. Luckily, his blue corduroys were intact, or at least as intact as they could be considering he’d worn nothing else for the last 3 months. The paperback in his pocket was torn but dry. The one silver lining to his fury was that he knew how he’d have to begin this day - another in the interminable procession of his existence. Extracting the crumpled-up bills from his jacket that Lenny had given him as a severance, he laid them out on the lid of the dumpster and let the already humid day relieve them of their moisture for a moment. A ten, two fives, and a few ones: 24 bucks in all. A dollar for each hour, spread across the day in this kingdom of suffering. That was his thought as he set out for the thrift store a half-dozen blocks away. Sandy, the old lady behind the checkout counter liked him, and so if he found a new jacket for 10 dollars, she’d give it to him for 7. And he could always take a new book, so long as he left the one he’d taken before. She was the closest thing to a mother that he had ever known.

“Hey kid, what the hell happened to you?! I don’t remember them reopening the waterpark after that little girl’s brain damage. Ya know you’re supposed to take your shirt off for the slide.”

“To tell you the truth Sandy, after the night I’ve had I’d normally tell you to fuck off but instead I’ll simply say that I’m looking for a new jacket”

“Well, you’re in luck bucko cause some big wall street hotshot dropped off a load of top-tier crap yesterday. He had a mad look in his eyes, said he was going to find some yogi in the Himalayas. I put this puppy aside just for you.”

From under the counter she pulled out a worn leather jacket, dark and oily, but it looked like in its heyday it would’ve fetched a pretty penny.

“Here’s this for ya kid, don’t tell my boss and make sure that smug S.O.B. doesn’t find out, cause I’ll give it to ya for 5 bucks is all. Here, take it, try it on. How’s that Kazantzakis treatin’ ya by the way? Ready to exchange it for another?”

“He was a saint I’m sure of it, Sandy. I decided I’d read it again, and I know you’re already doing me a big favor, but I was wondering if I could take another off the shelf. I could use something to occupy my mind at the moment.”

“You got it kid; I can see you need it. Just make sure to remember your old gal Sandy whenever you get around to writing that book of yours. Most of the people come in here and buy that shit fiction, the kind of stuff that actually subtracts your brain cells. You on the other hand, well, you’re just a kid and you’ve never taken anything less than a grown person book. Real heady stuff. Take a look around for something you’d like.”

“Thanks Sandy. At this point it may be another millennium before I get to write something of my own, but I’ll make sure you get a piece of it.”

…

The back wall of the thrift shop was crammed with books, most of them useless, but after enough searching, he always came up with a hidden gem. He passed the Garcia Marquez he had read a few weeks before. “Hard to imagine how anybody could feel solitude in a setting like that, what with Colonel Aureliano’s 22 Aurelianos.” He thought about Umberto Eco and his seed of an idea: “I wanted to poison a monk”. He couldn’t help but read a masterpiece like that and wonder if the story of his own life had ever planted a seed. And if so, in what soil? “Probably the kind that the street cows in Delhi pick their diets of plastic and cardboard out of. How exactly can they be revered by the people if they subsist on filth?” He couldn’t remember where he’d seen the video of the Indian slums, but the visuals lodged in the periphery of his mind. “I’m like those sacred cows.” His eyes flittered back and forth, scanning the titles and authors in an unconscious automation. Suddenly, the impulse came to him that he had overlooked something. Moving in reverse, he saw sitting perpendicular on top of the row of books were two which seemed out of place. First, there was a small black journal, made of moleskin leather that appeared eerily alike to the quality of his new jacket. Underneath was a book he had never heard of before by a man he’d only read about in passing. Gravitating towards it, he decided he’d take the book for his new project. But before setting the black journal down he was incentivized to flip through it. The paper was faded and yet pristine. It possessed an almost golden tinge. It took a few pages before anything appeared but soon he saw a block of words, inscribed calligraphically so he couldn’t tell if they were printed or written. It said simply:

The world’s equilibrium is equivocal

In other words – it all works out

He had no idea what that meant, but he thought it sounded pretty stupid. And yet, he knew, innately, that he couldn’t put the journal back on the shelf. There was something ethereal about it, something he had never felt with another book. Without thinking, he tucked it into his new jacket pocket and turned back for the counter. He showed his selection to Sandy.

“Good Lord lad, I wish you the best of luck with that one. I’ve heard he’s a thinker. Let me know if you end up deciphering any of it. And stay safe out there kiddo.”

….

A poet once said: “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”

Despite our infinite insignificance, life perpetuates

Understanding existence is simple: you simply must live, and know that you cannot understand

He spent the whole afternoon flipping through the black leather journal. There was no order to the passages which comprised its pages; some of them were poems, some of them were inane aphorisms, some of them were metaphysical maxims that after reading a dozen times he still couldn’t make sense out of. And yet, planted on a park bench, he read through that cryptic, almost magical little book, and forgot completely the swarm of problems that had plagued him since the day of his birth. He had no idea where he was going to sleep that night. He had enough money for a couple of meals, but nothing after that. The moleskin journal and its incomprehensible sentences, like literary symbols of the highest power and magnitude, absolved his suffering entirely. The afternoon grew into evening, and soon the stars, few and far between, stood above the faded lamp post overhead. He had just finished a passage comparing the works of Khalil Gibran and Eckhart. A sigh left his body and eclipsed his mind. He rested his hands on his chest, with his eyes closed. All of a sudden, he felt the outline of an envelope in his new jacket. There was no pocket where the contents could have entered from, and yet he felt it just the same. He tore the lining of the jacket and inside was revealed a thin sleeve stitched and then resealed. He opened the envelope, which contained a sheaf of one-hundred-dollar bills. There was no note.