By Christopher Stoddard
I made your ears bleed to declare our end. Said goodbye to Berlin. Rebuilt the wall in my brain and bled again.
I bought a nosebleed to see my life. Sucked the straight white lines. Begged the morning for moonlight.
I gave your foreign mouth to a cabinet. Filed with the other lies. Accepted the empty bin of a recycled night.
CLICK HERE to check out Christopher Stoddard’s short story and collaboration with Gio Black Peter for imfromdriftwood.com!
By Christopher Stoddard
The belts on his wrists and ankles restricted his movements. The drugs weighed down his head, moved it around, to and fro, back and forth. The exhausted policewoman guarding the door, the disapproving nurse, his nervous friend—all of it sucked, but nothing sucked worse than the burning, intrusive sensation of the thin, rubber tube shoved inside the hole of his penis. He’d gained consciousness, not because he wanted to live, but because he had to piss badly.
“I have to pee,” he stated, weakly lifting the scratchy wool blanket and loose-fitted hospital gown to peek underneath and discover the tubing attached to his limp extremity.
“So pee,” said an exhausted friend who sat next to the medical bed, a crinkled New York Times in his lap.
“Where am I? What happened?” asked the patient in a lethargic voice.
“I called an ambulance when I couldn’t wake you. You showed up at my door after three last night and proceeded to pound on it until I let you in.”
“Where were you?”
“You were wasted, slurring your speech, talking of killing yourself and then collapsed in my kitchen. The cops came with the ambulance, but you were pushing and swearing. They wanted to arrest you…I’ve spent most of the night convincing them not to.”
The patient tried to push out the urine. At first the maneuver just forced the tubing deeper inside. The burning made him wince. His friend called for the nurse, letting her know he’d woken up.
“I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t.” The room began to spin. The patient kept his eyes closed longer every time he blinked, to fight off the nausea, but it didn’t help at all. His friend didn’t respond to the denials, just listened. The patient noticed the absence of his mother and was grateful his friend hadn’t called her. The friend didn’t ask why he did it, nor did he want to know if the patient was planning on doing it again.
“The hospital psychiatrist will be here in a moment to perform a psychiatric evaluation,” said the nurse.
“How long do I have to be here?” asked the patient, his head swaying like a rocking dinghy in choppy waters.
“Forty-eight hours,” she replied, replacing the drip.
“Two days?!”
The New York cop peered in the room.
“It’s the standard for suicide attempts, sir,” continued the nurse.
“But I didn’t try to kill myself! I was drunk and took some pills—too many pills—but it wasn’t to kill myself!”
The nurse gave the patient a cold look and glanced at his friend. “Speak with the psychiatrist. He’ll be in momentarily.”
In the meantime, the patient tried pissing again, this time successfully, but he couldn’t get it all out no matter how hard he tried. The catheter was a real bitch. It felt to him as if he were trying to piss after coming.
He checked the time on his friend’s watch to get his mind off the uncomfortable sensation. It was 8 a.m. The friend came over and patted the patient on the knee, then returned to the chair next to the bed and reopened the Times. His friend was there, but somewhere else in his mind. The psychiatrist would be in any moment. The patient had to collect his thoughts, appear sane and straight, or he’d be sitting in that hellhole for nearly half a week, which could not happen. He really would kill himself then, he thought.
The psychiatrist practically crawled in on his hands and knees, had obviously been working all night. He sighed heavily before saying, “And how are we feeling?”
“Fine. A little hung over.”
“Do you want to tell me what you were doing with the pills, the…,” he read from his little chart, “Xanax?”
“Yeah, I was just trying to get fucked up. I mean, I take them all the time. I guess I took too much last night. I have a prescription for them, you know, for anxiety and panic attacks. I just wanted to calm down.”
The psychiatrist didn’t look up as he scratched around the outside of his left nostril. “And from what were you trying to calm down?”
The friend looked up. The patient could tell that his friend was genuinely curious about the answer to that question. He didn’t want to tell them that he was trying to calm down from life, the dark ways in which he sees the world, people. He was as guilty as an attempted murderer, but didn’t want to confess his contempt for life and desire to kill it. How pathetic, how easy to get locked up for two days, he thought.
In an even-toned voice, he said, “I don’t know. Nothing. I shouldn’t have taken the pills with the booze, but I was definitely not trying to commit suicide.”
On top of dealing with the rubber straw in his cock, he had to resist his head’s desire to roll around. The pills hadn’t worn off. There he was, catheter-stricken, Xanax-afflicted, trying with all his might to appear lucid and apologetic.
The doctor approved the patient’s release, and after a painfully long ride from the hospital to the patient’s apartment, he still hadn’t really thought about the night before. He slid out of the car seat as his friend opened the cab door for him. Before closing it, the patient looked at his friend, but avoided eye contact and said, “I’m sorry. I know it was a selfish thing to do.”
“I’m not mad, man. I love you, regardless. These things happen,” said the friend softly,”…just don’t do it again.
The patient wasn’t sure if his friend meant to sound comforting, or if he was just so exhausted he could hardly speak. Either way, it made the patient feel somewhat better about the whole ordeal. By the time he reached the front door to his apartment, he’d forgotten it’d ever happened. Once inside, he felt nothing but relief; it was such a hot and muggy morning, and he’d left the air conditioner on all night.
When I think of Occupy Wall Street, I think of human feces. I work in advertising in the Financial District of Manhattan, and I have, on a number of unfortunate occasions, ridden my bike past Zuccotti Park. The wind that whipped around the buildings and past the tents of the “protesters” always carried with it the stomach-turning stench of shit. Yesterday evening, I heard bucket-drums in the distance while a toothless man danced violently at the edge of the park, clearly inebriated at four in the afternoon, beckoning onlookers to enter as if he were the ringleader for an unsanitary circus. What began as a peaceful protest has turned into a haven for deranged homeless, thieves, hardcore drug addicts and sex offenders. Two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street, only about one-percent of the “99-percent” were still protesting in the park. The rest were freeloaders. Personally, I’m glad Bloomberg shut it down.
By Christopher Stoddard
Inspired by Rilke’s “Autumn Day”
Universe: We’re ready. The last season’s ended.
Now replace the heat with hielo,
and on the sidewalk let the roaches freeze.
But first,
give the grass in parks power
over these final sun-days,
force it to thrive and multiply;
encourage it toward its fate, and stain
our white clothes with its vibrant greenness.
New Yorkers who rent now, will never own.
New Yorkers who are single, will be forever,
will work, read, shop compulsively everyday,
and hop around Brooklyn’s bars, sober then not,
hopefully, while the weather is disappointing.
I believe in the periphery of my feelings. I worship the demigods inside the meat of this blood orange and its peelings. I am a carnivorous vegetarian, starving in a once emoted world that’s been degenerated by beasts like me. When I feed I taste sweet, juicy goodness. But unlike real forbidden fruit, I rot. The maggots devour me. The flies lay their eggs, and their babies eat my decaying flesh, including my cherry heart, kidney bean kidneys and pâté liver. I am a rare delicacy, cooked on the burning outskirts of all recognizable emotions. Because we have none. We are the antithesis of your feelings. We are the true mirrors of your hate. We are the fate of dysfunctional families. Our existence is a simile for horror. Whores, borrowers of broken brothers, head-bobbing robbers of the unstoppable kind–we are unkind, our kind.
By Christopher Stoddard
The young banker named M wears over his head a black dust bag made of thick cotton. It came with the Allen Edmonds loafers he bought for his new job at Franklin-Miller Financial in Midtown. The black, polished leather shoes are hand-sewn, leather-lined and cushioned with a material called PORON®. They were originally 225 bucks but on sale for 25-percent off. He’s not wearing them now because it’s Saturday night, pretty late, almost 1 a.m. Instead he has on a heavily worn pair of Sperry Topsider boat shoes, which are camel-colored and have white rubber soles. Paired with Kelly green shorts and a dingy white polo shirt over a chiseled chest, he looks like a Ralph Lauren model—minus the black bag on his head.
When he entered the Archive Building, he wasn’t wearing the bag. To the doorman and any of the upper middle-class residents who were coming and going as M was arriving, he looked just like them or even better. With his neatly groomed, slightly wavy, moderately short, dark auburn hair; chestnut-colored eyes; defined jaw line on a beautiful, 20-something face; full lips and sharp cheekbones, he might have even turned a few heads.
But he wasn’t paying attention to passersby. If he didn’t acknowledge them then maybe they wouldn’t notice him or wonder what he was doing. The black dust bag was neatly folded and stuffed into the back pocket of his shorts like a handkerchief. To an onlooker it may have appeared as if M were trying to give his preppy style a hipster twist, a little Williamsburg-edge, even though he lives in Gramercy Park.
Nervously, he told the doorman he was there to see O. M hoped he got the name right; the dude had only told him once. The doorman phoned O’s apartment. O answered and gave M clearance. As the doorman hung up, M quickly thanked him and walked hurriedly toward the elevator, hoping to God that he didn’t see anyone he knew. Several of his new coworkers lived in the West Village, possibly in that very residence! He was really taking a chance. As a precaution, he’d told the doorman his name was N.
O answered the door and, without hesitation, invited M, who was now shrouded, into the apartment. Neither spoke. O led M into what M deduced was the living room. His bare leg brushed against what felt like a cold leather sofa.
“You don’t mind if I do a line, do you?” asks O, sniffling.
M shakes his head. He doesn’t give a shit. He just wants a blowjob.
M hears O do a line off a nearby surface then quickly return to where M stands. O stuffs a trembling hand down M’s shorts and pulls out his cock. M forcefully brings O to his knees so O can get to work. O does a clumsy job, but it still feels amazing to M. After M comes, feelings of guilt and shame invade his nervous system. He’s suddenly suffocating in the dust bag. He rips it off and quickly turns away from O. He rushes out in silence, but the elevator down to the lobby takes forever, and the doorman says goodbye.
CLICK HERE to get White, Christian on Kindle. Only 9.99!
Amos Lassen writes, “Even though you are not going for a happy ride, you dare not stop—like Christian himself…Stoddard gives us brilliant prose and a fascinating main character and that is what kept me reading.” CLICK HERE to read the full review!
