A High Cost Paid Dearly

I’m standing in a bar near the beach. The bar is having a house music night, and I’m near the DJ booth with a co-worker who knows the people running the event, a luxury that I don’t have. Feeling uncomfortable and out of place I’m downing drinks at record pace, I've already consumed more than anyone else who I’m there with. I've been drunk since noon. I had to convince my colleague to allow me to join him due to the state of intoxication I was already in. As the minutes quickly tick by and the circumstances continue to disappoint my preconceived expectations, I conclude that I have no business at this club or this event on this night.

I was drinking as much as I could, as quickly as I could from the bar, trying to ameliorate the disdain. This usually worked for me. At this point in my career of catastrophe I was immensely disappointed in the way this tried-and-true prescription was failing me. I was beginning to feel the dissonance surrounding my expectation's bloody cage match with reality. I managed to get inconceivably drunk and in the process was rewarded with a level of shitfaced I could not handle functionally. This was a phenomenon that I had some success mitigating with other drugs in the past. That cure-all not being available meant I was doomed to raw dog the deliriant psychosis that alcohol induces in the self-destructive and functionally retarded.

Transitioning from the humidity of the outdoor area of the beachside bar to the humidity of the cracked sidewalk – hailing a cab seemed like a good idea. Stepping from sidewalk to street I entered the forgetful stage of my poor decision making. The next retained memory I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a van-turned-cab on the opposite side of town from my apartment, van-turned-cab driver as confused as I am.

He’s asking me where to go motioning towards the meter which said “$40.00” and counting. Having neither forty dollars nor a route home; I made the executive decision to leave the vehicle and tear ass across the street. As the van-turned-cab driver pursued me – shining flashlights into potential hiding places on the street to try to find me – I managed to clamber onto some poor bastard’s raised wrap-around porch. Laying down, concealing myself, I successfully evaded the van-turned-cab driver’s efforts to locate me and promptly drifted to sleep on the porch.

I woke up with a start, taking in my surroundings the next day. Very disoriented, half drunk and hungover all at once, for some reason I wanted to knock on the door of the home I had used to commit a misdemeanor and talk to the homeowners about whatever the fuck I thought at the time to be a good line of questioning. This was not to be, as thank the lord above nobody answered, and I walked down the stairs to walk the many 25 or so blocks back to my apartment in a daze.

Getting back to my apartment a horrifying prospect had begun to dawn on me. I started to realize that I did not have my wallet, which contained my ID and social security card. I had left it in the cab. This presented me with an existentially terrifying dilemma of epic stakes and disproportionately limited solutions. The first, and only real option I chose was to call the cab company seeing as there were only two or three established, locally. Once I had located the correct company, I spoke with the driver. He stated that there was “already a warrant for my arrest”, my heart sank into a bottomless pit of dread. The van-turned-cab driver stated that he would collect the money from me and drop my wallet off later that day.

Whatever he said about calling off the arrest warrant was not enough to calm my nerves. Perhaps due to the situation not being resolved yet, but also perhaps because the driver decided to leave me in suspense by something he said. This was not helped by my hangover. The day's saga, accompanied by the typical dissociative hellscape I confronted daily, multiplied several times over after drinking. A high cost paid dearly. At this point I had spent the day pacing my tiny apartment in a permanent mode of crisis infused, dissociative agony.

As the business day ended, and the sun began to set, the van-turned-cab driver approached the appropriately steel barred enclosure that secured the entrance to my apartment complex. He had called me to let me know he had arrived, and I had jumped up, rushing to meet him. Stepping up onto the sidewalk and walking towards where I stood, he removed his sunglasses and took the sixty dollars I had mooched to pay him. He regaled me with the stories of his time working as a correctional officer before he left, stating that there was a lot of sexual assault between inmates, and gang rapes even. He stated that, given the nature of the mistake I had made, I would likely face jail time if I had not resolved the situation the way that I did. I thanked him, emphatically. He turned and left. I walked back into my apartment and closed the door.