Editor’s Note: Here is an email that I got from one of our writers. I was pretty sure he was dead, since I hadn’t heard from him in 7 months.
Well, here we go, then! I finally got my cordless keyboard delivered, so now I can type properly. I’ve had my laptop for a while, and to be short: it’s fast! And brand-new! Did I mention that? I’m really excited about it, because it’s only the second time in my life I was able to buy a new computer. You know, because I’m poor as shit? (I realize that being poor in one of the richest countries in the world is very relative, of course, and receiving 1100 euros a month from my kind government for doing absolutely nothing is not something to scoff at, so I won’t, but still, in my country, I’m considered poor.)
Damn! Where to begin?
Yes, I was in prison for seven months. Why? Well, that’s easy: because I set fire to the room I was living in. And no, that’s no joke. I really did. I set my mattress on fire and left the house, waited for about fifteen minutes, and then I called the emergency services. It never got much bigger than my mattress, and although there was some smoke and water damage to the room, the house didn’t burn down and no one got hurt. Still, that sort of thing isn’t taken lightly by the powers that be, so I got arrested and went to prison. Now, the big question is, off course, why I did that. Well, that’s a long story. So here goes…
I think I mentioned that somewhere in one of those many, MANY mails I’ve sent you when I was still living there: I rented that room there, a small dark horrible little smelling hellhole of a room, no more than three by three meters in size, so something like 96 square feet in that weird system of yours. The room was part of a house, as they tend to do, and other people rented other rooms in the same house. I’m not trying to sound stupid when I try to explain it like this, but it’s just a rental system we have here, I’m not sure if you have something similar over there.
I’ve lived in places like that before in my life, and they are always filthy, noisy and generally full of degenerates. Alcoholics, drug-users, all sorts of insane people. You know, like me! So I knew what I could expect when I moved in there, but this house was the worst, the filthiest, smelliest, nosiest horrible disgusting gruesome terrible (I had to look up some synonyms for ‘horrible’, just to make my point…) place I had ever lived, bar none. I had to share a bathroom and kitchen with the people who lived there, and on the best days the toilet was just filthy, repulsive and plain vile, on the worst days it was a total nightmare of piss and shit. I’ve seen rats in the kitchen, I’ve had mice in my room on more than one occasion, and the kitchen was always full of dirty dishes and moldy food scraps.
The first four weeks or so I lived there, I didn’t even have furniture: I slept on a thin mattress that was lying on the floor, I had my laptop standing to my left and a TV and the other end, and that was about it. I remember, quite fondly I must add, one of the first weeks I was living there, I woke up one morning and needed to use the bathroom, so I left my room, only to be stopped in my tracks by a trail of fresh shit, leading from my neighbors’ door, passing mine, and up the five steps of stairs leading to the toilet. I turned around and went back to my room, disgusted to my core. Later that day, that neighbor cleaned most of that up, but the hallway floor was covered in carpeting, so…
And that, my dear friend, was only the condition of the house itself. Then there were the people living in it. First, there were only two, besides myself: that neighbor I just mentioned, who lived two doors down in the same hallway as me, and another living one floor up. Both these guys were of my age and were living there for some years before I moved into the house. The first time I met my next-door neighbor was in the hallway: he was as tall as I am, only 40 or 50 pounds heavier, bald and dressed in nothing than a tight, multicolored Speedo. And drunk of his ass. His name was William. The man on the top floor was called Nordin, he was of Turkish descent.
These two, they’ve known each other for some time, and they had a sort of love-hate relationship. That William, he was actually an okay guy, once I got to know him a little, at least the few times I saw him when he was sort of sober, but that Nordin-fellow was a bloated obnoxious irritating little fuck-up. His hobby was having his own little house-parties, in which he hooked up his phone to one of those giant subwoofers and played that horrible hip-hop-crap that’s so popular these days, with certain types of people. At volume ten, all night long, starting at something like eleven at night, all the way through to the next morning.
He and William would then start drinking together, and at first it would all be fun and games, and laughing and so on, but as the night wore on things would get ever nastier and meaner between the two of them. Laughter turned into shouting, name-calling, slamming with doors, that sort of shit. And me? I would sit in my little room, and if I was lucky and had a little money, I would buy me some weed and beer myself, in the hope that if I could only get stoned and drunk enough, I might be able to catch some sleep, but if I didn’t, I just sat in my chair (I did get some furniture later on) and listened to that insanity. And maybe write a movie review, or two.
I lived there for seven months, and this sort of thing would happen virtually every weekend. Sometimes only on Fridays, sometimes Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes the music would pound only from ten PM to around three AM, sometimes to seven AM. Usually, the days in between the weekends were the quietest.
After about three months or so, a woman named Patricia moved in to the room on the first floor, and from then on it could just so happen that when Nordin and William were finally done, somewhere early in the morning, and I thought I finally, FINALLY could get some sleep, that insane whore came home from her weekly all night party, with her just-as-insane boyfriend, ingesting loads of GHB [EDITOR’S NOTE: Street names- Easy Lay, G, Georgia Home Boy, GHB, Goop, Grievous Bodily Harm, Liquid Ecstasy, Liquid X, and Scoop] together with a combo of all sorts of anti-psychotics, and then I could listen to those two tearing each other and their room apart for a few more hours.
Seven months I lived there. Seven months I endured that insanity. And then something just snapped.
Now, I can imagine when you are reading this you ask yourself some questions. Such as: didn’t you have some sort of landlord, a proprietor that rented out that filthy excuse for a house, and that was supposed to keep that sort of thing in check? Yes, I did, but he (or they, I must say, there were three of them) were what you would call the archetype of a slumlord. The sort of people who couldn’t care less about what went on in their properties, as long as they received their monthly rent fees.
Didn’t I, then, had at any time the rather powerful inclination to stomp that scrawny little Nordin-fucker AND his subwoofer into the ground? Yes, I did. But I was afraid that if I, seeing that he really was this skimpy little asshole, were to really let all my anger and frustration loose on that fucker, I would kill him. And I do really mean kill him. And then I would probably have to go to jail for much longer than seven months, and that wasn’t worth it. But yeah, I’ve had some very vivid imaginations about that…
Why then, you might also ask, didn’t I just move out of there? Well then, now we’re getting to the most important point. First, I didn’t have the money to do that. Second, and this is much more crucial: because, deep down, I don’t like myself all that much. I’ve had that problem all my life, and one of the consequences of that is, as I mentioned briefly in that mail I’ve sent you a few weeks ago, that I have the tendency to sabotage my own life every once in a while.
This resulted in a rather chaotic life, in which I’ve spent most of my lifetime bouncing around between a plethora of different assisted living-systems, from the age of 12, alternated with all sorts of rooms, little apartments, prison, homeless shelters and so forth. This rehab-facility I’m in right now I actually visited twice before. That time in prison I spent just now was also not the first time I went there. You said in your mail I was now the second ex-con on Ruthless, but I was already an ex-con the first time I met you. Or wrote to you. You know what I mean.
So. Here we are, then. Still awake, over there? Alrighty, then! So, now I’m sober. I have been since June last year, since I went to prison. Being sober is weird. I don’t like it. All the world just comes rushing unfiltered into my brain, and that tends to get a bit much, at times. Drugs diffuse that a little. Also, using drugs is freaking AWESOME. I’ve told those people over here that too, and also that it is NOT my plan to stay sober after my treatment here is done, in about a year or so. That would be an illusion. Drugs have been a big part of my life for thirty years now, and that is not going to go away.
And I know, from experience, that when I have a good place to live, and some professional help guarding my finances, I can keep my drug-use under control, in that I drink and smoke only a few days in the week, and be sober the rest of the time. The people here agreed with me on that, and the therapy I’m going to have will be directed at curing that inferiority complex, or at least make a start with that, because it’s probably going to be a lengthy process.
So, that’s the story of why I went to prison. The short version, at least. Lol…
It IS my plan to stay sober while I’m in this facility, so if we are to keep up our little exchanges (and I for one would like that) you are going to have to learn how to deal with a clear-minded, level-headed version of me, at least for the time being, so that is going to be interesting…
Well, there you have it. Quite a story.
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