HOME - FICTION - NONFICTION - POETRY - PHOTOS/ART

An Ugly Routine

by Mike Hilbig

July 2011

“All in,” I said as I pushed the last fifty dollars I had to my name into the center of the poker table. I was nervous, but was trying hard not to show it. I checked my hand again, pocket kings. The flop came queen, jack, and three, nothing suited. Unless Dick had trips, I was probably in the clear. I couldn’t imagine he’d have two pair after I had raised pre-flop.

“Call,” Dick said and flipped over his cards to reveal pocket Aces. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I had only two outs to a better hand. The dealer turned the last two cards, neither one being a king. It was six o’ clock in the morning and here I was again at the Stoner Game with the all too familiar feeling of being drunk, broke, high, and wondering how in the hell I was going to manage to make it to work in four more hours. I could stay up, but I probably didn’t have enough drugs left for that, and if I went to bed I would likely oversleep and miss work. They told me if I was late one more time I would be fired.

I slowly got up from the table as I stared at the cards one more time wishing they would magically transform into a hand in which I could win back the five hundred dollars I had blown that night between cocaine, the bar, and the poker game. What’s wrong with me? Why am I such a fuck up?

I walked to the back room of the poker house where T-Bone and Keith were watching television and smoking a bowl. T-Bone ran the game along with Dick who had just busted me off the table. Keith, a crazy skinhead, was one of their best friends and was always armed with an array of mind-altering substances. I decided it would be best to smoke another bowl and even out a little before driving home.

“You bust out?” Keith asked me as I entered the room.

“Cowboys against pocket rockets,” I was short with my explanation. Being poker players, they were plenty aware of the nature of bad beats.

“Damn, that sucks man. Well, here, hit this,” T-Bone said as he presented me with a consolation prize of freshly packed shoreline in his prized bubbler pipe.

I hit the pipe hard and began to hack my way back into a false euphoria. It’s only money. I repeated the clichéd aphorism of the poker community in my head as a justification for my financially nightmarish lifestyle. As my confused, shell-shocked look replaced itself with a grin that my muscles seemed to naturally contort into, I looked back at Keith and Bone.

“Fuck this game. The poker gods are after my ass.”

“Oh whatever, you’ll get em’ next time,” Keith reassured me and then said, “Hey, we were about to do a rail, you interested?”

“Well, of course. I got a little left too, I’ll throw in on it,” I replied as I reached into my pocket and produced the last twenty of blow I procured from the bar earlier on that night. I tossed the translucent baggie of white powder to Keith who dumped it onto a plate with his own and began cutting it all up into lines. I guess I won’t be getting to bed too soon. Whatever. A little more won’t hurt. I subsided my worries realizing that getting higher was my only avoidance to a reality of pain and a good excuse to prolong my trip home for a few more minutes.

Keith finished cutting up the coke and passed me the plate and a straw. I looked down at a gargantuan line of cocaine. Shit. This can’t be good for me. I took the straw and inhaled half up my left nostril, paused to gag for a second, and then took the rest up the right. I had to still myself for a brief moment and use mind control on to my stomach. I had not eaten anything that day and on a full belly of beer and whiskey, a large amount of booger sugar could sometimes make me nauseous. When I felt my stomach start to settle, I began to snort with vigor to get the leftover powder up the clogged pipes that were my nostrils. Finally, my head got that tingling feeling I loved and I began to taste what can only be described as a mixture of concrete and bananas in the back of my throat. The drip, I used to hate the taste, but I eventually acquired an affinity for it after a year or so of heavy usage.

“You feel like hanging out and watching a movie,” T-Bone asked me after he finished inhaling his own line.

I looked down at my watch. It was six-thirty. If I had any hopes of making it to bed for a couple of hours before work, I had better leave soon. I could stay up with them and just watch the movie, but if I passed out there would be no alarm to wake me for work and I’d be screwed.

“Nah man, I better not. I gotta work in the morning.”

“Shit man, I don’t know how you do it. Maybe I’ll come visit you on your lunch shift and grab a couple of beers,” Keith said to me as he overheard my reply to T-Bone.

“For sure. Come on. You know I always take care of you.”

I said my good-byes to everyone at the apartment that doubled as a poker room three nights a week. There were still seven people on the table when I left. I envied and somewhat resented them for not having anything to do the next day. I wished I could play for another couple of hours. Really, I wished I hadn’t stayed up all night again. Mostly though, I hoped my parents would still be in bed when I got home. I absolutely didn’t feel like dealing with their bullshit at seven in the morning.

As I walked outside, the morning sunlight hit me and drained me of all my artificial energy and replaced it with sickness and guilt. Any goodness that was left in me had been replaced by a craving that could never be fulfilled and a longing to just be normal again. I existed in a paradox, desperately wanting to live the extraordinary life of a rock star or professional gambler, but also, I just wished I could be a regular guy with a regular job. I just wanted anyone’s life but my own. Furthermore, I was about to make the trek home and drain the two people who loved me most of their own sense of normalcy.

I got stuck in morning traffic as I drove home. I watched all the people on their morning commutes to work. How did they do it? They got up in the morning and went to work at a desk job. They worked all day, didn’t see their families, and made it home just in time to eat dinner, watch a couple of hours of mindless television, bitch at their kids, and then go to bed only to wake up at the butt crack of dawn the next morning to repeat the whole process over again. It didn’t seem like a life at all, but I guess it still seemed better than my life. Sometimes, that idea made me even more depressed, that the best life I could aspire for was one I didn’t even want.

I finally made it to my exit and pulled off the freeway and into the quiet neighborhood of Oak Forest. The neighborhood was probably originally a suburb of Houston, Texas, but in the extreme growth of the city during the oil boom, now it was simply another part of inner city Houston except that all the houses had that suburban feel of being carbon copies of each other. I made it to De Milo Street, and turned left. The irony of living on a street named after a representation of perfect beauty in a house that had no originality whatsoever was never lost on me. It was just like in those old cartoons when the dehydrated character would see a lake in the middle of the desert. He’d run to it and take a leap only to have the lake disappear just in time for him fall flat on his ass and have little birdies and stars circle his skull.

I arrived at my house and noticed the light on in my parents’ bedroom. My dad’s car was gone so at least I wouldn’t get threatened with getting kicked out of the house this morning. While it was more painful to talk to my mother than my father, she couldn’t bear to see me go. I finished my cigarette slowly as I prepared myself for another interrogation. For most people, I imagined home was a place of comfort, somewhere that felt familiar and warm. Home for me was just another source of anxiety and fear.

I opened the front door and tried to enter as quietly as I could. I was still hoping that maybe I could sneak by my parents’ room and into the security of my own bedroom without having to deal with them. As I crept down the hallway, I heard the voice of my mother call out to me.

“Michael?”

“What Mom?”

“You’re not even going to say hello? Just ‘what Mom.’”

“Sorry, Hello. Did you need something?”

“It’s seven-thirty in the morning. Why are you just getting home?”

I used to lie to them when they asked me questions about what I was doing, but now I just met their inquiries about my lifestyle with silence. There was no use lying anymore, they knew I was on drugs and up to no good. Lying to them just pissed them off even more than they already generally were at me.

“What drugs are you doing? Why won’t you talk to me about it?”

Again I met her with silence.

“We need to talk, there was a letter today from a pawn shop addressed to you. I opened it and saw that you pawned my aunt’s guitar. What the hell are you doing with all your money?”

“You opened my mail,” I asked indignantly at the mention that my privacy had been threatened.

“Don’t start with me, I expect you to have that guitar back by next week. Do you understand?”

I stared at the floor and mumbled, “Yeah yeah, I got it.”

“Look at me when I talk to you. I’m not kidding.”

“Fuck you! I’m tired of this. I always planned on getting it back, I just needed a little extra scratch.”

“For what? You have a job, and you never pay your car note or your cell phone bill or your insurance. You live at home. What do you need all this money for?”

I knew the drill. She was trying to trap me. She knew very well what I was doing with my money. She kept trying to make me say it. How could I? How could I tell the person who raised me, “Mom, I’m a drug addict,”? Sometimes, I really wanted to. I would repeat the line in my head trying to find the strength to just say it, but I just couldn’t do it; nor did I want to at that point. I still needed to beat some more pain into me before I would eventually tell her.

“Look, I need to go to bed. I have work in a couple of hours. Can we talk about this later?”

“When, Michael, when do you plan on talking to me?”

As I shrugged my shoulders, I saw the change in her eyes. She had just made the transformation from worried to pissed-the-fuck-off.

“You better get up for work tomorrow. I can’t afford to pay for you if you lose another job.”

“Fuck, I’ll get up. Is that all you care about anyways, your goddamn money?”

“Don’t talk to me like that; you know I put up with a lot from you. Besides, I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t care. I...” Her voice started to quiver, and I saw a tear roll down her cheek, “…I love you. I love you so much,” she managed to get out before she started into a full onslaught of tears. I met her with detached silence and watched her for a minute or so. Finally, she started to compose herself and looked back up at me.

“Are you finished? I’m going to bed.”

“Please Michael, get some help.”

“Whatever.”

I stormed into my bedroom. Sometimes I wished I would just oversleep forever. I set my alarm clock for nine-thirty and began to calculate that if I fell asleep at that very moment, I would get a mere two hours of sleep, but I was still feeling the effects of that last line I had done at the game. Furthermore, as the numbing agent in the coke wore off, I began to feel as if the insides of my nostrils had railroad spikes being pounded into them. I looked at the shadows on the walls of my bedroom and saw them transforming into demons. Maybe they had finally come to take me; maybe they had already taken me. As I realized that this was actually me actually living this life, all I could do was put my head into my pillow and cry.

This was not the last time I got high, pulled an all-nighter, or lost all my money. It wasn’t the last time I broke my mother’s heart. I lost another job and a whole lot more money. I suffered the indignity of a lack of self-control, and I wished more and more with each passing day for death to come and end my misery. The demons in my bedroom visited more often and grew larger as my bedroom grew smaller proportionally. Simply put, I was living an ugly routine. I eventually would get help, but the next day I simply got up and repeated the whole cycle over again.

Mike Hilbig is an English major at the University of Houston Downtown. When he’s not smoking too many cigarettes, reading, or excessively worrying about the metaphysics of the universe, he spends his free time writing fiction and memoirs.